This document contains the lecture notes in Englisch. I summarized the lectures and I got an 8.5 (mean of both exams) with just studying this. It contains BOTH periods: so period 1 and 2! Lectur 1 to 18. NOTE THAT: these notes and the summary are made in 2023, new material could be added in years a...
Biological and cognitive psychology
First exam: lecture 1-13
Second exam: lecture 14-18
Lecture 1: introduction
This exam views two kind of psychology aspects:
Cognitive Psychology: Study of the mind
- Functional explanations; process models
- how do these processes interact with each other?
Biological Psychology : Study of the biological basis of the mind
- Focus on brain processes; structural models
- How do brain areas interact?→ actions and interactions
Historical foundations of cognitive psychology
Wilhelm Wundt → “Father of Experimental psychology”
- He had no methods to use so he found out his own methods. He was interested in the basic
units of the mind for example. He wanted to find out the structure of the mind.
- An easy way to study psychology is through the subjective experience of the person →
‘describe the sound’ for example.
- His first psychology lab: University of Leipzig 1879
→ Wundt believed scientific psychology should study a person’s subjective experience.
Introspection: participants trained to describe experiences and thought processes in response
to stimuli →
Two problems with introspection:
- Extremely variable results from person to person → you don’t know if the things that are going on
in the mind are right. Everyone also has other responses to stimuli.
- Results difficult to verify → Invisible inner mental processes
John Watson proposed a new approach → behaviorism (1913)
– Eliminate the mind as a topic of study
– Instead, study directly observable behavior
Founder of Behaviorism (1913): Psychology can only be a science, if we restrict ourselves observable
stimulus-response relationships.
He wanted to be more experimental → you look more at people’s reactions e.g. the Pavlov discovery
That was hard because the dog can’t speak. Even though he doesn’t talk, you can still look at the dogs
reaction (to different stimuli).
Watson (1920) → “Little Albert” experiment
– Classical conditioning of fear → little albert was not afraid of rats at first but when he associated the
rat with something he was afraid of, he got afraid of the rat.
– 9-month-old became frightened by a rat after a loud noise was paired with every presentation of
the rat
Pavlov and Watson are passive, the skinner box is more active (operant conditioning)
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Skinner (1950s)
Interested in determining the relationship between stimuli and response → actions with good
outcomes are more likely to recur
Operant conditioning: shapes behaviour by rewards or punishments
Also by Skinner:
A controversy over language acquisition → he thinks language was being learned by operant
conditioning
– Argued children learn language through
operant conditioning
→ Children imitate speech they hear
→ Correct speech is rewarded → e.g. by a laugh from the parent.
the children will mostly learn from feedback
Noam Chomsky (1959)
– Argued children do not only learn language through imitation and reinforcement, it’s a creative
process:
• Children say things they have never heard and cannot be imitating → they say things that they
never heard before, so the language isn’t imitated
• Children say things that are incorrect and have not been rewarded for
– Language must be determined by inborn biological program → they learn sentence structures, but
they also overgeneralize grammar rules → he ‘hitted’ me instead of he hit me. Language is no
behaviorism
He thinks we can study the mind:
Linguist: complex cognitive operations (e.g., language) cannot be
explained in terms of behaviorism.
Edward Toman → rats have a mental map to know the right way. In
cognitive psychology they took navigation in account, but in
behaviorism they didn’t → the learns is a COGNITIVE map and not a
behavioral response
Core → the human is an information processor. You have a ‘hard disc’ → LTM. The computer is a
metaphor of the mind.
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Broadbent → filter model of attention
- based on an experiment where people
can’t listen to two voice messages at
the same time
- When the message is predictable its
better to remember
- You cant remember both of the
messages.
To understand complex cognitive behavior:
– Measure observable behavior
– Make inferences about underlying cognitive
activity
– Consider what this behavior says about how the mind works
Shift from behaviourist’s stimulus-response relationships to an approach that attempts to
explain behaviour in terms of the mind
Assumptions Cognitive Psychology:
• Mental processes exist
• Mental processes can be studied in a scientific way (we can reveal these)
• Humans are active information processors → we process information and then do something with
that.
A short history of biological psychology
Brain function is examined through ablation →
you take a part of the brain and you look what
happens. You have to give the animal a task to
see if their behavior is changing, because if
you don’t then you might not see any changes.
If you add food to a task, you can see if the
monkey (e.g.) learns a task.
→ Broca: Patient with left frontal lesion impaired in language production
→ Wernicke: Patient with left temporal lesion impaired in language comprehension
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Prokinje → discovered neurons in the cerebellum.
Henry Molaison: Epilepsy → had removal of medial temporal area
- Could no longer form new long-term memories
- Loss of long-term memories from the period prior to the brain surgery (retrograde
amnesia)
Wilder Penfield
• Direct electrical stimulation of cortex → an introspective way.
• Produces "mental" sensations of thinking, perceiving etc., rather than a sense of the brain being
stimulated
• "a star came down and towards my nose", "those fingers and my thumb gave a jump", "I heard the
music again; it is like the radio"
Penfields work contributed to the understanding of localization of brain functions:
Motor cortex (red area): neurons project to the spinal cord to activate
muscles
Somatosensory cortex (blue area): Neurons receive activation from sense
receptors on skin, muscles and joints.
The speed of information processing
Johannes Müller (first half 1850) → Nerve conduction velocity is infinitely fast → spiritual
“Lebenskraft”.
Von Helmholtz (1850): Nerve conduction velocity = 30 m/s (for a frog) and 60 m/s (for a human).
• Paves the way for mental chronometry. It isn’t fast, it actually does take time. The closer to the
muscle, the faster the contraction will be. It will then be faster. Als je een voet aanraakt dan zal je
reflex minder snel zijn dan bij je nek, aangezien de processen langer duren.
Fransiscus cornelis Donders → How can you measure the time that mental processes take?
Assumptions:
- Mental processes take time because nerve conduction takes time
- We can measure the time that processes take
Important measurement for duration of mental processes:
Goal: Estimate duration of a postulated mental process, X
Method:
• Create two identical tasks, except for involvement of X
• Measure RT(reaction time) in both tasks
- the go/no-go task: you have to click a button when you see green (or blue)
- the simple RT task: you always have to click when you see a color, it doesn’t matter if its
green or blue.
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