Voluntary Control over Mental Processes Flashcards
What is cognitive control and what are the two types?
Cognitive control is a set of cognitive processes that regulate more specialized cognitive processes
Evaluative control checks to see if you have made a mistake
Executive control tries to correct the mistake the evaluative has determined
What is the SAS?
The Supervisory Attentional System
It chooses the most appropriate action when presented with a stimulus
Patients with damage to frontal lobes can show utilization behaviour, which is when you perform an action strongly associated with the stimulus but might not be appropriate
Shows that the SAS is not in control
What is the modularity hypothesis?
The mind is modular
Phrenology comes under this as it says that parts of your personality are associated with specific brain regions
However a one to one mapping of functions to physical areas is impossible
What is aggregate field theory?
It says the faculty of sensation is essentially one faculty
This was shown by Pierre’s lesions in bird brains, as he found it didn’t matter where specifically the lesion was but instead how much damage was done
What is spatial stimulus-response compatibility?
We prefer stimuli that are spatially located on the same side of our response
i.e. stimuli on left requires left key response, right key for right
An incompatible response would be right key for left and left key for right
What was the Simon task?
A spatial stimulus-response task but with circles and squares
Left key if circle, right key if square
Compatible and incompatible trials (depends on what side they appear on)
Make more mistakes on incompatible trials which shows it’s hard to inhibit spatial location
What is the dual-route model?
We react to stimulus either through object or location analysis
The location analysis route leads to motor processing faster than the object analysis route
What does the LMA show us?
Shows us when we have decided what response to do
When we decide to respond with our right hand, the left motor cortex becomes negative
What does the LMA show in incompatible trials?
It shows we have activated the wrong side
If correct hand is activated then it is negative
In an incompatible trial there is a small time when it is positive
Shows we override to activate the correct response hand
Means we start with location analysis and the override and go to object analysis
What is the Eriksen task?
See central stimuli surrounded by others
Left key if H, right if S
Compatible if surrounding is the same as central and incompatible if different (e.g. SSHSS)
How do we process the Eriksen task?
H nodes are connected to our left response and S nodes to our right response
In an incompatible trial our spatial attention gives us activation for both hands which produces conflict in our cognitive system
What is the Stroop task?
Naming the ink colour of the printed word
It either matches (compatible) or it doesn’t (incompatible)
There is a substantial Stroop affect for colour naming (only a small one for word reading)
How does the dual-route model explain the Stroop effect?
The word reading route is much faster than the colour naming route so we read words automatically
The word reading comes earlier so this leads to the Stroop effect
What is post-error response?
We tend to adopt a more conservative strategy after we make an error in reaction time tasks
We balance accuracy against the speed of our reaction time so we slow down to become more accurate
What sequential adjustment is shown in the Eriksen task?
If the previous trial was compatible, we are much faster for compatible vs incompatible
If the previous trial was incompatible however, we are still faster for compatible but the difference between the two is much less
