Midterm 1 (NEW PROGRESS) Flashcards
What is the human brain often compared to?
- A computer
- It’s considered the most complex and sophisticated computer in the known universe
What are examples of activities that require intelligence (or cognition)?
- Talking
- Listening
- Navigating
- Reading
- Remembering
- Playing
- Working
What are examples of activities that don’t require intelligence (or cognition)?
- Lower-level functions
- Ex: breathing or digestion
What is the sum of all intelligent mental activities?
Cognition
What’s cognition?
- The acquisition and processing of sensory information about the world and within ourselves in order to make behavioural decisions
OR - The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses
- Cognition is about processing external stimuli but also internal stimuli (dreams, thoughts)
What are different areas of cognition?
- Perception
- Attention
- Short-term memory
- Long-term memory
- Language
- Problem-solving
- Decision making
What is the field of cognition primarily concerned with understanding?
The processes that allow things to go right and that produce complex behaviors
What year was dubbed the “decade of the brain”
The 1990s
What are the 2 major scientific disciplines that undermine the study of the brain and its functioning?
- Experimental psychology
- Neuroscience
Describe basic research
- Scientific research whose goal is to try to understand the world and its phenomena, without regard to specific end-use of this knowledge
- Use to understand how we perceive information, remember, reason and solve problems
Describe applied research
- Research concerned with the end goal of developing an application or solution to a problem
- Includes understanding natural changes to the mind, cognitive diseases and disorders
Describe the field of human factors
A field where research in perception can facilitate the design of systems with which people interact, such as machines or computer consoles
Describe the field of artificial intelligence
A branch of computer science and engineering that’s concerned with building machines that can perform some or all of the tasks that humans can do, and perhaps also some that we can’t do
What’s the rationale behind artificial intelligence from a psychology standpoint?
- That if we really understand how something works, we should be able to build it, or at least create a working model of it
- One of the best ways to gauge how much we understand what the brain does is to assess how well we’re able to build artificial devices that can produce its behaviour
What was one of the biggest surprises in the field of engineering in the 20th Century?
- How difficult it is to build a machine that can produce what we would consider intelligent behaviour
- Building a machine that can do the kind of things we humans take for granted (ex: recognizing objects, understanding language, making a plan) is very difficult
What used to be seen as the pinnacle of human intelligence?
The ability to play high-level chess
What’s Deep Blue?
- A chess-playing computer that beat the world chess champion
- It played chess by performing many simple operations carried out very quickly
What’s the difference between computer chess players and human chess players?
Computers can carry out millions or billions of calculations in a second while humans take much longer to carry out one calculation
What made people think that machines would one day be able to outthink people?
The deep blue chess-playing computer beating the world chess champion
What’s If-this-then-that programming?
When a human programmer specifies what a computer program should do under each condition
Ex: chatbots
What are chatbots?
Computer programs designed to carry on a conversation with a person in such a way that mimics real human interaction
What does the success of predetermined automation depend on?
- It depends on the predictability of the problem the machine will have to solve
- Ex: chess game is highly predictable
TRUE OR FALSE: The brain has unlimited processing resources
FALSE
- The brain has limited processing resources and it must constantly choose what to process among a variety of competing signals
What are the kinds of applications where machines have historically failed?
Those that require dealing with novel, constantly changing conditions that the machine has not encountered before
What do intelligent machines lack or struggle with?
Flexible intelligence
What’s the revolution taking place in Artificial Intelligence?
The programming approach of machine learning, where computers are programmed to learn, changing their behaviour to get better at some task
In the past decade, what are the techniques that the dominant form of machine learning uses?
- Techniques that are modeled on the brain
- These techniques are highly generic
What are the 3 main approaches to studying cognition?
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive psychology
- Computational modeling
What do the 3 main approaches to studying cognition contribute to research into cognition?
They contribute to the golden age of research into cognition
What’s neuroscience?
- The study of the physical brain and related systems
- Concerned with discovering the structures and processes taking place in the physical brain and linking it to the mind
- Asks: what parts of the brain carry out functions we see behaviourally?
What’s cognitive psychology?
- A field of psychology concerned with studying intelligence through the observation of behaviours (often using behavioural experiments)
- In general, cognitive psychology depends on measuring behaviours, such as how long it takes to respond to some presented stimulus, to develop theories of the underlying neurophysiological processes
What’s a naturalistic observation?
When researchers observe the behaviour of people or other organisms in their natural habitat, without any experimental intervention
What inspired the theory behind much of the research into cognition in the last approx. 60 years?
The rise of powerful computers
Why do cognitive psychologists often have to be clever to design experiments that can address a hypothesis in a meaningful way?
- Because of the inherently indirect nature of cognitive psychology methodology
- The results of experiments are hence also often open to interpretation and debate
What’s the goal of most research in artificial intelligence?
To build machines that can imitate human cognition, not as a means of understanding human cognition itself
What’s the Mind-body problem?
The question, or debate, of how mental events, such as thoughts, beliefs and sensations, are related to, or caused by, physical mechanisms taking place in the body, such as cellular or molecular processes in the brain
What’s dualism?
- Dualism views the mind and body as consisting of fundamentally different kinds of substances and properties
- Body = physical
- Mind = not physical
- For much of history, people believed in mind-body dualism
- Ancient and modern conceptions of dualism recognized that the mind and body have a strong relationship with one another
For much of human history, what did people assume about the relationship of the mind and body?
Many assumed that the human capacity for cognition couldn’t be explained based on the kinds of observable physical processes with which they were familiar -> due to the mind-body problem
What’s monism?
The view that there’s only one kind of basic substance in the world, whether exclusively physical or exclusively mental
What are the different types of monism?
- Physicalism/materialism
- Idealism
- Neutral monism
Describe the physicalism/materialism form of monism
- The view that all of reality is physical or material in nature
- Cognition is just another physical phenomenon and mental states can ultimately be explained as being based in the processes of the physical brain
- Any sense that there’s a non-physical mind is an illusion
Describe the idealism form of monism
- The view that all of reality is mental in nature
- The brain and all physical reality is really a mental construct, not the other way around
- Ex: in the Matrix
Describe the neutral monism form of monism
The view that there’s only one kind of substance that’s neither just physical or mental, and that mind and body are both composed of that same element
What is dualism often related or synonymous to?
With the idea of a soul or a spirit that’s common across people and time
Who first brought up Dualism in the western world?
- It was likely first formally articulated by the Greek philosopher Plato in around 350 B.C.
- He argued that the mind was based on an immortal soul that was, in some sense, more “real” than the physical world
What did René Descartes do in terms of dualism?
- He formalized the principles of dualism
- He proposed that the mind and body formed 2 different types of substance but that these could interact with one another
Who first identified the pineal gland?
- René Descartes
- The pineal gland is a structure in the centre of the brain
What’s pragmatic materialism?
- Science operates based on physical methods, measurements, and explanatory mechanisms and can’t test non-physical theories
- This view states that observable behaviour can be explained based on physical processes, but our inner consciousness may not be explained by these physical processes
- This view is also not based on the fact that we have a full understanding of how the physical brain works and how its function relates to behaviour (which we don’t)
- It instead reflects a belief that such an understanding is possible in principle, perhaps with the advance of scientific knowledge
What’s an example of pragmatic materialism?
Most working scientists who study the brain and behaviour subscribe to the idea that the products of the mind (ex: intelligent behaviour) may ultimately be understood in terms of the workings of the physical brain, without appealing to any sort of immaterial properties
How many neurons and how many neural connections is the human brain estimated to contain?
- The human brain is estimated to contain approximately 86 billion neurons with 7000 connections each
- That’s over 600 trillion (602 trillion to be exact) neural connections
What are the contexts in which the brain operates?
- The brain functions within a body: which provides it with sensory information and the ability to move
- This body is embedded within an environment and society: which determine what the inputs and outputs of the body are
- The local society of the person is itself embedded in the larger structures of the world: which determines the broader context within which the person may receive information and act
- Each of these is crucial to understanding the intelligent behaviour the brain produces and must be studied at their own levels to fully consider how cognition comes to be
What does our current scientific understanding of the brain struggle to explain in sufficient detail?
What makes different brains produce different behaviours
What gives us privileged access to the inner workings of our mind?
Through conscious experience of our own thought process
What’s structuralism?
- A school of psychology whose approach relied on the introspecting on one’s own conscious mental states to understand the mind
- Introduced by Wilhelm Wundt
- Criticisms:
- Experimental methods were considered too subjective, relying on self report
- Approaches were too simplistic (focusing on simple sensory processes)
What’s introspection?
- A technique employed by the structuralists to study the mind by training people to examine their own conscious experiences
- Visual imagery is a form of introspection
- In addition to its use as a data source, introspective processes can play an important role in generating theories that are then tested using other methods
What is Wilhelm Wundt credited for?
- He’s the founder of experimental psychology and the structuralist approach
- He’s also credited for founding the first scientific psychology laboratory
- He wanted to identify the simplest units of the mind that he thought followed certain laws to create complex thoughts
- He wanted to establish a ‘mental’ periodic table of elements
- He used empirical introspection -> psychophysics
- Often used mental chronometry, with which he estimated time for a participant to perceive something (“I see it”; “I hear it”)
- He created the ‘thought meter’
How do structuralists use the introspection technique?
- Practitioners were trained to carefully consider and describe their own internal conscious experiences in terms of fundamental “elements” of consciousness
- Their hope was that they would discover basic principles of how these elements combined to form the contents of the working mind
What’s replication?
An important mechanism of self-correction in science in which different researchers performing the same experiments using the same methods should get the same, verifiable, results, assuming the original findings are valid
What are the 2 reasons for the failure of the method of introspection to live up to its ideal as a scientifically valid method?
- Data that can only be seen by one individual and can’t be objectively verified by others is inherently problematic and without objectively measurable data, we can’t be sure what’s going on in someone else’s mind -> introspection doesn’t lend itself well to replication
- It can only access mental activity that’s available to conscious awareness. However, much of our brain activity takes place outside of awareness
What’s an example of something we know/do that takes place outside of conscious awareness?
- The knowledge of grammar, which is implicit and not available to consciousness
- However, people can be fluent in a language without having any explicit knowledge of its grammatical rules
What system performs a great deal of processing outside of awareness, in the early stages of brain processing?
- The visual system
- Can be seen in patients with cortical blindness
Describe cortical blindness
- Condition in which an individual with damage to the visual cortex will report having no visual experience, despite having working eyes
- They have damage to the visual cortex aka the part of their brain that processes incoming visual information before sending it to higher-level processing that leads to conscious perception
- People with this condition will report being blind in part or all of their field of vision
- While they report being blind, careful experimentation will show that they’re still able to behaviourally respond to visual stimulus (blindsight)
What’s blindsight?
A phenomenon in which someone who reports blindness due to cortical damage still shows behaviour consisting with some perception
What has research on cortical blindness and blindsight shown?
That people with cortical blindness may be able to tell with greater than chance accuracy if visual stimuli is in the right or left visual field, but they’ll insist they didn’t see anything or just guessed -> example of blindsight
What’s a consensus among most working scientists today about the study of the mind?
That a valid science of the mind ultimately must depend on phenomena that can be externally measured
What’s the think-aloud protocol?
Research method that involves having participants verbally describe their thought process as they’re performing a specified task -> similar to introspection
Describe behaviorism
- School of psychology that emphasized using observable stimuli and behaviours as the basis of scientific experimentation
- It was founded by John Watson in the early 20th Century due to his frustration with the introspection method
- This approach ignores how the subject generates the response from the stimulus and instead treats the intervening processes (ex: the brain) as a “black box” whose workings can’t be investigated
What’s a stimulus?
Anything used to stimulate the senses as part of an experimental procedure, such as an image or a sound or a smell
What’s a response?
The behaviour an experimental subject engages in after a stimulus is presented
What was John Watson’s belief about behaviourism and the study of the mind?
- He believed that in order to become a true science, psychology had to abandon discussion of internal mental states in favour of objectively observable data
- He replaced talk about “mental images”, “ideas” and even “memory” with the framework of stimulus and response
- Both the stimulus and response may be objectively observed and measured
- He derived some of the basic ideas for behaviorism from experiments performed by Pavlov in the 19th Century
What was Ivan Pavlov’s contribution to the field of psychology?
- He discovered some of the basic properties of the nervous system’s role in digestive processes, such as salivation
- He also discovered classical conditioning
What’s classical conditioning?
- Process in which an involuntary behaviour can be induced by a stimulus that wouldn’t normally cause such a reaction, based on the fact that the stimulus was previously paired with a different stimulus that naturally does cause that reaction
- This can eventually lead to that behaviour being elicited by the stimulus alone
What happens before the conditioning in Pavlov’s demonstration of classical conditioning?
- An unconditioned stimulus (food) generates an involuntary/unconditioned response (salivation)
- UCS (food) -> UCR (salivation) - A neutral stimulus (a bell) is then introduced and generates no conditioned response (no salivation)
- NS (bell) -> no response
What happens during the conditioning in Pavlov’s demonstration of classical conditioning?
- The neutral stimulus (bell) is paired with the unconditioned stimulus (food) which generates an unconditioned response (salivation)
- NS (bell) + UCS (food) -> UCR (salivation)
What happens after the conditioning in Pavlov’s demonstration of classical conditioning?
- The bell alone (now a conditioned stimulus) now generates a conditioned response (salivation)
- CS (bell) -> CR (salivation)
Pavlov’s classical conditioning can be considered a method for explaining psychology in terms of what?
In terms of laws concerning the relations between completely observable phenomena
What important idea did behaviourists derive from classical conditioning experiments?
That behaviour can be learned rather than depending on inborn (“innate”) behavioural capacities or tendencies
Which side would behaviorists take in the nature-vs-nurture debate?
Behaviorists like Watson were strongly on the nurture side
Describe the case of little Albert
- Watson believed in the idea that behavioural responses can be modified by experience so he conducted a set of experiments to prove that a young child could be classically conditioned to respond with great anxiety and fear to something that the child initially had no fear of
- Little Albert was a young child who was exposed to white furry objects after they had been repeatedly paired with loud crashing noise
- After the experiment, little Albert had developed a strong fearful reaction to all types of furry objects (not only white furry ones) -> generalization
- Watson concluded that phobias were likely conditioned responses
What’s a Skinner Box?
- A chamber used to contain and automatically provide behavioural feedback to an animal during operant conditioning experiments
- The lever in the chamber can lead to the release of food or an electrical charge causing a shock
- AKA operant conditioning chamber
What’s operant conditioning?
A method of conditioning that reinforces certain behaviours through a system of rewards and punishments
Pavlov’s dog and the Little Albert experiments are examples of the conditioning of what kind of responses?
Involuntary responses
What kind of experiments did B.F. Skinner conduct?
He conducted experiments in which rats could be conditioned to engage in certain behaviours based on either reinforcing that behaviour (through a reward) or punishing that behaviour -> operant conditioning
What’s reinforcement learning?
- Form of behavioural conditioning based on punishment and reinforcement (reward) feedback
- Serves as the basis for much of Skinner’s work
What did Skinner find about animals and reinforcement learning?
That animals could be reliably trained to perform or avoid many different behaviours
What was Skinner’s belief about behaviours and classical and operant conditioning?
- Skinner claimed that all behaviours could be explained based on a combination of classical and operant conditioning
- People learn which behaviours to produce in any situation, based on the reinforcement they received for producing those behaviours in the past
What’s negative reinforcement?
Removing an unpleasant stimulus
What’s negative punishment?
Removing a pleasant stimulus
What’s positive punishment?
Generating an unpleasant stimulus
What’s positive reward/reinforcement?
Generating a pleasant stimulus
What did Noam Chomsky argue/criticize about behaviourism?
- He argued that behaviourism could never achieve its goal of explaining behaviour through conditioning because people engage in novel behaviours that they’ve never had a chance to learn
- He pointed to language as a case where people generate novel, meaningful sentences that they have never uttered or heard before
- Ex: “I hate you mommy!”
- He had a huge impact on the field, convincing many that the basic program of behaviourism was doomed to failure
Describe Edward Tolman’s maze experiment
- First, the rat wanders around, exploring the maze without any food reward present
- Then, a food reward is placed in the maze and the rat learns to turn right to find it
- Finally, the rat is placed in the maze at a different starting point. Instead of turning right, as it learned to do previously, the rat exhibits novel behaviour and turns left to find the food
- This novel behaviour was demonstrated only by rats who were able to explore the maze before a food reward was present
What did Edward Tolman conclude about his maze experiment?
- That while the rats first explored the maze, they engaged in latent learning
- He proposed that they formed an internal “cognitive map” of the maze during their initial exploration that they accessed later on in order to choose a novel path to the food reward
What’s latent learning?
Learning in the absence of any reward or punishment conditioning
What fatal flaw did Edward Tolman’s maze experiments highlight in the behaviourist approach?
- These experiments showed how the behaviourist approach can’t account for the flexibility of cognition to generate novel, intelligent behaviours that haven’t already been observed or performed
- These novel behaviours must depend on more than stimulus-response pairing
- They require more complex kinds of processing that can only be captured by positing internal processes and mechanisms, such as cognitive maps
What is at the heart of what it means to be intelligent?
The ability to generate novel behaviours
Which subfield of psychology still widely uses the behaviourist methodological approach?
- Behavioural neuroscience labs, which use animal models to study the physiology of cognition
- Ex: Using reinforcement learning on a rodent to study the neural mechanisms of learning and memory
What are computers at their most basic level?
Machines that are able to automatically generate functions
