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Cognitive Psychology 335 > Exam 1 > Flashcards

Exam 1 Flashcards

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1
Q

What’s the fundamental question of cognitive psychology?

A

What is the nature of the mind?

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2
Q

What are the general applications?

A

memory, problem solving, learning, reasoning

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3
Q

Cognitive psychology addresses deep scientific questions, helps you make better use of your mind, is widely applicable, reminds us not to take ourselves for granted

A

REMEMBER

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4
Q

Structuralists

A

1870-1920 They’re interested in the structure of people’s mind–not the methods

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5
Q

Behaviorists

A

1920-1960 Only care about behavior (don’t hypothesize internal events)

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6
Q

Cognitive Psychology

A

1956-present Mental processes exist and can be studied in a scientific way (not just stimuli and response)

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7
Q

What are the methods of structuralism/introspectionism?

A

anecdotes (describing daily life), describing sensory experience, stream of consciousness, test self

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8
Q

What are the problems of structuralism/introspectionism?

A

different people get different results, cannot introspect on all processes (we have very little thought about what we are doing during certain thought processes), introspections can be wrong

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9
Q

Who is Wilhem Wundt?

A

famous introspectionist, known for describing sensory experiences–he was trying to get students to describe the podium they were seeing (but must ignore the sensory error=all the things you can see and not the things you infer due to your knowledge of the world).

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10
Q

What causes introspections to be wrong?

A

unconscious influences on judgement, change-blindness: difficulty detecting obvious changes from one scene to another

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11
Q

What is stimulus-response (S-R) psychology

A

looks at how given a particular stimulus of an organism, how do they react to it… and how does that reaction change as the stimuli change

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12
Q

Behaviorists are also empiricists

A

uses experimental research methods

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13
Q

What are some problems with behaviorism?

A

animals are not infinitely malleable, nor tabula rasas, not just learning S-R combinations, language

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14
Q

What is tabula rasa?

A

the idea that your mind is a blank slate–all of your behaviors are learned

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15
Q

Not all associations are equally learnable

A

Acquired taste aversion is very strong (coyote experiment) taste-to-stomach-ache associations are easily built

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16
Q

There’s more to association than simply reinforcement history

A 
Mouse experiment:
learn
    lights > shock
    taste > stomach ache
didn't learn
    lights > stomach ache
    taste > shock
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17
Q

What are Tolman’s cognitive maps

A

rat learns more than just the response (route) necessary to get reward–when the block is in the maze the rat knows to go around it, but when the block is remove the rat didn’t go down the learned path but straight toward the food, meaning rats learn their environment not just a behavior.

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18
Q

Learning is possible even if not personally reinforced

A

the cat will get better at getting out of the box the more times he is in their. They will also get better if they’ve seen anyone cat get out of the box.

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19
Q

Who is Noam Chomsky?

A

a behaviorist who deduced that language cannot be learned solely by learning stimulus-response associations. We are predisposed to learning language–we have a part in our brain just to learn language.

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20
Q

Cognitive scientists do experiments that get finer and finer details by coming up with better imputs (experiments)

A

REMEMBER

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21
Q

What are modules?

A

spatially localized parts of the brain that are specialized for specific function

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22
Q

What is excitation and inhibition?

A

the way neurons talk to eachother

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23
Q

What does it mean to say that the brain is parallel, not serial?

A

parallel means that multiple things can happen at one time vs. serial which means one at a time.

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24
Q

What is a super-releaser?

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A

an artificial stimulus that causes more responding than the natural stimulus (alien hand experiment)

25
What is the primary motor projection area?
This is the area that is active when you will yourself to move a body part (the primary sensory projection area is right next door)
26
What is the reception field?
the spatial area that a neuron will respond to
27
What's the difference between course coding and fine coding?
?
28
What are the five main lobes we look at in Cog. Psych?
Frontal lobe, temporal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe
29
What is the frontal lobe responsible for?
planning and reasoning, Broca's area for speech production (important for using the syntactical rules of language), inhibition, motor mapping
30
What are the signs if you have an issue in your broca's area?
halted but contentful speech if lesioned
31
What is aphasia?
any organic cause of impaction language
32
What is the temporal lobe responsible for?
memories (often for sound), Wernicke's area for speech comprehension, "what" visual system
33
What are the signs if you have an issue in your wernicke's area?
"world salad" if lesioned: fluent but contentless
34
What is the parietal lobe?
association cortex: links visual information to its meaning (if lesioned, patients may bot be able to integrate parts together), "where" visual system
35
What is the occipital lobe responsible for?
primary visual area, visual topographic map is located here
36
What is the limbic lobe responsible for?
it's located in the center of the cortex (the most primitive cortical region), emotional regulation, feeding-fighting-mating
37
What is agnosia?
a disorder whereby people cannot identify objects or see what the meaning of a visual object is (although they can see just fine). It is not a problem of language--they can say the words
38
What is prosopagnosia?
difficulty recognizing faces
39
What is alexia?
difficulty recognizing words
40
What is a wada test?
anesthetize one entire hemisphere
41
Why is perception important for cognition?
it's grounding for abstract thought, and false dichotomy between perception and cognition
42
What is bottom-up perception?
physical characteristics of stimulus drive perception, and realism (perceptionists most always need to believe that all things are real to everyone)
43
What is top-down perception?
knowledge, expectations, or thoughts influence perception. Constructivism: we structure the world. "perception is not determined simply by stimulus patterns; rather it is a dynamic searching for the best interpretation of the available data."
44
What is the McGurk Effect?
speech that is heard depends upon the face that is seen (ga and ba and da example)
45
What is race perception?
the idea that people can learn names for faces of their same race better than faces of another race--people can categorize by race people of another race faster than their own race
46
Why do we study illusions?
illusions reveal constraints/biases on perception
47
What is the ames room?
a trapezoid room--we typically assume the room is a rectangle
48
What is lateral inhibition?
neighboring neurons inhibit each other (inhibition: if a neuron is on, it will turn off its neighbors) LATERAL INHIBITION ENHANCES EDGES
49
What is the Ebbinghaus Illusion
when two circles are the same size but one is surrounded by bigger circles and the other smaller circles...the sizes of the middle circles is perceived relative to their surrounding circles
50
What is cognitive impenetrability?
perception is resistant to strategies and knowledge
51
What are some constraints on motion perception?
proximity (parts A and B tend to be the same object if they are close), shape similarity (parts A and B tend to be the same object if they are similar in shape), color and size similarity, One-to-one mapping constraint
52
Why is pattern recognition important?
humans' ability to recognize patterns is what separates us most from machines
53
What are forms of pattern recognition?
Templates, feature analysis, ___
54
What are the problems with templates in pattern recognition?
there are too many templates needed (specific size, orientation, color, etc.), and ignores intuition that objects are composed of smaller parts
55
What is our evidence for feature analysis being useful towards pattern recognition?
neural feature detectors have been found, simple and conjunctive feature search tasks (simple features are detected in parallel, but combining features requirements attention to be moved across an image in a serial manner), and illusory conjunction
56
What are illusory conjunctions?
when attention cannot be used to bind features together because displays are too fast, then features free-float independently, and may incorrectly recombine with each other
57
What is structural analysis?
represents parts and relations between parts
58
What is Geon theory?
a fixed number (36) of primitive geometric components--composed in different arrangements to create all objects. Some evidence for geons is that object recognition is hard if object cannot be analyzed into geons
59
Why is imagery important to cog psych?
its a classic example of internal mental representation, people are adept to storing and using images, link between perception and abstract cognition... imagining is like perceiving--but, there are some differences

Cognitive Psychology 335 (3 decks)

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