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Cognition final exam review notes Chapters 1 - 8, 13 Definitions and experiments/results
CHAPTER 1 - Intro to cognitive psych and complexity in
cognition
What is cognitive psychology? The scientific study of human memory and mental process including: perceiving, remembering, using language, reasoning, and solving problems ➔ Cognition in everyday life: e.g. recall the day you were at a party Selective attention : focusing on the person that you are having a conversation with while suppressing speech from the background that is not relevant to you Divided attention: while you are speaking with your friends, you also hear what the party host might want to announce to the whole group When reading and trying to understand information we…
- Perceive the letters and words (putting together into a word)
- Comprehension of words and the overall meaning of the question
- Retrieval of relevant information
- Evaluation and response ➔ Even the simplest thoughts and behaviors involve a large number of complex cognitive processes (e.g., identification, pattern recognition, comprehension, matching info in memory, checking against previously stored information, reasoning, decision making, step-wise computations, etc.) ➔ Many processes occurring parallel and influence each other, and occurs outside of conscious awareness John Locke: Tabula rasa - the mind starts as a blank state, denies innate ideas and says knowledge comes from sensation (direct experiences with external world) and reflection (ideas from an interaction of new session and ideas from prior sensation) Wilhem Wundt: founded the first psychology laboratory, focusing on “conscious processes and immediate experience” ➔ Structuralism and analytical introspection (looking carefully at and reporting inner sensation and experiences, required intensive training to report only immediate experience)
Edward Tetchener: a student of wundt, concerned with phenomena that could be investigated using introspection ➔ Structuralism: sensations, images, and feelings are elements of the mind structure → trained people to avoid “stimulus error” Introspection: the examination of one’s own conscious thoughts and feelings ➔ Effort to asses: adding mental processes through reflection on internal experience ➔ Stimulus error: adding an interpretive layer of what you experienced instead of seeing the experience objectively (applying what you experience instead of looking at the experience in a way that is not influenced by personal feelings or opinions) F.C Donders: “father of mental chronometry”, analyze the mind by breaking down into separate discrete process/stages ➔ Subtraction method: behavior = processes A (simple) + processes B (choice/decision making), Donders approach was one of the first tasks to measure reaction time Hermann von Ebbinghaus: pioneered the scientific study of memory, studied formation and retention of associations (nonsense syllables vs meaningful material/CVC trigrams, e.g., BOL, TAM, COS ➔ Discovered forgetting curve (as a function of time, time to learn vs times to re-learn), saving score, spacing effect William James: founded the first psychology laboratory, focusing on “conscious processes and immediate experience”, Structuralism and analytical introspection (looking carefully at and reporting inner sensation and experiences, required intensive training to report only immediate experience) ➔ Functionalism: principles of psychology, “stream of consciousness” metaphor as thought as a following steam ➔ Solidified psychology's credibility as a science Behaviorist psychology: systematic approach to scientific psychology, skepticism of scientific study of consciousness and rejection of introspection as a methodology, inspired by scientific rigor of physics, emphasized objective scientific methods
specific skills or behaviors, neural representations of information Brain: weights approx. 400g (14oz) at birth, approx. 1m450g (-3lbs) by adulthood, basic building block = neurons, approx. 180 billion cells ( neurons + connective/supporting cells) Neurons : basic building blocks of the brain and nervous system, specialized cells to receive and transmit neural impulse Dendrite : branches that receive information from other neurons Cells body (soma): integrates information from dendrites, house the nucleus, keeps cells alive Axon: nerve fibers, long tube that information travels down, sends messages and ends in axon terminal, may have myelin sheath (faster transportation from one location to another and helps protect the cell) Resting potential: electric charge of neuron at rest, -70mv Action potential: change in electrical charge of neurons during information transmission (does not change size or shape as it reaches end of other axon), 40mv, intense sensations = more action potential Neurotransmitters: chemical released by one neuron transmits information to other neurons, neurotransmitter makes it possible for the signal to be transmitted across synapse Synapse: gap between neurons, where information transmission occurs Receptor: specialized neural structures that respond to environmental stimuli such as light, mechanical stimulation, or chemical stimuli Receptor neurons: receiving information from synapse Neurotransmitters: acetylcholine, norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, glutamate Acetylcholine: plays a vital role in the central and peripheral nervous system. It is important for muscle control, autonomic body functions, and in learning, memory, and attention memory functions, lack relates to Alzheimers Norepinephrine: memory retrieval and attention, alertness Dopamine: motivation and impulse control Serotonin: attention, mood, eating behavior Glutamate: learning and memory Glial cells: compose most of the brain and support transmission
Astrocytes: responsible for immune functions, provide energy, and information processing Oligodendrocyte: create and maintain myelin sheath Basal ganglia : controls, regulates, and coordinates movements (motor control) and involved in learning Limbic system: Deals with emotion, memory and motivation. Deals with feelings of motivation and reward, learning, memory, fight or flight response, hunger, thirst, and production of hormones that help regulate the autonomic nervous system Amygdala: fear and anger zone Hippocampus: necessary for memory generation Thalamus: sensory relay, all sensory information goes through here expect smell (regulation of sleep, consciousness and alertness) Hypothalamus: regulates the four F’s for survival (fighting, fleeing, feeding, and fornication), controls body temperature, hunger, fatigue, and sleep Cerebral cortex: white matter and gray matter Frontal lobe: thinking/imagination Prefrontal lobe: executive and cognitive function, personality Parietal lobe: kinesthetic → relating to a person's awareness of position and movement of body parts by means of sensory organs (proprioceptors) in the muscles and joints, responsible for processing somatosensory information from the body: touch, pain, temperature, and the sense of limb position, involved in integrating information from different modalities. Occipital lobe: visual processing Temporal lobe (TEM): receive auditory information Hubel and Wiesel - Neuronal sensitivity: neurons respond to simple features and demonstrated that some neurons were only responsive to information that came from a single eye, “ocular dominance”. Neuronal representation: everything a person experiences is based on representations in the person's nervous system, information that the brain (or neurons) carries about the organisms environment Specificity coding: specializing firing of a neuron for one stimulus, the idea that an object could be represented by the firing of a specialized neuron that responds only to that object
brain damage somewhere, X and Y are all impaired, inseparable, and not associated with each other. We need double dissociation in order to do mapping. Structural MRI: good for determining brain structures, bad for determining brain function Functional MRI: examines brain function (see which parts of the brain are functioning the most), tracks oxygen levels in hemoglobin, not instantaneous, temporally it is not good but spatially it is Measuring electrical/magnetic current: Electro-/Magneto-encephalogram (EEG/MEG), high temporal resolution, when something is happening, poor spatial resolution, where in the brain, MEG can give high spatial resolution. Electrocorticography (ECoG), direct recording from the brain, can answer when and where something is happening Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS): uses magnetic coil to disrupt normal processing in a specific area Transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS): lower current through electrodes to applied via electrodes Animal models: single cell recordings, lesioning, genetic manipulation Parahippocampal place area (PPA): area activated by images of indoor and outdoor scenes (evidence from fMRI) Extrastriate body area (EBA): area activated by images of bodies and parts of bodies but not faces Facial fusiform area (FFA): this is area is damaged in cases of prosopagnosia, specialized in facial recognition Visual word form area (VWFA): lies within the visual system in the fusiform gyrus and left hemisphere. Skilled in adult readers, this area appears to package the letters of words into visual units Language processing network: (Hickok and Poeppel) dual stream model of language processing (ventral stream and dorsal stream) are two functionally distinct neural networks that process speech/language information Attentional/executive function network: allows voluntary control of behavior in accordance with goals, controls attention that involves dealing with conflicting responses. Default mode network: Network of structures that are active when a person is
not involved in specific tasks. When this structure is active, our minds tend to wander. (e.g., you’re driving to school, paying close attention and without realizing, your mind starts to wander and you start thinking about what your plans are for tonight. Your brain switched from task-related networks involved in driving to your default mode network.) Structural connectivity: the brain's “wiring” diagram created by nerve axons that connect direct brain areas. There are fibers connecting one to another “structurally connected” Functional connectivity: the extent to which the neural activity in separate brain areas is correlated with each other. Contralaterality: control of one side of the body is localized in the opposite-side cerebral hemisphere. E.g., the left hand is largely under control of the right hemisphere Hemispheric specialization: each hemisphere has special functions and abilities Cerebral lateralization: different functions within the brain tend to rely more heavily on one hemisphere or the other, certain functions tend to be performed differently across the two hemispheres Right hemisphere: dominance for non-verbal & spatial information ➔ Visual system: complex geometric patterns & faces ➔ Auditory system: non-language sounds, music ➔ Memory: nonverbal memory ➔ Language: prosody, narrative, interference Left hemisphere: dominance for language ➔ Visual system: letters, words ➔ Auditory system: speech sounds ➔ Memory: verbal memory ➔ Language: speech, reading, writing, arithmetic Cortical specialization: different brain areas are critically involved in certain different functions Sensory cortex: responsible for processing sensory information Motor cortex: responsible for controlling all your voluntary muscle movements Dorsal pathway: where things are (e.g., location) Ventral pathway: what things are (e.g., identity)
when environmental energy stimulates the receptors. E.g., hearing a loud crash, looking at a light, stubbing your toe on a chair ➔ Some cells are specialized in identifying features Bottom-up theories: examples of pattern recognition systems based on “templates”, a pattern with a copy in memory. E.g., recognizing letters of the alphabet or numbers. The issue with template matching is that it’s a little too strict because it requires “exact” match, and has inflexibility. Top-down processing: knowledge and expectations the observer brings to the situation, use current knowledge and expectation to interpret. Originates in the brain at the “top” of the perceptual system. Using stimuli/knowledge from prior experiences to figure things out. ➔ Perception - Information processing: stimuli input → stimuli processing → perception → prior knowledge, experience, expectations, etc. (sensation is all the physical and chemical stimuli coming in) What is sensation/perception driven by? Prior knowledge (or expectation) Feature integration theory: an approach to object perception, developed by Treisman, that proposes a sequence of stages in which features are first analyzed and then combined to result in perception of an object. (e.g., looking for your child during a soccer game. Your child is wearing a purple uniform and the opposing teams wear yellow uniforms) ➔ Object → preattentive stage → focused attention stage → perception ➔ Treisman and Gelade: early stage processing → independent features, later stage processing → features are bound together into an objection through attention ➔ Issues: features are not informative on their own, they mean different things depending on how their combined, possible combinations are too much, attention can affect the early stage of processing Recognition by component (GEON) theory Biederman: you can start building things out of geons and combining them in different ways. (e.g., with all the blocks you can eventually build many shapes with them like a house or tower) ➔ Limitations: overall shapes (outline) can be organized well, global shape vs geons, unclear how geons are matched with object representations Gestalt laws of organization: we have higher order thinking and processes like grouping, perceptual organization (the way elements are grouped together to
create larger objects), perception is NOT due solely to the operation of feature detectors (respond to specific stimulus such as orientation, movement, length), our perceptual system groups elements together and separates different groups of elements “The whole is other (greater) than the sum of the parts”: this is grouping, once you know how to group things together Figure ground: the eye differentiates between an object form, silhouette, or shape, which is naturally perceived as the figure (object), while the surrounding area is perceived as ground (background) Closure: occurs when an object is incomplete or a space is not completely closed. If enough of the shape is indicated, people perceive the whole by filling in the missing information. Proximinity: (or nearness) when elements are placed close together, they tend to be perceived as a group Pragnanz: (law of good figure or law of similarity) every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as possible. Organization tends to favor simple, symmetric and regular. Similarity: when objects look similar to one another, people often perceive them as a group or pattern. Good continuation (continuity): Law of perceptual organization stating that when points connect they result in straight or smoothly curving lines that are seen as belonging together, lines tend to be seen as the smoothest path. gestalt law that states learners “tend to continue shapes beyond their ending points”. The edge of one shape will continue into the space and meet up with other shapes or the edge of the picture plane. (continuity only, continuity and similarity working together, working in opposition) Common fate: entities that move together, are grouped together Gestalt grouping laws: the collection of gestalt grouping principles attempts to describe how people tend to organize visual elements into groups and helps provide an understanding of human perception Helmoltz’s theory of unconscious inference: symbols or representations of the physical world that can be interpreted and disambiguated through converging evidence from different senses. A type of top-down knowledge, from what we already know we can make the inference (e.g,. Seeing someone standing behind
it. Conclusion is that there are separate mechanisms for judging orientation and coordinating vision and action.
CHAPTER 4 - Attention
What does it mean by attention? Detecting signals for focused processing, orienting attention to events or to specific stimuli, voluntary attention, involuntary attention (fire alarm captures your attention when you were not originally focusing on it), distraction (when people are talking in a study space) William James - attention: “Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in a clear and vivid form, of one but of what seme several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought” Selective attention: the ability you choose to focus on only one stimulus (or dimension), excluding others. Cocktail party effect (listening to the conversation you are having but ignoring other conversations around you) → colin cherry (1953) Divided attention: the ability to focus on one (or occasionally more) stimuli/dimensions at the same time; usually, there is some loss in attention to one or both Shadowing task (Cherry): different messages are presented to the left and right ear (dichotic listening), and the subject attempts to “shadow” one ear (relay/relay the messages) while other message is presented in the other ear Dichotic listening: The procedure of presenting one message to the left ear and a different message to the right ear. Participants are instructed to attend one stream of spoken messages and ignore/filter out the other stream. Then repeat the “attended message” out loud immediately as it is being presented. Used to ensure attention to the target message. Manipulations of unattended message (Cherrys & Moray’s work): vary the context of the message and ask the subject to recall it later (can they understand the message?), switch the language in midstream, switch from male to female voice (voice change) Findings for manipulating unattended message: content memory for unattended message was usually bad. (even word repeated 35 times not noticed).
Language change was sometimes detected but might not. Relatively good accuracy for reporting changes in perceptual characteristics. Attention as a filter (aka bottleneck): unattended and attended go to sensory store, to sensory filter, (bottle neck) to higher level processing into working memory. Broadbent's filter model: filtering is based on auditory feature detection (and that is what affects performance because it gets past). Acoustic/feature analysis: filtering the basis of physical properties rather than content (e.g, male vs female voice), filtering out the irrelevant info takes place prior to analyzing meaning/content) Early selection model: Model of attention that explains selective attention by early filtering out of the unattended message. In Broadbent’s early selection model, the filtering step occurs before the message is analyzed to determine its meaning. only the attended message receives higher level meaning-based processing and can affect behavior. Late selection model: A model of selective attention that proposes that selection of stimuli for final processing does not occur until after the information in the message has been analyzed for meaning. (information of a message is not processed until it has meaning) Problems/challenges with broadbent’s filter model: problems are that selective attention is difficult if the simultaneous messages are of similar content, meaning of unattended stimuli. Challenges are the cocktail party effect and some things capture our attention in the unattended ear. Treisman experiment (1960, 1964): carried out dichotic listening tasks using the speech shadowing method. Typically, in this method participants are asked to simultaneously repeat aloud speech played into one ear (called the attended ear) whilst another message is spoken to the other ear. (the recording was arranged so that the coherent message being shadowed was unexpectedly shifted to the unattended channel). Findings are that participants were still able to identify the contents of an unattended message, indicating that they were able to process the meaning of both the attended and unattended messages. Treisman's attenuation model: model of selective attention that proposes that selection occurs in two stages. In the first stage, an attenuator analyzes the incoming message and lets through the attended message—and also the
primates its meaning in memory, also activates related meaning memory and makes related meanings easier to access. Overt attention: shifting attention by moving eyes (eye movements = saccade), taking information where the eyes are fixated (central vision) Covert attention: occurs when attention is shifted without moving the eyes, commonly referred to as seeing something “out of the corner of one’s eye.” It involves the mental shift of attentional focus - like a spotlight beam (covert - corner of eye) Posner: spatial cueing task: designed to measure the time it takes to re-orient attention from one side of the visual field to the other, when a misleading cue was given. It also measures how much time is saved if attention was already drawn to the side of the screen where the target will be shown. Participants looked into the middle of a screen the entire time and objects would appear on both sides, then the participants had to describe what was on each side of the screen. Participants were instructed to keep their eyes on the fixation cross at all times so they could only shift their mental attention. A cue to indicate where a target could appear → 80% valid cue, 20% valid cue, and controls trails: neutral. Conclusions are attentional shift to a target area occurs prior to any eye movement. Spatial attention is not completely reliant on conscious visual input. Valid cues: participants responded much faster, where they were not cued (baseline) and when the cue was invalid Facilitation (or benefit): a faster than-baseline response resulting from useful information Cost: a response slower than the baseline because of misleading cues. (i.e., misleading cue “costs” you to respond slower) Spotlight visual attention: the mental attention focusing on mechanisms that prepares you to encode stimulus information, move the spotlight around visual field, independent from the actual eye movement Inhibition of return (IOR) - Posner & Cohen: The target you're supposed to detect appears in the box and when it appears quickly, people are really fast at detecting that change. when participants had the uncued target their reaction time was slower. This is because people tend to second guess themselves and search elsewhere. Inhibition means you are a little slower than the cued reaction.
➔ This reflects the idea that attention is inhibited from returning to a previously attended location. ➔ This keeps attention from repeatedly searching the same locations too soon. ➔ It encourages orienting towards novel locations and hence might facilitate foraging and other search behaviors. ➔ recently searched locations are mentally marked by attention as places that the search process should not return to ➔ The attentional system favors novel spatial locations Facilitation effect: faster response at the cued than uncued location Inhibition of return: slower response to a target appearing in a cued than uncued location Object-based attention: (Egly) attention can be allocated to a place on an object. The experiment found that participants are faster to detect the same object than a different object. Object works more in this situation, not space. (related to covert attention) (i.e., you are really only focusing your attention “based” on that same “object” aka.. object-based attention) Illusion conjunctions: demonstrated in experiments by Anne Treisman, in which features from different objects are inappropriately combined. Inattentional blindness: failure to see consciously caused by lack of attention (when focusing on one task, we fail to notice some obvious change) Change blindness: the inability to notice a change, failure to notice larger changes (e.g., my parents didn’t notice that I dyed my hair) Hemispatial neglect: related to brain damage in right parietal lobe and is an attention deficit, disruption or decreased ability to attend to something in one half of the visual field
CHAPTER 5 - short term and working memory
What is memory? The mental processes of acquiring and retaining information for later retrieval and the mental storage that enables retention and retrieval of
sensory memory stage of the modal model of memory. Each bolt generally lasts 3- seconds, a very brief memory register that receives visual input, visual persistence. Whole report method: Procedure used in Sperling’s experiment on the properties of the visual icon, in which participants were instructed to report all of the stimuli they saw in a brief presentation, 5ms & long 500 ms display…. Task : what letters did you see? (AQZR) results showed that 37% correct (4.5 out of 12 letters) and same results for both short 5ms & long 500 ms display of the array. It does matter how long the array is, people were only able to recall 4-5 letters. Possible conclusions are that not all letters are represented in memory or all were represented, but faded quickly. Partial report task: Procedure used in Sperling’s experiment on the properties of the visual icon, in which participants were instructed to report only some of the stimuli in a briefly presented display. Wanted to know whether sensory memory can store a few or a lot of things. Only report what is in the first, middle, or bottom row. Memory capacity to recall each row should be equal… tone cue after display because participants did not know which row they would be asked to recall. Conclusions are that 76% correct; recall 3 or 4 letters (1 row = 4 letters), capacity of iconic memory is 9 items. This task shows decay begins immediately and reporting might interfere with this recall (people holding a lot of information in visual sensory memory but it dissipates so quickly). Iconic memory is limited in terms of span apprehension, the number of items recallable after any short display (after a delay of about 1 second - performance declines to 36%) Delayed partial report method: participants were instructed to report only some of the stimuli in a briefly presented display. A cue tone that was delayed for a fraction of a second after the display was extinguished indicated which part of the display to report. Decay: forgetting as a passive process like fading, happens automatically over time Interference: forgetting caused by an interviewing stimulation or mental processing Backward masking: presenting a mask immediately after stimulus, results in the inability to recall anything
Echoic memory: Brief sensory memory for auditory stimuli that lasts for a few seconds after a stimulus is extinguished. Sounds occur over time (intrinsically temporal), need to extent information over time in a buffer or memory Short-term memory STM: one of the stages in the modal model of memory and has limited capacity of information for a brief period of time, usually around 30 seconds (15-20 sec or less) unless there is rehearsal (such as repeating a telephone number) to maintain the information in STM. (Miller 1956 says STM capacity was 7 +/- 2 items, and Cowan 2001 says about 4 items) Chunking: combining small units into larger ones, such as when individual words are combined into a meaningful sentence. Chunking can be used to increase the capacity of memory. Change detection task: participants shown a picture and asked to detect change with 3-4 items, with more items it was harder to detect change Information complexity: capacity to remember the colored patches compared to the greebles is very different Baddley and hitch: created the working memory model Working memory: more complex than STM, a limited-capacity system for temporary storage and manipulation of information for complex tasks such as comprehension, learning, and reasoning. Baddeley's working memory model: claims there are four components of working memory: the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, the central executive, and the episodic buffer. Central executive: The part of working memory that coordinates the activity of the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketch pad. The “CEO” of the working memory system. Planning actions, initiation, retrieval, and decision processing, integrates information coming into the system, updates and checks information to determine next steps, attention allocation (focus on relevant items and inhibiting irrelevant items) Prefrontal cortex: planning moves in problem solving task, allocation of attention to switch multiple tasks, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and cingulate gyrus Phonological loop: The part of working memory that holds and processes verbal and auditory information.
