Quiz 1 (Ch. 1, 2, 4, 5) Flashcards
Who were the important figures who did early work in cognitive psychology?
Indirect observations (Franciscus Donders, Hermann Ebbinghaus) Introspection (Wilhelm Wundt, William James)
What was Donders’s experiment and its findings?
Donders measured simple reaction time (flashing light and asking participants to press button upon seeing light) and choice reaction time (flashing two lights and asking participants to decide press the left button when seeing the left light).
Difference in reaction time is the time it takes to make decision (1/10 of a second).
What was Wundt’s approach to study psychology? What technique did he use to study mental processes?
Structrualism: overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience (sensations).
Analytic introspection: trained participants describe their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli.
What was Ebbinghaus’s experiment and its findings?
He made himself learn lists of 13 nonsense syllabuses. He recorded the time it took him to learn for the first time, waited for a specific amount of time (delay), and recorded the time it took him to relearn the list.
Savings: original time to learn - time to relearn
Savings curve: savings as a function ot delay, memory drops rapidly for the first 2 days and levels off.
What was the significance of William James’s work?
Published the first textbook, Principles of Psychology
The observations of his own mind included a wide range of cognitive topics and had high accuracy (e.g. paying attention to one thing involves withdrawing from other things)
What was Watson’s view on the study of mental processes?
He rejected the method of analytic introspection (produced variable results across people & difficult to verify) and believed that observable behaviors should be studied instead of mental processes (behaviorism).
What subject did Watson study and how?
Classical conditioning, through the “Little Albert” experiment.
What did Skinner mainly study and how?
Operant conditioning (behaviors strengthened by reinforcers), reinforcing the rat’s behavior of pressing bar with food.
Which early cognitive psychologist initially followed behaviorism? What was his experiment and its findings?
Edward Chace Tolman: rat in a maze
First explores the maze; when placed at A, learned to turn right to obtain the food at B; when placed at C and without being able to smell the food, knew which way to turn (left) to reach B for the food –> Cognitive map (conception about the maze’s layout in the rat’s mind)
Which event caused the decline of behaviorism?
Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior (argued that language acquisition is through operant conditioning)
Criticized by Noam Chomsky, children say things that are never reinforced (“I hate you”) and use incorrect grammar, argued that for inborn biological program for language (product of how the mind is constructed)
What is the cognitive revolution?
A shift in psychology from behaviorists’ focus on stimulus-response relationships to more focus on understanding the operation of the mind.
What is a paradigm? How is it important for scientific revolutions?
A system of ideas that dominate science at a particular time.
A scientific revolution involves paradigm shift.
(Kuhn)
How did digital computer influence the development of cognitive psychology?
Information-processing approach: traces sequences of mental operations (occurring in stages) involve in cognition. (Computers: input processor –> memory unit –> arithmetic unit), use of flow diagrams
Conference on Artificial Intelligence: computers to mimic the operations of human mind (proposed by McCarthy)
Newell and Simon created the “logic theorist” –> could create proofs to mathematical theorems involving principles of logic
Conference on Information Theory
1956
Who wrote the first textbook for cognitive psychology?
Ulrich Neisser, 1967
What are levels of analysis?
The idea that a topic can be studied in a number of different ways, with each approach contributing its own dimension to our understanding.
What is cognitive neuroscience?
Study of the physiological basis of cognition.
What was an early theory about the brain’s structure?
Stained brain tissues appeared to be continuous and were called nerve nets. They were believed to create a pathway for conducting signals uninterrupted through the net work.
Who proposed the neuron doctrine and what techniques did he use?
Ramon y Cajal
Golgi stain, thin slice of brain tissue immersed in silver nitrate, made it possible to stain only fewer than 1% of the cells
Studied brains of newborn animals, smaller cell density compared to adult brains
What did the neuron doctrine claim?
Individual cells transmit signals in the nervous system and are not continuous with other cells.
What is the structure of a neuron?
Cell body: metabolic center, mechanisms to keep the cell alive
Dendrites: branch out from the cell body to receive signals from other neurons
Axons/nerve fibers: long processes that transmit signals to other neurons
How are neurons connected to each other?
A small gap between a neuron’s axon and the dendrites/cell body of another neuron, called the synapse.
Form connections only to specific neurons –> together form neural circuits (groups of interconnected neurons)
What is a receptor?
Neurons that are specialized to pick up information from the environment, with an axon but have specialized receptors to pick up information in place of the cell body/dendrites.
Who discovered the mechanisms for transmitting signals between neurons and how?
Edgar Adrian
Recorded electrical signals from single sensory neurons with microelectrodes (recording electrode with tip inside the neuron and reference electrode located away to not be affected)
What is the process of transmitting signals between neurons?
Resting potential: -70mV (more negative than outside), no signal
Nerve impulse/action potential: transmits down the axon (1 millisecond), charge inside rises to +40 mV and reverses back to negative after the impulse passed (below resting stage/overshooting).
No change in height or shape, stronger stimuli –> increased rate of firing
What is the principle of neural representation?
Everything a person experiences is based on representations in the nervous system
What are feature detectors? Who discovered them and how?
Neurons that fire only to specific qualities (length, orientation, movement) of the stimuli.
Hebel and Wiesel –> presented visual stimuli to cats
What is experience-dependent plasticity?
The structure of the brain changed by experience
Blakemore & Cooper: raised kittens in space with only vertical black and white stripes –> batted at moving vertical stick and ignored horizontal objects.
What is hierarchical processing?
Progression from lower to higher areas of the brain Visual cortex (relatively simple stimuli) --> higher levels of visual system (temporal lobe)
What is the problem of sensory coding? What are the possible ideas proposed?
How neurons represent various characteristics of the environment.
Specificity, population, and sparse coding
What is specificity coding?
An object could be represented by the firing of a specialized neuron that responds only to that object. (Unlikely)
What is population coding?
Representation of a particular object by the pattern of firing of a large number of neurons. (Evidence for it in the senses and other cognitive functions, but not all)
What is sparse coding?
A particular object is represented by a pattern of firing of only a small group of neurons, with the majority of neurons remaining silent.
What is localization of function?
Specific functions are served by specific areas of the brain.
What is cortical equipotentiality?
Brain operated as an indivisible whole as opposed to specialized areas.
What is the cerebral cortex and the subcortical areas?
A layer of tissue about 3mm thick that covers the brain.
Subcortical areas are located below the cortex
What is neuropsychology?
Study of behavior of people with brain damage.
