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Samenvatting hoorcolleges Cognition & Emotion [2023-2024]
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Summary Cognitive Psychology – BioCog 2022-2023 | Anouk WiersmaBiologische en cognitieve
psychologie
Summary Cogniti ve Psychology – Goldstein & Van Hooff
Chapter 1: Introduction to cognitive psychology
- The mind creates and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory,
emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning.
o This definition reflects the mind’s central role in determining our various mental
abilities. Furthermore, this definition indicates different types of cognition – the
mental processes which is what the mind creates.
- The mind is a system that creates representation of the world so that we can act within it to
achieve our goals.
o This definition reflects the mind’s importance for functioning and survival, and also
provides the beginnings of a description of how the mind achieves these ends.
Furthermore, this definition indicates something about how the mind operates (it
creates representations) and its functions (it enables us to act and to achieve goals).
- Cognitive psychology: the study of mental processes, which includes determining the
characteristics and properties of the mind and how it operates.
Studying the mind: early work in cognitive psychology
- Donders (1868): interested in determining how long it takes for a person to make a decision.
o Determined this by measuring reaction time – how long it takes to respond to
presentation of a stimulus.
o He used two measures of reaction time:
Simple reaction time: measured by asking his participants to push a button
as rapidly as possible when they saw a light go on.
Steps that occur: presenting the stimulus (light flashes) causes a
mental response (perceiving light), which leads to a behavioral
response (pushing the button). Reaction time is the time between
presentation of the stimulus and the behavioral response.
Choice reaction time: measured by using two lights and asking his
participants to push the left button when they saw the left light go on and
the right button when the right light goes on.
o Donders reasoned that the difference in reaction time between the simple and
choice conditions would indicate how long it took to make the decision that led to
pushing the correct button.
Because choice reaction time took one-tenth of a second longer than simple
reaction time, Donders concluded that the decision-making process took
one-tenth of a second.
o This experiment illustrates something extremely significant about studying the mind:
mental responses cannot be measured directly, but must be inferred from behavior.
- Wilhelm Wundt (1879)
o Dominant approach in psychology in late 1800s and early 1900s: structuralism.
According to structuralism: our overall experience is determined by
combining basic elements of experience which were called sensations.
, Summary Cognitive Psychology – BioCog 2022-2023 | Anouk Wiersma
o Wundt that he could achieve a scientific description of the components of
experience by using analytic introspection, a technique in which trained participants
described their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli.
- Herman Ebbinghaus (1885) used another approach to measuring the properties of the mind.
o Interested in determining the nature of memory and forgetting – specifically, how
rapidly information that is learned is lost over time.
o Method: memory experiment, used himself as the participant, he repeated lists of 13
nonsense syllables to himself one at a time at a constant rate. He determined how
long it took to learn a list for the first time. He then waited for a specific amount of
time and then determined how long it took to relearn the list.
Used a measure called savings, calculated as follows, to
determine how much was forgotten after a particular
delay: savings = (original time to learn the list) – (time
to relearn the list after the delay).
Result: longer delays results in smaller savings
savings curve.
According to Ebbinghaus, this reduction of savings
provided a measure of forgetting, with smaller savings
meaning more forgetting.
- John Watson (1913): founded an approach to psychology called
behaviorism.
o Key points:
1) Watson rejects introspection as a method.
2) Observable behavior, not consciousness, is the main
topic of study.
o Famous experiment: little Albert, with the rat.
Associated with classical conditioning – how pairing one stimulus with
another, previously neutral stimulus causes changes in the response to the
neutral stimulus (Pavlov).
o Watson used classical conditioning to argue that behavior can be analyzed without
any reference to the mind.
- B. F. Skinner (1938): operant conditioning, which focused on how behavior is strengthened
by the presentation of positive reinforcers Skinner boxes.
- Tolman (1948): experiment with a rat in a maze
o Tolman’s explanation was that when the rat initially experienced the maze it was
developing a cognitive map – a conception within the rat’s mind of the maze’s
layout.
o Use of ‘cognitive’, and the idea that something other than the stimulus-response
connections might be occurring in the rat’s mind, placed Tolman outside of
mainstream behaviorism.
- Chomsky (1959): critical review of Skinner’s language development theory
o Skinner argued that children learn language through operant conditioning. However,
Chomsky pointed out that children say many sentences that have never been
rewarded by parent, and that during the normal course of language development,
, Summary Cognitive Psychology – BioCog 2022-2023 | Anouk Wiersma
they go through a stage in which they u incorrect grammar, even though this
incorrect grammar may never have been reinforced.
o Chomsky: language development is determined by an inborn biological program.
- The decade of the 1950s is generally recognized as the beginning of the cognitive revolution
– a shift in psychology from the behaviorist’s focus on stimulus-response relationships to an
approach whose main thrusts was to understand the operation of the mind.
- Thomas Kuhn (1962): structure of scientific revolution
o Kuhn defined a scientific revolution as a shift from one paradigm to another, where
a paradigm is a system of ideas that dominate science at a particular time.
A scientific revolution, therefore, involves a paradigm shift.
- The paradigm shift from behaviorism to the cognitive approach provided a new way to look
at behavior.
o During behaviorism, behavior was considered an end in itself. Psychology was
dominated by experiments studying how behavior is affected by rewards and
punishments.
o The cognitive paradigm allow any consideration of the mind’s role in creating
behavior.
Modern research in cognitive psychology
- Models are representations of structures or processes that help us visualize or explain the
structure or process.
- Two kinds of models:
o Structural models: represent structures in the brain that are involved in specific
functions.
Structures can also be represented by diagrams that don’t resemble the
structure itself but that instead indicate how different areas of the brain are
connected.
o Process models: illustrate how a process operates.
With boxes usually representing specific processes and arrows indicating
connections between processes.
o Resource models: closely related to process models, but focus on the mental “effort”
or the “resources” that these processes require.
When a process uses a lot of effort or can only obtain this effort from a
limited resource, a capacity problem can arise leading to ineffective
functioning of the process.
Processes often share resources and therefor have to compete for them.
E.g. doing multiple things at the same time.
Cognitive psychologists in the 1970s discovered however, that some
tasks can be done simultaneously while other suffer when done at
the same time multiple resource model.
o Consists of three dimensions
1. Stages of processing dimension, distinguishing
between perception and cognition processes on the
one hand and responding on the other.
2. Codes of processing dimension, indicating that
spatial activities require different resources than
verbal/linguistic activities.
3. Modalities dimension, indicating that auditory
perception uses different resources than visual
perception.
, Summary Cognitive Psychology – BioCog 2022-2023 | Anouk Wiersma
o According to this model: “the extent that two tasks use
different levels along each of the three dimensions,
timesharing will be better”.
Chapter 2: Cognitive neuroscience
Levels of analysis
- Cognitive neuroscience: the study of the physiological basis of cognition.
- Levels of analysis refers to the idea that a topic can be studied in a number of different ways,
with each approach contributing its own dimension to our understanding.
Neurons: basic principles
- Neurons: create and transmit information about what we experience and know.
- Ramon y Cajal discovered that the individual unitis called neurons were the basic building
blocks of the brain. This was the centerpiece of neuron doctrine – the idea that individual
cells transmit signals in the nervous system, and that these cells are not continuous with
other cells as proposed by the nerve net theory.
- Basic parts of a neuron:
o Cell body: the metabolic center of the neuron; it contains mechanisms to keep the
cell alive.
o Dendrites: branch out from the cell body; receive signals from other neurons.
o Axon / nerve fibers: transmit signals to other neurons.
o
- Conclusion about neurons found by Cajal:
o 1) There is a small gap between the end of an neuron’s axon and the dendrites or cell
body of another neuron synapse.
o 2) Neurons are not connected indiscriminately to other neurons but form
connections only to specific neurons. This forms groups of interconnected neurons,
which together form neural circuits.
o 3) In addition to neurons in the brain, there are also neurons that are specialized to
pick up information from the environment, such as neurons in the eye, ear, and skin.
These neurons, called receptors, are similar to brain neurons in that they have an
axon, but they have specialized receptors that pick up the information from the
environment.
- Working neuron:
o Recording of electrical signals from single neurons using microelectrodes.
o When the axon is at rest, the meter records a difference in potential of -70 mV
resting potential; the inside of the neuron has a charge that is 70mV more negative
than the outside.
o When the neuron’s receptor is stimulated, a nerve impulse is transmitted down the .
axon. The charge inside the axon rises to +40mV action potential.
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