Cognitive Psychology: History and Visual Perception

• Two philosophical approaches historically influenced psychology: nativism, emphasizing innate knowledge (nature), and empiricism, emphasizing experience (nurture).
• Behaviorism, with its focus on observable behavior, significantly contributed to contemporary research methods in psychology.
• The cognitive revolution criticized behaviorism's dominance and advocated for incorporating mental functioning to fully understand human behavior.
• Research techniques developed to infer the characteristics of mental processes directly from observable behavior.
• The development of the computer served as a model for the human mind.
• A new trend, big data, is being used to address the replication/reproducibility crisis in psychology.
• Cognitive processes are active, remarkably efficient, accurate, and interrelated.
• Cognitive processes rely on both bottom-up and top-down processing.

Visual Perception

• Sensory adaptation affects perception by causing us to stop perceiving stimuli that remain relatively constant over prolonged periods.
• Attention impacts perception through phenomena like inattentional blindness and change blindness.
• Language influences perception, as described by the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, where a language's structure affects its speakers' perception and thought.
• The primary visual cortex (V1) is retinotopic, retaining the spatial arrangement of light on the retina in the response properties of V1 neurons.
• Visual processing pathways are bi-directional, involving feedforward/bottom-up and feedback/top-down processes.
• Visual processing is highly modular.
• V4 is associated with Achromatopsia, V5/MT is associated with akinetopsia.
• There are ventral ("what") and dorsal ("where"/"how") streams in visual processing.
• Visual agnosia involves disorders of object recognition.
• Apperceptive agnosia is a type of visual agnosia.
• Integrative agnosia involves a failure to integrate parts into wholes in visual perception.
• Associative agnosia is a type of visual agnosia.
• Optic ataxia involves impaired "where"/"how" processing, leading to poor visual guidance of reaching.
• Selfridge’s (1959) pandemonium model describes object recognition using features, cognitive demons, and a decision demon.
• Recognition by components uses geons to recognize 3D objects.
• The recognition by components theory makes verifiable predictions about viewpoints and object recognition difficulty.
• Template matching involves comparing objects to an average/standard representation in memory.
• The Bruce and Young (1986) model describes face recognition.
• The fusiform face area (FFA) for face recognition.
• Prosopagnosia is a face recognition deficit.

Auditory/Speech Perception

• The speech stream doesn't consist of discrete phonemes and clear word boundaries, speech sounds smear into each other.
• Coarticulation involves overlapping phonemes in the speech stream.
• There is a lack of invariance, meaning there is no reliable relationship between a phoneme and the acoustic signal.
• Context and top-down processing influences speech perception.
• Phonemic restoration involves filling in missing segments of the speech stream with contextually appropriate material.
• Multimodal perception involves the modality appropriateness hypothesis and the visual prepotency effect for conflict resolution.
• The McGurk effect can be explained with /ba/ /da/ /ga/.

Attention

• Selective attention has been studied using the dichotic listening technique.
• Early selection vs. late selection are models of selective attention.
• Automaticity is a process where a task can be performed without conscious effort.
• The Stroop task/effect involves congruent vs. incongruent trials.
• The Stroop task/effect involves controlled vs. automatic processes.
• Spatial attention can be described using the spotlight metaphor.
• Exogenous orienting/shift of attention is attention capture.
• Endogenous orienting/shift of attention is a voluntary shift.
• Non-spatial attention includes object-based, time-based and attentional blink.
• Pseudo-neglect is over-attention to the left side of space.
• Neglect is a failure to attend to stimuli on the opposite side of space to a brain lesion, often caused by a right-sided lesion leading to inattention to the left side of space.
• Structural limits: interference between tasks is more likely if they share the same processing resources.
• Central bottleneck: doing two things→alternating attention between the two tasks.
• Distracted driving has been studied by Strayer and Johnston (2001) and Just, Keller and Cynkar (2009).
• fMRI studies show a decrease in brain activation associated with driving when listening to someone speak.
• Sustained attention is also known as vigilance.
• The Mackworth clock task is used to measure vigilance.
• Vigilance decrement can be caused by overload or underload.

Memory

• Sensory memory (iconic, echoic) registers a large amount of information and typically decays quickly.
• Short-term/working memory has a limited amount of information.
• Retention span and digit span measure memory capacity.
• Rehearsal and chunking improve memory capacity.
• Pronunciation time and the word length effect affect memory span.
• The serial-position effect describes the primacy vs. recency effect.
• Working memory not only temporarily stores information but also manipulates it.
• Working memory is an alternate and more detailed/dynamic version of short-term memory.
• Baddeley’s model of working memory includes the phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and episodic buffer.
• The central executive is the "working" component of working memory.
• The N-back task is used to assess working memory.

Memory

• Long-term memory includes episodic memory and semantic memory
• Retrograde amnesia: loss of memory before an event.
• Anterograde amnesia: inability to form new memories after an event.
• Infantile amnesia is not a memory disorder.
• The reminiscence bump is when many first-time events occur during this period, so distinctive.
• Flashbulb memories are subject to the same distortions and inaccuracies as normal memories, confidence remains high.
• Consolidation theory and forgetting involve retroactive vs. proactive interference.

Memory

• Craik and Lockhart proposed levels of processing.
• More meaning-based handling of information leads to better encoding of that information.
• Craik and Tulving (1975) showed visual, auditory, and meaningful processing.
• Transfer-appropriate processing involves matching the tasks/cognitive processes.
• Deeper processing at encoding does not always result in better retrieval.
• Matching the encoding and retrieval tasks results in better retrieval.
• Morris et al. (1977) studied transfer-appropriate processing.
• The encoding specificity effect involves matching conditions/contexts, including environmental surroundings and internal states.

Imagery

• Mental imagery is exclusively top-down in nature and knowledge driven.
• Mental imagery is not directly observable.
• Shepard and Metzler (1971) studied mental rotation.
• Larger rotations take more time.
• There are gender differences in cognitive abilities.
• Estimating the distance between two known points in cognitive maps is often distorted by the number of intervening cities, category membership, and landmark effect.
• There is a general tendency to provide shorter distance estimates when traveling to a landmark rather than a nonlandmark.

Imagery

• Synesthesia involves inducer and concurrent.
• Synesthetic responses can be elicited by concepts as well as percepts.
• Paivio’s dual-coding theory includes imagens and logogens.
• Paivio’s study (1965) involved paired-associate learning using concrete/abstract stimulus – concrete/abstract response.
• Analog code vs. propositional code.
• Perception vs. language.
• The propositional knowledge hypothesis states that knowledge about the world is stored in memory in the form of propositions, and images are epiphenomenal.
• Mental rotation supports analog-coding.