Understanding Capgras Syndrome

• The text provides an overview of cognitive psychology, its history, key concepts, and research methods.

Science of the Mind

• Cognition involves acquiring, storing, transforming, and using knowledge.
• Cognitive psychology emphasizes mental processes and knowledge and is applicable to various interdisciplinary areas.
• Cognition starts with sensations interpreted into perception.
• Knowledge is important

Historical Figures

• H.M. had epilepsy and lost the ability to form new memories after surgery, highlighting the brain's role in memory.
• Wundt focused on the structure of consciousness using introspection, having participants think aloud, but was criticized.
• Wundt's first lab in 1879 established psychology as a science.
• Ebbinghaus studied forgetting using nonsense syllables, finding a sharp initial decline in memory followed by a leveling off.
• The "forgetting curve" applies when information isn't rehearsed and varies among individuals.
• William James, a founding father of American psychology, criticized Wundt and Ebbinghaus and focused on memory function and the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.

Emergence of Behaviorism

• Behaviorism was criticized for not observing things directly and centered on stimulus and responses, believing free will was absent.
• Key figures in behaviorism were Skinner and Watson.
• Cognitive psychologists argued that behavior involves a thought process. They reintroduced the importance of studying thoughts.

Cognitive Revolution

• The cognitive revolution shifted the focus from behaviorism to cognition by indirectly studying mental events.
• Kant's transcendental method solves problems by working backward from the endpoint and studies mental events indirectly.
• Ulric Neisser is the father of cognitive psychology.
• Tolman demonstrated mental activity in rats, showing they learn even without reinforcement, challenging behaviorism.
• Noam Chomsky argued that behaviorism can't explain the creativity in language acquisition.

Other Influences

• Gestalt psychology looked at mental processes and behavior holistically
• Bartlett studied how schemas, based on experiences, influence interpretation and memory
• It drew parallels with computer science, using computer terminology to explain cognitive events but highlighted the differences, such as emotions.

Research Methods

• Research methods have diversified from introspection and observation to accuracy measures, response time, and neuroimaging.
• Cognitive neuroscience combines cognitive psychology and neuroscience to study the brain's role in mental functioning
• Clinical neuropsychology studies brain function based on damaged structures through case studies, like patient H.M.

Neural Basis for Cognition

• Capgras syndrome is caused by broken connections memories where patients recognize people but think they are imposters.
• Capgras is most common in patients with schizophrenia, dementia, and other neuropsychiatric conditions or seizures, drug use or TBIs.

Effects and Studies of Capgras

• Capgras involves a disconnect between intact perceptual recognition and emotional reaction.
• Research indicates that the amygdala is linked to emotional processing, leading to feelings of unfamiliarity and emotional decision-making deficits when damaged.
• Simple processing involves multiple brain regions

Brain Anatomy

• The brain has three parts: the hindbrain, midbrain, and forebrain.
• The hindbrain includes the cerebellum (movement, balance & spatial reasoning), pons, and medulla.
• The midbrain coordinates eye movement, relays auditory information, and regulates pain.
• The forebrain includes the cortex, thalamus, hypothalamus, and limbic system (amygdala & hippocampus).
• Four lobes: frontal (attention), parietal (spatial awareness and sensory processing), temporal (auditory/language), and occipital (vision).
• Lateralization refers to functional differences between brain hemispheres and that hemispheres communicate via the corpus callosum.
• Split-brain patients have severed corpus callosums, limiting communication between hemispheres.
• Neuroscience techniques are important

Neuroscience Techniques

• Neuroimaging techniques include CT (brain structures), MRI (detailed structures), and fMRI (neural activity).
• PET scans measure glucose consumption for neural activity.
• EEG records electrical communication within neurons.
• TMS uses magnetic pulses to activate or disrupt neural activity
• Combining techniques overcomes limitations to get a full comprehensive picture.
• Motor areas include primary sensory and motor projection areas.
• More cortical coverage provides greater motor performance.
• Sensory areas include the parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes.
• Apraxia, agnosia, aphasia, neglect syndrome, and prefrontal damage relate to specific functional deficits.

Neurons and Glia

• Glial cells function in maintaining, repairing, and insulating neurons.
• Neurons consist of dendrites (receive signals), a cell body, and an axon (transmits signals).
• Synaptic transmission involves neurotransmitters.
• Synaptic connections are adjustable, enabling learning.
• All-or-none law dictates that action potentials are of the same magnitude. Electrical signal frequency varies by stimulus.

Visual Perception

• Visual perception can be affected (Akinetopsia- motion blindness)
• Light goes to the eye (cornea --> lens --> retina)
• The visual system uses photoreceptors (rods for low light and cones for color vision)
• Information transfers from eye (photoreceptors to bipolar cells to ganglion cells, then to LGN, then to V1)
• Lateral inhibition enhances edges thanks to neurons inhibiting the middle neurons. (visual coding)

Coding visual input

• Visual coding involves the relationship between activity, sensation, and stimulus.
• Single-cell recordings capture how individual cells respond to different stimuli.
• Receptive fields (center-surround, edges, angles, motion) influence cell firing rates.
• Parallel processing allows for speed and resolution of contradictory demands, involving what (identifies) and where (locates) systems.
• What system = inferotemporal cortex connecting occipital lobe and identifies the objects. Damage leads to visual Agnosia.
• Where System = posterior parietal cortex connecting occipital lobe aids helps identify location. Damage can cause difficulty when reaching for object.

Binding Elements

• Spatial position, neural synchrony, and attention are important for reducing binding errors.
• The Gestalt principles show ways the mind organizes visual information.
• Neural synchrony connects attributes of familiar objects
• Form perception organizes visual elements based on Gestalt principles.
• These include ambiguous images, figure/ground relationships, similarity, proximity, good continuation, and simplicity.
• Illusory contours create perceived edges. Parallel processing gathers and interprets information.

Perceptual Factors

• Perceptual constancy maintains constant object properties despite sensory changes.
• Brightness constancy allows recognizing colors despite light levels. Size and shape constancy allows recognizing shapes regardless of the retina.
• Depth perception relies on binocular and monocular distance cues, including disparity, convergence, lens adjustment, interposition, linear perspective, texture gradients, and motion parallax.

Object Recognition

• Apperceptive agnosia prevents perceiving objects in their entirety.
• Bottom-up processing means that the processes are directly shaped by the stimulus. It's data driven and focuses on individual stimulus to give you a conclusion
• Top-down processing is based on expectations and prior knowledge, which influences processes (concept driven)

Word Recognition

• Triesman and Gelade explains isolated effect.
• Isolating the main part of objects to see vertical lines amongst horizontal line is easier to perceive than other objects.
• Factors influencing word recognition include familiarity and priming.
• The Word-superiority effect recognizes words in context.

Facial Recognition

• Feature nets process 2-D images.
• A feature net is a series of steps to read words.
• Geons influence recognition of 3-D objects and our viewpoint invariant.
• Prosopagnosia is face blindness.
• Influencing facial recognition can be holistic vs Featural Recognition.