Week 1 Flashcards
What is “Learning”?
A change in mental states that is associated with some environmental or cognitive event.
What is “Memory”?
The total, lasting effects of your life experiences.
What is “Attention”?
The capacity for managing our limited cognitive
resources, so that we use (and learn) what is most relevant.
How does an organism survive (and thrive) in
a complex world that is constantly changing?
Innate or learned biases or constraints tell us what is immediately relevant.
What helps bias/constrain aspects of the world?
Attention System
What are our eyes drawn to?
Visually salient items - high contrasts or moving
What is “bottom-up” process?
Process that happens automatically or innately - no direction or intention
What is “top-down” process?
Process that occurs deliberately based on learned experiences, usually when there are multiple visually salient items
How does your cognitive system work in the world?
There is a constant integration of bottom-up and top-down information to determine what is relevant.
What is indeterminacy of translation?
Situation
“under specifies” a unique meaning
How do organisms determine what is relevant to them?
natural biases about stimuli in the environment
What is the whole-object constraint?
Young children have a bias for
assuming that labels refer to whole objects, rather than parts of
objects
What is taxonomic assumption?
labels can be extended to other objects
of the same kind
What are 2 biases?
taxonomic assumption and whole-object constraint
What are the properties of biases?
Innate (bottom-up) and help constrain
how words are learned and applied to objects
How do cognitive systems tend to overcome
computational complexity?
By using a variety of innate and learned
biases
What are species-specific biases?
They reflect an animal’s evolutionary
adaptation to their ecological niche
What is the trade-off of species-specific biases?
The trade-off may be reduced
flexibility is responding to new threats
Do different cognitive systems(memory, attention, and learning) have different limits and constraints?
Yes
What is the purpose of cognitive psychology?
To characterize how each cognitive system
operates, it is helpful to study the biases and tendencies of the
system
What is the first reason Donders’ reaction-time experiments were remarkable?
It was the first use of a behavioral measure to infer a mental
process
What is the second reason Donders’ reaction-time experiments were remarkable?
Lead to the underlying assumption was that the mental processes were
resource-limited
What is the third reason Donders’ reaction-time experiments were remarkable?
The subtraction method put mental events on the same basis as
physical events. You can quantify mental activity