Class notes

UWO Cognitive Psychology Textbook/Class Notes (PSYC2135)

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Course
Psych 2135 (PSYCHOL2135)

Institution
University Of Western Ontario (UWO )

These documents will take you through the first six weeks of PSYC 2135. All of these notes are condensed versions of the textbook reading (Cognitive Psychology and its Implications, chapters 1-5) and class notes. At the beginning of each document, there is a vocabulary of important words in the tex...

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Number of pages 51
Written in 2020/2021
Type Class notes
Professor(s) John minda
Contains Week 1 - week 6

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Chapter 1 Notes: The Science of Cognition

Vocabulary

Cognitive Psychology: The scientific study of cognition

Artificial intelligence (AI): A field of computer science that attempts to develop programs that
will enable machines to display intelligent behaviour.

Empiricism: The position that all knowledge comes from experience in the world. Compare
nativism

Nativism: The position that children come into the world with a great deal of innate knowledge.
Compare empiricism

Introspection: A methodology much practiced at the turn of the 20th century in Germany that
attempted to analyze thought into its components through self-analysis

Behaviourism: The theory that psychology should be concerned only with behavior and should
not refer to mental constructs underlying behavior

Gestalt psychology: An approach to psychology that emphasizes principles of organization that
result in holistic properties of the brain that go beyond the activity of the parts

Linguistics: The study of the structure of language

Information-processing approach: An analysis of human cognition into a set of steps in which
information is processed

Sternberg paradigm: An experimental procedure in which participants are presented with a
memory set consisting of a few items and must decide whether various probe items are in the
memory set

Cognitive neuroscience: The study of the neural basis of cognition

Neuron: A cell in the nervous system responsible for information processing. Neurons
accumulate and transmit electrical activity

Dendrites: The branching part of a neuron that receives synapses from the axons of other neurons

Synapse: The location at which the axon of one neuron almost makes contact with the dendrite of
another neuron

,Neurotransmitter: A chemical that crosses the synapse from the axon of one neuron and alters the
electric potential of the membrane of another neuron

Excitatory: A synapse in which the neurotransmitters decrease the potential difference across the
membrane of the neuron

Inhibitory: A synapse in which the neurotransmitters increase the potential difference across the
membrane of a neuron

Action potential: The sudden change in electric potential that travels down the axon of a neuron

Axon: The part of a neuron that carries information from one region of the brain to another

Rate of firing: The number of action potentials, or nerve impulses, an axon transmits per second

Gyrus: An outward bulge on the brain. Contrast with sulcus

Sulcus: An inward crease of the brain. Contrast with gyrus

Occipital lobe: The region at the back of the cerebral cortex that controls vision

Parietal lobe: The region at the top of the cerebral cortex concerned with attention and higher
level sensory functions.

Temporal lobe: The region at the side of the cerebral cortex that contains the primary auditory
areas and controls the recognition of objects

Frontal lobe: The region at the front of the cerebral cortex that includes the motor cortex and the
prefrontal cortex

Prefrontal cortex: The region at the front of the frontal cortex that controls planning and other
higher level cognition

Hippocampus: A structure within the temporal lobe that plays a critical role in the formation of
permanent memories

Basal ganglia: Subcortical structures that play a critical role in the control of motor movement
and complex cognition

Corpus callosum: A broad band of fibres that enables communication between the left and the
right hemispheres of the brain

,Split-brain patients: A patient who has had surgery to sever the corpus callosum, which connects
left and right hemispheres

Broca’s area: A region in the left frontal cortex that is important for processing language,
particularly syntax in speech

Wrenicke’s area: A region of the left temporal lobe important to language, particularly the
semantic content of speech

Aphasia: An impairment of speech that results from a brain injury

Electroencephalography (EEG): Measurement of electrical activity of the brain, measured by
electrodes on the scalp

Event-related potentials (ERPs): Measurement of changes in electrical activity at the scalp in
response to an external event

Magnetoencephalography (MEG): Measurement of magnetic fields produced by electrical
activity in the brain

Position emission tomography (PET): A method for measuring metabolic activity in different
regions of the brain with the use of a radioactive tracer

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): A method for determining metabolic activity by
measuring the magnetic field produced by the iron in oxygenated blood

Topographic organization: A principle of neural organization in which adjacent areas of the
cortex process information from adjacent parts of the sensory field

Hemodynamic response: The increased flow of oxygenated blood to a region of the brain that has
greater activity—the basis of fMRI brain imaging

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS): A magnetic field is applied to the surface of the head
to disrupt the neural processing in that region of brain

Blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) response: A measure obtained in fMRI studies of the
amount of oxygen in the blood

,- Much of social science has developed without grounding in cognitive science
- the field of cognitive psychology is not that advanced
- researchers in other areas of social science have managed to find other ways to explain
the phenomena in which they are interested

- Early philosophical discussions about memory and thought developed into a centuries-long
debate between empiricism and nativism

- Cognitive psychology is less than 150 years old

- Beginning of psychology as a science began in 1879 when Wilhelm Wundt established the
first psychology lab in Germany (structuralism)
- used a method of inquiry called introspection
- the basic assumption was that the workings of the mind should be open to self-
observation

- Main influences that account for the modern development of cognitive psychology:
- research on human performance
- developments in computer science, particularly AI
- linguistics

- Dominant approach in cognitive psychology is the information processing approach
- Sternberg paradigm
- Sternberg’s theory exemplifies a classical abstract information-processing account:
- information processing is discussed without any reference to the brain
- the processing of the information has a highly symbolic character
- the processing of information can be compared to the way computers process
information
- the measurement of time to make a judgment is a critical variable, because the
information processing is conceived to be taking place in discrete stages

Lecture Notes

- What is cognitive psychology?
- the study of human thought
- mental abilities common to all people
- what do these abilities tell us about behaviour and differences?
- the study of information processing

- What is information?
- potentially useful information

, - how does an intelligent system let the useful information in, and how does it keep less
useful information out?

- Conceptual complexity
- too much information and the complexity is too great
- use satisficing
- a decision-making strategy that aims for a satisfactory result rather than an
optimal result
- heuristics are cognitive shortcuts, similar to satisficing
- mental shortcuts
- we rely on memory and heuristics to make decisions

- Memory
- people rely on past experiences
- memory for prior events are used to guide decisions about the present

- Historical approaches
- philosophical precursors
- Nativism
- Plato, Descartes, Kant
- emphasis on that which is innate
- Empiricism
- Locke, Hume, Stuart Mill
- emphasis on experience/learning
- experimental psychology
- application of the scientific method to psychology
- structuralism
- Wundt
- studying cognitive processes by looking inward (introspection)
- experimenter may introspection
- Problems for introspection
- Unreliable across labs; ignores unconscious influences; not appropriate for
many issues
- functionalism
- William James
- explanation of experience
- function more important than content
- Gestalt psychology
- Behaviourism (not included in cognitive psychology)
- Watson and Skinner
- study of behaviour
- you can observe stimuli (inputs) and behaviours (outputs)
- constructs for internal states are not observable

, - associations are the main explanatory processes
- problems for behaviourism:
- delayed response
- failed to adequately explain language
- cognitive revolution
- rise of information processing
- shortcomings of behaviourism
- psychology began to study thinking, memory, internal mental states, representations
- main reasons for this:
- computers were developed between 1940 and 1950
- gave psychologists a new metaphor for studying the mind
- inputs and outputs (stimulus and response)
- a physical internal state
- cognitive neuroscience
- how the brain carries out cognitive processes

- Cognition in the class: review on studies
- Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available
Cognitive Capacity by: Ward, Duke, Gneezy, and Bos
- test to see the “brain drain” hypothesis that the mere presence of one’s own
smartphone may occupy limited-capacity cognitive resources, thereby leaving fewer
resources available for other tasks and undercutting cognitive performance
- results from two experiments indicate that even when people are successful at
maintaining sustained attention—as when avoiding the temptation to check their
phones—the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capacity
- Laptop versus longhand note taking: effects on lecture notes and achievement by:
Luo, Kiewra, Flanigan, and Peteranetz
- study investigated whether note-taking medium (laptop, longhand) influenced note
taking and achievement when notes were recorded but not reviewed (note taking’s
process function) and when notes were recorded and reviewed (note taking’s product
function)
- note-taking results showed that laptop note takers recorded more notes (idea units
and words) and more verbatim lecture strings than did longhand note takers who, in
turn, recorded more visual notes (signals and images) than did laptop note takers
- achievement findings suggest that the optimal note-taking medium depends on the
nature of the lecture and whether notes are reviewed
- Don’t Ditch the Laptop Just Yet: A Direct Replication of Mueller and
Oppenheimer’s (2014) Study 1 Plus Mini-Meta-Analyses Across Similar Studies
- participants watched a lecture while taking notes with a laptop (N = 74) or longhand
(N = 68) and after brief distraction and without the opportunity to study, they took a
quiz
- like the original study, laptop participants took notes containing more words spoken
verbatim by the lecturer and more words overall than longhand participants

, - laptop participants did not perform better on the quiz than longhand participants
- in both the original study and our replication, higher word count was associated with
better quiz performance and higher verbatim overlap was associated with worse quiz
performance, but the latter finding was not robust in our replication
- results do not support the idea that longhand note-taking improves immediate
learning via better encoding of information

- Questions to consider:
- What are some of the "precursors" to cognitive psychology? How and why are some
of these non-scientific?
- philosophical precursors: nativism, empiricism
- was non-scientific because they were philosophical at their core, but did slip into
psychological speculations about human cognition, and did not use the scientific
method
- experimental psychology
- not until the end of the 19th century that the scientific method was applied to
understanding human cognition
- many cognitive psychology experiments could have been performed but our
egocentric, mystical, and confused attitudes about ourselves and our own
nature, which made it seem inconceivable that the workings of the human mind
could be subjected to scientific analysis
- structuralism
- used introspection in which trained observers reported the contents of their own
consciousness under controlled conditions
- unreliable, subjective, theories of cognition were only explained by
introspective reports
- How does behaviourism differer from cognitive psychology?
- behaviourism only concerns itself with the behaviour that can be observed
- it assumes that we learn by associating certain events with certain consequences, and
will behave in the way with the most desirable consequences
- assumes that when events happen together, they become associated and either event
will have the same response
- cognitive psychology assumes that humans have the capacity to process and
organize information in their mind
- concerned less with visible behaviour and more with the thought processes behind it
- cognitive psychology tries to understand concepts such as memory and decision
making
- both attempt to explain human behaviour but behaviourism emphasizes observable
external behaviours rather than the internal state of the mental processing of
information
- What are some of the questions that you can ask about human behaviour that
cognitive psychology might not be able to answer?

, - language: is there a ‘prime time’ for language acquisition? Can you only learn
language when you are young, and not past a certain age as certain aspects of
language will not be able to develop?
- We use our memories to guide our decisions and plans for the future. How is this a
benefit and how is this sometimes a problem?
- people rely on past events and experiences to help guide us in the future
- ex. if we touch a red, hot stove once and it burns us, we will know not to touch
it again if the stove is red because we will know from past experience that it
hurt
- memories can be deceiving because we can create false memories through leading
questions and suggestion
- our short term memories cannot hold very many things and only for a limited
amount of time; need constant repetition to put into long-term memory
- To the extent that using a notebook (instead of a laptop) might occasionally produce
better recall, what is a possible mechanism for the benefit?

,Chapter 1 Notes: The Science of Cognition (continued)

- Neurons
- human brain contains approximately 100 billion neurons
- main body of the neuron is called the soma
- attached to the soma are short branched called dendrites, and extending from the soma is
an axon
- Axons provide the fixed paths by which neurons communicate
- near contact between axon and dendrite is called a synapse
- the inside of the membrane covering the entire neuron tends to be 70 millivolts (mV)
more negative than the outside, due to the greater concentration of negative chemical ions
inside and positive ions outside
- neurons communicate by releasing chemicals called neurotransmitters
- potential changes accumulate on a cell body, reach a threshold, and cause an action
potential to propagate down an axon. This pulse in turn causes neurotransmitters to
be sent from the axon terminal to the body of a different neuron, causing changes in
that neuron’s membrane potential. This sequence is almost all there is to neural
information processing, yet intelligence arises from this simple system of
interactions
- two quantities are particularly important to the representation of information in the brain:
- the membrane potential can be more or less negative
- the number of action potentials an axon transmits per second (rate of firing)
- neurons represent information because individual neurons respond to specific features of
a stimulus
- the brain can represent information in terms of patterns of neural activity rather than
simply as cells firing

- Organization of the brain
- central nervous system consists of the brain and
spinal cord
- function of the spinal cord is to carry neural
messages from the brain to the muscles, and
sensory messages from the body to the brain
- lower portions of the brain are responsible for
more basic functions
- medulla controls breathing, swallowing,
digestion, and heartbeat
- hypothalamus regulates the expression of
basic drives
- cerebellum plays an important role in motor
coordination and voluntary movement
- thalamus serves as a relay station for motor and sensory information from lower
areas to the cortex

, - the cerebral cortex (neocortex) is the most recently evolved portion of the brain
- divided into left and right hemispheres
- only region that plays significant role in higher level cognition
- cortical regions are organized into four lobes: frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal
- limbic system holds memory
- contains the hippocampus that is critical to human memory
- disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease result from damage to the
basal ganglia

- Localization of function
- left hemisphere seems to be associated with linguistic and analytic processing, whereas
the right hemisphere is associated with perceptual and spatial processing
- left and right hemispheres connected by the corpus callosum
- people with Broca’s aphasia speak in short, ungrammatical sentences; people with
Wernicke’s aphasia speak in fairly grammatical sentences that are almost devoid of
meaning
- adjacent cells in the cortex tend to process sensory
stimuli from adjacent areas of the body

- Topographic organization
- adjacent parts of the body are represented in adjacent
parts of the neural tissue
- overrepresented areas of the body (hands, lips)
correspond to those that are more sensitive
- it is thought that topographic maps exist so that neurons
processing similar regions can interact with one another
- similar principle of organization governs the
representation of the body in the somatosensory cortex
and motor cortex

- Methods in cognitive neuroscience
- EEG
- records the electric potentials that are present on the scalp
- participant wears a cap of many electrodes
- electrodes detect rhythmic changes in electric activity and record them
- event-related potentials have very good temporal resolutions but it is difficult to
infer the location in the brain of neural activity that is producing the scalp activity
- magnetoencephalography (MEG)
- recent variation is ERP that offers better spatial resolution
- records magnetic fields produced by the electrical activity
- best at detecting activity in the sulci of the cortex and is less sensitive to activity in
the gyri or activity deep in the brain
- PET

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