Inleiding en Cognitie deel B: Cognitieve Psychologie
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Universiteit Van Amsterdam (UvA)
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Cognitive Psychology
This is a summary of the book Cognitive Psychology by Gilhooly. I got an 8 for this course and I hope you can get a good grade with my summary as well!
Inleiding en Cognitie deel B: Cognitieve Psychologie
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Samenvatting boek Cognitive Psychology
Chapter 1: Introduction
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology: concerned with how the mind represents and uses information
about the outside world > how people and animals acquire, store, retrieve and work with
information (to reach goals)
Mental (or internal) representations: inner representations such as an image or a verbal
concept of some external reality
History
Plato: compared memory for information writing on a wax tablet, which if not rubbed
smooth by time could be read off (as in recall)
- Ancient world was concerned with the art of rhetoric: persuasive (convincing) speaking
- Method of loci: vivid images are formed linking the objects to be remembered to
a sequence of familiar places > mnemonic (learning device used to aid memory)
17th until early 19th century: Associationism
- Empiricism: all knowledge comes from experience > John Locke, David Hume & John
Stuart Mill > John Locke: and ideas and memories were linked by associations (= linkage
between mental contents such that activation of one content activates linked content)
19th century: Introspectionism > Wilhelm Wundt
- Wundt tried to analyze normal perceptions into simpler sensations which combined to
give the perception
- ‘Classical Introspection’: specially trained participants gave a verbal account of their
sensations in terms of mode (visual, auditory etc), quality (color, shape, texture etc),
intensity, duration and feeling (positive, negative, relaxed, tense etc)
- Limitations:
1) Extensive training was required
2) Not everyone could participate (children, people with mental illness)
3) Could not be applied to study cognition in non-human animals
4) Can only be applied to some mental processes
5) The process of introspection might well confound the cognitive process of interest
6) Differences in results between laboratories were difficult to resolve
Early 20th century: Behaviorism > John Watson, Edward Thorndike
- This approach abandoned the attempt to look inside the mind and took only observable
behavior and stimuli in its data > without reference to internal cognitive processes
- Focus was on learning and about how behavioral responses could be predicted from
knowing the history of rewards and punishments following behavior in response to
particular stimuli > learning processes were the same in animals and humans
- Tolman: mental maps: mental representations of a spatial (ruimtelijke) layout (rats and
foodbox)
- Behaviorist approach was less applicable to complex mental phenomena such as
1
, reasoning, problem solving, decision making and language (solution: information
processing approach)
End of 20th century: The Cognitive Revolution
- Information processing approach: metaphor for understanding mental activity, based on
computing (computers can be programmed to carry out any kind of symbol manipulation)
- Strategies: systematic ways to carry out a cognitive task (such as solving a problem)
- Simulation: a computer program which expresses a model of human thinking
- Artificial intelligence program: solving problems as effectively as possible without any
attempt at mimicking human strategies
- Internal representations: mental representations of external objects and events
- Mental operations: inner actions manipulating mental representations
- Connectionism: an approach to cognition in terms of networks of simple neuron-like
units that pass activation and inhibition through receptor (ontvanger), hidden and output
units
- Backwards propagation: learning rules to which link strengths are modified > in
response to errors, to obtain the desired output
Cognitive Neuroscience
Brain basics:
- Corpus callosum: thick
band of nerve fibres that
connects the left and right
cerebral hemispheres
- Cerebral cortex: outer layer
of the brain
- Dorsal: towards the top
- Ventral: towards the bottom
- Anterior: towards the front
- Posterior: towards the back
- Lateral: at the side
- Medial: in the middle
- Neurons: the basic units of
the nervous system,
principally consisting of a cell, axon and
dendrites
> cells that exchange information by transmitting
electrical impluses
Cognitive neuropsychology:
- Examines the effects of brain damage on
behavior, with a view to indentifying how
psychological functions are organized
- Broca’s area: damage to which is associated
with aphasia: speech deficits (in the left
temporal lobe)
- Localization: view that specific mental
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, functions are tied to specific brain areas
- Phrenology: early form of localization that attempted unsuccessfully to link
psychological functions to bumps in the skull taken to reflect growth of brain in specific
areas
- Double dissociation: arises when due to brain injury, some people do well on task A and
poorly on task B while others with different brain injuries show the opposite pattern > the
two tasks are then double dissociated
Brain imaging (or brain scanning): Two main categories:
1) Structural imaging: shows the static autonomy of the brain (= manipulatie)
- Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI): uses radio waves and a strong magnetic field
which surrounds the person being scanned as he/she lies in a narrow tunnel > does not
involve possibly damaging radiation
2) Functional imaging: represents brain activity over time (= registratie)
- Electroencephalography (EEG): method showing waves of electrical activity from scalp
recorders
- Event-Related Potentials (ERPs): functional brain imaging method recording electrical
activity during repeated stimulus presentations
Advantages EEG and ERPs: they are able to measure the electrical activity of the brain
with the precision of milliseconds
Disadvantages: more sophisticated measures are needed to be able to localize the part
of the brain that is the source of the electrical activity
- Positron Emission Tomography (PET): method which uses positron emissions from
radioactive glucose to indicate areas of increased blood flow in the brain > when a brain
area is active, more blood flows into it and thus there is increased chemical activity
involving the radioactive compound (verbinding)
Disadvantages PET: PET scans only show activity averaged over about 90 seconds or
longer, giving a very crude (grof) picture of the sequence of activity + the need for an
invasive injection of a radioactive material
- functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI): uses oxygenation levels of blood flow
and has good temporal and spatial resolution > measures the degree to which oxygen in
the blood flow is depleted (slinken) in many areas simultaneously > known as BOLD
Disadvantages fMRI:
- The reliability of repeated scans is not high
- The environment in which the measurements are carried out is very specific and
highly unusual
Chapter 2: Perception
Perception
Perception: set of processes that organize our sensory experience into an understanding
of our surrounding world
- The study of perception gives us insight into how properties of the physical world are
transformed into our mental world and informs our understanding of behaviors like
navigation and recognition
Sensation: the processes by which physical properties are converted to neural (brain)
signals
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