W1 - Intro Concepts Flashcards
What approach does cognitive psychology use to explore human cognition?
behavioural data
What approach does cognitive NEUROpsychology use to explore human cognition?
brain damage case studies
What approach does cognitive NEUROscience use to explore human cognition?
uses brain and behavioural evidence
from normal patients
What approach does computational neuroscience use to explore human cognition?
uses computational models, algorithms, designed to simulate or imitate human processing on a given task
What type of processing involves a stimulus input and results in a behavioural output?
Bottom-up processing
What TYPE of processing is bottom up processing?
serial
What type of processing allows later stages to start before early ones are finished?
top-down processing
whereby the stimulus processing is influenced by individuals expectations and past experiences and knowledge rather than the stimulus itself (memory influences perception and attention)
What is a common illusion that exhibits top-down processing?
“Paris in the
the springtime”
What types of tasks often involve parallel processing?
procedural tasks one has experience in
What is cascade processing?
- a type of parallel processing
- whereby the later processing stages are initiated before one or more earlier stages are finished
What is an example of cascade processing?
many people form hypotheses about the word presented before identifying all the letters in the word (McClelland, 1979)
What is the task impurity problem?
The phenomenon where most cog. tasks initiate several processes at the same time, making it hard to interpret / isolate the findings
How do we solve the task impurity problem?
by consider various tasks that all require/use the same cog. Process, eg. stroop task, stop-signal task - and find commonalities in brain regions
ie., by using converging evidence
What are some tasks that involve the pure measures of inhibitory processes?
- Stroop task (word colour is incongruent with semantic meaning)
- Anti-cascade task = inhibiting the tendency to look at something and instead look in the opposite direction, takes longer than looking at the cue
- Stop-signal task = respond quickly to indicate which words is animal/non-animal, response was instructed to be inhibited on the sound of a key tone
What are 5 limitations of cognitive psych?
- low eco-validity
- too vague
- too many predictions
- indirect evidence for cog. processes
- paradigms being too specific (cant be generalised)
What is the focus and exploration in cog. neuropsychology?
- Focuses on cognitive performance of intact and impaired brains, eg. patients with lesions (structural damage from injury/disease)
- Mainly focus on information-processing models of cognition over the brain itself
What are the 5 traditional assumptions of neuropsychology?
- Modularity - the cognitive system has domain-specific modules, serial processing, eg., FFA
- Anatomical modularity - domain-specific modules correspond to distinct brain areas
- Universality - people have same/similar cognitive organisations and brain regions
- Subtractivity - brain damage impaired 1+ processing regions but does not change or add anything
- Transparency - performance of brain damaged performance reflects how a theory (designed to explain the behavior of healthy individuals) would work in an ideal brain, with the only difference being the effects of their brain damage (lesion).
The lesion is seen as something that subtracts or alters parts of the normal functioning.
What is the evidence for/against anatomical modularity?
- yes in simple visual processes, but not in complex tasks, eg., PFC and ACC are involved in many different tasks
- For = if brain regions were distributed, BD patients would suffer many cog. impairments, but this is not true, they often have intact X and impaired Y, supports some degree of localisation
What is the evidence for/against modularity?
- For = Bigger brains have more specialisations, eg., evidence for modularity
- Against = Neuroscientific evidence shows more neuroconnections, evidence against modularity, towards parallel processing
What is the evidence for/against universality?
For universality = Penfield studies: impaired performance on tasks from direct electrical stimulation to specific brain regions provides evidence for more universal cognitive regions/functions
Against universality = big differences between patients in the location of speech and language brain networks and functional connectivity, more like a fingerprint and unique and reliable
What is Duffau’s two-level model of universality?
- At cortical level = high variability across individuals in brain structure/function, at cortical inconsistent with the universality assumption
- At subcortical level = very little variability, more universal at subcortical level, eg., premotor cortex, amygdala
Why are the subtractivity and transparency assumptions important?
- Assume brain-damaged patients develop new cog. modules to compensate for cog. Damage - that would make studying the intact cog. system much harder through the study of brain damaged patients
Example = pure alexia - condition where brain damaged patients have severe reading issues but intact language, where there is generally a direct relationship between word length and reading speed due to letter-by-letter processing, indicating use of compensatory strategies to normal reading processes
