Cognitive Psychology Quiz

Introduction to Cognitive Psychology: History and Approaches

• The cognitive revolution in psychology led to the study of mental processes such as perception, thought, memory, and reasoning.
• Different approaches to psychology were developed, such as introspection, psychoanalytic theory, humanistic psychology, behaviourism, and cognitive psychology.
• Behaviourism focused on measuring behaviour, while cognitive psychology studied mental processes.
• Sensation is the detection of low-level properties such as brightness, colour, and sweetness, while perception is the interpretation of sensory signals.
• The brain relies on signals received from sense organs such as the eyes, ears, and skin, through afferent nerves.
• Photoreceptors in the retina of the eye, called rods and cones, are sensitive to light and initiate the process of visual transduction.
• Rods detect low light levels and shades of gray, while cones detect bright light and colour.
• The retina has 120 million rods and 7 million cones, which are interconnected and form the optic nerve that transmits visual information to the brain.
• The optic nerve feeds the visual cortex part of the brain, where visual information is processed.
• The retina has a network of connections between receptors and optic nerve, and a specific patched area of the retina, called a receptive field, activates a particular RGC that transmits visual information to the brain.
• The visual cortex has two main pathways, the ventral stream for recognition and discrimination of visual shapes and objects, and the dorsal stream for identifying location and motion of an object.
• The visual cortex has feature detectors, which are neurons that selectively activate in response to a particular visual stimulus.