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Detailed Lecture Notes Cognitive Psychology - all information is in here (of my year's slides)
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Lecture 1: IntroductionBook chapter 1+2 (YOU NEED TO READ THE BOOK FOR THE EXAM)
What are the mechanisms that drive the mind? What is the mind?
Definition = “The collection of all internal experience, thoughts and abilities that an
organism may have”
The set of experiences, thoughts and abilities is infinite: blinking, loving, eating, chewing,
walking, communication etc. → mind is very broad
What are the mechanisms driving the mind? 2 routes.
1. Cognitive route
⇒ Define all brain functions and discover the relationships among those functions
Try to capture the mind in terms of its abilities and how they come into existence
Example: find baby yoda in a picture
What types of brain functions do we use in this task?
- Visual perception
- Attention, focusing on the picture
- Interpretation of the image: how do we recognize stuff
- Memory: need baby yoda in memory to look for it
- Ocolumotor control: plan eye movements
- Feature detectors
- Interaction among these things
2. Neurophysiological route
⇒ Discover the neural circuitry that drives brain functions (older science of the 2). More
directly.
We need both! Why? (LOOK UP/ASK) Focus on examples introduced throughout the
course.
E.g. perception of something may be imperfect. Information comes in, gets distorted and
causes altered perception. Find the noise channeling through a neurophysiological
experiment.
How do we investigate the mind?
→ The ‘black box’ problem:
input → “processing” → output (response)
How do we know what goes on inside?
,We cannot directly observe this. We can provide a trigger (stimulus) and we see some
response in the end. We can infer stimulus-response relationships. How a stimulus leads to a
response is a black box we cannot see into. The mechanisms can only be inferred indirectly.
→ With experiments we measure stimulus-response relationships to infer the mind’s
operations
Franciscus Donders carried out the first cognitive psychology experiment
→ How long does it take to make a decision?
The person does multiple things: looking, recognizing, making a decision, responding
He created an experiment with blue and red circles.
- Screen with blue or red circle
- People are asked to answer as fast as possible
- Same group is tested to respond as quickly as possible about the object
- Subtract the time to take a decision made about the object with the time about the
color is the time it takes to make a decision on the color
- This is called mental chronometry
What might be shortcomings of mental chronometry? (students)
- Very simple decision. More challenging tasks might take more time, so there is no
absolute truth. However, you need time to make a decision, which makes the decision
making process an entity on its own.
- Is it response time or decision making time?
- Between 2 conditions other processes were also affected by the conditions, we do not
know
Teacher shortcomings:
- It assumes information is processed in distinct stages
- Perception → recognition → motor planning → motor execution
- Some stages can never be left out, so not everything can be timed
- Perception cannot be measured: no condition with and without perception
- Things do not unfold so chronologically in the mind
- While we perceive sth, there is a lot of other stuff going on in the brain. We
engage in memory when searching for something to compare what is coming
in from the eyes against. Not hierarchically, happens simultaneously.
Nevertheless, today we still try to divide the brain up into distinct functions.
- There’s neural mechanisms that drive attention or memory for example.
,Challenge:
- Try to come up with an experiment to find out how long a perception takes.
- EEG technology (neuro)
Recap:
What are the mechanisms driving the mind?
CP:
- assume mental processes exist
- construct models of internal processing.
- examine observable behaviour
- uses observable behavior to test/adapt models
First computers
- We conceptualize the brain as an information processing system
- How is information carried and represented in the brain?
First step: look inside the brain
- fMRI: functional magnetic resonance imaging.
- Active areas of the brain demand oxygen
- Blood (and thus oxygen) travels to those areas
- Hemoglobine (part of blood) changes the magnetic properties of an area
- Using a very strong magnetic field, we can trace those areas
- But the brain presumably does many things at once: how would you know which
brain area is responsible for, say, motion?
- Moving a red dot and see a lot of areas becoming active
- Maybe you look at activity for seeing a circle, irrespective of motion.
- You could measure this by comparing it to the red dot not moving: we want to
isolate activity to motion detection. Control conditions must be equal except
for one element: motion.
, - Use Donder’s subtraction method: one with and one without, subtract them
and you have the ones that are active
- Visual stimulus with motion - visual stimulus without motion = brain
areas responsible for motion detection
- fMRI tells us nicely where something happens, but not what happens precisely or
how.
- Also, it is a sluggish method: blood tracking to the brain. 4 seconds later you
see which area becomes active. Blood is sluggish so you can’t say in
milliseconds what happens, only in seconds.
Just as in a computer, all information in the brain is carried in the form of electrical signals
- Neurons are our electrical wires
- Know the zoomed in picture and study key concepts:
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