Cognitive Psychology Concepts

• Cognitive processes are decision making, sensory perception, attention, recall, knowledge, language, and intelligence.

Specifics

• Perception (Ch 3-4)
• Attention (Ch 5)
• Memory (Ch 6-8)
• Knowledge (Ch 9)
• Language (Ch)
• Visual Imagery (Ch)
• Judgement, Reasoning, Problem Solving (Ch)
• Intelligence (Ch)

The Broad Role of Memory

• Memory is used to remember things like jobs, names, voices, images, implications, and faces.

Cognitive Psychology

• Cognitive Psychology emerged in the 1950's and 1960's.
• Cognitive Psychology was partly a response to the limitations of previous research traditions.

Introspection

• Introspection involves observing and recording the content of your own mental life and the sequence of your own experience.
• Introspection required systemic training, giving a vocabulary to describe what they observed.
• People are trained to thoroughly report their experience with a minimum of interpretation.

Behaviorism

• Behaviorism focused on observable behaviors and stimuli, not mental events.
• Behaviorism sought to overcome the limitations of introspection.
• Behaviorism aimed to collect more objective data: data that could be directly observed, tested, and verified.
• Behaviorism was founded by John Watson.
• Behaviorism dominated psychology in America for the first half of the 20th century.
• Fear conditioning, “classical conditioning" (Ex: Little Albert) showed he was initially not afraid of white fluffy things.
• Watson started introducing loud sounds from banging metal rods when presented with white fluffy things.
• Soon enough every time he saw a white fluffy thing he would cry because of classical conditioning.
• Grasp reflex in babies
• Ivan Pavlov discovered classical conditioning.
• Pair a neutral event with an event (the US) that naturally produces some outcome (the UR)
• After many pairings, the “neutral" event (the CS) now also produces the outcome (the CR).
• B.F. Skinner discovered operant conditioning.
• Behavior that is rewarded is more likely to be repeated.
• Behavior that is punished is less likely to be repeated.

The Year of Behaviorism

• Problems with behaviorism became apparent by the late 1950's.
• Stimulus-response accounts aren't enough to explain behavior
• Different stimuli can elicit the same behavior (can you pass the salt? More salt please! My food would be more palatable with sodium chloride crystals.)
• The same stimulus can elicit different behaviors (can you pass the salt?)

The limits of Introspection

• Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) began the study of experimental psychology in the late 1800's (1890) with his student Edward B. Titchener.
• He believed psychology should focus on studying conscious mental events.
• Introspection is hard to test on reliability because everyone has different experiences
• Introspection is less clear on how we are obtaining and recording data (ex: trust me bro).
• Introspection is a self-survey where everyone has their own biases and opinions so the data won't always be accurate (people aren't very good at understanding their own thought processes).
• Introspection is not directly observing thoughts, just listening to what the test subjects are telling us.

The limits of Behaviorism

• The way people behave and what they feel is guided by how they understand or interpret the situation not just the objective situation itself.
• Subjective mental states play a role in guiding behavior, so they should be studied.

Foundations of the Cognitive Revolution

• Experimental psychologists learned from introspection and behaviorism that we need to study mental events in order to understand behavior.
• Introspective methods for studying mental events are not scientific.

Transcendental Method

• Reason backward from observations to determine the cause (Inference to best explanation"
• Mental processes aren't directly observable, but they have observable consequences (e.g., delayed reaction times, accuracy rate, etc.)
• Emmanuel Kant
• Psychological researchers can measure observable stimuli and responses, develop hypotheses about mental processes, and design new experiments to test these hypotheses.

Ulric Nelson

• Ulric Nelson is the father of cognitive psychology.
• He wrote the first book on cognitive psychology (1967).
• He focused on vision and hearing.
• He had scant information on “higher mental processes”
• He had scant information on physiology.

Edward Tolman

• Edward Tolman was a behaviorist and early cognitive psychologist.
• He placed rats in mazes and then trained them to find food in the maze.
• Behaviorism believes that the rats learned a behavior (e.g. "turn right to find food".)
• Tolman believed that the rats created a cognitive map of the maze and used it to navigate to the food [Correct!]
• B.F. Skinner had a strong critique of behaviorism, 1904-1990, and was an American behaviorist.
• He studied humans' usage of learning and language, arguing that language use can correlate to behaviors and rewards (1957).

Noam Chomsky

• Noam Chomsky (1928-?) rebutted Skinner's proposal.
• He made a complex argument about how Skinner's view could not explain the creativity of language (ability to produce and understand new sentences).
• He argued that the creativity was rooted in abstract principles that demanded a type of theorizing incompatible with Skinner's approach.

Frederic Barlett

• Frederic Barlett (1886-1969) is best known for his studies of memory and the notion that people spontaneously fit their experiences into a “schema” (mental framework that helps people organize, interpret, and understand information based on past experiences as well as aid in memory later on).
• Bartlett emphasized that people can shape and organize our experiences.

CHAPTER 1: The Scope of Cognitive Psychology

• Almost everything you do, or feel, or say depends on your cognition - what you know, what you remember, and what you think.
• Memory shapes your self-image and self-esteem.
• The mental world must be studied indirectly.
• It is difficult to study the mind through direct observation.
• Our behavior depends in crucial ways on how we perceive and understand the world around us.
• There are lots of questions about why people make the choices they do in day-to-day life.
• Our cognition has failures and limitations.
• Lots of things rely on memory like taking an exam, remembering groceries at the supermarket, and reminiscing about childhood.
• Memory can also be used to transfer a small amount of information into a general understanding of what is being talked about (Ex: Betsy wanted to being Jacob a present. She shook her piggy bank. It made no sound. She went to look for her mother.) Lots of information is implied without saying it outright.
• Without memory, H.M., mid 20's, had brain surgery to control his severe epilepsy.
• The surgery was a success but the anterior part of the brain that was removed was also in control of how new memories are formed.
• He survived 50 years after the operation and had little trouble remembering the events from before the operation but afterward he was unable to form new long-term memories.
• Very short term he could handle but once something was out of sight and mind for more than an hour he wouldn't remember anything about it.
• Uncle's death affected him greatly and kept forgetting it and every time he was reminded it caused great grief.
• Henry Molaison was his full name. Died in 2008.
• His brain was frozen and sliced into sections for detailed anatomical study.
• There has been a debate on who owns his brain and how we might interpret some observations about his brain.
• He commented that in important ways, he didn't know who he was.
• He didn't know if he should be proud of his accomplishments or ashamed of his crimes; he didn't know if he'd been clever or stupid, honorable or dishonest, industrious or lazy.
• In a sense then without memory, there is no self.
• Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of the acquisition, retention, and use of knowledge.
• "Knowledge” is relevant to a huge range of concerns such as self-concept.
• Emotional adjustments to the world rely on our memories, and even our ability to understand a simple story/experience.
• Cognitive psychology can help us understand capacities relevant to every moment of our lives; physical movement, social lives, emotions, or any other domain.

The Cognitive Revolution

• Cognitive psychology is roughly 60 years old (1950's and 60's) - and asks questions about memory and decision making.
• People in Introspection were taught to have specific vocabulary, complete as possible, and to report their experiences with a minimum of interpretation.
• Wundt was the father of experimental psychology.
• Introspection is limited because some thoughts are unconscious, claims aren't testable (trust me bro).
• Then behaviorism has observable evidence based on inputs, measurable, recordable, physical events.
• Beliefs, preferences, hopes, and expectations cannot be directly observed.
• The first half of the 20th century was about rewards and punishments.
• Invisible data directly affects visible data so we must consider them.
• Various stimuli can lead to the same understanding in someone's brain (salt example).
• Solution to introspection and behaviorist limitations came from Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) in the form of the transcendental method.
• Begin with observable facts and work backward from these observations.
• Ask how the results came about, what must be the underlying causes and effects?
• This will cause inference to best explanation
• Kantian logic - how people remember, make decisions, pay attention, or solve problems
• What triggered the revolution?

European Roots of the Cognitive Revolution

• Other perspectives flourished in Europe (Gestalt psychology movement) - many of the gestaltists fled to the United States in the years leading up to WWII and became influential figures.
• Gestalt Psychologists argued that behaviors, ideas, and perceptions are organized in a way that cannot be understood through a part-by-part, element-by-element, analysis of the world.
• Instead they claimed that the elements take on meaning only as part of a whole - and therefore psychology needed to understand the nature of the “whole”.
• Empasis on the role of perceivers in organizing their own experiences and shape their own experience.
• A common theme between Tolman, Chomsky, the Gestaltists, and Barlett was that these scholars agree that we can't explain human behavior unless we explain what is going on within the mind. - Whether the emphasis is on cognitive maps, schemas, or some other form of knowledge
• Computers and the Cognitive Revolution
• Happened in the 1950's, computer scientists were developing new hardware and software.
• Computers are capable of information storage, “memory”, and can do tasks that involve precise decision making and problem solving.
• Artificial intelligence made rapid progress in the 1950's.
• Psychologists used new technology to explore the possibility that the human mind followed procedures similar to those used in computers which explained the human mind in terms of “buffers” and "gates" and "central processors”.
• This approach was evident in the work of Donald Broadbent, a British psychologist who was one of the earliest researchers to use this language of computer science to explain human cognition and explained how people loaded information into memory or how they made decisions, researchers hypothesized a series of information-processing events that made the performance possible.

The Diversity of Methods

• Cognitive psychologists frame many hypotheses in computer-based terms as well as hypotheses framed in terms of the strategies a person is relying on or the inferences they are making.
• No matter what form of hypotheses, we still run the tests following logic we've already described, basically just deriving predictions from the hypothesis for example "If this is the mechanism behind the original findings, then things should work differently in this circumstance or that one".
• Then data is gathered to test those predictions, then a new hypothesis is needed.
• What methods are used and what data is collected?
• Diverse methods are used and many types of data are collected.
• There are no particular procedures that are used.
• We see how well people perform a particular task.
• In tests of memory, for example, we might ask how complete someone's memory is (does the person remember seeing something when it was never there in the first place?). We can also ask how performance changes if we change the "input" (how well does the person remember a story rather than a picture?). And we can change the persons circumstances (how is memory change if the person is happy, or afraid, when hearing the story?). We can also manipulate the person's plans or strategies (what happens if we teach the person some sort of memorization technique?). And we can compare different people such as children and adults, novices and experts, people with normal vision and people that are blind, etc..
• Another approach relies on measurements of speed (RT- response time) which is how long someone needs to make a particular response (Ex: Do cats have whiskers? Do cats have heads?) Someone that makes a mental image will be faster with heads and someone that doesn't will be faster answering the whiskers question.
• We can also gain insight from observations directly focused on the brain and nervous system.
• Cognitive psychology has formed a productive partnership with the field of cognitive neuroscience which seeks to toward understanding human's mental functioning through close study of the brain and nervous system.
• We learn a lot from damaged and healthy brains.
• Information from damaged brains comes from clinical neuropsychology which uses damage and illness in the brain as the main source of data.
• Information from healthy brains comes from neuroimaging techniques which let us see precise structure of the brain and track the moment-by-moment pattern of activation in a brain.

Applying Cognitive Psychology

• Cognitive psychology's relevancy extends to police and the justice system (attention, memory, reasoning, and judgment).

Chapter Review

• Introspection: when someone looks within to record personal accounts of one's own life
• Behaviorist movement: "rewards” and “punishments”, focused more on visible data rather than invisible
• Transcendental method: Immanuel Kant, first observes result, then asks how it got there
• Response time (RT): the amount of time someone needs to respond to a particular event
• Cognitive neuroscience: close study of the brain and nervous system (mental functioning)
• Clinical neuroscience - usage of brain damage and illness as main source of data
• Neuroimaging techniques: examine structure and activation pattern in a brain
• Capgras Syndrome is sometimes found in people with Alzheimer's syndrome, thinks that people they know are imposters, and thinks there are subtle personality or appearance changes in the person they think looks like someone they know.
• It Shows that face recognition involves two separate processes in the brain (cognitive appraisal and emotional appraisal) and happens because of damage to the right side of the temporal lobe,this damage disrupts circuits involving the amygdala, also people with Capgras have abnormalities in the frontal lobe in the right prefrontal cortex.
• The Prefrontal Cortex is especially active when a person is doing tasks that require planning or careful analysis
• What do we learn from Capgras Syndrome?
• It shows that the amygdala is an important emotion center, and that it helps people, remember emotional events in their lives
• The study of the brain indicates: The human brain weighs about 3 lbs and contains 86 billion nerve cells, each having about 10000 connections for a total of 860 trillion connections
• Explain midbrain, forebrain, cortex, convolutions, longitudinal fissure, cerebral hemisphere, frontal lobes, central fissure, parietal lobes, temporal lobes, lateral fissure, occipital lobes, subcortical structures, thalamus, hypothalamus, limbic system, and hippocampus
• Lateralization: both halves of the brain mimic each other, made possible by commissures and the corpus callosum

Neuroimaging

• CT Scan: three-dimensional x-ray pictures of the brain
• PET Scan: tracer substance like glucose (use of radioactivity tells us which tissues are using more or less of the glucose (activity levels))
• MRI Scan: magnetic properties of atoms to make detailed structural images
• fMRI Scan: measure the oxygen content in blood flowing through each region of the brain, which is good for moment-by-moment activities
• EEG: it is good for looking at brain rhythms and timing
• TMS Scan: it applies strong magnetic pulses at specific locations on the scalp area (good for testing what happens if we stimulate certain neurons)
• Apraxia: disturbances in voluntary movement
• Agnosia: impairment in seeing familiarities
• Akinetopsia: the inability to perceive motion
• Unilateral neglect Syndrome: someone ignores half of the visual world (lesions in the parietal lobe cause this)
• Aphasia: disruption to language capacities
• Coding: how neurons remember information (fire strongly or weakly depending on the input)
• All-or-none law: there will be an action potential in the axon or none at all

Visual Perception

• The Eye: light passes through the cornea and lens which focuses light on the fovea of the retina
• Iris: the muscle around the pupil
• Three layers of the retina: photoreceptors, bipolar cells, and ganglion cells
• Two types of Photoreceptors: rods (low light), and cones (high light)
• Path of Visual INformation: From the Eye (photoreceptor to bipolar cell to ganglion cell), to the optic nerve, then to the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus, then to the, occipital lobes primary visual cortex
• Lateral Inhibition: cells linking the retina and brain perform some basic analysis of the visual input, when cells are stimulated, they inhibit the activity of neighboring cells (results-in edge enhancement)
• Visual Coding: the relationship between activity in the nervous system and the stimulus associated with it, the language of the nervous system is action potentials (the magnitude of all action potentials is the same, but the firing rate is not)
• Single-Neuron and Single Cell Recording: a neuron's firing rate is recorded as various kinds of stimuli are presented to the subject, each cell in the visual cortex has a receptive field (cat brain video as an example)
• Multiple Types of Receptive Fields: “center-surround” cells, also known as “dot-detectors” are used when a stimulus in the center increases firing rate, and vice-versa for a stimulus on the edge of the visual field
• Binding Problem: task of reuniting elements of a stimulus that were processed by different systems in different brain regions
• Spatial Position: overlay map of what is where, which colors are where, and which motions are where
• Neural Synchrony: attributes registered as belonging to the same object if neurons fire in synchronicity
• Attention: with insufficient attention, conjunction errors are common
• Parallel Processing: What Pathway helps in identifying visual objects, is located in the inferotemporal lobe, and damage to this area would lead to visual agnosia (inability to identify objects)), Where Pathway (aids in perception of location, is located in the posterior parietal cortex, and damage to this area would lead to an inability to reach for objects with your hands)
• Form Perception: sensation vs. perception (Gestalt psychologists believed that perceptual whole is different than the sum of the parts
• Gestalt Principles: the ability to interpret ambiguous scenes is governed by some basic principles of similarity, proximity, continuation, closure, and simplicity which describe each of them with a focus on Organization and Features: our interpretations influence how basic visual features are processed.
• Constancy: constant properties (size, shape, etc.) even when viewing circumstances change (perceptual constancy, unconscious inference (relationship cues and distance cues), binocular disparity (the difference between each eye's view of a stimulus), and monocular distance cues (lens adjustment (closer=more adjustment)))
• Interposition: static and in a line

Recognizing Objects

• Apperceptive Agnosia: patients can perceive an object features but not the object in its entirety
• Associative Agnosia: patients can see fine but cannot link this input to visual knowledge Bottom-Up Processing: directly influenced by stimulus, data driven, starts with the senses
• Top-Down Processing: shaped by a person's knowledge, concept-driven, starts with the brain
• Recognition begins with identifying visual inputs in the features using feature detectors
• Large units can be detected by assembling the smaller features
• Visual Search Tasks: one feature is easy, two or more features are hard (conjunction, separate processes)

Word Recognition

• Words can be recognized in as little as 35 milliseconds
• Common words are more recognizable
• Words that have been seen recently are better recognized because of priming
• Word Superiority Effect: it is easier to perceive and recognize letters in a context than in isolation
• Well-Formedness: how closely a letter sequence conforms to the typical patterns of spelling in a language and how the more well-formed it is, the easier it is to recognize the sequence
• People tend ton perceive stimuli as being more regular than they actually are.
• Selective attention and the models of selective attention, including broadbent's filter is a filter blocks unattended inputs, while allowing attended inputs through for further processing making it A bottleneck
• Early vs Late Selection models

Early selection hypothesis

• Only the attended input in analyzed and perceived so unattended information receives little or no analysis (filtered out and never perceived)

Late Selection Hypothesis

• All inputs are analyzed, selection occurs after analysis, unattended information might be perceived but is then forgotten
• Evidence for Early Selection: electrical brain activity for attended inputs vs. unattended inputs differs as soon as 80ms, attention can influence activity levels in the lateral geniculate nucleus
• Evidence for Late Selection: stimuli that are not attended to can nevertheless affect perception
• Selection Via Priming

Priming Expectation

• Selection may be a consequence of priming based on your expectations (perceiver anticipates the attended information, detectors that are needed for the now expected input are primed, primary detectors fire more readily)
• Regardless of expectation, some high-frequency or salient information is already primed
• Biased competition Theory: attention creates a temporary bias in neuron sensitivity (More responsive to input with detected properties, desired inputs receive further processing, less responsive to everything else, distractors do not receive further processing

Spatial Attention

• It is the ability to focus attention on a specific location in space, Posner et al.
• Use the task: press a button as soon as the target appears while focusing on a central fixation mark
• Prior to each trial: neutral cue to signal the start of the trial, or arrow indicating the location of the upcoming letter with 80% accuracy

Types of Priming

• Repetition Priming does not have a cost (produced by a prior encounter with the stimulus)
• Expectation Priming has a cost (participants performed worse when they are misled than when they have no expectations, requires mental resources, reveals the presence of a limited-capacity system)
• Attention as a Spotlight is sometimes thought of as a spotlight beam which can be moved anywhere in the visual field, does not require moving the eyes just moving the focus on attention, and its scope can be widened or focused
• The control system for attention: orienting system which disengages attention from one target, shifts attention to a new target, then engages attention on new target, and the alerting system (maintain alert state in the brain) and the executive system (control voluntary actions) Factors that influence what people attend to include: visual prominence (color, movement, etc.), level of interest importance (depends on context) beliefs and expectations, culture, endogenous control of attention (within an individual's control) and exogenous control of attention (an element of the environment that automatically seizes one's attention)

Attention

• It plays a Feature Binding role in solving the binding problem
• Preattentive Stage: involves parallel processing of the stimulus, object analyzed into features, automatic, and is unconscious
• Focused attention stage: Expectation-based priming created processing advantages for the stimulus and its features are combined
• Feature Integration Theory Experimental Results: (Illusory Conjunctions of incorrect feature combinations, features were “free floating” before they were combined), (Expectation-based attention draws on a limited-capacity system, directing resources reduced the resources available to process other things)
• Feature Binding in Visual Search Tasks: a broad focus captures all of the features but not the combinations, a narrow focus slows down the search but is able to capture the accurate combinations of features

Divided Attention

• The ability to perform multiple tasks simultaneously that is easier if the concurrent tasks are different from each other and our limited mental resources restrict how well we can multitask.
• Tasks vary in their perceptual load; the amount of mental resources required is different for each.
• Executive Control can be devoted only to one task at a time that refers to mechanisms that allow us to organize and control our thoughts, keep goals in mind, shift plans and change strategy, and inhibit automatic responses
• Damage to the prefrontal cortex can impair executive control.
• Preservation: the tendency to produce the same response over and over when the task clearly requires a change in response (Wisconsin Card Sorting Test).
• Practice: practical skills require fewer resources, and tasks that are well practiced lead to automaticity and require little or no executive control, there can be downsides to automaticity such as Stroop Effect

This quizzes evaluates understanding of cognitive psychology concepts such as object recognition, visual search, the word superiority effect, Gestalt principles, depth cues, perceptual constancy, attention models, the transcendental method, and Capgras syndrome.