Top Hat module 2

Question 1

Mind-body problem

Answer 1

The question of how mental events, such as thoughts, beliefs, and sensations, are related to physical mechanisms taking place in the body.

Question 2

Dualism

Answer 2

The view that the mind and body consist of fundamentally different kinds of substances or properties. While the body may be made of a physical material, the mind, in this view, was not. Commonly held view, related to idea of soul.

Question 3

Monism

Answer 3

The view that there is only one kind of basic “substance” in the world, whether exclusively physical or exclusively mental.

Question 4

Physicalism/materialism

Answer 4

The monist view that all of reality, including mental processes, is physical or material in nature. In this view, cognition is just another physical phenomenon and mental states can ultimately be explained as being based in the processes of the physical brain. Any sense that there is a non-physical mind is an illusion.

Question 5

Idealism

Answer 5

The monist view that the only kind of reality is mental in nature. In this case, the brain (and all physical reality) is really a mental construct, not the other way around.

Question 6

Neutral monism

Answer 6

The view that the mental and physical are identical and all of reality is made of this one kind of thing.

Question 7

Frank Jackson’s thought experiment

Answer 7

A colorblind scientist succeeds in figuring out all of the physiological processes involved in seeing color, including reactive behavior. Does this scientist understand what “red” actually means?
Materialists would say yes: There is nothing left to explain once all the physics and physiology have been accounted for.
Dualists would say no: the scientist may know all of the physical facts, but not the mental components, requiring personally experiencing what it’s like to see yellow .

Question 8

Cartesian dualism

Answer 8

Descartes proposed that the mind and body formed two different types of substance but that these could interact with one another. Descartes identified the pineal gland, a structure in the center of the brain, as a likely location, a notion that had its origins in the ancient Greeks as well.

Question 9

Pragmativ monism

Answer 9

Most scientists who study the brain and behavior believe the products of the mind may ultimately be understood in terms of the workings of the physical brain, without appealing to any sort of immaterial properties. The mind and body aren’t seen as identical, but observable behavior can be explained based on physical processes. Our inner consciousness might not be explained by these physical processes. Still, there is the assumption that there are no non-physical mechanisms at work in causing cognition.

Question 10

Why isn’t everyone who is interested in cognition a neuroscientist?

Answer 10

The brain is enormously complex and our understanding of it remains quite poor (86 billion neurons with 7000 connections each). The brains of different people are very similar to one another at a certain level of description. Thus, it’s necessary to observe the behavior itself to know what the brain does.

Question 11

Why is understanding the brain itself not enough?

Answer 11

Even if science could one day fully reveal the inner workings of the physical brain, this would have limited utility if these processes were understood in isolation of the contexts in which the brain operates (the body, the environment, the society, the world in itself…). Each one of these contexts is crucial to understanding the intelligent behavior the brain produces and must be studied at their own levels in order to fully consider how cognition comes to be.

Question 12

Structuralism (Wundt + Titchener)

Answer 12

A school of psychology whose approach relied on introspecting on one’s own conscious mental states in order to understand the mind. It emerged at a time when progress was being made in fields such as physics and chemistry by breaking down complex processes into simpler elements. The structuralists attempted to do the same for the mind.

Question 13

Introspection

Answer 13

A technique employed by the structuralists to study the mind by training people to examine their own conscious experiences and decribe them in terms of fundamental “elements” of consciousness. Their hope was that they would discover basic principles of how these elements combined to form the contents of the working mind.

Question 14

Why was introspection short-lived?

Answer 14

• It wasn’t scientifically valid: data that can only be seen by one individual and cannot be objectively verified by others is inherently problematic. Introspection can’t be replicated (because there is no verifiable measure).
• It can only access mental activity that is available to conscious awareness.

Question 15

Replication

Answer 15

A process in scientific research in which a previous experiment is repeated using the same methods as the original to see if they get the same results.

Question 16

How is introspection still used in cognitive research?

Answer 16

• The think-aloud protocol: a research method that involves having participants verbally describe their thought process as they’re performing a specified task. These self-reports are often complemented by other measures.
• It can can play an important role in generating theories that are then tested using other methods.

Question 17

Behaviorism (Watson)

Answer 17

A school of psychology that emphasized using observable stimuli and behaviors as the basis of scientific experimentation. This approach ignores how the subject generates the response from the stimulus and instead treats the intervening processes (ex. brain) as a “black box” whose workings cannot be investigated. Watson based his work on Pavlov’s experiments. Believes in “nurture” rather than “nature”.

Question 18

Stimulus

Answer 18

Anything used to stimulate the senses as part of an experimental procedure, such as an image or a sound.

Question 19

Response

Answer 19

The behavior an experimental subject engages in after a stimulus is presented.

Question 20

Classical conditioning

Answer 20

A learning protocol in which an involuntary behavior is paired with a stimulus, eventually leading to that behavior being elicited by the stimulus alone. This shows that behavior can be learned rather than depending on innate behavioral capacities.

Question 21

Operant conditioning

Answer 21

A method of conditioning that reinforces certain behaviors through a system of rewards and punishments.

Question 22

Skinner box

Answer 22

A chamber used to contain and automatically provide behavioral feedback to an animal during operant conditioning experiments.

Question 23

Reinforcement learning

Answer 23

A form of behavioral conditioning based on punishment and reinforcement (reward) feedback. Skinner claimed that all behaviors could be explained based on a combination of classical and operant conditioning: people learn which behaviors to produce in any situation, based on the reinforcement they received for producing those behaviors in the past.

Question 24

Chomsky’s contribution to psychology

Answer 24

He argued that behaviorism could never achieve its goals of explaining behavior through conditioning because people engage in novel behaviors that they have never had a chance to learn, ex. language (people speak sentences they never did before).

Question 25

Edward Tolman’s rate maze

Answer 25

The rats were first allowed to wander around the maze with no food reward present. Then, a food reward was placed in one location of the maze. The rats were put into the maze and allowed to find the food reward. This was repeated, with the rat and the food placed in the same location, until the rat learned to always turn in the direction of the food. Finally, Tolman put food in the same location, but placed the rat in a new starting point within the maze. This time, to find the food, the rat would have to turn in the opposite direction, which they automatically did. However, this was only true if the rats had first been allowed to explore the maze without a food reward.

Question 26

Latent learning

Answer 26

Learning in the absence of any reward or punishment conditioning, as in Tolman’s maze experiments. Tolman believed that the rats had formed an “internal map” of the maze during the initial exploration, which they then used to find a new path to the reward.
This showed a flaw in the behavioralist approach: it cannot account for the flexibility of cognition to generate novel, intelligent behaviors that have not already been observed or performed.

Question 27

How is behavioralist methodology still used today?

Answer 27

• used in behavioral neuroscience labs, which use animal models to study the physiology of cognition (ex. lesion a rodent’s brain after reinforcement learning)
• used in some forms of therapy for humans (ex. re-condition phobia patients to associate the negative stimulus to a pleasant one)

Question 28

Computers’ beginnings

Answer 28

At their most basic level, computers are machines that are able to automatically generate functions (mappings from inputs to outputs). An algorithm is a set of operations that produces the input/output mapping of a function.

Question 29

Turing’s ideas

Answer 29

Alan Turing first described, in abstract terms, what properties a general purpose computing device would have to have to be able to compute any function. These included a medium of storing symbols and a set of instructions that tells the machine what to do when it encounters each symbol on the tape. Nowadays, we would call this set of instructions a program.

Question 30

Cognitive revolution

Answer 30

A movement in the 1950’s that proposed that the mind could be understood as a computational system, with sensory information serving as the input and a decision or behavior serving as the output (this is the idea of information processing). The goal of cog. researchers is thus to determine what underlying algorithm/program the brain uses to compute its input/output functions.

Question 31

Cognitivism/cognitive psychology

Answer 31

An approach in psychology that uses behavior as a method for developing and testing theories of the underlying processing of the mind.

Question 32

Donders (1868) experiment

Answer 32

He was interested in understanding how individual mental responses might consist of component processes. He reaction times in responding to a light stimulus under three different conditions. In the detection condition, the subject had to respond as quickly as possible to the stimulus by pushing a button. In the discrimination condition, participants were presented with two possible stimuli. If one stimulus appeared, they would respond by pressing the button; if the other stimulus appeared, they would not press the button.
Donders found that the detection condition was the fastest, while the choice condition took the longest. He reasoned that these different stimulus-response tasks actually depend on different combinations of underlying cognitive processes—the more processes involved, the longer the response takes.

Question 33

Human factors

Answer 33

A field of applied psychology concerned with the interaction between human perception and the design of systems.

Question 34

Independent variable

Answer 34

The conditions that are being manipulated by the experimenter in order to determine their effects on the dependent variable.

Question 35

Dependent variable

Answer 35

Property measured in an experiment. In the study of cognition, these are often the behavioral response(s) of interest that is being measured

Question 36

Most common measurements of subject’s responses

Answer 36

• Correctness (accuracy of subject’s response)
• Thresholds
• Reaction times (sometimes, researchers will analyze the data to determine whether participants are sacrificing accuracy in order to respond more quickly, which is a speed-accuracy tradeoff)
• Subjective responses (there is no verifiable correct answer or other objective measure, but where it is still possible to find systematic differences in response with manipulation of the independent variable)

Question 37

Involuntary behaviors commonly measured

Answer 37

• Eye movements (can be useful for assessing the mechanisms of attention, interest, etc.)
• Pupil dilation (can be used to assess effort, attention, and reaction to light)
• Heart rate (can provide insight into emotional state and arousal)
• Galvanic skin response/ Skin conductance (used to measure emotional arousal, particularly fear or anxiety, in response to experimental conditions)
• Facial and body gestures

Question 38

Noisy data

Answer 38

Variability in the data that is not due to the experimental manipulation but, rather, to so-called “nuisance variables.” For example, people may not be paying attention or they may make a mistake and accidentally choose the wrong response.

Question 39

Trials

Answer 39

Repetitions of an experimental condition, typically used in order to compensate for variability in performance across attempts. The measurement that ends up being analyzed will typically consist of the pooled average across all of the trials in that condition, rather than the individual trials. The idea behind this technique is the statistical principle that the larger your sample size, the more likely it is to represent the true population means.

Question 40

Individual differences

Answer 40

Variations in performance across different individuals in cognitive tasks. some cognitive psychologists deliberately focus on revealing such variations across people, but in most cases, it is assumed that the variation across people’s performance is not due to fundamentally different mechanisms.

Question 41

Cognitive neuroscience

Answer 41

A scientific field that merges brain imaging with behavioral experimentation. The combination of brain data and behavior can provide a powerful form of empirical “triangulation” for a theory.

Question 42

Behavioral neuroscience

Answer 42

A scientific field that assesses behavior and neurological factors in animals as models of human function. A common technique in this field is to implant microelectrodes in the animal’s brain in order to record the activity of individual brain cells while the animal is awake and behaving.

Question 43

Optogenetics

Answer 43

A technique used to control the activity of brain cells based on introducing light-sensitive proteins into the cells and activating them with light. This allows neuroscientists to turn the activity of brain cells on and off at very precise time scales to assess the activity of these brain cells at a much more precise level.

Question 44

Opsins

Answer 44

Light-activated proteins, used in optogenetics to experimentally modify the activity of neurons

Question 45

Computational neuroscience

Answer 45

A scientific field that uses computer models of the brain to model real brain function. his allows researchers to experimentally manipulate the properties of a simulated brain in a systematic way that is often impossible with real, biological nervous systems.