psych 318 study final Flashcards
cognitive psychology
those processes by
which the sensory input is transformed, reduced,
elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.
Perception Learning & Memory Attention Language Problem-solving
Cognitive science
A larger disclosure
philosophy psychology linguistics artificial intelligence neuroscience anthropology
Dualism
Rene Descartes (1596-1650) Body is material, mind immaterial
Dualism is the view that the mind and body both exist as separate entities.
Descartes / Cartesian dualism argues that there is a two-way interaction between mental and physical substances.
Interactionism
the position that mind and body are distinct, incompatible substances that nevertheless interact, so that each has a causal influence on the other.
Epiphenomenalism
the view that mental events are caused by physical events in the brain, but have no effects upon any physical events.
Behavior is caused by muscles that contract upon receiving neural impulses, and neural impulses are generated by input from other neurons or from sense organs.
Parallelism
the theory that mental and bodily events are perfectly coordinated, without any causal interaction between them.
Materialism
(alone)
the philosophical position that everything, including mental events, is composed of physical matter and is thus subject to the laws of physics
Idealism
the position that reality, including the natural world, is not independent of mind.
Monism
the belief that ultimately the mind and the brain are the same thing.
The guiding principle of connectionism aka (parallel distributed processing)
The mind is an activation-spreading network.
A computational modeling approach using artificial neural networks
Because connections between neurons (synapses) are
what grow and change during learning, we can think of
human (and animal) memory as being “stored” in that
pattern of connections
Soma
cell body
where the signals from the dendrites are joined and passed on.
The soma and the nucleus do not play an active role in the transmission of the neural signal.
Instead, these two structures serve to maintain the cell and keep the neuron functional.
Dendrites
(signal receivers)
where a neuron receives input from other cells.
Dendrites branch as they move towards their tips, just like tree branches do, and they even have leaf-like structures on them called spines.
Axon
(signal carrier line)
where electrical impulses from the neuron travel away to be received by other neurons.
Synapse
(a junction between two nerve cells, consisting of a minute gap across which impulses pass by diffusion of a neurotransmitter. )
the junction between the axon of one neuron and the dendrites of another
Spike-timing-dependent plasticity
if a presynaptic neuron consistently fires just before a postsynaptic neuron, the synapse is strengthened; but if the presynaptic neuron consistently fires just after the postsynaptic neuron, the synapse is weakened.
Activation spreading
when a neuron receives enough excitatory input, it “spikes” – an electrochemical impulse
travels down its axon, and it dumps chemical messengers on any downstream cells with which it shares a synapse
Connection weight
degree of difficulty or relative time and effort required for comprehending a given piece of software,
What constitutes “learning” in an artificial neural network?
Learning is that which tunes the functioning of this loop in response to prior history
Error-driven learning
a sub-area of machine learning concerned with how an agent ought to take actions in an environment so as to minimize some error feedback. It is a type of reinforcement learning.
Internal representation
a presentation to the mind in the form of an idea or image.
Pavlov’s physiological theory of classical conditioning
we are born with reflexive responses to some stimuli
But we can also learn novel stimulus-response associations
Unconditioned response
a pre-existing reflexive response to a stimulus (like salivating in response to meat)
Conditioned response
a novel learned response to a stimulus (like salivating in response to a tone)
Unconditioned stimulus
a stimulus that drives a pre-existing reflexive response (like meat driving salivation)
Conditioned stimulus
a stimulus that comes to drive a novel learned response (like a tone driving salivation)
Extinction
only the conditioned stimulus is presented (only tone, no meat) to try and get dog to stop associating it with meat
Spontaneous recovery implies the conditioned association was not lost.
Pavlov suggested that during extinction an inhibitory connection, parallel to the excitatory one, grew between the affected brain centers
Spontaneous recovery
Spontaneous recovery implies the conditioned association was not lost.
Pavlov’s inhibitory interpretation of extinction
Pavlov suggested that during extinction an inhibitory
connection, parallel to the excitatory one, grew
between the affected brain centers
Conditioned inhibition
see if you can teach the organism that the presence of one stimulus should neutralize the conditioned response learned for another stimulus
metronome equals meat and then metronome plus whistle equals no meat (whistle and metronome gave less saliva)
Generalization
it will be reasonable to respond to similar stimuli in a similar way
Retina
contains millions of light-sensitive cells (rods and cones) and other nerve cells that receive and organize visual information.
Your retina sends this information to your brain through your optic nerve, enabling you to see.
Photoreceptor
specialized cells for detecting light.
They are composed of the outer nuclear layer that contains the cell nuclei, the inner segment that houses the cell machinery, and the outer segment that contains photosensitive pigment.
Rods and cones
Rods -Responsible for night & peripheral vision -Very sensitive -Work well in low-light -Concentrated in periphery
Cones
- Responsible for color vision
- Less sensitive
- Work best under bright light
- Concentrated in fovea
Retinal ganglion cells
the bridging neurons that connect the retinal input to the visual processing centres within the central nervous system.
Center-surround receptive field
allows ganglion cells to transmit information not merely about whether photoreceptor cells are exposed to light, but also about the differences in firing rates of cells in the center and surround. This allows them to transmit information about contrast.
Retinotopic organization
The neurons are arranged in a rough “map” of the retina
Arranged into hierarchical layers with overlapping receptive fields: Receptive fields at “higher layers” take lower-level receptive fields as input
neurons with receptive fields close together in visual space have cell bodies close together in the cortex.
Dorsal and ventral streams
Dorsal stream
- ”Where” path
- Determines locations in space
- Helps to guide motor actions
Ventral stream
- ”What” path
- Object recognition
Simple and complex cells
Simple cells are selective (fire the most) for bars of light in preferred positions and orientations
(used for edge detection)
Simple cells feed their outputs to complex cells
Complex cells are selective for bars of light in a preferred orientation that are moving. Sometimes they have a preferred direction of motion
Trichromatic theory
the theory that our color vision depends on how light energy is distributed across three different frequency “bands”
Opponent-process theory
The theory that color vision involves competition between opposites, like blue and yellow, or red and green
Retinex theory
the theory that color is partly “constructed” on the cortex, in response to top-down cues
The theory is largely an attempt to explain color constancy = the principle that objects appear roughly the same color to us under a wide variety of lighting conditions
Color constancy
the principle that objects appear roughly the same color to us under a wide variety of lighting conditions
Parallax
(buildings moving in background)
the interrelated movements of elements in a scene that can occur when the observer moves relative to the scene.
Stereopsis
triangulating across two slightly different images of the same scene
Convergence
degree to which eyes angle toward each other when fixating on object (looking at your finger close and then from far)
Figure vs. ground
Figure-ground perception refers to the tendency of the visual system to simplify a scene into the main object that we are looking at (the figure) and everything else that forms the background (or ground).
Feature analysis theory
Objects recognized via the presence or absence of
large sets of features
Has emphasized letter and number recognition
Gibson (1969): Decisions about whether letters are
different take longer if letters share large number of
features (e.g., P & R)
Distinctive features
Primitive, salient visual characteristics are distinctive
features
Recognition-by-components theory
Recognizable forms are composed from 3D geometric
visual primitives called geons
However, objects are recognized slower when viewed
from unusual perspectives
Geons
Recognizable forms are composed from 3D geometric visual primitives called geons
Word superiority effect
letters recognized faster when in components of real words than when seen in isolation or pseudowords
Facial pareidolia
imposing a face-like percept on a stimulus that is not a face (face in coffee)
Change blindness
when two pictures are slightly changed (picture of globe with people on the side then picture of globe without people on the side.
Frequency vs. amplitude
Frequency is how many cycles are completed per unit time
Amplitude is the height of the peak (or trough) of the wave
Fundamental vs. harmonic
The harmonics are multiples of the fundamental frequency. So if the fundamental frequency is 100 Hz, the higher harmonics will be 200 Hz, 300 Hz, 400 Hz, 500 Hz, and so on.
Pinna
That funky set of outer ear folds
It “funnels” sound toward the eardrum,
thus working as an amplifier
Notch of pinna
the filter function that dampens some frequencies applies differently to sounds coming from above than sounds coming from below
phase cancellation in a small band of high frequencies
Cochlea
The cochlea is a hollow, spiral-shaped bone found in the inner ear that plays a key role in the sense of hearing and participates in the process of auditory transduction.
Hair cells
The variability in hair cell length differs across ranges of the pitch spectrum, so we discriminate better in some ranges than others
Inner hair cells collect and relay sound information to the brain through the auditory nerve. Outer hair cells work to amplify sounds, helping us to pick up quiet sounds by making them seem louder.
What do we perceive as pitch?
We experience the fundamental frequency (f0) of a complex waveform as the psychological value of “pitch.”
What do we perceive as timbre?
The specific set of audible harmonics is what gives a sound source its timbre, or sense of uniqueness.
Inter-aural time difference
sound reaches one ear slightly before the other
Segmentation problem
Might not be gaps between segments or
words
Sometimes gaps occur mid-word
Coarticulation
Coarticulation
the articulation of two or more speech sounds together, so that one influences the other.
Phoneme
sets of basic sounds (in fact, the smallest set of sounds) that are the building blocks to all spoken language.
Formant
peak frequencies made by our vocal cords when we speak. The vibration of the vocal cords and the changing shape of the vocal tract occur when speaking.
