COG2008 Main Lecture Summary

[Lecture 7: Associative and visual statistic learning ] **Types of learning:** 1. **Classical conditioning**: learning stimulus X predicts outcome Y 2. **Operant Conditioning**: learning that doing X leads to outcome Y 3. **Erroneous learning**: illusory correlations and learning that X a...

[Lecture 7: Associative and visual statistic learning ] **Types of learning:** 1. **Classical conditioning**: learning stimulus X predicts outcome Y 2. **Operant Conditioning**: learning that doing X leads to outcome Y 3. **Erroneous learning**: illusory correlations and learning that X and Y go together when they are just random **Classical conditioning** (Ian Pavlov and his dogs) - **Unconditioned Stimulus:** a stimulus that naturally prior to learning elicits a response e.g. dog food - **Unconditioned Response**: the response elicited by UC e.g. salivating - **Conditioned Stimulus**: stimulus that did not initially elicit a response, but consequence of learning now elicits a response. E.g. the tuning fork sound - **Conditioned response:** the response elicited by the CS e.g. salivating at the sound of the fork. **Classical conditioning terminology** - **Acquisition**: learning the association between the conditioned stimulus and the Unconditioned stimulus and thus learning to produce a conditioned response e.g. dog food plus tuning fork equals salivating at the tuning fork - **Latent inhibition:** When a conditioned stimulus (CS) is presented repeatedly without being paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US), the subject's ability to form an association between the CS and the US is reduced. This pre-exposure to the CS without reinforcement results in a slower rate of conditioning when the CS is later paired with the US - **Extinction:** dog that has learned to salivate when it hears a bell because the bell (CS) was repeatedly paired with food (US). The salivation in response to the bell is the conditioned response (CR). Now, if you start ringing the bell but stop giving the dog food, over time, the dog will stop salivating when it hears the bell. - **Renewal:** after extinction in one context, presentation of the CS in a new context reinstates responding e.g. dogs move to different room and continue extinction, but then they return to original room and ring the fork and the dogs may salivate again. - **Stimulus generalisation:** learning to respond to a specific stimulus while ignoring others. E.g. if a child learns to fear all dogs and not just the one that bit them - **Stimulus discrimination:** the organism does not differentiate between the original CS and other similar stimuli e.g. a child learns to fear the dog that bit them and not all dogs. - Pairing of a white rat to an aversive sound - US- aversive sound, UR-fear, CS- white rat, CR-fear - Albert learnt to associate the rat with the aversive outcome and showed a fear response to the white rat without the sound - Stimulus generalisation: began to fear other white fluffy objects - Stimulus discrimination: he did not fear all things that had hair **Operant Conditioning** (B.F. Skinner) - Association between behaviour and consequence for that behaviour - Learning to increase or decrease certain behaviours via rewards and punishments **Operant Conditioning Terminology** - **Reinforcement increases good behaviour** - **Punishment decreases a given behaviour** **Frequency of reinforcement** - Continuous: behaviour reinforced every single time it occurs (faster learning and less robust) - Partial reinforcement: the response is only reinforced part of the time (slower learning and more robust) **Schedules of partial reinforcement:** Description Example ------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------- Fixed Ratio Responses reinforced after a certain number of times Rewarded with chocolate after watching 2 lectures Fixed Interval Response rewarded after a specified amount of time Rewarded with a break after 2 hours of practice questions Variable Ratio Response reinforced after and random number of responses Gambling (rewarded after a random number of play) Variable Interval Response rewarded after can unpredictably amount of time has past Checking email that will appear after unknown time **Reinforcers:** - **Premack Principle:** an activity that an individual is more likely to engage in can be used as a reward for completing a less likely activity. - **Primary:** essential for survival or reproduction of the organism e.g. food, water and sex - **Secondary:** conditioned to be associated with primary reinforcers e.g. money, praise, grades - **For example:** money can be used to buy primary reinforcers like food and shelter, verbal affirmations are associated with positive outcomes, trophies associated with success. **Erroneous learning:** - The act of intentionally making errors during learning process to enhance understanding and retention. - **Illusory correlations**: situations in which people see associations or systematic relationships where only randomness exist - **Example**: Rorschach blots, superstitious behaviours and things always happen to me. - **Why**: Because the brain is so attuned to picking up associations and regularities, we can often believe that two things are associated even when they are not and are poor at appreciating randomness. **Visual Statistical learning:** - Learning the relationships between stimuli where there are regularities in the information. - **Familiarisation**: when you see the image often enough that the brain starts to notice patterns without trying - **Ensemble perception:** Statistical property representation after exposure to individual instances or simply, when your brain quickly summarises information from a group of similar objects e.g. instead of focusing on each leaf, you notice the leafiness overall. (can the system acquire more general or average information about instances compromising a particular category?) - **What:** how humans can learn about the statistical properties of visual scenes such as the likelihood of certain shapes appearing together through observation. - **Findings:** quickly and automatically learned the spatial properties of the shapes, predict the presence of one shape based on the presences of another, learning occurred without feedback or guidance. - Bulf, Johnson and Valenza 2011 - preferential looking paradigm looking at where the child looked - **Habituation phase:** familiarise infants with a sequence of visual stimuli, helping researchers to determine when infants have become accustomed to stimuli indicated by reduction of attention. - **Test Phase:** two paired presentations of familiar and novel test stimuli - **Results:** sensitive to simple statistical regularities, and statistical learning in 4-7 is associated with acquisition of syntax. - Shown set and then test - **Judgement** **A)** if test spot had appeared in the set or **B)** if the test spot was larger or smaller than the mean spot size of the set **Results of Ensemble Perception** - **Individual Dot Identification** (Judgement A): participants were inaccurate at determining if test spot has appeared in prior set - **Good mean discrimination** (Judgement B): accurate at determining if the test spot corresponded to the mean size of prior set. - **Multi-element arrays:** easier to quickly extract summary about visual events than the individual instances comprising event (Ariel 2001) [Lecture 8: Visual and working memory] **Working memory**: temporary maintenance of information and the ability to control or regulate attention in the service of goals especially in competing distracting information. - **Central executive:** attentional control system which co-ordinates information from the visuospatial sketchpad and phonological loop - **Visuospatial sketchpad:** manipulates visual images and tied to perception and action - **Phonological loop:** stores and rehearses speech-based information and is immediately tied to language (units are phonemes) - **Example of test:** over short durations, more difficult to remember similar sounding letters than the same number of different sounding letters. - **Chess plays decisions:** are affected by a visuospatial load, not a verbal one suggestive of two separate stores one for visual and one for verbal. **How is the capacity of WM measured?** - **Simple Span Task**: require participants to remember information that is presented (not valid measures of WM) - **Complex Span Task:** require participants to remember information while also concurrently processing other information - **Operation Span (OSPAN):** requires participants to solve simple number manipulation problems while remembering a series of letter words - **Reading Span:** participants read sentences and try to remember the last word of each sentence - **Symmetry Span:** participants judge weather social displays are symmetrical while remembering the locations of squares in a grid - **N back task:** participants monitor a sequence of stimuli and respond when a stimulus matches one presented (N) trials earlier - **BUT**: poor reliability as an individual differences measure and only correlates weakly with WM complex span scores (Jaeggi et all 2010, Kane et al 2007 and Redick and Lindsey 2013) **\*START\* What is working memory capacity associated with? (Many points)** - Associated with regulation of additional resources - Individual differences: flexible use of spatial attention (Bleckley et al. 2003) and anxiety, empathy and emotion-regulation. - **NOT** correlated with less complex and low-level processes i.e. alerting and orienteering (Redick and Engle 2006) **Scores from Complex span predicts:** - **Reading comprehension** (Turner and Engle 1989) - **Fluid intelligence:** ability to think logically and solve problems in new situations independent from acquired knowledge (Engle et al., 1999 and Kane et al.., 2004) - **Inhibition of task-irrelevant information such that high capacity equals**: reduction of notice own name in unattended stream DLT, reduce stroop effect, flanker interference effects and attentional capture. - **Mind Wandering** (McVay and Kane 2009) - **Performance on anti-saccade task** (participants must look away from a visual cue) (Engle 2018) **Anxiety and Attention bias towards threat:** - Higher levels of trait anxiety= attentional bias towards threatening stimuli - Evidence of higher anxiety have general regulation attention problems and not limited to instances of threatening stimuli e.g. less efficient inhibition of task-irrelevant information, switching between task and lower WM scores on complex span task - However unsure if due to intrinsic capacity differences or if rumination consumes available cognitive resources **\*End\* Cognitive empathy:** - **Definition:** taking another's perspective and understanding their thoughts, feelings and emotions. - **Individual differences in WMC** gauged by complex span task related to if participants made egocentric errors on a cognitive empathy task. - **Garrison and Schmeichel 2022:** assessed how people responded to stressful events. **Found**: more stressful events meant greater negative affect but was reduced among participants with higher WMC **suggesting** WMC buffers against the effect of stressor. - **How:** WMC related to reappraisal (highly adaptive emotion regulation strategy), entails changing the way one thinks about an event to regulate emotion. - **Outcomes of reappraisal:** positive emotions, reduce risk of depression/anxiety, higher self-esteem, optimism and greater social connectedness. **What does Working memory load impact?** - **How to measure:** comparing performance on a task under no, low and high load conditions - **Impact:** used to test efficiency criterion of automaticity - **Automaticity:** **4 dissociable processes-** efficiency, unconsciousness, unintentionality, uncontrollability - **Example of WM loads:** remembering string of numbers, location of shape stimuli, preforming mental arithmetic of sequence of numbers, counting back from a given number at given increments. - Task that entails **more active operation** on information rather than just remembering can **more fully gauge the true impact of WM load**. - **ALSO** impacts visual search efficiency, attentional capture by salient task-irrelevant stimuli, cognitive empathy, social reasoning, interference from global level ect. - **DOES NOT** impact object individuation: perceptual process occurs early in the visual processing stream, relying on brain ability to distinguish and identify object based on certain features. **WM training:** - **Near transfer**: benefit of training on same or closely related task - **Far transfer**: benefit of training on task that gauge theoretically relevant but distinct processes - **Not work**: no evidence of intelligence improvement, short term effects, did not generalise to improvements in executive function or fluid intelligence. **Visual Memory:** **Iconic memory:** stores visual images after the extinction of a physical stimulus. Huge capacity, it declines rapidly. It can be over written or masked by other stimuli Iconic Visual Short Term Memory (low capacity, infinite duration) **Iconic memory Test 1** - Stimulus duration 15 ms to 500 ms - Report as many letters as possible and most could report 4 items **Iconic memory test 2** - Report tone-cued line (partial report) - Could report the cued line accurately [Lecture 9: Memory -- autobiographical memory ] Memory: - Not a simple process of consulting a video like recording Types of Memory **Factors that affect memory: (PT 1)** - Part 1 Level of processing: presented with a question and then a word, varied the judgement required to answer the question to vary depth of processing \*Next page continuation\* Calvin and Tulving 1975 - Part 2 recognition test: words that had and hadn't appeared before and had to say if they had been presented. Results: - Deeper level processing promotes better memory - Making connections between both materials - More likely to recall information if relates to oneself. - Understanding or comprehending at the time of encoding improves memory Factors affecting memory (PT2) Generation Effect: - information is better remembered if it is generated from one's mind rather than just being read. E.g. remembering words by transforming them into a sentence Paired associates: Slamecka and Graf 1978 - learn to associate pairs of terms so that the presence of one item prompts the recall of the other item. E.g. rapid-fast or cat-dog or sea-ocean Spacing Effect: - Better memory when learning is distributed over time rather than in a mass period - E.g. study in small amounts over the course of the semester rather than in a chunk just before the exam - Ebbinghaus: memorising meaningless consonant-vowel-consonant strings - Why: when studied together you are less likely to attend to each presentation, contextual changes. Godden and Bradley 1975 - Learn list of words under water or on land and then recall on land or under water - Found: the environment in which the words were learnt meant recalling them in the same environment was better e.g. learning under water then better retrieval underwater. Chunking - Humans can usually recall about 7 units of information plus or minus 2 in their short-term memory - Can be 7 numbers or 7 strings of numbers Serial Position Effect (Ebbinghaus 1913) - People tend to re-call the first and last items in a list better than the items in the middle - Primacy (transferred to LTM and receive more attention and rehearsal) and recency (STM means easier retrieval) effects DRM Paradigm - Presentation of semantically related words at encoding e.g. dream, bed, night and PJ's. - Participants are asked whether they remember/recognise a series of words which included a lure that was not present but semantically related - Often, the lure word is recognised with high probability despite it not being there (false memory) Autobiographical Memory: - Memory is reconstructive and therefore prone to false memories - Loftus and Palmer 1974: traffic accident research (reporting based on words in questions ask e.g. crashed or hit (different words lead to different false responses) False memory through suggestion - Both in minor and major details and even for entire events (Loftus 1998- refer to the slide for this, left out because was covered in psyc2011) - Thing a is visualised when question about thing b and therefore associating a memory of thing a with memory of thing b. - Lost in the mall technique (Loftus and Pickrell 1995): asked participants about 3 real and one false event from when they were five and most participant completely fabricated information regarding the false event just from suggestion that it happened from someone they trust. - Implications for eyewitness memory: is everything that is said a real or false memory and what were the conditions in which these memories were made? [Lecture 10: Flashbulb & photographic memories and Judgement & decision making ] Flashbulb memories - Memory for surprising, emotional and consequential events - Refers to the circumstances surrounding how a person heard about the event, rather than the event itself - Examples: JFK assassination, 9/11, Michael Jackson's death, Trump winning election in 2016 - More subjectively more vivid than everyday memories but are not more accurate Photographic memories - **Eidetic**: extraordinarily detailed and vivid recall of visual images - **Picture elicitation method:** unfamiliar images are looked at and after 30 seconds, the participant is asked to continue to look at the easel and report anything they see - **Facts:** don't move with eye movement, remains 30 sec to several minutes, can be removed by blinking, can't be retrieved. - **BUT:** they are not accurate and sketchy on some details and suggest a reconstructive basis. [Judgement and decision making ] - Many everyday decisions are based on beliefs concerning the likelihood o uncertain events e.g. guilt of defendants, future value of real estate and person you just met belongs to a particular group. **Dual cognitive system model**: - **Intuitive (System 1)**: fast, automatic, unconscious, emotions, past experience, making snap judgements about character - **Analytical (System 2)**: slow, deliberate, conscious, logic, reasoning, evidence, complex math problems **Heuristics**: - Subjective assessment of probability resembles the subjective assessment of physical quantities such as distance of size (Mental shortcut, availability and representativeness) - Clearer object is perceived as closer, or poor visibility conditions means distances are over estimated. 1. Object a belongs to class b (e.g. banana belongs to fruit) 2. Event a originates from process b (e.g. good grades from study) 3. Process B will generate process a (e.g. reading about car crashes and judge that they are more common than they actually are) **representative heuristic:** - probabilities are evaluated by the degree to which A is representative of or resembles B - judgements based on representativeness ignore the prior probabilities or base rate frequency - Bayes theorem: prior probabilities should hugely influence our judgements **Availability heuristic:** - Judge the likelihood or frequency of something by the ease with which instances or occurrences can be brought to mind - E.g. What is more common; words beginning with K or words that have k as the third letter or more famous gender then reported more of that gender **Fallacies**: - Errors in reasoning that undermine the logic of an argument e.g. gamblers fallacy or confirmation bias **Conjunction Fallacy:** - The probability of a conjunction of events is always less than or equal to the probability of either of the events in isolation. - So if people judge that the probability of being a feminist and a bank teller is higher than just bank teller or feminist, they are falling to the logic fallacy **Adjustments**: change your initial estimate based on new information but not enough e.g. starting at 50 but then adjusting to 40. **Anchoring**: when the 1^st^ piece of information you receive influences your decisions e.g. \$100 discounted to \$50 makes it seem like a good price - 1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8= mean was 512 - 8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1= mean was 2250 - Correct answer: 40,320 **Prospect theory**: - explains how people make decisions under risk as they value gains and losses differently e.g. loss aversion (fearing loss more than value gains) and reference points such as he status quo. - **Non-Linearity:** - If you have nothing than \$100 has significant value but if you just won \$500,000 then an addition \$100 is nothing. **Loss Aversion:** - The pleasure of gaining \$100 is less intense than the pain of losing \$100. **Expected utility theory:** how do people make decisions in uncertain outcomes? - Economics based - Higher expected value investments are preferred [Lecture 11: Motivation, self-control, social cognition and language ] Evidence that boosting extrinsic motivation and undermined intrinsic motivation e.g. by making an interest examinable, you become to stop feeling motivated e.g. drawing and then learning about how may lead to a loss of motivation. Lepper and Greene (idk date) - 50 Children were intrinsically interested in drawing - Assigned to either expected reward, surprise reward or no reward. - Expected reward significantly reduced the amount of time the children spent drawing relative to the other two conditions. - In other words, if you enjoy something, when you start expecting rewards, then you begin to loose internal motivation. Mirror Self-recognition test - Used to determine at what age children begin to recognise themselves in a mirror (typically around 18-24 month) - If the child touches the dot of their face or recognises the mark then this indicates self-recognition. Self-Prioritisation effect - People process information related to themselves more efficiently and accurately than information related to others - Enhanced attention: hearing your name in a loud room - Improved memory: personal experiences - Faster decision making reacting faster to a picture of yourself Self-recognition: critiques - Prone to false negatives: may notice the mark but no react to it - Vision may not be primary sensor modality: dogs' primary sense is smell - Aggressive tendencies may overshadow opportunity to appreciate the self. Social Cognition - Empathy is a psychological process: affective, cognitive and empathetic concern - Affect = emotion Affective Empathy: feeling what someone else is feeling - If friend is upset, that you would feel upset in response to this - Need to be aware of the source of the emotion for it to qualify - Emotional contagion Cognitive empathy: putting yourself in someone else's shoes to understand their perspective - If you see a friend upset, you could come to understand that they are upset because their boyfriend has broken up with them - Similar to theory of mind Differences between CE and AE - AE appears earlier in development - Double dissociation: 2 cognitive functions operate separately from each other and damage to one part affects one thing but not the other - Damage to ventromedial prefrontal cortex = impaired CE but intact AE (Autism) - Damage to inferior frontal gyrus = impaired AE but intact CE (Psychopathy) Needing a balance of CE and AE - Too high AE can lead to occupational burnout in helping professions and CE buffers against burnout - Emotional regulation ability can be important too as high AE can be problematic Empathetic Concern: motivational dimension about desiring the well being - Example, if you see your friend upset and crying in response to a breakup, you would want them to find a loving relationship in which they are happy Reading the mind in the eyes (RMET) - Choosing what mental state best describes the person Cognitive empathy measurement