Cognitive Psychology Chapter 1

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Questions and Answers

What impact does using a cell phone while driving have on accident risk according to the studies?

Accident risk is 4 times higher (correct)

Accident risk is 2 times higher

No effect on accident risk

Accident risk is only significant for handheld phones

What defines inattentional blindness?

Forgetting the order of steps in a routine task

Failing to notice an unexpected stimulus in one's field of vision (correct)

Seeing overtly but failing to process visual information

Not recognizing familiar faces in different contexts

Which stage in Treisman's feature integration theory involves analyzing objects by their features unconsciously?

Pre-attentive stage (correct)

Focused attention stage

Integrated feature stage

Conscious analysis stage

What is one characteristic of change blindness?

Difficulty in noticing changes requires concentrated effort Signup and view all the answers

In the context of divided attention, which of the following best describes the Allocation in capacity theory of attention?

Determination of which task is more important at the moment Signup and view all the answers

What is an illusory conjunction?

Mixing up features of different objects during pre-attentive processing Signup and view all the answers

Which of the following represents a characteristic of the feature present/feature absent effect?

Targets are easier to find if they are present than if they are missing. Signup and view all the answers

What type of failures are categorized under action slips?

Forgetting goals or changing tasks mid-action Signup and view all the answers

What does the choice reaction time task measure?

Time to make a decision between multiple stimuli Signup and view all the answers

Who is credited with proving the limitations of structuralism?

Watson Signup and view all the answers

What was a significant finding from Tolman's work with rats?

Rats have a cognitive map of their environment. Signup and view all the answers

What is the main role of the thalamus in sensory processing?

To process and relay sensory information to the appropriate cortex area. Signup and view all the answers

What is the primary difference between top-down and bottom-up processing?

Top-down processing relies on previous knowledge, while bottom-up processing starts with sensory data. Signup and view all the answers

What does the Stroop effect illustrate about attention?

Naming colors can interfere with the process of reading words. Signup and view all the answers

Which neurotransmitter is categorized as excitatory?

Acetylcholine Signup and view all the answers

What characteristic defines 'selective attention'?

The ability to focus on one message while ignoring others. Signup and view all the answers

Why is Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve significant in memory studies?

It illustrates the importance of spaced repetition. Signup and view all the answers

In which part of the brain is Broca's area located?

Frontal lobe Signup and view all the answers

What does the term 'brain ablation' refer to?

The destruction of certain brain parts to study their functions. Signup and view all the answers

What is the main focus of cognitive neuroscience?

Understanding the physiological basis of cognitive processes. Signup and view all the answers

Which model explains how attention filters information during the processing stages?

Broadbent’s Filter Model Signup and view all the answers

What does a high threshold in Treisman’s Dictionary Unit imply?

The word is infrequently encountered or used. Signup and view all the answers

Study Notes

Chapter 1: Cognitive Psychology and Its Foundations

Cognitive psychology studies human mental processes, focusing on how people think, learn, and remember.
Donders pioneered the use of mental chronometry, employing reaction time experiments to measure cognitive processes.
Differentiates between Simple RT tasks (one response) and Choice RT tasks (multiple responses); the difference indicates decision-making time.
Ebbinghaus focused on memory, conducting experiments on nonsense word memorization, revealing that shorter intervals between retrieval enhance learning efficiency.
Introduced the concept of "savings" to measure memory retention through relearning, leading to the Forgetting Curve.
Wundt, the founder of psychology, introduced structuralism, breaking experiences down into sensations.
Structuralism relied on analytic introspection, which proved unreliable due to subjective variability among individuals.
Watson's behaviorism challenged structuralism, emphasizing observable behavior over mental processes and demonstrating classical conditioning effects.
BF Skinner's operant conditioning demonstrated that consequences shape behavior, with rewarded actions increasing frequency while punished actions decrease it.
Chomsky criticized behaviorism by highlighting novel language development in children, leading to the proposal of an inborn language capacity.
Tolman's experiments with rats established the existence of cognitive maps, contradicting behaviorist views that behavior was solely a response to conditioning.
The cognitive revolution framed computers as models for understanding human cognition, marking a shift to internal mental processes.
Information processing models describe cognition as occurring in stages, reflecting how computers operate.
Structural models physically represent cognitive functions, while process models depict the mechanisms through flow diagrams.

Chapter 2: Cognitive Neuroscience and Nervous System

Cognitive neuroscience examines the physiological basis of cognition, focusing on the nervous system's mechanisms.
The nervous system is divided into the central nervous system (CNS) and the peripheral nervous system (PNS).
Neurons consist of axons (transmit signals), dendrites (receive signals), and cell bodies (sustain the neuron).
Action potentials are electrical signals that travel along neurons, with firing rates indicating the intensity of the stimuli.
Synapses facilitate chemical communication between neurons via neurotransmitters; they can be excitatory or inhibitory.
Neural representation defines how information is stored in the brain.
Hubel and Wiesel discovered feature detectors in the visual system, differentiating between simple and complex neurons responding to specific stimuli.
Hierarchical processing builds complex representations from basic sensory inputs, flowing from lower to higher brain areas.
Knowledge can be coded in three ways: specificity, sparse coding, and population coding.
Localization of function identifies specific brain areas assigned to distinct cognitive functions.
The cerebral cortex comprises four lobes: frontal (action coordination), occipital (visual processing), temporal (auditory, language, perception), and parietal (physical sensation processing).
The limbic system includes structures such as the hippocampus (memory), amygdala (emotion), and thalamus (sensory processing).
Localizations of brain function include areas specifically for perception (FFA, PPA, EBA) and language (Broca's area for production, Wernicke's area for comprehension).
Damage to specific brain areas may disrupt particular processing, highlighting brain interconnectivity.
Advanced imaging techniques (PET, fMRI, DTI) assess brain activity and structural connectivity.
Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) measure brain responses to stimuli, excelling in temporal resolution but lacking spatial precision.

Chapter 3: Sensation, Perception, and Attention

Sensation involves absorbing raw sensory data, while transduction converts that energy into neural signals.
Attention denotes focused mental energy on incoming information, leading to perception—interpreting sensory signals.
Perception is shaped by personal experiences and may not represent the world accurately.
Bottom-up processing starts with sensory data, building recognition from components.
The Recognition by Components theory (geons) posits that three-dimensional objects consist of simple shapes, though criticized for oversimplification.
Top-down processing relies on prior knowledge and inferences to interpret sensory information.
Helmholtz's theory of unconscious inference suggests that previous knowledge influences perception.
The likelihood principle states that perception is guided by the most probable interpretations of sensory input.
Gestalt laws of perceptual organization describe human tendencies in visual perception, including similarity, proximity, and continuity principles.
Heuristics are mental shortcuts for decision-making; algorithms provide guaranteed solutions but require more time.
The oblique effect emphasizes that humans notice vertical and horizontal lines more easily.
The occlusion heuristic suggests that occluded objects are perceived as continuing behind the covering object.
The Greeble study demonstrated experiment-dependent plasticity, where neural adaptations occur through exposure to stimuli.
The "what" pathway (identifying objects) correlates with the temporal lobe, while the "where" pathway (locating objects) is connected to the parietal lobe.
Brain ablation studies reveal functional deficits tied to specific damage.
Single and double dissociations help distinguish between different cognitive functions based on damage outcomes.

Chapter 4: Attention Mechanisms

Selective attention allows the focus on specific messages while ignoring others, exhibiting limited capacity and timing.
Cherry’s Dichotic Listening Study showed participants could identify physical characteristics of ignored messages but not their meaning.
The cocktail party effect illustrates the ability to recognize salient information (like hearing one's name) in noisy environments.
Early selection models, such as Broadbent's filter model, propose filtering information early based on physical characteristics before meaning is processed.
Evidence against early selection includes findings from Moray, Treisman, and Corteen & Wood, demonstrating that meaning can influence attention.
Treisman’s Attenuation Theory suggests that both attended and unattended messages are processed, with the attended message occurring with greater strength.
Late selection models indicate that selection occurs after meaning has been processed, as shown in McKay's experiment.
The Stroop effect highlights automatic processes interfering with attentional tasks, complicating bottom-up visual processing.
Overt attention involves direct eye movements (saccades and fixations) studied through eye tracking techniques.
Bottom-up determinants of eye movement focus on stimulus salience, while top-down determinants involve scene schema and task demands.
Covert attention allows directional focus without eye movement, evidenced by pre-cueing studies.
Object-based visual attention suggests that attention can be allocated based on the object rather than solely spatially.

Chapter 4: Divided Attention and Its Effects

Divided attention refers to the capacity to perform multiple tasks simultaneously.
Spelke et al. demonstrated through studies that practice increases the ability to multitask effectively.
Attention capacity limits the number of tasks manageable at once, influenced by arousal and allocation strategies.
The divided attention driving study showed a fourfold increase in accident risk when using cell phones while driving.
Strayer and Johnson's studies confirmed that phone use, whether handheld or not, delays reaction times and increases missed signals.
Inattentional blindness describes failures to notice visible objects when focused elsewhere, demonstrated by Mack and Rock's experiments on line lengths.
Change blindness occurs when significant changes to a scene go unnoticed without concentrated effort.
Action slips can result from various failures, including storage, test, sub-routine, discrimination, and program assembly errors.
Treisman’s Feature Integration Theory posits that attention is required to combine features of objects correctly.
Illusory conjunctions result from feature misbinding when attention is diverted, as seen in Treisman and Schmidt's study.
Visual search tasks highlight variables affecting the ease of locating targets, including feature presence and distractor similarity.
The isolated feature/combined feature effect distinguishes between parallel and serial processing methods in visual searches.

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Explore the foundational concepts of cognitive psychology in this quiz. Learn about pioneering figures like Donders and Ebbinghaus, and delve into key theories including mental chronometry and structuralism. Test your knowledge on decision-making processes, memory retention, and the evolution of psychological thought.