PSYC221 Final Flashcards
What is the mind?
A system that creates representations of the world so that we can act and achieve goals
OR
What creates and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, decision making, reasoning
What is cognition?
The mental processes, such as perception, perception, attention
It is created by the mind
What is cognitive psychology?
The study of cognition aka mental processes
Who was Franciscus Donders?
First researcher to study cognition. Did a reaction time study in the 19th century
Who is Wilhelm Wundt?
Founded the first laboratory of psychology
, was a structuralist
What is structuralism?
Overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience, pasts make up a whole
Analytic introspection
Wundt. A trained ability to describe experiences for study
Who was hermann ebbinghaus
An early researcher into memory tested himself on nonsense 3 letter combos
Who was Williams James
Noticed that attending to one thing involves ignoring others
Who is John watson
The founder of behaviorism, identified the issues with structuralism. Little Albert experiment
What is behaviorism
Studying the mind is impossible, but conclusions can be made by studying behavior. Pavlov, Skinner and Watson.
Who is Chace Tolman?
Early cognitive psychologist. Taught rat to find food in a maze. Discovered the cognitive map
What was the cognitive revolution?
During the 1950s psychologists shifted away from behaviorism towards the mind
What is a flow diagram?
The processing system of a computer, occurs in stages, has filters
Who suggested the first flow diagram?
Broadbent
What did Broadbents diagram look like?
Input - filter - detector - memory
What does miller mean by the magical number plus or minus two?
He is referring to the number of items a human can hold in their short term memory. Usually the length of a phone number
What did the late 1960s model look like?
Input - sensory memory - short term memory - long term memory
Long term memory went back and forth with short term and rehearsal occurred in short term
What are the three components of long term memory
Semantic - knowledge/ facts, episodic - life events, procedural - tasks/ physical actions
What is neuropsychology?
Studying the behavior of those with brain damage
What is electrophysiology?
Listening to the activity of single neurons, measuring electrical responses in the nervous system
What is brain imaging?
A study technique that takes images of brain activation through PET and later MRI imaging
What is cognitive neuroscience?
The study of the physiological basis for cognition. How does the brain carry out mental processes?
What were the early conceptions of neurons?
Discovered by applying a stain to brain tissue. Thought it was one continuous fiber called a nerve net
What was the golgi stain?
An extremely thin slice that was stained. Revealed individual neuron cell, discovered by Ramon y Cajal
What are the parts of a neuron
Cell body, dendrites, axon, synapse
What is a receptor
A neuron in a sense organ that has a specialized receptor instead of dendrites
What is an electrode tube?
A small shaft of glass that can pick up electrical signals from electrodes. It records action potential and therefore neuronal firing
What is a neurotransmitter
A chemical signal sent between an axon terminal and a dendrite through the synapse
What was the early research into neural firing focused on and why?
Vision, it was easy to control light
What are feature detectors
Neurons that fire in response to specific features such as orientation, movement, length
What is experience dependant plasticity
The phenomenon that experience shapes the structure of the brain
Describe the Blakemore and Cooper kitten experiment and its findings
Rose kittens in an environment with only vertical lines. Kittens only responded to verticals. Had differently shaped visual cortexes
In the Gross Monkey experiment what did the mystery neuron respond to?
Handlike shape with fingers pointing up
What is heirarchical processing?
The brain processes information from lower to higher areas of the brain. In to out. Simple information is processed at the lowest level. Ex. processing the shape, then the object, then that it is a face, then who’s face
What is sensory coding
How neurons represent various characteristics of the environment
What is population coding
The representation of an object by the pattern of firing across a group of neurons
What is sparse coding
When the pattern of neurons is represented by a small group of neurons
What does localization of function mean
Specific functions are served by specific areas of the brain
What is Broca’s area
An area in the frontal lobe discovered by paul broca when studying brain damage patients. Broca’s aphasia results in jumbled sentences, slow speech
What is Wernicke’s area
Discovered by Carl Wernicke. An area in the temporal lobe, that if damaged causes Wernicke’s aphasia and results in incoherent speech that is fluent and grammatically correct and a lack of speech recogniton
How did they discover that vision was in the occipital lobe?
Studies of Japanese soldiers during WW1
Where is the auditory complex
Upper temporal lobe
Where is the somatosensory cortex
Parietal lobe
What occurs in the frontal lobe
Coordination, thinking, problem solving, receives all sensory information
What is prospagnosia?
Damage to the lower right temporal lobe. Inability to recognize faces, including their own
Double dissociation
If something at sight 1 causes A, but not B, while something at sight 2 causes B but not A they can be seen as independent mechanisms
What is a voxel
The pixel of an fMRI, it is a 3D image that is about 2-3mm on each side. Shows increase or decrease in brain activity
What is the fusiform face area
The area that responds to pictures of faces. Damaged in prosopagnosia patients. Is more an experts region as it responds for cars and birds for those kinds of experts.
What is the parahippocampal place area
Responds to spatial layout
What is the extrastriate body area
Activated by pictures of bodies and parts of bodies
What did Alex Huth learn when he had participants watch movies in an fMRI
That many things are localized but also trigger multiple specific locations in different places
Distributed representation
Activates many areas of the brain. While function is localized, we are completing many functions at once
What is a neural network
An interconnected web of areas of the brain that communicate with eachother
What is structural connectivity
The brain wiring diagram connecting different part of the brain
What is track weighted imaging
Detects water diffusion through the brain, shows that brain wiring is unique like a fingerprint
What is functional connectivity
Functional pathways that exist within the structural pathways that meet a specific function
How do we know if two areas are functionally connected
If they are both activated during the same task
What is resting state fMRI
The activity that is recorded when not doing a task
What is the executive control network
Controls higher level cognitive tasks involving working memory, attending and decision making
What is default mode
Mind wandering, life story, social functions, monitoring of internal emotional states
What is the salience network
Attends to survival relevant information
What is perception
Experiences resulting from stimulation of the senses
Why is it difficult to design a percieving machine?
Stimuli is ambiguous, objects can be hidden or blurred, look differrent from each angle, scenes contain high levels of infomation
What is the inverse projection problem
The image on the retina can be created by many things at different distances and angles
What is bottom up processing
Starts from the beginning of the system, the environment stimulates the receptors and this information is passed to the brain
What is top down processing
Processing that originates in the brain
How is speech segmentation top down processing
We perceive word gaps where there are none
What are transitional probabilities
Calculations the brain makes about how likely it is that one sound will follow another
What is hemholtz’s theory of unconscious inference
Everything we perceive is based on unconscious inferences that we make based on our experience
What is the likliehood principle
We percieve the object that is most likely to have caused the pattern of stimuli
What are some of the gestalt principles of organization?
Good continuation - ropes in a not, Pragnaz / Good figure - olympic rings, similarity - we group similar objects
What was wrong about gestalt theories
They believed in top down processing but believed it was all innate not learned
What are some physical regularities that cause optical illusions
Oblique effect, light from above assumption
What is a scene schema
Knowledge of what a given scene usually contains
What is the bayesian inference
The hypothesis that states we make estimate of probability based on prior probability and likliehood (present evidence)
How is the oblique effect represented in the brain?
More neurons for verticals and horizantals
What was the greeble experimenant?
Gauthier had participants becomes experts in greebles and found it activated the FFA
What are the two processing streams in the brain
Perceiving objects, locating and taking action towards objects
What are the what and where streams
The two processing streams in the dual processing model
What is the object discrimination problem
Tests ability to identify an object that was previously presented
What is a landmark discrimination problem
Tests the ability to identify a location that was previously shown
Where is the what pathway in the temporal lobe
Ventral pathway
Where is the where pathway in the temporal lobe
Dorsal pathway towards pareital lobe
What is brain ablation and lesioning
Purposeful removal of a part of the brain - incurring. brain damage for study
What study showed that there are different mechanisms for judging orientation and coodrinating vision and action
Card holding brain damage test. Could not replicate a way of holding a card but could rotate card to fit in slot
What are mirror neurons
Neurons that fire when observing someone doing the action as well as while doing the action
How do we know mirror neurons respond to intention?
Picking up cup study. Showed a person reaching for an empty cup, a full cup and an unclear cup. Had stronger response for the cups with clear intentions
Size weight illusion
If two objects are the same weight but different sizes the smaller one is percieved as heavier due to surprise
What did Colin Cherry find while doing a dichotic listening task with shadowing?
Participants could only remember the words they said aloud but they were aware of the gender of the other voice
What is an early selection model
A model that eliminates the unattanded information at the beginning with the filter
What did Moray find that disproved Broadbent’s early selection theory
Participants responded to their names being said in unattended ear
What occured with the Dear Aunt Jane experiment?
Participants heard a string of words and numbers and were told to attend to one ear, but ended up combining words from each to here coherent phrases, top down processing
What was the attenuator and how did Anne Treisman modify the model of attention
Replaced filter with attenuator, it seperated information based on its meaning not just physical characteristcs. Treismans model was the leaky faucet. All messages pass through attenuator but the unattended ones are weak and fade
What is the late selection model
Information is filtered out later, all information is processed to the level of meaning
Which is right? Early or late selection?
Both can be proven depending on the task
What is processing capacity
The amount of information people can process
What is perceptual load
The amount of processing capacity that a task requires
What did Sophie Forster find about low load and high load tasks
Did a high load task and a low load task and then presented a distraction, it impacted the low load task far more as there was room for it to be processed
What is the stroop effect
The difficulty to name the colour of a printed word
What is stimulus salience
The physical properties of the stimulus and how they influence attention
What is attentional warping
Brain responding to things related to the object one is attending for
Does it make a difference if a cellphone is handheld on driving accidents
No
What is inattentional blindness
Missing objects when purposefully attending to something - the dancing bear
Sensory memory
Breif persistence of a sense after its occurence
What is the modal model of memory
Has LTM and ST, has control processes such as rehearsal, has encoding, retrieval and sensory memory
What is the duration of short term memory
15-20 seconds
What is chunking
Grouping objects into larger meaningful units
Working memory vs STM
Working memory uses memory, it doesn’t just sit there
What is the phonological loop
Language, a few seconds
Visuospatial sketchpad
Picturing things
Central executive
Directs other components of working memory
What impact did the tamping rod have on Phineas Gage
Ruined his impulse control and reasoning, needed his temporal lobe for executive functioning
Is information held in memory by a change in neuronal connectivity or continual nerve firing?
Change in connectivity
Reading span test and SAT
Reading span asks participants to remember last words of a span of sentences in order, number of words remembered correlates to SAT scores
What is the serial positon curve
A graph that is made to show how well a list of words is remembered, compares percentage of those who remembered the word to its place on the list, it forms a curve due to the primacy and recency effect
What is proactive interference
When previously learned, similar informaiton confuses participant and interferes. Ex remembering a second list that is of the same category as a previous one
How do we know long term and short term memory is functionally seperate
Double dissociation brain injury cases
Are episodic and semantic memories different in the brain?
Yes there are double dissociative brain damaged patients to prove it
Is there any overlap for episodic and semantic memory
Yes some was found in an fmri scan, however mostly it was different regions and part of this is due to the fact that all memories have both
Can people who have lost their ability to form episodic memories imagine the future?
No
Can you retain procedural memory even if episodic memory is lost?
If the skill had become automatic then yes, skilled violinists
What is expert induced amnesia
Experts lost ability when they think about it and do not know what they doing as it happens
Propagana effect
Participants more likely to rate things they ahve heard before as true
Maintenance vs elaborative rehearsal
Maintanence is repetition elaborative involves creating or connecting
What can help with memory
Generating, relating to self, images, survival, organization, retrieval practice
How do most memory errors occur
Not during encoding but during retrieval
State dependent learning
Matching learning and testing environments
Consolidation
Solidifying memories in LTM
How are memories physiologically consolidated
Start in the hippocampus, paths are made to the cortex and then these paths are reactivated until the hippocampus path fades and it is just the cortex
Can a memory that is retrieved be edited and or lost
Yes rat experiment with tone and shock and the antibiotic showed this
What are the hypotheses for the reminiscence bump
Cultural life script, cognitve (rapid change - stability), self image, youth bias
How is emotion linked to memory
Amygdala linked to emotion and memory, emotion strengthens consolidation except for those with amygdala damage
Flash bulb memories
Memories of learning of a shocking event - usually are edited due to reconsolidation and are therefore false
Illusory truth effect
More likely to evaluate a statement as true if it presented repeatedly - propaganda effect?
Misinformation effect
Misleading information presented after an event can change memory of the event
