BIOLOGICAL AND COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: all lecture notes summarized (including pictures and examples)
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Course
Biologische & Cognitieve Psychologie (P_BBIOCOG)
Institution
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU)
Book
Physiology of Behavior
This document contains all lecture notes for the course: BIOLOGICAL AND COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY.
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Summary Biological Psychology, everything you need to know.
Extensive notes of the lectures and book (12th edition) Biological psychology
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Bio Cog hoorcollege 1 31-10-2022
Biological and cognitive psychology very strong related
But, also are very different:
Cognitive psychology
• Study of the mental processes of the mind
- Functional explanations; process models
- Looking at how do these processes interact
Biological psychology
• Study of the biological basis of the mind
- Focus on brain processes; structural models
- Looking at how these brain areas interact
Fortunately, we have an interaction/integration: Cognitive Neuroscience
All the interactions between these mental processes and between these brain regions
So, biological and cognitive psychology are not that different → they’re just different
perspectives of more or less the same thing (human mind/human behavior)
This integration is very young science (since 1990s) because of:
- In the past: long-time dominance of body-mind dualism (body and mind apart)
Now: more monism (the mind is what the brain does)
- Also, hard to study mental processes in brain, so technical developments help: fMRI
(brain imaging to examine where mental processes occur in the brain)
• History 19th century:
Cognitive psychology really got started in 1950s, but there are some predecessors → they
weren’t psychologist (because not yet a field of study at that time), but they were typically
physiologists, physicians etc.
- 1860: Weber / Fechner
• They developed psychophysics: focusses on perception by manipulating the stimulus
• So, they look at relation between physical energy to sensation
- 1867: Hermann von Helmholtz examined how individuals subjectively interpret outside
world → he sees perception as processes of unconscious inferences about the world
- 1879: Wundt opened first psychology lab
• Physiological chronometry
Chronometry: the timing (of biological or mental processes) → can be measured: by
measuring the speed of nerve conduction
- Johannes Müller thought that the speed of nerve conduction is infinitely fast (not true)
Came up with spiritual ‘lebenskraft’: suggesting a spiritual/mental force that guides
biological processes → already kind of interaction between mental and biological aspect
- Von Helmholtz: was able to measure this nerve conduction velocity → 60 m/s (human)
Physiological chronometry paves the way for mental chronometry
,• Mental chronometry
- Donders: idea after Helmholtz’ discovery that nerve conduction velocity is not infinite
→ If nerve conduction takes time, mental processes also take time
So key points:
• Mental processes take time
• We can measure that time (but how do you do that?)
Measuring by Donders’s subtraction method
Goal: estimate the duration of a mental process (X) → so measuring the time to answer
Method:
• Create two identical tasks, except for involvement of X
(One task involves X and the other task doesn’t involve X)
• Measure RT (reaction time) in both tasks
• Subtract RTs
→ gives us duration of X
Simple RT task
Response: always (alien Anthony and alien Al)
Go / No-go task
Response: only to one color (only alien
Anthony, not Al)
→ RT (go/no-go) – RT (simple) = stimulus
discrimination time
Problems:
▪ Depends on assumptions about stages
▪ Strong assumption about stages being independent
• Proceeding of history 19th century:
- 1885: Ebbinghaus’ memory research
Procedure
• Study phase: learn a list of nonsense words (DAX,
ZUG, YOP etc.) to perfection
→ register the time this takes
• Wait a certain time (minutes, days, several days)
• Test phase: register how long it takes to relearn
the list (less time to relearn)
• Calculate percentage of savings
All these examples are mental: researchers were studying perception, memory, time taking
for tests etc. → all processes that are going on in the mind
That quickly changed in 20th century (from 1913 onwards)
,• Era of behaviorism
John Watson (1913): ‘behavior manifesto’
- Completely ignore the mind (mental processes) and just study behavior
- Stimulus Response psychology (S-R psychology)
- Focus on learning
- Conditioning is really important for psychology (it’s the basis of certain forms of behavior
and memory)
• Research tradition still kicking and alive
• BUT not as extreme as behaviorism → the interpretation has changed, so
behaviorism that’s still alive is known as: S – O – R (stimulus, organism, response)
We study stimuli and response, but now also what’s going on inside organism
• Towards a cognitive interpretation
Edward Tolman → he discovered that there’s something in the mind that we need to take
into consideration when developing models (not enough to focus on stimuli and responses)
It’s possible to train rat to move to the right for food
Behaviorist would say: rat learned to act/move to right to get to the food
→ But if food is on the left, it would still turn right, so it wouldn’t get the food
Tolman discovered that rats were good at it and suddenly move to the left (where food is)
So, what rat learns is:
- Not a behavioral response (hard to explain purely through behaviorism)
- BUT suggests that the rats have learned a ‘cognitive map’ of environment that leads the
rat to right location → S – O – R
• Cognitive Psychology
Core: human as information processor
Invention of Personal Computer also important
→ compare internal processing of computers
to human processing
, - Measuring ‘central processer’ speed
→ Scanning short-term memory
Sternberg: Memorize letters and tell if they’re present in a stream of
letters (the more letters to remember, the longer it takes to remember)
- The brain: from S to R
Arrow points to right:
→ first perception: info from the retina (via
thalamus) to occipital lobe
→ then info through: dorsal (actions: ‘where/how’) and ventral
(concepts: ‘what’) route
→ then make a decision, so 2information is passed on further to front
of brain: interaction with behavioral goals & motivations (frontal)
→ info sent back to primary motor cortex
→ info from primary motor cortex to → spinal cord
→ response
• The brain: How do we know what and where things happen?
Different methods:
- Neuropsychological studies with patients with brain damage (strokes, accidents)
• Single association:
One group of patients with the same damage (patients have disassociation with
control group)
• Double dissociation:
Two groups of patients (one group damaged A, not B / other damaged B, not A)
Evidence for localization of function: function A and B served by different brain areas
Example: Broca examined a stroke patient with normal speech understanding, but
with deficient speech production
Wernicke examined a stroke patient with fluent speech production, but with
deficient speech understanding
- Brain imaging techniques to record activity on the scalp
• EEG
Electrodes register electrical activity on the scalp, as produced by the brain
• MEG
Similar to EEG, but it registers magnetic activity produced by the brain
Both ‘direct measurements’ of neural activity
• PET
• fMRI
Principle: Active brain areas attract blood
Oxygen reduction in hemoglobin → change in magnetic properties
fMRI detectors pick up the changing magnetic properties
Both ‘indirect measurements’ of neural activity
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