Cognitive Psychology- Psych 200 – Spring 2016

Review for Midterm 1

Below is a list of the topics we have covered in class. The list does not contain all the details

about the issues, it simply serves as a guide of the main concepts that you should study. In

studying, you should familiarize yourself not only with the concepts, but the details that

relate to that concept. In addition to lecture, you should know the information from

Chapters 1-4 in the text, the split brain video, the in class demos and the 11 coglab

experiments.

Definitions of cognitive psychology & the basic information processing approach.

-Cognitive Psychology: the science of thinking; emphasizes internal mental processes

oProcesses in which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored,

recovered, and used

oPerception is an active cognitive process---we fill in missing information

oEven simple tasks require a large amount of processing that often aren’t available

for introspection: voice/object recognition

oApproach start with simple lower-level processes and build to a higher level



Complex combination and interaction lead to: -language –problem-

solving –decision-making

History –

oHelmholtz – physician who trained both Wundt and James – Interested in neural

conduction rates, color vision, founded ophthalmology.

oJames – Father of American Psych- first lab here –proposed multicomponent

memory system, wrote principles in psychology – many cognitive chapters

oWudnt- 1st psych lab – >150 PhD students- started structuralism & relied on

introspection to figure out cognition.

oTitchner – Proponent of structuralism & tied the field very closely to

introspection as a method. The method was allowed to define the field.

oStructuralism was failing due to problems with introspection (no agreement about

elements of thought and many processes may be too fast or unconscious to be

available to introspection). This attempt to explain unconscious processes

combined with introspection’s failures produced a backlash that led to

behaviorism – denies mental processes all together.

oThe fall of Behaviorism- Tolman’s latent learning study, Evidence of strategies

(e.g. Bousfield’s list learning and ordering the items), Skinner’s claim that he can

explain language development & Chomsky’s counter These factors combined

with human factors work related to WWII, the emergence of computers, and

work on linguistics to precipitate the cognitive revolution.

Tolman: behaviorist---we must have mental representations

Rats got practice finding food in maze

Other rats got practice in maze without food---eventually put food

in maze

Both groups “learned”

oUsed behavioral methods- observable phenomena

Bousfield (1953) showing that recall of memorized lists is usually

grouped by category

Partial preview of the text

Download Midterm 1 Study Guide - Cognitive Psychology | PSY 200 and more Study notes Cognitive Psychology in PDF only on Docsity!

Cognitive Psychology- Psych 200 – Spring 2016

Review for Midterm 1

Below is a list of the topics we have covered in class. The list does not contain all the details about the issues, it simply serves as a guide of the main concepts that you should study. In studying, you should familiarize yourself not only with the concepts, but the details that relate to that concept. In addition to lecture, you should know the information from Chapters 1-4 in the text, the split brain video, the in class demos and the 11 coglab experiments.  Definitions of cognitive psychology & the basic information processing approach.  - Cognitive Psychology: the science of thinking; emphasizes internal mental processes o Processes in which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used o Perception is an active cognitive process---we fill in missing information o Even simple tasks require a large amount of processing that often aren’t available for introspection: voice/object recognition o Approach start with simple lower-level processes and build to a higher level  Complex combination and interaction lead to: -language –problem- solving –decision-making  History – o Helmholtz – physician who trained both Wundt and James – Interested in neural conduction rates, color vision, founded ophthalmology. o James – Father of American Psych- first lab here –proposed multicomponent memory system, wrote principles in psychology – many cognitive chapters o Wudnt- 1st psych lab – >150 PhD students- started structuralism & relied on introspection to figure out cognition. o Titchner – Proponent of structuralism & tied the field very closely to introspection as a method. The method was allowed to define the field. o Structuralism was failing due to problems with introspection (no agreement about elements of thought and many processes may be too fast or unconscious to be available to introspection). This attempt to explain unconscious processes combined with introspection’s failures produced a backlash that led to behaviorism – denies mental processes all together. o The fall of Behaviorism- Tolman’s latent learning study, Evidence of strategies (e.g. Bousfield’s list learning and ordering the items), Skinner’s claim that he can explain language development & Chomsky’s counter These factors combined with human factors work related to WWII, the emergence of computers, and work on linguistics to precipitate the cognitive revolution.  Tolman: behaviorist---we must have mental representations  Rats got practice finding food in maze  Other rats got practice in maze without food---eventually put food in maze  Both groups “learned” o Used behavioral methods- observable phenomena  Bousfield (1953) showing that recall of memorized lists is usually grouped by category

 Strategies aren’t observable  Skinner (1938-1950s)  Operant conducting o Behavior strengthened by positive/negative reinforcements  Argues children learn language through operant conditioning o Children imitate speech and then are rewarded  Chomsky (1959)-linguist  Children don’t only imitate  Children say things that they never heard or incorrect things  Methods – o Behavioral- many example of specific paradigms used to infer internal mental operations.  Donders- Simple v. Choice reaction time and the ability to use time to infer internal processes.  Shepard’s mental rotation – RT for a proxy of an internal process  Visual Search – how measures like RT can be used to deduce processing (serial v. parallel processing). o Modeling – producing models of processes to predict behavior – Ex: re- interpreting serial search data as a limited capacity parallel process o Physiological Methods – know how they work, their benefits & shortcomings.----observe brain activity and infer was processes occur  Single cell recordings, EEG, PET, fMRI, TMS  EEG(Electroencephalography)/ERP(Event Related Potential: uses changes in EEG to see events) o GOOD:  direct observation  good temporal resolution  you know where the action potential is occurring o BAD:  hole in the brain  limited number of cells  Single Cell Recording: micro electrode by axon that detects action potential o GOOD:  very good temporal resolution  fairly cheap  non-invasive o BAD:  poor localization  PET Scan (Positron Emission Tomography): need to burn fuel to activate system---tag glucose with radioactive markers that will indicate metabolic activity o GOOD:  see function o BAD:  Radioactive

 Overdevelopment of connections and neural pruning.  Gostay et al (2004) o Looked at people through growth, ages 5- o Measured gray matter density (neural connections) o Have more connections as a child  Too many~ prune ineffective ones  Posterior matures then anterior  Early damage can be fixed---find new pathways  Brain specialization – (specialization rather than equipotentiality) o Brain stem and function (Mike the wonder chicken)—basic program for survival o The cerebellum and function—coordinated movement/balance, timing of behaviors o Limbic system (hypothalamus, hippocampus, and amygdala):  Hypothalamus-regulates vital functions and drives  Hippocampus-long term memory  Amygdala: processes emotional stimuli o 4 lobes and their basic function streams of processing- cerebral cortex (what makes humans advanced)  Occipital lobe: multiple basic visual processing areas  Temporal lobe: primary auditory cortex, high level visual processing- what something is  Parietal lobe: primary incoming somatosensory, visual processing-where/ how  Frontal lobe: primary outgoing material  Prefrontal cortex-attention, planning, interpersonal/emotional behavior  Establishing what (ventral) vs. where (dorsal) pathways – know the lesion studies, and the human work that led to a what vs. how (rather than where) distinction.  Double dissociation: independent processing--- can show deficits in lesioned areas, needs to have been shown in different patients so it’s not just due to different individual anatomy  Undergerleider & Mishkin (82)  Trained monkeys- object discrimination and landmark discrimination (closeness to a different marker)  Lesioned temporal lobe= couldn’t do object discrimination but could do landmark discrimination  Lesioned area between occipital and parietal lobes=couldn’t do landmark discrimination but could do object discrimination  Dorsal stream- up the back of the head—parietal lobe: WHERE or HOW  Selective damage to the dorsal system o Optic ataxia: can recognize objects but can’t grasp them o Can judge visual orientation but can’t do visual-motor orientation  Ventral stream- along the side of the head—temporal lobe: WHAT  Selective damage to ventral system

o Visual agnosia: inability to recognize objects visually o Couldn’t perceptually orient but could do viscometer posting  Visual agnosia vs. optic ataxia  Understand the need for double dissociation in lesion work o Somatosensory Maps in cortex - areas requiring more control/sensitivity need more brain area. o Hemispheric specialization & split brain patients  See stuff on the left in right hemisphere etc  Can still be functional without corpus collosom connection (lots of eye movement in day-to-day life)  Left hemisphere: involved in speech, local structure  Right hemisphere: global picture  Basic perceptual processing strategies based on neurological wiring.-if you think two areas are communicating, NEED to be connected o Lateral Inhibition – it relation to neural convergence and cell’s receptive fields, how wiring achieves it, how it creates efficiency, demonstrations of its effect on perception (Craik-Cornsweet edge, and the Herman’s grid).  Wired in center vs surrounding (retinal ganglion)  Cells in inside opposite of outside  First level of computation in vision  Makes system preferentially respond to edges(changes in brightness)/changes  Creates efficiency  Craik-Cornsweet Effect  Paint by number- paint this until otherwise told  Intensity is coded by speed of firing  Early form of visual processing  Condenses info leaving the eye=efficiency o Distributed coding (vs. specificity coding) - orientation selectivity in V1 and how the orientation tuning curves allow distributed coding. How color processing demonstrates distributed coding. How it creates efficiency.  V1=primary visual cortex  Use lines not spots for RF (oriented edges or bars)  Bell curve response for nearby orientation up to +/- 20° o V1 cell’s orientation tuning curve  Specificity coding- a single cell (grandmother) signals a single perceptual property  Distributed coding- pattern of activity across a number of cells that is important for perception****WHAT BRAIN DOES****  Cells respond optimally to one orientation but somewhat to similar orientation  Perceptual sensitivity for nearby orientations affected by adapting to a certain orientation  Tilt after affect---think of it as fatigue for cell that was used  Creates efficiency~ use two cells at 50% (added =100%)

Word units Letter units Feature units  Cats in restricted environment (all horizontal/vertical) for first 3 months (Blakemore and Cooper 1970)  Normal environment after 3 months  Major deficits- no placing reflex, no startle reaction, won’t follow moving object  Major deficits go away after a few days  Long term effect  Behavioral: cat won’t track/play with a toy that movies in the opposite orientation as the restrictive environment  Physiological: V1 cells almost all tuned to environment raise in o Tune brain towards experience  Cover one eye vs both first 3 months (Wiesel and Hubel 1963)  1 eye covered more problematic  Raised in stroboscopic illumination (Cynadan, Berman, and Hein 1973)  No cells responsive to moving stimuli  Brain may have preset design but very plastic in beginning and competitive  Amputees- face region takes over hand stimulus  You can train to get more brain area (Elbert et al 1995)- string players increase fine motor especially if started when young o Somatosensory maps and amputees- know the findings and implications. o Training studies and their implications o The use of multi-electrode arrays for neural prosthetics. Evidence for a distributed code and holds promise for future health benefits.  Animals can control robotic arms with thoughts alone  Train robot to respond to thoughts of movement arm o Motor cortex  Limits: how well we can read brain activity  Object ID o Basic Object recognition theories-  Template model – template stored in your head for each possible input… match the input to the template to identify and object  Problems – Too many possible templates; predicts no learning transfer to novel views of objects  Interactive Activation Models - know the model and how top down projections are thought to effect the model (including the word superiority effect example).  Break into basic features, features excite appropriate letter units, mutual inhibition between letter units, word representation  Word superiority effect—having a word helps you perceive letters  Activation from word to letters associated with word  Both bottom up and top down processing

 Ambiguous stimuli: feedback from higher in the processing stream o What word coming next can drive reading o First/last letter have stronger signals  Prototype models- Store a single prototypical representation for each type of object you can identify  Evidence: Picture verification and RT; Solso & McCarthy’s recognition test with faces that were derived by morphing a prototype, and the coglab.  Biederman’s Geon Theory – basic properties of geons; evidence used to support geon theory. Pros and Cons of Geon Theory  Geon: basic shapes that combine to describe form o Simple 3D shapes o More complex shapes made of geons  View(point) invariance: geons can be identified from different angles because they have invariant properties  Discriminability: geons can be distinguished at all viewpoints  Understand how geon theory and prototype models can be integrated into an interactive activation model.  Input is broken into feature  Features combine to form geons  A geon structural description (GSD) is formed o List of geons and spatial relationships  Our prototypes are stored as GSDs- so we compare the input to stored GSDs  You recognize an object if the input activates the right GSD  Benefits o Small set of geons can be put together in lots of ways to make a vast array of objects  Problems o Essentially no neurophysiological support o No obvious way of accounting for discrimination between objects with same GSD- different cars, people, four legged animals Problems extending object recognition to multiple object scenarios.  Why distributed coding predicts limitations o Same neuron may be involved in coding many different objects o Can’t simultaneously code for multiple objects  The binding problem- How does information from specialize brain areas get integrated? o Given specialized areas for different properties how does all the features get put together  FIT – know the model and the basic evidence for it and how it supports the idea that attention is necessary for object recognition  Model: sensory “features” coded in parallel by specialized module- “feature maps”

o Deutsch & Deutsch – model of late selective attention – but can’t explain why late attention effects are usually relatively small. o Treisman proposes her attenuation model…and claims that unattended messages may get processed to some degree…but they don’t last long because they are attenuated.  Evidence- Trailing or leading messages experiments  Problems with the model - What is attenuated processing of meaning? o Beyond Early and Late – a limited resources issue  The more unattended stimuli and the more attended stimuli the less interference in a stroop task & Lavie’s modified flanker task that looks like late selection with a low load and early selection with a high load.  Successive vs Simultaneous studies = for letters, Successive > Simultaneous for words o Overall Conclusion: Maybe not early or late detection. Maybe limited resources… if there are resources left over looks like late selection…if not looks like early.

Midterm 1 Study Guide - Cognitive Psychology | PSY 200, Study notes of Cognitive Psychology

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Download Midterm 1 Study Guide - Cognitive Psychology | PSY 200 and more Study notes Cognitive Psychology in PDF only on Docsity!

Cognitive Psychology- Psych 200 – Spring 2016

Review for Midterm 1