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Cognitive and Biological Psychology > Week 13 > Flashcards

Week 13 Flashcards

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1
Q

Nativism (Plato)

A
  • maintains the belief that certain kinds of knowledge are innate
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2
Q

Empiricism (Aristotle/John Locke)

A
  • claims the mind at birth is a blank state
  • everything we think and feel has been acquired throughout life through sensory experience
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3
Q

Dualism (Descartes)

A
  • the concept that body and mind are two distinct entities that interact
  • question of how “spiritual” mental activity can be coordinated with physical behaviour of the body
  • Hobbesian perspective goes entirely against this (belief that the mind is what the brain does)
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4
Q

Phrenology (Gall)

A
  • belief that specific mental abilities and characteristics are localised to specific regions of the brain
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5
Q

Structuralism

A
  • the analysis of basic elements that make up the mind
  • breaking consciousness down into elemental sensations and feelings
  • difficult introspective approach (relies on mental observations)
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6
Q

Functionalism

A
  • the study of the purpose mental processes serve in enabling people to adapt to their environment
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7
Q

Gestalt psychology

A
  • emphasises that we often perceive the whole rather than the sum of the parts (i.e. the mind imposes organisation on what it perceives)
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8
Q

Psychoanalytic theory (Freud)

A
  • emphasises the importance of unconscious mental processes in shaping thoughts and behaviours
  • important to look at a person’s past/early experiences to uncover their inner thoughts and fears
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9
Q

Humanistic psychology

A
  • emphasising the positive potential of human beings (allowing people to reach their full potential rather than being bound by their past)
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10
Q

Psychology as a science (Wilhelm Wundt)

A
  • founding father of experimental psychology
  • created the idea that the mind can be studied as a science (rather than philosophy)
  • e.g. introspectionism
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11
Q

Introspectionism

A
  • involves training people to carefully analyse their thoughts to gather information about how the mind works, experimentally
  • e.g. complication clock experiment
  • not always reliable to report on thoughts rather than quantitative data (subjectivity + bias)
  • many interesting mental activities (e.g. development, personality) are not transparent to introspection
  • difficult to study young children and animals
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12
Q

Behaviourism

A
  • the study of only overt behaviour (not subjective thoughts), used to determine the science of the mind
  • mind considered to be a black box (we cannot see internally so just observe the outputs in terms of behaviour)
  • idea that most types of behaviour are learned rather than innate –> empiricism
  • use of classical conditioning (e.g. Pavlov’s dog - study of conditional/learnt reflexes)
  • operant/instrumental conditioning (e.g. Thorndike’s cats - animal is involved in the conditioning)
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13
Q

Law of effect

A
  • seeking pleasure rather than pain
  • good outcome leads to a repeated action
  • occasional reinforcement is more effective than constant reinforcement
  • e.g. Skinner box
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14
Q

Connectionism

A
  • new form of behaviourism (all about learning processes rather than things being innate)
  • link between basic understanding of nerve cells in the brain and using computer simulations to think up neural networks
  • requires enormous computer power
  • concept of deep learning being relevant to application to the brain
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15
Q

Cognitive revolution (Chomsky)

A
  • better to conceptualise the mind as an “information processing” device, rather than regarding it as a black box like in behaviourism
  • box-and-arrow models of cognitions as flow charts (with brain as central processing unit between input and output)
  • cognitive neuroscience attempts to understand the links between cognitive processes and brain activity
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16
Q

Brain study experiments

A
  • goal of establishing the validity of a hypothesis (rejecting null hypothesis that outcome was due to chance –> further studies to validate a positive hypothesis)
  • controlled experiments provide insight into cause and effect by altering one factor
  • useful for behaviourist approach but difficult to “measure” mental states due to bias
  • mental chronometry (measuring the time a mental process takes to be carried out)
  • statistical tests assess the strength of evidence for a particular result
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17
Q

Neuroimaging

A
  • EEGs (electroencephalography) explore electrical activity along the scalp via electrodes
  • fMRI (magnetic resonance imaging)
  • PET (positron emission tomography, measuring brain activity by detecting increases in cerebral blood flow to localise specific activities in different brain areas)
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18
Q

Acquired brain damage cases

A
  • individuals who were neurotypical previous to an accident
  • determining which brain areas are responsible for different functions based on what functions have been lost
  • e.g. Phineas Gage
  • brain is neither complete discrete or holistic (many functions require multiple areas)
  • the more selective a cognitive impairment, the more useful it is for cognitive science
19
Q

Graceful degradation phenomenon

A
  • means the brain is protected against total wreckage so if one area is damaged, the whole brain will not shut down entirely
20
Q

Agnosia

A

loss of ability to recognise objects (despite vision being intact)

21
Q

Prosopagnosia

A

inability to recognise faces (but objects can still be recognised)

22
Q

Aphasia

A

specific language impairment

23
Q

Amusia

A

deficit in musical pitch processing, musical memory and recognition (but auditory system is intact)

24
Q

Single dissociation

A
  • when a patient is impaired in one domain but well-functioning in all other domains
  • does not necessarily provide useful information about a brain area as there may be other explanations
25
Q

Double dissociation

A
  • connection between dissociations which record patients with complementary impairments
  • implies the two mental domains are likely carried out in different areas of the brain (i.e. more solid proof for assigning brain function to different areas)
26
Q

Sensation

A
  • detection of simple properties (e.g. brightness, colour etc.)
  • this is the biological aspect of the senses
27
Q

Perception

A
  • interpretation of sensory signals as information about the outside world (e.g. object recognition, identification of properties)
  • uses semantic knowledge to impact perception
  • our brain takes a 2D image from the retina and processes it to give a 3D view of the actual world (e.g. Necker Cube)
28
Q

Receptors

A

most sensory detectors are modified neurons to transmit signals from sense organs via afferent nerves to the CNS

29
Q

Photoreceptors in the retina

A
  • modified neurons containing photosensitive pigment (rhodopsin)
  • rods function at low light levels (these are “colourblind” and respond to intensity only)
  • cones function in bright light, they are colour-tuned (with peak sensitivity to either red, green or blue wavelengths)
30
Q

How many cell does the retina contain?

A
  • 120 million rods
  • 7 million cones
  • optic nerve formed of approx. 1 million ganglion cells
31
Q

Single-cell recordings

A
  • electrophysiological response of a single neuron (simple cells) being stimulated by the environment, can be observed by inserting a microelectrode into its visual cortex
  • noted that feature detector cells are selectively active in response to a particular stimulus in a particular orientation
32
Q

Segmentation of the visual scene

A

first stage of object recognition (with visual features that belong to the same object being grouped together)

33
Q

Figure-ground perception

A
  • assignment of figure and ground can sometimes be ambiguous (e.g. Rubin vase optical illusion)
  • note that at every one given time a distinction must be made
34
Q

Gestalt principles of grouping

A

grouping elements to make a “unified image” of an object in the mind is determined by innate and automatic principles:
- grouping by similarity (e.g. similar in colour, shape or texture indicates part of the same object)
- grouping by proximity (objects close together generally grouped)
- grouping by good figure (visual system tends to select the simplest or most likely interpretation)
- grouping by connectedness (edges or contours with the same orientation grouped + we tend to fill in missing elements of a visual scene to form complete objecys)

35
Q

Illusory conjunction

A

a perceptual mistake where features from multiple objects are incorrectly combined - occurs through lack of attention or parietal lobe lesions

36
Q

Feature integration theory

A
  • proposes that attention binds individual features together to comprise a composite stimulus
  • uses both the dorsal and ventral visual stream (with integration done by the parietal lobes)
  • illusory conjunctions occur when full attention is not given to each of the features
37
Q

Synaesthesia

A
  • perceptual experience of one sense evoked by another sense (e.g. number-colour matching)
  • different brain wiring so brain regions for different sensory modalities cross-activate each other –> may be if separate sensory areas do not fully streamline as they should in adulthood and remain interconnected as they initially are
38
Q

Depth perception

A
  • depth perception appears to be innate (or learnt at a really early age), e.g. the visual cliff experiment
    depth perception determined by:
  • occlusion (things in the foreground occlude things in the background)
  • atmospheric perspective (things in the background tend to be more washed out than those in the foreground)
  • relative height/size difference (objects closer to you are lower in your visual field)
  • perspective convergence (parallel lines seem to converge as distance increases)
  • texture gradient (parallel lines seem to converge as they recede into the distance)
  • binocular disparity (stereoscopic vision means the closer the object the greater the disparity between images shown from each eye, indicating depth)
  • motion parallax (nearby objects appear to zip by quickly but far objects appear not to move at all - MT region of temporal lobe)
39
Q

Perceptual constancy

A
  • brain generates an interpretation of visual images even if they are sometimes ambiguous
  • brain implicitly assumes that objects are stable and unchanging, making allowances for varying sensory input
  • automatically computes true size, shape etc. by taking into account viewing conditions (e.g. if an object is smaller because it is further away, we use our knowledge of depth perception to infer that they are actually the same size)
40
Q

Brightness constancy

A
  • if we perceive a light source to come from a certain angle in an image this will alter our perception of how light/dark certain areas of an image are, even if they are in fact the same colour
  • e.g. Checker shadow illusion
41
Q

Template matching

A
  • when we recognise something, we match it up with the closest instance (template) of things stored in our long-term memory
  • pattern recognition based on global similarity match between sensory input and templates stored
  • best match found is the output (e.g. P detector in visual cortex only fires when letter P is presented)
  • in reality, input is often quite variable (e.g. different handwriting, rotation, viewpoints of an image etc.)
  • also completedness issue with similar letters (e.g. R may be recognised as a P)
42
Q

Feature matching

A
  • subconsciously breaking down objects into features so pattern recognition is based on identification of features in a visual array (e.g. letter A made up of two slanted and one horizontal line)
  • each feature should be efficient so alternatives can be appropriately discriminated between
  • low-level visual feature analysis through simple cells (e.g. lines at particular orientations)
  • difficulties with more complex images + variation between images
  • viewer-centered representation (assumes changing the viewpoint means object will not be recognised) –> object-centered representation (3D perception so brain can align a reference frame regardless of orientation image is viewed in)
43
Q

Structural pattern recognition theories

A
  • representation of pattern includes a description of individual features and relations between them
  • Biedermen geon theory: simple 3D shapes = geons that make up the mental representation every object with attachment relations connecting them
  • evidence through removal of attachments in images leading to more difficulty interpreting images + single cell recordings
  • difficult to distinguish between more specific objects with similar geons structures (e.g. natural objects - animals, faces)
44
Q

Facial recognition

A
  • believed to be different from generic object recognition
  • fusiform gyrus particularly active in this
  • face inversion effect (more difficult to identify when upside down - but only for faces not general objects; implies facial recognition is more “holistic”)
  • e.g. Thatcher Illusion and part-whole effect prove the above

Cognitive and Biological Psychology (8 decks)

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