Textbook for PSY 108 Midterm 1

Introduction to Cognitive Psychology

• Definition of cognition: mental activity, including the acquisition, storage, transformation, and use of knowledge
• Cognitive approach to psychology: a theoretical orientation that emphasizes people's thought processes and their knowledge

Origins of Cognitive Psychology

• Introspection: an early approach to studying mental activity, in which carefully trained observers systematically analyzed their own sensations and reported them as objectively as possible
• Wundt's introspection technique: considered subjective by current cognitive psychologists
• Early memory researchers: Ebbinghaus, Calkins, and James
  • Ebbinghaus: interested in human memory, examining factors that influence performance on memory tasks
  • Calkins: reported the recency effect, emphasizing the study of cognitive processes in real-world situations
  • James: preferred to theorize about everyday psychological experiences, emphasizing the active and inquiring nature of the human mind

The Cognitive Revolution

• Behaviorism: an approach to psychology that focuses on observable, objective reactions to stimuli in the environment
  • Watson and other behaviorists: emphasized observable behavior, studying nonhuman animals, and quantifying changes in behavior
• Gestalt psychology: emphasizes the active organization of what we see, the perception of patterns, and the whole being greater than the sum of its parts
• Cognitive revolution: Piaget and Chomsky
  • Piaget: believed children actively explore their world to understand concepts, and their cognitive strategies change as they mature
  • Chomsky: emphasized the complexity of language structure, arguing that humans have an inborn ability to master language

Empirical Research and Ecological Validity

• Empirical evidence: scientific evidence obtained by careful observation and experimentation
• Ecological validity: a principle of research design that uses conditions similar to the natural setting where the results will be applied

The Connectionist Approach and Cognitive Neuroscience

• Connectionist approach: a theory describing cognitive processing in terms of networks that link together neuron-like units
• Cognitive neuroscience: an approach to studying mental activity that uses cognitive psychology and neuroscience techniques

The Computer Metaphor of the Mind

• A way of describing cognition as a complex, multipurpose machine that processes information quickly and accurately

Visual and Auditory Recognition

Definition of Perception and Object Recognition

• Perception: the use of previous knowledge to gather and interpret stimuli registered by the senses
• Object recognition: the process of identifying a complex arrangement of sensory stimuli and perceiving it as separate from its background

The Visual System

• Distal vs proximal stimuli: the actual object in the environment (distal) vs the information registered on sensory receptors (proximal)
• Sensory memory: a large-capacity storage system that records information from each of the senses with reasonable accuracy
• Iconic memory: visual sensory memory, preserving an image of a visual stimulus for a brief period
• Primary visual cortex and occipital lobe: the part of the cerebral cortex concerned with basic processing of visual stimuli

Figure-Ground Relationship and Illusory Contours

• Figure-ground relationship: a perceptual phenomenon studied by gestalt psychologists, where the figure and ground of a visual stimulus reverse
• Illusory contours: the perception of edges in a visual stimulus even though they are not physically present

Feature-Analysis Theory and Recognition-by-Components Theory

• Feature-analysis theory: proposes that people recognize visual objects based on distinctive features
• Recognition-by-components theory: proposes that people recognize three-dimensional shapes in terms of an arrangement of simple 3D shapes called geons

Top-Down vs Bottom-Up Processing

• Top-down processing: emphasizes the importance of concepts, expectations, and memory in object recognition and other cognitive tasks
• Bottom-up processing: emphasizes stimulus characteristics in object recognition and other cognitive tasks

Face Recognition

• Gestalt: an overall quality that transcends the individual elements in the stimulus
• Prosopagnosia: the inability to recognize human faces visually, though other objects may be perceived relatively normally
• Face-inversion effect: the observation that people are more accurate in identifying upright faces compared to upside-down faces

Applied Research and Schizophrenia

• Applied research: examples include workers letting someone with an incorrect photo ID slip past them, and security surveillance systems
• Schizophrenia: a serious psychological disorder characterized by lack of emotional expression, hallucinations, disordered thinking, and poor performance on many cognitive tasks

Speech Perception

• Phoneme: the basic unit of spoken language, such as the sounds a, k, and th
• Word boundaries: the perception of clear-cut boundaries between words in the language
• Variability in phoneme pronunciation: interspeaker, intraspeaker, and coarticulation
• Phonemic restoration: filling in a missing phoneme based on contextual meaning
• The role of visual cues on speech perception: the McGurk effect
• Special mechanism vs general mechanism theories of speech perception: debating whether humans have a specialized device for decoding speech stimuli or use general neural mechanisms

Attention and Consciousness

Definition of Attention

• Attention: a concentration of mental activity

Divided vs Selective Attention

• Divided attention: paying attention to two or more simultaneous messages
• Selective attention: paying attention to certain kinds of information while ignoring other present information

Tasks Used to Measure Selective Attention

• Dichotic listening: a laboratory technique presenting one message to the left ear and a different message to the right ear
• Stroop task/effect: the observation that people take a long time to name an ink color when it appears in an incongruent word

Visual Search

• Visual search: a task requiring the observer to find a target in a visual display with numerous distractors

Theories of Attention

• Bottleneck theories: proposing a narrow passageway in human information processing limits the quantity of information to which one can pay attention
• Feature-integration theory: proposing two elements: distributed attention and focused attention

Definition of Consciousness

• Consciousness: a person's awareness of the external world and of their own perceptions, images, thoughts, memories, and feelings

Mind-Wandering and Thought Suppression

• Mind-wandering: a situation where a person's thoughts shift away from the external environment
• Thought suppression: the attempt to push an undesirable idea out of consciousness, often resulting in ironic effects