T1: no more study needed Flashcards
- Cognition is…
- includes abilities like …
- acquiring and processing info about the world in order to make behavioral decisions
- perception, language, memory
basic research is
research whose goal is to try to understand the world and its phenomena without regard to a specific end-use of this knowledge
o EX: studying why are people color blind
applied research is
concerned with the end-goal of developing a solution to a problem
o EX: How can I make the world easier for people who are color blind?
o Video games now have color blind uniform settings so players can ID their team vs enemy
EX’s of pseudoscience from class
lumosity:
phrenology:
freud:
lie detectors:
graphology
The filing drawer problem is
- publishers only publish significant findings (p<.05)
- many labs do an expir and find no sig diff (these go into filing drawer) but one expir finds sig results & is published
What is the mind-body problem?
What is the connection between the brain and the mind? Is the mind purely a result of the physical brain?
Perspectives on the mind-body problem
monism, dualism, pragmatic materialism
Monism is…
the brain and the mind are one substance
the 3 types of monism are…
a. Physicalism aka materialism
b. Idealism
c. neutral monism
dualism states…
2 dualist philosophers are…
the mind and the body exist separately / they consist of different substances or properties
ex: Plato (the mind is based on an immortal soul that is more ‘real’ than the physical world.)
ex: René Descartes, the mind and body form two different substance but they interact with one another
what are 3 examples of perception without awareness?
Much of our brain activity takes place outside of our awareness, Ex:
-implicit use of grammar
-Cortical Blindness & Blindsight
-binocular rivalry
cognition is made up of subfield research , including
eyewitness test., decision making, object recognition, language disorders, neuropsych
AI is most successful in
if-this-than-that functions, ex: math, chess, manufacturing
AI isn’t good at
flexible thinking, ex: chatbot hell
machine learning technique modeled on the brain
artificial neural networks
EX’s of invasive neuroscience technique
injecting a person with radioactive tracer then have them do a task; trans-cranial mag stim (TMS)
EX of NON-invasive neuroscience tech
EEG, MEG, fNIRS
Physicalism aka materialism
There is only physical matter. cognition is based in the processes of the physical brain.
cortical blindness & blindsight
direct line from eyes to occipital lobe, damage can cause line to be broken, if it is broken “later in the chain” they have unconsciousness vision
ex: blind man moved around objects in his path without seeing them
structuralism is
founded by Wilhelm Wundt 1876
aimed to break down the complex processes of the brain into its smaller “fundamental elements” via introspection.
introspection is
the structuralist technique that trained people to examine their own conscious experiences in terms of fundamental “elements” of consciousness
What are 3 challenges to structuralism?
- Subjective, non-measurable data
- Lack of possibility for replication
- Much of our brain activity takes place outside of our awareness
Behaviorism was founded by… in the …
John Watson… early 1900’s
Behaviorism held that…
in order to become a true science, psychology needed to abandon discussion of internal mental states in favor of objectively observable data.
ex: He replaced talk about “mental images,” and “memory” with the framework of stimulus and response
in psych a stimulus is
anything used in an experiment to stimulate the participant’s senses
in psych a response is
the behavior that the experimental subject engages in after a stimulus is presented.
describe the black box concept
behaviorists were only interested in research based on stimulus & response because they can be objectively observed and measured. This approach ignores how the subject generates the response from the stimulus and instead treats the intervening processes (e.g., the brain) as a “black box” whose workings cannot be investigated. This reflected the lack of understanding at the time of how the brain functioned.
Watson derived some of the basic ideas for behaviorism from experiments performed by
Ivan Pavlov (a physiologist)
Pavlov discovered a process now called
classical conditioning
In classical conditioning…
an involuntary behavior is induced by a neutral stimulus (salivation at bell ring), because that stimulus (bell ring) was previously paired with a different stimulus that naturally does cause that reaction (salivation at food)
Note: involuntary behavior
3 stages of classical conditioning
- Before conditioning:
unconditioned stimulus –> unconditioned response /
neutral stimulus —> no conditioned response - during conditioning: UCS + NS –> UCR
- after conditioning: CS (previously NS) –>
CR (previously UCR to UCS)
did behaviorists believe more in nature or nurture?
nurture (learning / classical conditioning)
operant conditioning was devised by… using the…
BF Skinner… skinner box
baby albert
Watson did experiments to show that a child could be classically conditioned to respond with great anxiety to something that the child initially had no fear of (rabbits –> white furry things)
“The mind is based on the immortal soul which is more ‘real’ than any physical world”
plato
“The mind and the body are made up of different types of substances. But the mind and the body can interact with one another ”
rene descartes
I believe that introspection can help us understand the inner workings of the mind
Wilhem Wundt
“The concept of blindsight challenges my school of psychology because people can respond to stimuli without conscious awareness”
wilhem wundt
We need to completely abandon the idea of the mind, and only focus on peoples’ responses
John Watson
“In my Little Albert studies, I demonstrated that any child can be afraid of something if paired with an unpleasant stimulus”
john watson
“Rather than classical conditioning, my experiments demonstrated that rewards and punishments can condition animals to make specific responses”
skinner
My famous experiment was the first to demonstrate classical conditioning
ivan pavlov
“I strongly disagree with the ideas behind behaviorism because I believe that humans engage in novel behaviors that they have never had a chance to learn”
Noam Chomsky
operant conditioning encourages
voluntary behaviors based on rewards or punishments
reinforcement learning
rat learns which behaviors are rewarded and which are punished and chooses actions accordingly
EX of subjective measure
attractiveness
EX of behavioral measures
Correctness, thresholds (detect light, temp change, sound), reaction time (must be accurate for RT to be meaningful)
“Although I am not a psychologist, my contributions in my own field helped to begin the Cognitive Revolution, when we started to view the biological mind as some sort of computer”
Turring
aphasia
loss of ability to understand or express speech, caused by brain damage
Broca’s Aphasia is marked by
very slow and deliberate speech, sometimes a single word uttered at a time (AKA expressive aphasia)
Wernicke’s aphasia is marked by
difficulty understanding language spoken to them (receptive aphasia), and word salad (speech that is fluid, but doesn’t have meaning)
Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia show that language production and comprehension are
doubly dissociated ( one can funct while the other is impaired)
the vertical dividing mark of the brain is the
central sulcus
Lettvin found neurons in the frog’s brain that…
responded only to small dots moving in certain patterns, which they called “bug detectors!”
Point of neural circuits: the brain can use layers of simple biological circuits to…
produce increasingly complex and sophisticated computations
specificity encoding holds that
at the higher levels of the brain (in which the neurons receive converging input from many layers of feature detectors), neurons may be selective for very specific things, such as certain kinds of objects (e.g., faces) and even specific individual objects (e.g., grandma’s face)
distributed encoding
is AKA
population encoding
distributed encoding states that
many neurons are active in response to a single stimulus such as a face, and we recognize that face based on the pattern of activation that occurs across those neurons (Alan may produce high activation of neuron A, lower activation of neuron B, and intermediate activation of C, while Brittany might produce a different pattern across the same neurons)
An advantage to the sparse coding hypo is
Energy and spatial efficiency bc at any given time, only a small number of high-level neurons needs to be active, potentially saving on energy. This may be compared with distributed encoding, where many neurons are active for any given stimulus. However, unlike specificity encoding, we do not need to have a unique neuron assigned to every object we encounter. Instead, neurons are shared across different objects and people.
pragmatic materialism
intelligent behavior can be understood by the workings of the physical brain,
Does not involve a stance on the source of our inner consciousness (“the feeling of red”).
fusiform face area
originally we thought FFA was only specialized for facial recognition; but actually it is for recognizing detailed objects (including faces)
AI does simulations of
brain processes
Machine learning programs computers to
learn more than what they were originally programmed to do, ie: change their behavior to become better at a task
binocular rivalry
- We have binocular rivalry with our eyes all the time because our eyes are in different locations on our head
- study: blue & red glasses and images, Consciously they see one image but unconsciously they can see both and use information about both (say v write the shape you see)
o This is a problem for structuralism because the info that they “can’t see” is being used unconsciously
How can computers be applied to the idea of mental processes? (the cognitive revolution)
cognition may be viewed as a type of algorithmic computation, with sensory info as input and a decision or behavior as the output; also can code for neuronal firing in binary: yes or no, 0 or 1
a function is
a mapping between an input and an output
an algorithm is
a set of operations that produces the input/output mapping of a function
The Cognitive approach is
based on the idea that we can measure objectively observable behavior in order to test theories of the underlying mental processes. EX: Donder’s experiments, & mental rotation studies
mental rotation study’s findings
rotating objects in one’s mind (mental imagery) is similar to doing it physical. Time for task and brain region used are similar.
What was Donder’s Experiment about? How measured?
understanding how individual mental responses might consist of component processes (used reaction time to measure length of processing it too for people to perform each step)
Main findings of Donder’s experiment?
We can systematically measure time needed for steps of mental processes (can study cognition based on behavior)
3 conditions of Donder’s expiriment
- detection: detect & press button
- discrimination: detect + decide if it is the correct stimulus to press button for or not)
- choice condition: press L button for L light; R button for R light (detect & discriminate x2)
What are the different types of neuroimaging techniques?
EEG, fMRI, TMS
a neuron in a neural circuit detects
one specific feature of the environment
The response of each neuron in a neural circuit is defined by
all of the neurons connected to it.
Hubel and Weisel found neurons in the cat visual cortex that responded to bars of light with… (3)
specific widths, orientations, and directions of motion
connecting neurons, each sensitive to a particular, simple property, and converging them onto yet another neuron would make that neuron…
detect the combination of these features.
excitation of a neuron =
more frequent action potentials
transduction is
the converting of sensory information into a neural code
3 ex’s of interoceptive senses
Proprioception: the sense of where are limbs are
Nociception: sense of pain due to injury
Equilibrioception: sense of balance
