Summary Biological and Cognitive Psychology/Biologic and Cognitive Psychology Summary
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Course
Biologische & Cognitieve Psychologie (P_BBIOCOG)
Institution
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU)
This document contains everything you need to know before BioCog's first partial exam. This summary was written by a Psychology student at VU University Amsterdam. The summary consists of both text and images
Hoorcollege 1 Cognitive
Cognitive Psychology
• Study of the mind
- Functional explanations; process models
- How do these processes interact?
Biological Psychology
• Study of the biological basis of the mind
- Focus on brain processes; structural models
- How do brain areas interact?
Integration: Cognitive Neuroscience
Very young science (since the 1990s)
- Long-time dominance of body-mind dualism.
- Now: “the mind is what the brain does”
- Technological developments: fMRI (and PET).
Biological & Cognitive Psychology
Aim of this course
Introduction to fundamental mental processes and their biological basis
● General function (cognitive perspective): perception, attention, motor control,
learning, memory, motivation, sleep, reasoning, decision making,....
● Implementation (biological perspective): Brain
19th century
1860: Weber / Fechner’s law
- Psychophysics
- Relation physical energy to sensation
1867: Hermann von Helmholtz proposes perception as process of unconscious inferences
about the world
1879: Wundt opened first psychology lab
Physiological chronometry
Johannes Müller (first half 1850).
- Nerve conduction velocity is infinitely fast spiritual “Lebenskraft”.
Von Helmholtz (1850):
- Nerve conduction velocity = 30 m/s (frog) and 60 m/s (human).
!! Paves the way for mental chronometry.
Franciscus Cornelis Donders (1818 - 1889)
- Key points
● Mental processes take time
● We can measure that time
,Donders’s subtraction method
Goal: Estimate duration of a postulated mental process, X
Method:
- Create two identical tasks, except for involvement of X
- Measure RT in both tasks
- Subtract RTs
→ Duration of X
Go / No-go task
Stimulus: green or blue
Response: only to one color; not to the other
Simple RT task
Stimulus: green or blue
Response: always
RT (go-nogo) - RT (simple) = Stimulus discrimination time
Problems:
● Depends on assumptions about stages
● Strong assumption about stages being independent
19th century
1860: Weber / Fechner’s law
- Psychophysics
- Relation Physical Energy To Sensation
1867: Hermann von Helmholtz (1821 - 1894)
- proposes perception as process of unconscious inferences about the world
1879: Wundt opened first psychology lab
1885: Ebbinghaus’ memory research →
Memory research: Ebbinghaus
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850 – 1909)
Procedure
- Study phase: learn a list of nonsense syllables (e.g. DAX, ZUG, YOP, ...) to
perfection. Register time this takes.
- Wait a certain time (minutes,day, several days)
, - Test phase: Register how long it takes to relearn the list.
- Calculate percentage of savings
Era of Behaviorism
John B. Watson (1913). “Behaviorist manifesto”
- Discard the mind; Exclusive focus on
behavior
- Stimulus – Response psychology
- Focus on learning
1. From the retina (via the thalamus) to the occipital lobe
2. Dorsal (actions; “where/how”) and ventral (concepts; “what”) route
3. Interactions with behavioural goals & motivations (frontal) Here: task rule
4. Premotor cortex / supplementary motor area Primary motor cortex
5. primary motor cortex → spinal cord
6. Spinal column → effector (right index finger)
The Brain: How do we know?
- Neuropsychological studies with patients (strokes; accidents)
→ single / double dissociation.
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