What is Cognitive Psychology?

Question 1

What did Professor John R Anderson define cognitive psychology as?

Answer 1

Cognitive psychology is the science of
how the mind is organised to produce
intelligent thought and how it is realized
in the brain

Question 2

What did Wundt study and what was wrong with his methods?

Answer 2

Psychology the study of conscious experience.

• Using introspective methods
• Introspective reports of conscious experiences dealt with the unobservable and private, and they were unreliable.

Question 3

What did Watson study?

Answer 3

Psychology is the study of behaviour. (Behaviorism)

Question 4

What did followers of behaviourism believe?

Answer 4

Behaviourists denied the existence of the “mind”

• Responses (behaviour) is determined by environmental events (stimuli) and reinforcement arising from historical responses to them.
• Internal mental activity does not exist. People do not have strategies, memories, beliefs etc, not even mental arithmetic.

Question 5

What did Smith et al (1947) prove about the theory of behaviorism?

Answer 5

Smith voluntarily fully paralyzed himself (hence no muscle responses) and was kept alive via an artificial respirator. HOWEVER CONTRARY to behaviorism, he was able to understand speech & what was going on, and he remembered it.

Question 6

What was the 3 flaws which lead to behaviorism being overthrown?

Answer 6

1. Behaviourist principles proved incapable
   of explaining performance on WWII tasks
   e.g. radar, bomb aiming, code breaking.
2. CHOMSKY (a famous linguist): Showed that logically
   Behaviourism is incapable of accounting
   for natural language acquisition (infants and toddlers).
3. The powerful metaphor of mind provided
   by computers and artificial intelligence.
   - computers being able to replicate human thought processes
   - e.g. – Newell and Simon produced a program
   capable of proving theorems in formal
   logic and it appeared to mimic humans
   at least to some extent.

Question 7

What was a legacy left behind by Behaviorism?

Answer 7

Very good and controlled set of methods for experimental study of observable behavior

Question 8

What is information processing models?

Answer 8

Information processing models resemble processing in
computers – made Cognitive Psychology popular and
contributed to the decline of Behaviourism

Question 9

How is information processed in information processing?

Answer 9

1. Information made available by the environment is processed by a series of processing systems.
2. Processing system is a set of processes that work together to accomplish a type of task, using and producing representations as appropriate.
3. The major goal of research is to specify these processes and representations.

Question 10

How is an information processing task analysed?

Answer 10

Information-processing analysis breaks a cognitive task into a set of abstract information-processing steps.

e. g. shown 3 numbers (7, 8, 9) then asked whether a certain number was present (9).
- -> 9 = 3?, 9 = 9?, 9 = 5?, –> decide –> generate response –> YES

Question 11

What is cognitive neuroscience?

Answer 11

Cognitive neuroscience is the study of how cognition is realized in the brain.

Question 12

What did brain imaging help resolve?

Answer 12

Brain imaging a new tool to help resolve issues between competing information-processing theories

Question 13

Where does information processing mainly occur?

Answer 13

information-processing occurs mainly in neurons that

reside in the brain and especially the cortex – which is small or non existent in many species.

Question 14

What is a neuron?

Answer 14

A special kind of cell that accumulates and then
transmits electrical activity.
- There are ≈100 billion neurons in the human brain –
100,000,000,000 and on average each connects to 1000 other neurons. A very complex network.

Question 15

What is the ratio of neurons compared to other cells in the brain? and what is important about glial cells?

Answer 15

Neurons are out numbered 9:1 in the brain by other cells, including glial cells. Recent discoveries suggest glial cells may facilitate the permanent synaptic changes that underlie learning. (Einstein apparently had an unusually high proportion of glial cells.)

Question 16

How do neurons communicate?

Answer 16

Neurons communicate by forming a synapse, neurotransmitters are released from the bouton on the terminal of a neuron, these neurotransmitters then bind to the receptors on the dendrites of the receiving neuron, changing electrical polarity of the receiving membrane.

Question 17

What are the components of a neuron?

Answer 17

Dendrites, Cell body, axon hilock, myelin sheath, axon,, axon terminal, boutons.

Question 18

Approximately how many other neurons does a neuron form synapses with?

Answer 18

1000 on each end (terminal and dendrites)

Question 19

What is the average polarity change caused by an action potential?

Answer 19

polarity change from -70 mv to + 40 mv and back again within 1 ms

Question 20

In expanded time, what does each action potential appear as?

Answer 20

A spike that travels down axons at speeds of 0.5 m/s to 130 m/s (faster in axons that are more myelinated).

Question 21

Once a ____ level is reached the rate of firing of a neuron is a ___ ___ of _____ _____

Answer 21

threshold, continuous function, input strength

Question 22

What can a neurotransmitter that fires do to the receiving neuron and how is a overall decision made by the receiving neuron?

Answer 22

It can either inhibit or excite the receiving neuron.
Neurons “compute” the sum of all excitatory (increase rate of firing of neuron) and inhibitory (decrease rate of firing) inputs on their dendrites.

Question 23

How are excitatory connections brought about?

Answer 23

by decreasing a potential difference across cell boundary

Question 24

How are inhibitory connections brought about?

Answer 24

increases the potential difference across cell boundary

Question 25

When is an action potential carried down a neuron?

Answer 25

When the sum of all the many positive potentials minus all the negative potentials arriving at its dendrites exceeds a threshold level

Question 26

Approximately how long does it take for communication to pass from one neuron, down the axon, across a synapse and to the next
neuron?

Answer 26

Around 10 ms (1 < 10 < 100)

Question 27

How is the way information is represented different when comparing the brain to a computer?

Answer 27

• Computers represent information discretely in terms of patterns of 0’s and 1’s (Binary)
• Brains represent information in terms of rate of firing (>100 impulses per second), a continuously varying quantity
• Greater the rate of firing (activation) in an axon the greater its influence on “downstream” neurons.

Question 28

Information-processing and hence thinking is…:

Answer 28

the result of the
spread of activation through the excitatory and inhibitory
synaptic connections in a vastly complex network

Question 29

What are patterns of activation in neurons classified as and what can they not do?

Answer 29

Patterns of activation in neurons are transitory.

Transitory patterns of activation cannot encode permanent knowledge.

Question 30

Do grandmother cells exist and if not, how is information represented in the brain?

Answer 30

No, information is represented by patterns of activation across sets of interconnected neurons (distributed representation).

Question 31

What are feature detectors?

Answer 31

Cells that respond maximally to particular kinds of information but not to other features e.g. the red, green, blue receptors in the eye, the straight line and
angle detectors in the primary visual cortex

Question 32

What are the main 3 planes the brain is viewed from?

Answer 32

Sagittal, Coronal and Horizontal sections

Question 33

What region of the brain is of greatest interest to psychologists and why?

Answer 33

The cortex, as it performs most of the operations that give rise to our intelligence.

Question 34

What are the lobes of each hemisphere of the cortex called?

Answer 34

The Frontal, parietal, occipital and temporal lobes

Question 35

what is grey matter and white matter?

Answer 35

grey matter is a thin layer of folded cortex.

white matter are connecting myelinated axons.

Question 36

what is topographic organisation?

Answer 36

Adjacent cells in the cortex tend to process sensory stimuli from adjacent
areas of the body

Question 37

How does FMRI work?

Answer 37

When there is high neuron firing in the brain, there is more oxygenated blood present. Radio waves are passed through the brain the iron in the
haemoglobin produces a local magnetic field that is detected by magnetic sensors round the head.
Signal is stronger in more active areas.

Question 38

What are the downsides to FMRI?

Answer 38

Expensive, noisy, claustrophobic testing conditions.

Question 39

What is Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI)?

Answer 39

a variation of MRI, tracks the

movement of water molecules along nerve cell connections revealing the brain’s pathways

Question 40

what are techniques like ERP, fMRI, and TMS allowing

researchers to study?

Answer 40

the neural basis of human cognition

with a precision - in animals