TMS & Perception (1) Flashcards
What did Donders (1818-1889) do?
-he developed mental chronometry
-he also created the reaction-time experiment
What is a reaction-time experiment?
measures interval between stimulus presentation and person’s response to stimulus
What is mental chronometry?
a measure of how long a cognitive process takes
What is a simple RT task?
-participant pushes a button quickly after a light appears
-steps: perceive the light, generate the response
What is a choice RT task?
-participant pushes one button if light is on the right side and another if the light is on the left side
-steps: perceive the light, select a button to push, generate the response
What is subtraction method?
choice RT - Simple RT = Time to make decision
How much longer does choice RT take compared to simple RT?
0.1s or 100ms
What are the assumptions of the subtraction method?
-assumption of serial stages: that processing stages occur one after another; non-overlapping or parallel
-assumption of pure insertion: adding an additional stage does not change the length of the other stages
According to Donders, how can mental processes be measured?
cannot be measured directly but can be inferred from a participants behaviour
What did Ebbinghaus do?
- Savings curve method for studying forgetting
- aimed to look at the contents of the mind including what’s unconsciously there
What is the task involved with the savings curve method?
- View a series of nonsense syllables (ex. DAX or LUH)
- repeat and predict what the next syllables will be until you can do it correctly
- he was counting how many times the participant had to go through the sequence before they could correctly recall the next syllable
What do people experience when doing the savings curve method?
- they have to repeat a fewer amount of times to ‘relearn’
- even if they have no conscious memory, at 31 days they have 20% savings
How is ‘savings’ calculated in the savings method?
savings = (initial reps - relearning reps) / initial reps
What happened during the cognitive revolution?
- birth of the digital computer
- theory of computation
- information theory
- computer science
- artificial intelligence
What did Alan Turing do?
- computability: anything that can be computed is computable by a simple “universal machine”, i.e. a Turing machine
- to the extent that what the mind does is compute, it can be specified as a computer program
What is cognitivism?
- mental functions can be explained by the use of experiments following the scientific method
- cognition consists of internal mental states whose manipulation can be described in terms of algorithms
What is cognitive psychology?
- the scientific study of how people perceive, learn, remember and think about the information
- rejects introspection as a primary tool
- accepts the existence of internal mental states
Who are some famous phrenologists?
- Franz Joseph Gall
- Johann Spurzheim
What is phrenology?
- interested in how the brain relates to the mind
- brain is the organ of the mind (not heart)
- parts of the brain represent different faculties with the size of the part indicating the “strength”
- studied from the outside of the brain using bumps and depressions
How many traits were identified in phrenology?
- 27 traits
- 19 common to human and animals (reproduction, courage)
- 8 unique to humans (Wisdom, vanity, satire, religion)
Which groups opposed phrenology?
- anti-localizationists: argued brain functions are an indivisible unit (brain not in sections)
- anti-materialists: argued mental/spiritual faculties are not of organic matter (mind not tied to physical part of body)
- both were wrong
What two psychologists provided evidence for localization in the 19th century?
- Paul Broca’s Tan
- Carl Wernicke
- found specific functions to be associated with specific locations
What did Paul Broca observe?
- speech loss not due to paralysis
- “loss of memory of movements needed to pronounce words”
- Broca’s area in left frontal lobe
What did Carl Wernicke observe?
- cases of lost speech comprehension
- Wernicke’s area in left temporal lobe
What were the implications of Broca’s and Wernicke’s discoveries?
- shift towards physiologically real functions (motor and sensory)
- localization of higher mental functions