Cognitive psychology: Perception, attention, memory

• Study notes covering various topics in cognitive psychology like history and themes, visual & auditory perception, attention, memory, and imagery

History

• Nativism (nature) and empiricism (nurture) represent two philosophical approaches in the field.
• Behaviorism emphasized the study of observable behavior, significantly influencing contemporary research methods.
• The cognitive revolution challenged behaviorism's dominance, advocating for the inclusion of mental functioning in psychology to understand human behavior comprehensively.
• Research techniques developed to directly infer the characteristics of mental processes from observable behavior.
• Computers served as models for the human mind.
• Big data addresses the replication/reproducibility crisis.

Themes

• Cognitive processes are active, efficient, accurate, and interrelated.
• Many processes rely on both bottom-up and top-down processing, as seen in visual perception.

Visual Perception

• Perception is affected by factors which include sensory adaptation, which is not perceiving constant stimuli over prolonged periods.
• Attention affects perception as demonstrated through inattentional and change blindness.
• Language affects perception, exemplified by The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, as it states that language structures the way its speakers perceive and think.
• The primary visual cortex (V1) is retinotopic, retaining the spatial arrangement of light on the retina in the response properties of its neurons.
• Visual processing pathways are bi-directional (feedforward/bottom-up and feedback/top-down) and modular in nature.
• V4 relates to achromatopsia and V5/MT relates to akinetopsia
• Ventral streams process "what," while dorsal streams process "where"/"how."
• Visual agnosia includes disorders of object recognition ("what" impairment), such as apperceptive and associative agnosia.
• Integrative agnosia is a failure to integrate parts into wholes in visual perception.
• Optic ataxia involves impaired visual guidance of reaching ("where"/"how").
• Selfridge’s pandemonium model involves features, cognitive demons, and a decision demon.
• Recognition by components involves geons.
• Template matching involves the prototype which is an average/standard representation of an object in memory.
• The Bruce and Young (1986) model describes face recognition.
• Fusiform face area (FFA) is related to prosopagnosia.

Auditory/Speech Perception

• The speech stream lacks discrete phonemes and clear word boundaries due to sounds smearing and overlapping.
• Coarticulation is the overlapping of phonemes in the speech stream.
• Lack of invariance describes the unreliable relationship between a phoneme and the acoustic signal.
• Top-down processing influences speech perception through phonemic restoration, filling in missing segments of the speech stream with contextually appropriate material.
• Multimodal perception is described through the modality appropriateness hypothesis and visual prepotency effect (conflict resolution).
• The McGurk effect can be explained with /ba/ /da/ /ga/.

Attention

• Dichotic listening technique is used involves selective attention.
• Early selection and late selection describe the mechanisms of attention.
• Automaticity is demonstrated in the Stroop task/effect.
• The Stroop task/effect involves congruent vs. incongruent trials and controlled vs. automatic processes.
• Spatial attention is described through the spotlight metaphor.
• Exogenous orienting/shift (attention capture) and endogenous orienting/shift dictates how spatial attention works.
• Non-spatial attention includes object-based, time-based, and the attentional blink.
• Pseudo-neglect involves over-attention to the left side of space.
• Neglect involves a failure to attend to stimuli on the opposite side of space to a brain lesion (typically right-sided, causing inattention to the left).
• Interference between tasks is more likely if they share the same processing resources.
• Central bottleneck: doing two things leads to alternating attention between the two tasks.
• Divided attention relates to distracted driving.
• Strayer and Johnston (2001) and Just, Keller and Cynkar (2009) researched divided attention and distracted driving.
• An fMRI study showed a decrease in brain activation associated with driving when listening to someone speak.
• Sustained attention involves vigilance.
• The Mackworth clock task researches sustained attention.
• Vigilance decrement may be caused by overload or underload.

Memory

• Sensory memory (iconic, echoic) registers a large amount of information but typically decays quickly.
• Short-term/working memory involves a limited amount of information.
• Retention span and digit span dictate how much information short term memory can retain.
• Rehearsal and chunking are methods to retain short term information.
• Pronunciation time and the word length effect are related.
• The serial-position effect involves primacy vs. recency effect.
• Working memory manipulates information, acting as an alternate/dynamic version of short-term memory.
• Baddeley’s model which includes the phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and episodic buffer.
• The central executive is the "working" component of working memory.
• N-back task measures the "working" component of working memory.
• Episodic memory and semantic memory are types of long-term memory.
• Retrograde and anterograde amnesia affects long term memory.
• Infantile amnesia is not a memory disorder.
• The reminiscence bump occurs because many first-time events occur during this period, so distinctive.
• Flashbulb memories are subject to distortions and inaccuracies like normal memories, but confidence remains high.
• Consolidation theory dictates how memory is forgotten.
• Retroactive and proactive interference affect memory.

Encoding and Retrieval

• Craik and Lockhart developed Levels of processing theory.
• Meaning-based handling of information leads to better encoding.
• Craik and Tulving (1975) researched visual, auditory, and meaningful processing.
• Transfer-appropriate processing involves matching the tasks and cognitive processes.
• Deeper processing at encoding does not always result in better retrieval.
• Matching the encoding and retrieval tasks results in better retrieval, as researched by Morris et al. (1977).
• The encoding specificity effect involves matching conditions, contexts (environmental surroundings), and internal states.

Imagery

• Mental imagery is exclusively top-down in nature (knowledge driven) and not directly observable.
• Shepard and Metzler (1971) researched mental rotation.
• Mental rotation states that larger rotations take more time.
• Meta-analysis results show that there are gender differences in cognitive abilities.
• Estimating the distance between two known points within cognitive maps is often distorted by the number of intervening cities, category membership, and the landmark effect.
• The general tendency is to provide shorter distance estimates when traveling to a landmark rather than a nonlandmark.
• Synesthesia involves an inducer and concurrent.
• Synesthetic responses can be elicited by concepts as well as percepts.
• Paivio’s dual-coding theory involves imagens and logogens.
• Paivio’s study (1965) on paired-associate learning: concrete/abstract stimulus – concrete/abstract response.
• Analog code relates to perception, while the propositional code relates to language.
• The propositional knowledge hypothesis states that knowledge about the world is stored in memory in the form of propositions (Images are epiphenomenal: by-products of something else).
• Mental rotation supports analog-coding.

Study notes covering cognitive psychology topics like perception, attention, and memory. It includes the history of cognitive psychology, emphasizing the shift from behaviorism to the cognitive revolution. Key themes, visual and auditory perception, attention, memory, and imagery are discussed.