Cognitive Psychology And Cognitive Disorders (CLPS11052)
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The University Of Edinburgh (ED)
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Cognitive Psychology
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The Psychology of Mental Health Conversion Course – Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive
Disorders (CLPS11052)
Exam – Answer 3 short answer questions out of a choice of 5 and 1 essay out of a
choice of 3 (2 hours)
Topics:
Week 1 – Approaches to Human Cognition
Week 2 – Attention
Week 3 – Memory
Week 4 – Language
Week 5 – Emotions
Week 1 - Approaches to human cognition
1. What are the major approaches to studying cognition?/Compare 2 approaches to studying cognition
3 main = cognitive psychology, cognitive neuropsychology, and cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive Psychology:
- uses behavioural evidence, by observing people performing various cognitive tasks (e.g. Dot-probe task/Stroop
task), to enhance understanding of human cognition.
- Approach is concerned with internal processes involved in making sense of the environment and deciding on
appropriate action (processes include attention, perception, learning, memory, language, problem solving
reasoning and thinking)
Limitations:
- ecological validity (lab setting differs to real life)
- Only provides indirect evidence about internal cognitive processes
- Task Impurity – most cognitive tasks require several processes, making it hard to interpret the findings
- Theories are often expressed only in verbal terms – vague and so difficult to test
- Difficulties in falsifying theories have led to many different theories on many topics – there are at least 12
different theories of working memory
- Paradigm Specifity - Findings obtained during any given task are specific to that paradigm and do not generalise
to other similar tasks
Cognitive Neuroscience
- aims to understand human cognition by combining information from behaviour and the brain, as they argue
that the brain, as well as behaviour, need to be studied to understand human cognition as internal processes
involved in human cognition occur in the brain.
- This approach uses brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI),
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, electrophysiological techniques e.g. recording electrical signals generated
by the brain
Limitations:
- Cognitive neuroscience shares cognitive psychology problems of ecological validity and paradigm specificity
- Hard to bridge the divide between psychological processes and concepts and patterns of brain activation
- Sometimes hard to replicate findings from different brain-imaging meta-analyses on a given cognitive function
- Relies on reverse inference –involvement of a cognitive process is inferred from activation within a given brain
region
- False positives (mistakenly concluding that random activity in a given brain area is task-relevant are common
- Most brain-imaging techniques reveal only associations between patterns of brain activation and behaviour –
correlational and do not establish if the brain regions activated are necessary for task performance
, Cognitive Neuropsychology
- Focuses on the patterns of cognitive performance of brain-damaged patients having a lesion (Structural
damage to the brain caused by injury or disease) – believe this can tell us a lot about cognition in healthy
individuals
- Assumes modularity (cognitive system consists of many modules mostly separate from each other and
uniformity of functional architecture across people
Key concepts:
Dissociations (when patient performs within normal range on one task but is impaired on second task)
Double Dissociation (when one patient performs within normal range on a task and in the impaired range on
another task; whereas another patient shows the opposite pattern
Single case studies (one patient/limited), Case series (study with several patients w similar impairments)
Limitations:
- Modular systems assumption criticised for being too extreme – less evidence of modularity among higher level
cognitive processes
- Theoretical assumptions too extreme e.g. universality assumption
- Assumed provides direct evidence concerning brain damage on previously intact cognitive systems – but brain
damaged patients often make use of compensatory strategies to reduce/eliminate negative effects
- Lesions can alter organisation of brain in several ways – evidence for brain plasticity
- Overemphasis on single case studies – limited
2. What is the difference between bottom-up and top-down processing?
Bottom-up processing = processing directly influenced by environmental stimuli – a stimulus (problem/task is
presented which causes various internal processes to occur leading eventually to the desired response/answer) Top-
down processing = stimulus processing that is influenced by factors such as the individual’s past
experience/knowledge and expectations rather than by the stimulus itself
- E.g. reading Paris in the the spring – assumption it was a well-known phrase means top-down processing
dominated information from the stimulus (bottom-up processing)
Or use Attention example:
William James (1890) distinguished 2 modes of attention:
Active – controlled in a top-down way by the individual’s goals or expectations, takes executive control, comes from
within and has limited capacity
Passive (unintentional attention) – controlled in a bottom-up way by external stimuli e.g. (loud noise) and has
unlimited capacity
3. What is the difference between serial and parallel processing?
- Used to be assumed that only one process occurs at a time (serial processing) – meaning the current process
is completed before the next (suggesting each stage is separate) – BUT a drastic oversimplification
- Parallel processing – more than one process typically occurs at any time – humans more likely to use this
when performing a task e.g. driving
Week 2: Attention
1. Describe the difference between active vs passive models of attention?
William James (1890) distinguished 2 modes of attention:
Active – controlled in a top-down way by the individual’s goals or expectations, takes executive control, comes from
within and has limited capacity
Passive (unintentional attention) – controlled in a bottom-up way by external stimuli e.g. (loud noise) and has
unlimited capacity
2. What is the Stroop task/What can be assessed by the Stroop task?
The Stroop task involves participants naming the colour in which colour words are presented (e.g. RED printed in
green) and avoiding saying the colour word (which is hard to inhibit). The task measures response inhibition, which is
where you try to override an automatic response. As such, participants must engage executive control to inhibit
automatic responses
3. What is the cocktail party effect?
The cocktail party effect (Cherry, 1953) refers to the difficulty of attending to one voice when 2 or more people are
speaking at the same time. This is because of:
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