Midterm 1 Review PDF (Cognitive Psychology)

lOMoARcPSD|17993030 Midterm 1 Review Cognitive Psychology FW (University of Guelph) Scan to open on Studocu Studocu is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university Downloaded by C.J. Dahinten ([email protected]) ...

lOMoARcPSD|17993030 Midterm 1 Review Cognitive Psychology FW (University of Guelph) Scan to open on Studocu Studocu is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university Downloaded by C.J. Dahinten ([email protected])  lOMoARcPSD|17993030 Midterm 1 Review Review Material from: Learning How to Learn Acquisition of Info (encoding)  Role of repetition – early studies by Ebbinghaus o Took less time to learn the same material the next day  Massed vs. Distributed o massed practice is when learning sessions are crammed together at once (better results 24hrs after), whereas distributed practice is when learning sessions are spaced out over time (better results a week later)  Encoding variability (interleaving) o Blocked vs. Interleaving o Blocking is learning topics in chunks (AAA -> BBB -> CCC) whereas interleaving is basically distributed practice, you learn things simultaneously (ABC -> ABC -> ABC) o Variability is beneficial as it generalizes the info and isn’t restricted to a specific situation Retention of Info  Testing effect: retrieval practice is critical because it enhances log-term retention o The repeated retrieval of an item of info from memory Metacognition  Ability to monitor the quality of our learning is influenced by many external factors o Speed of retrieval, and perceptual clarity can misguide understanding of how much is recalled later o Desirable difficulty – some difficult promotes learning o Can create illusions of knowing (especially by study strategies that lead to immediate illusions of knowing but poor long-term retention) Review Material from: Intro to Cognitive Psychology  Cog. Psych: collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, remembering, thinking and understanding, as well as the act of using those processes  Schools of thought o Introspection (Wilhelm Wundt): mind can be understood by examination of one’s own thoughts and feelings  Limits: cants study mental world directly, does not tell anything about unconscious thoughts, can’t be used to test hypotheses o Transcendental method (Immanuel Kant): solution to introspection not being scientifically workable, begin with observed facts then working backwards from the observed (visible effects from invisible cause, studying the mental world indirectly) o Functionalism (William James): emphasizes on understanding functions of the brain rather than structure - purpose (or function) of the human consciousness and how it leads to adaptive behaviour  Mental states identified based on what they do, but this view was to general o Behaviourism (B.F Skinner): How behaviour changes in response to various stimuli - The way people act, and the way they feel are guided by how they interpret the situation, not the situation itself  Therefore, you need to study mental processes to understand behaviour Downloaded by C.J. Dahinten ([email protected])  lOMoARcPSD|17993030  Tabula Rasa – all behaviours are learned and shaped through simple conditioning (blank slates)  Lab setting provide controlled settings, minimize influence of extraneous factors, can control stimulus, precise measure of behaviour  Measures of behaviour o Verbal reports (free reports of what they see/hear and repeat back, alternative forced choice with pushing a button I something specific is seen) - assesses accuracy o Reaction time reflects time needed for mental processes to transpire o Looking behaviour such as eye tracking can help isolate key regions of visual fields where info is most relevant  Ecological validity – to what extent do lab settings mirror real-life situations o Trade-off between tight experiment controls and ecological validity o Ex. Eye witness testimonies, driving Review Material from: Cog. Neuro. Methods  Mind-brain relationship o Computer metaphor for the mind as the hardware and brain as the software  Brain as physical and mind as the meta-physical o Dualism: mind and brain are separate, but they interact and influence one another o Epiphenomenalism: mind is a by-product of brains processes and irrelevant for understanding behaviour o Parallelism: mind and brain are 2 aspects of the same reality; every event in the mind has a corresponding event in the brain and vice versa  Historical perspectives o Phrenology/Modularity View (Franz Joseph Gall): individual and different mental abilities are reflected in unique patterns of cranial shapes/protrusions (functions thought to be localized o Equipotentiality (Karl Lashley): all brain regions contribute equally to complex mental functions  Morris water maze - Made lesions in rat brain to test how they would react to that same situation o Functional specialization: different regions have some functional specificity which allow for functional connections between regions (brain networks)  Ex. Patients of brain damage – neuroplasticity  HM – surgery to remove part of hippocampus, resulting in memory loss  Neural recordings: microelectrons inserted into neural tissue which can measure local field potentials - summed activity from groups of neurons o Electrocorticography: electrical activity measured from large areas of cortex (ex of video about the guys who’s FFA was stimulated) o Benefits: direct measure of neural activity and it gives insight into functional specificity o Limitations: more commonly used in animal require animal sacrifice and provides limited insight into large scale network properties  Lesion Studies: animal models can inform human understanding Downloaded by C.J. Dahinten ([email protected])  lOMoARcPSD|17993030 o Reversible lesions – effects of temporary deficits resulting from impaired neural in certain parts of the brain o Ex. Phineas Gage – damage to prefrontal cortex that changed his personality o Neuropsychology: the study of psychological impairment following neural injury in humans  Boca's (expressive) Aphasia – lose of ability to produce language, but comprehension generally remain intact (near motor area)  Wernicke’s Aphasia – fluent speech output but little meaning, comprehension deficit (word salad) - near auditory area  Prosopagnosia – face blindness, difficulty in identifying familiar faces, can be congenital or result from brain injury (damage to fusiform gyrus (FFA)  Split-brain patients – communication between hemispheres is lost due to damage in corpus collosum  Provide unique opportunity to study how each hemisphere processes info independently of the other  Left hemisphere: verbal/language  Right hemisphere: visual-spatial o Benefits: provides causal role of brain regions in different cog. functions and for distinct neural systems, provides evidence for distinct neural systems—double dissociation o Limitations: naturally occurring lesions are messy – not limited damage to a specific are corresponding to an impairment in that specific cognitive deficit, functional reorganization can occur over time and so it makes if difficult to make conclusions about affected areas  Neuroimaging techniques overcome limitations of lesion studies, but also have their own limitations o ECG – electrocardiography: measures electrical activity of the heart and links changes in cardiovascular functioning to behaviour (driven by PNS and SNS) o FEMG – facial electromyography: measure changes in facial expression/ muscle activity o SCR – Skin conductance: classic measure of autonomic arousal (sweat) o Pupillometry: measures contraction and dilation of pupils o EEG – electroencephalography: measure small electrical potentials from the scalp via electrodes (used to measure abnormal activity, ex epilepsy)  Event related potentials can be time locked to external event stimuli  High temporal resolution, low spatial resolution o FMRI- functional magnetic resonance imaging: measure changes in cerebral blood oxygenation (active tissue requires oxygen, BOLD response)  High spatial resolution, low temporal resolution  Super expensive, but can be used to study cognitive function in unresponsive patients o MRI is used to determine sizes of certain brain areas – interacts with protons in hydrogen atoms (show a static image- anatomical image)  Measures/ represents the brain structurally  Brain regions Downloaded by C.J. Dahinten ([email protected])  lOMoARcPSD|17993030 o Hindbrain: on top of spinal cord, controls key life functions, posture, balance (medulla, pons, cerebellum) o Cerebellum: coordinates body movements and balance (spatial reasoning, and integrates sensory info) o Midbrain: coordinates movement and visual movements, regulates pain experience o Cerebral cortex: outer surface of brain (80% of brain), wrinkles on surface—convolutions o Thalamus: relay center and directs sensory impulses to cortex o Hypothalamus: controlled motivated behaviours Review Material from: Perception  Sensation: process by which sensory receptors transduce physical stimulus in the environment into neural impulses  Perception: process in which sensory input is interpreted into a meaningful subjective percept  Contralateral organization: Stimuli on left side are projected to right side of brain, vice versa o Primary visual cortex receives bulk of visual input, subcortical pathways in the thalamus also receive input (lateral geniculate nucleus)  Psychophysics: how subjective percepts are related to the physical properties of environmental stimuli o Fechner’s Law- increase in stimulus intensity needed to perceive a change in intensity is proportional to original stimulus intensity (radio example)  Basic elements of vision o Contrast: diff in luminance between adjacent elements o Orientation: direction info contained within an image (human brain like horizontal info) o Spatial frequency: amount of detail in an image (variation in contrast/unit of space) o Contrast sensitivity function: not all spatial frequencies are perceived equally well (max sf – 60 cycles/deg and max sensitivity – 5-8 cycles/deg) o Depth perception: binocular disparity – each eye receives diff info about stimuli o Colour vision: wavelength dependent, photoreceptors in the eye  Processing hierarchy: basic visual features are processed hierarchically with more complex features being extracted at higher levels of analysis (visual feature--> object recognition--> knowledge) o Bottom up processing: analysis that begins with the sensory receptors and works up to the brain's integration of sensory information  Data-driven o Top down processing: information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, as when we construct perceptions drawing on our experience and expectations  Development of pattern recognition using contextual information.  Gestalt psychology: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, used to chunk visual world into discrete units  Denotivity: features that are familiar and meaningful tend to be perceived as the foreground  2 visual streams: after processing in early visual areas, info is processed hierarchically into 1 of these 2 paths o The ventral (what) pathways extracts shapes and texture info to identify objects Downloaded by C.J. Dahinten ([email protected])  lOMoARcPSD|17993030 o The dorsal (where) pathway processes relevant spatial information for the purpose of guiding action  Patient DF: visual agnosia (damage to ventral visual pathway, couldn’t identify objects but could use visual info to guide behaviour) - ventral didn’t work, dorsal worked  Associative: damage to anterior regions- forehead (can replicate drawing but can’t name what object was drawn)  Apperceptive: damage to temporal lobe- posterior (can’t copy shapes, but can name them just fine)  Patient VK: optic ataxia (damage to dorsal visual pathway, could identify objects but couldn’t use visual info to guide behaviour) - dorsal didn’t work, ventral worked  Patient L.M: akinetosia (unable to perceive motion even though other aspects of her vision were normal)  Visual neglect/ Hemi-spatial neglect: inability of a person to process and perceive stimuli on one side of the body or environment, where that inability is not due to a lack of sensation o Ventral stream – what is it?  Critical for object identification (intersection of vision and memory)  Neural representation increases in complexity from posterior regions to more anterior regions  Cells in inferior temporal cortex (IT) respond to complex visual info (house, face) and are insensitive to variation in size, occlusion  IT cells have large receptive fields – respond to preferred stimuli presented over a large region of visual space  Visual agnosia – a disorder in which a person cannot identify or recognize common visual objects, results from damage to structures within the ventral stream  Face perception – subregions within IT (FFA) play important role in face recognition, some subregions contain exclusively (97%) face selective cells  Unique behavioural profile  Thatcher illusion - is a phenomenon where it becomes more difficult to detect local feature changes in an upside-down face, despite identical changes being obvious in an upright face.  Inversion is particularly detrimental for face recognition o Dorsal stream – where/ how?  Thought to transform visual information for the purposes of action  Evolutionarily older than ventral stream  Thought to operate below the level of conscious awareness  Visual info is also processed in subcortical regions within the thalamus  This info is projected to higher-order regions within the dorsal stream bypassing V1  The brain processes visual information that does not reach conscious awareness  Does the dorsal stream see in the blind? 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Dahinten ([email protected])  lOMoARcPSD|17993030  Visual info can still guide action despite cortical blindness  Tachistoscope: a device that allows the presentation of stimuli to the eye for precisely controlled amounts of time o Can be used to increase recognition speed, or to test which elements of an image are memorable o Used in the study of learning, attention and perception Review Material from: Attention  Attention: focusing awareness on a narrowed range of stimuli or events  Selection attention: the ability to focus on a subset of perceptual info that reaches the senses (dual ear task)  Early selection: there is perceptual analysis but only the intended info that is heard is processed to create a meaning to the info that is heard  Late selection: both channels are processed into meanings, but awareness is only given to the intended channel (cocktail party effect)  Selection can be space-based spotlight metaphor: attention acts as a spotlight, selecting a region of space for further visual processing o Overt: movement of eyes towards attended regions o Covert: eyes remain stationary – shift of minds’ eye  Posner cueing paradigm: space-based attention, attention can be allocated to spatial locations independent of eye movement (cued vs uncued locations, assessing one's ability to perform an attentional shift) o Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA): time between the onset of one stimulus and the onset of another o Exogenous orienting: attention that is externally guided by a stimulus (pull attention), has inhibition of return – slowing of reaction time associated with going back to a previously attended location  People are faster at responding when the target appears in the cued location, but when there is a delay, they are faster at responding to the target at the non- cued location cueing effect / inhibition return o Endogenous orienting: attention is guided by the goals of the perceiver (push attention), no inhibition of return  Illusory conjunction: a perceptual mistake where features from multiple objects are incorrectly combined  Inattention blindness: become functionally blind to things that are not being paid attention to  Attentional blink: a brief period after perceiving a stimulus, during which it is difficult to attend to another stimulus  Capacity limitations (piggybank metaphor) o There is limited amount of mental “energy” that can be spent at any given moment o When we actively attend to a stimulus, a portion (or all) of this limited pool of resources is taken up, leaving little left over for other tasks  Psychological refractory period: refers to the period of time during which the response to a 2 nd stimulus is significantly slowed because a 1st stimulus is still being processed Downloaded by C.J. Dahinten ([email protected])  lOMoARcPSD|17993030 o The bottleneck mechanism occurs when the first stimulus is being processed, any other stimuli cannot be processed o The processing of the second stimulus is postponed which slows down reaction time.  Sustained attention: dedicate attention for a long period of time (also takes up resources) o Sustained attention to response task (SART)  Every time a number comes up hit the key, unless it’s a seven - don’t hit the key (make commission error – how many times did they make a mistake) o Vigilance Task (Mackworth Clock Task)  Banging a key every time the dot skips a position  Performance declines over time – vigilance decrement  Why is there a decrease: Resource-depletion? Underload view? (bored) o The role of task unrelated thoughts (TUT)  Can we assess mind-wandering with thought-probes?  Increase in mind-wandering over time leads to vigilance decrement - withdrawal of attentional effort from the monitoring assignment. o Resource- Control Account  Half resources are dedicated to the task, but over time they decrease as the task is being done  Mind-wondering also take resources  Lose the ability to control your own resources – physiologically lose the ability (humans need some degree of stimulus to keep doing a task)  Think of it as homeostasis as the mind/attention doesn’t want too much, but need enough to keep it going  Controlled processing o A process that requires conscious use of attentional resources o Allows for purposeful, goal-directed behaviour  Automatic processing o A process that does not require attention for its execution – occurs with repetition, transition from controlled processing to automatic processing o Can be carried out unconsciously with little awareness o Theory of automaticity: the ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low-level details required, allowing it to become an automatic response pattern or habit. It is usually the result of learning, repetition, and practice.  Stroop effect: a phenomenon that occurs when you must say the color of a word but not the name of the word. Downloaded by C.J. Dahinten ([email protected])  lOMoARcPSD|17993030 o Must surpass automatic process of word reading in order to name ink colour – example of a controlled process o Words reading is automatic and colour reading is controlled o ACC – anterior cingulate cortex (conflict detection, what the automatic response is and what the goal actually is) o DLPFC – dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (active control to surpass word reading)  Eriksen Flanker Task – identifying the direction of an arrow  Simon task – what colour is the circle, hit the button corresponding to the colour of the circle o Circles can occur in compatible and incompatible spatial direction (closer to left/right hand  Spatial Stroop – identifying direction of arrow in a box closer to left/right hand side  Emotional Stroop – reading word onto of a facial expression (sad face with happy written on top and happy written on top of the sad face  Task switching: This ability to adaptively shift attention and action, unconsciously shift attention between one task and another o Mental set: a preparatory mental state that tunes cognitive processing to achieving a task o Task-switching model assumes the role of executive control. If the cue repeats, the executive does nothing, and the target is processed in accordance with the task set from the previous trial. If the cue alternates, the executive switches tasks before processing the target. Switching takes time and creates a switch cost Downloaded by C.J. Dahinten ([email protected])