Exam 1 Review

Cognitive Psychology EXAM 1 I. Approaches to the study of the mind A. Introspection: method in which one looks carefully inward, reporting on inner sensations and experiences (examine our consciousness) a. Problems with introspection: we can?t observe or replicate something going on in the head i. Verifiability ii. Replicability - Structuralism: structure of the conscious mind, the sensations, images, and feelings that are the elements of the minds structure B. Neurophysiology: understanding mental process by looking at neural activity C. Behavior: can reveal mental activity 1. Pure behavior vs. inferring mental processes II. Contributions to cognitive psychology A. Neobehaviorism & verbal learning Radical behaviorism: at the root of everything is behavior, circumstances under which behavior can change Methodological behaviorism: recognizes you need observable behavior in order to draw conclusions, behavior is observable but it is not the subject matter, it?s simple Verbal learning: memory B. WWII a. Engineering i. Attention: limited & susceptible to being further limited by certain things (skilled pilots crashed) ii. Signal detection: radar & sonar operators failed to detect or misidentified enemies C. Linguistics Noam Chomsky: argued that language users follow rules when they generate language, rules that are stored in memory and cognitive structures are operated on by mental processes - Argued against Skinner?s book that states human language used ?verbal behavior? followed the same laws of learning discovered in animal learning labs ? stimulus, response, reinforcement D. Computer science: we liken the human mind to the most complex machine, and we think about mental processes as we think about computer processes Artificial intelligence: try to get machines to do things like humans; we use this to study human processes III. Assumptions of cognitive psychology A. Mental processes exist ? they are key to a complete useful psychology B. Mental processes can be studied objectively ? via inferences from behavior, broken down into components C. People are active information processors ? actively process, retrieve, and use. People respond actively on the basis of their mental processing of events and info IV. Information processing model: coordinated operation of active mental processes within a multi-component memory system I. Sequence of stages: info flows through stages, each stage transforms, sends output to next stage II. Flow of information: through stages, sent along to next III. Complex processes broken down into sub processes (reading, solving problems) a. Structures Sensory registers: first receive info, high capacity, short duration Short-term (working) memory: info held for further processing Long-term memory: no limits on capacity or duration V. Recurring issues in cognitive psychology A. Representation & Process: how info is represented mentally & what we do with it, process relies on representation, ex. Circle=drawing, equation, definition B. Parallel vs. Serial: parallel ? all stages going on at once C. Automatic vs. Conscious: automatic ? were not aware of, conscious ? were aware of D. Bottom up (data-driven) vs. top down (conceptually-driven) Bottom up: coming from stimulus, the incoming data& making its way to you Top down: information you already have influences processing. Info starting at higher level and influencing lower level (seeing your name on something) E. Modulatirity vs. interaction Modular: processes are automatic and independent *bottom-up only Interaction: top-down & bottom-up F. Universal vs. specific processes: you can have a theory that?s biologically based & that mean it should be the same in every species VI. Methods in cognitive psychology A. Accuracy: can be judged, ex. Did the subject recall the word right? B. Speed/reaction time: measure of time elapsed between some stimulus & persons response to the stimulus (ms/milliseconds) C. Verbal protocols: participants asked to verbalize their thoughts as they solve problems (self-descriptions or processes) *less used than time & accuracy *These can all be used to examine/infer stages of processing VII. Brain & cognition A. Methods of study 1. Lesions: damaged brains, look at effect brain destruction has on behavior, must rely on naturally occurring lesions (tumor, stroke), its difficult to predict what will come from what damage 2. Split brain & divided visual fields study: corpus collosom is cut so hemispheres can?t communicate.. If patient had pencil in left hand, neural input went to right hemisphere but could cross to left.. They could make appropriate hand movements as if writing w/ a pencil, but they could name the object unless placed in the right hand - People had faster responses on right visual field (left hemisphere) for language 3. EEG: electroencephalograms ? studies patters of brain waves & measures electronegetivity ERP: event related potentials ? measures momentary changes in electrical activity of the brain when a particular stimulus is presented **EEG & ERP are temporally (time) sensitive (not spatially sensitive) 4. Neuroimaging: *very spatially sensitive* 3D images of the brain MRI: magnetic resonance imaging ? picture of the structure of the brain PET scan: (positron emissions tomography/functional MRI) ? images show areas of the brain with heightened neural activity Subtractive method: difference between activated areas in 2 tasks A. Issues in the brain & cognition 1. Contralaterality: the receptive & control centers for one side of the body are in the opposite hemisphere Cerebral lateralization: different functions or action in the brain tend to rely more heavily on one hemisphere or the other, or performed differently 2. Laterality of function Left Hemisphere Right Hemisphere -Language -Speech sounds -Grammar - Speech production -Verbal memory -Reading -Spatial abilities -Face recognition -Language -Prosody: understanding pitch in things, sarcasm -Inference: everything isn?t always said, so we need to make connections/inferences -Coherence: drawing connections between things in story 3. ERP & time course of cognitive processes: cant show where each mental mechanism is, but shows in good deal when mechanism operates VII. Connectionist (neural net) modeling: computer bases technique for modeling complex systems A. Parallel processing: neuron units act on other units & are heavily interconnected B. Distributed vs. local processing: Parallel distributed processing: mental processes operate parallel & distributed across multiple levels of knowledge, activation from higher levels may influence processing at lower levels Local Processing: IX. Visual information processing A. Saccades: jerky eyes seeps from one point to another Fixations: pauses that interrupt movement; this is when eyes take in visual info B. Detection & identification: takes place quickly C. Sperling?s Research 1. Span of apprehension: how much info (# of individual items recallable after short display ? not a lot, 4-5 letters 2. Whole report procedure: report any letters they can 3. Partial report procedure: only one of the rows was to be reported = performance was better D. Limit on information ? capacity of memory is large but duration of memory is brief E. Duration of icon ? brief Icon: visual image that reside in iconic memory F. Loss of information from icon 1. Decay: passive process & just fades *psychology doesn?t like 2. Interference (masking): something takes its place, intervening stimulation or mental processing Backward masking: a later visual stimulus can drastically effect the perception of an earlier one Erasure: specific interference, when context of visual sensory memory are degraded but subsequent visual stimuli X. Visual pattern recognition A. Templates ? store model of all catagorizable patterns, matching stimulus to model B. Features ? simple patter, a fragment or component that can appear in combination with other features across a wide variety of stimulus patterns 1. The economy of feature bases representations: we recognize whole patters by breaking them apart into the building block features they contain ~instead of matching entire template pattern to ?G?, break down ?G? into features ?circle open right? etc. 2. Pandemonium (feature bases model): a feature bases computational approach a. A problem of context (letter perception & WSE): letters recognized better when in words to make more complicated, add top down processing C. Features with context---PDP (parallel distributed processing) models 1. Layers of processing units: Input units: basic elementary cells in the structure that receive inputs from the environment Hidden units: connected units that are activated when the input unit matches the features in the stimulus Output units: units that report the systems response to the question 2. Bi-directional activation among layers: activation sends across pathways that link units together, are always either positive or negative 3. Excitatory inhibitory connections: Excitatory: receive positive activation, govern the outcome of processing Inhibitory: receive negative activation, has little control over the outcome 4. Distributed processing: the representation fir a letter, word, concept is said to be distributed because the knowledge is spread widely across the units and their weights XI. Object recognition A. Geons: geometric icons, together have relationships with one another, features for objects (circle, square, triangle) Contours: Intersections: B. Agnosis: without ?knowledge?, inability of recognition 1. Apperceptive agnosia: difficulty perceiving patterns, unable to perceive basic shapes 2. Associative agnosia: difficulty associating pattern with meaning, perceives shape but can?t tie the shape to anything, ex. Recognizes a rectangle ½ inch think but can?t tie it to a book XII. Auditory information processing A. Auditory sensory register (echoic memory): brief memory system that receives auditory stimuli & preserves them for some amount of time Auditory vs. visual Capacity: lower for auditory, higher for visual Duration: higher for auditory, lower for visual *biggest difference Loss of information: echoic can also get masking effects