ACP Lecture Summaries

Applied Cognitive Psychology – Lecture 1 (Introduction)




Outcome = Cognition x Environment
 the degree to which goals are attained are a result of interplay between the users
(cognition) and the environment
 indicators to evaluate goal
 improving the system using factors: improve the interaction between the user and the
environment to better meet the intended goals
 change the cognitive functioning of the users or change the properties of the
environment
 testing the causal influence of certain factors on particular dependent variables (the
indicators)

,Lecture 2 – Fundamentals

 Intro: Morgan Freeman movie; Statement that we only use 10% of brain at a time 
WRONG (100% brain activity would be seizure)
 Human Information Processing (perceptual encoding, central processing, responding)
 Automatization of Info Processing  evolution to respond quickly (to threat)
 Prevention of automatization e.g. in flight safety
 Automatized vs. controlled processing (slow vs fast)
 PERCEPTUAL ENCODING
o Perception, sensory input
o low level phenomena (adaptation to motion, colours, lateral inhibition)
o Bottom-up (saliency) vs. Top-down (predictions, expectations about
environment)
o As quality of bottom-up info goes down, top-down influence increases!
 ATTENTION
o Broadbent’s Attentional Filter: early selection on attended channel
o But even if we don’t attend to sth, it is still processed cocktail party effect,
dichotic listening task (no conscious access to unheard stimulus, but
unattended perceptual input is still processed)
o William James = “if we attend to sth, we are conscious of it”
o Overt (physical change in body) vs. covert attention (no bodily movements,
we can redirect attention without moving; Posner experiment)
o Endogenous (from inside, controlled, targeted, top-down; colour-changing
cardtrick, gorillaattentional blindness) vs. Exogenous attention (from
outside, not intentional, external stimuli, automatic, bottom-up/stimulus-
driven)
o We can use exogeneous attention in clever wayscolours, text, follow gaze of
people, e.g. in sales gaze of model to actual product
o Visual search  pop-out effect, conjunction (distracting information)
o Attentional Control (controlled vs. automatic)
o Disadvantage of automatic task: automatization makes you less flexible to
engange in environment that is different than what you’re used to; multi-
tasking can be dangerous (driving)
 WORKING MEMORY
o Short-term memorysmall capacity (Miller’s law 7+/-2 items); short duration
(max 20 sec without rehearsal)
o Primacy and Recency effect, recall easiest for first/last items
o Facilitate memory through: Chunking, Interference (Stroop effect)
o Baddeley and Hitch Model of Working memory

,  Visuospatial Sketchpad (ability to maintain visual information,
mental rotation)
 Phonological loop (auditory counterpart, capacity = 2.5 seconds)
 different storage spaces, can be used simultaneously
 Central Executive (homunculus? Control)
 INHIBITION (e.g. simon effect, stoop effect, stop signal)
SHIFTING (switching cost, Wisconsin card sorting task, multi-task)
UPDATING (face recognition)
 rely on healthy dopamine functioning
 LONG-TERM MEMORY
o Semantic (factual) vs. Episodic (experiences)
o Explicit vs. Implicit (procedural)
o Patient HM  no longer new explicit memories, only implicit memories
o Three stages: Encoding, Storage, Retrieval
o Encoding influenced by
 existing schemas pre-existing knowledge and expectations
 Elaboration and Specificity
 Level of arousal (Yerkes Dodson law)  best performance in medium
arousal
o Storage: Decay process (memory gets lost with time), Interference (becomes harder
to distinguish bw memories when they interfere)
o Retrieval: Spontaneous recall, cued recall, recognition (easiest way of memory
retrieval)
o Forgetting  insufficient encoding, decay, interference, insufficient retrieval cues,
induced forgetting, reconsolidation
o The Google effect: figure out any answer by googling it
o Transactive memory: remembering where but not what
 DECISION-MAKING
o Frontal lobe, involves working memory
o Strategies: Heuristics (low effort, bias) vs. Normative …
o Situational Awareness
o Unconscious influence (e.g. right objects preferred; emotions)
o Morality (moral comparisons)