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Cognitive PSY summary
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summary of the chapters to be studied in the book 'cognitive psychology'
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Spiekbrief Cognitive Psychology - Cognitie en Perceptie (5072COPE6Y)
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Test Bank for Cognitive Psychology 3rd Edition by E. Bruce Goldstein, Johanna C. van Hooff Chapter1-13
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Samenvatting Cognitie & Perceptie
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Cognitieve psychologieChapter 1
Reaction time how long it takes to respond to presentation of a stimulus.
- Simple reaction time push a button as rapidly as possible when they saw a
light go on
- Choice reaction time push left button when left light goes on and right
button when right light goes on.
Steps for simple reaction are presenting the stimulus (the light) causes a mental
response (perceiving the light), which leads to a behavioral response (pushing the
button).
Structuralism (Wundt); our overall experience is determined by combining basic
elements of experience which were called sensations.
Wundt thought he could achieve a scientific description of the components of
experience by using analytic introspection, a technique in which trained
participants described their sensations, feelings and thought processes in response
to stimuli.
Wundt is seen as leading the shift in the study of the mind from the rationalist
approach to the empiricist approach, emphasizing the pivotal role of experiments in
gaining knowledge about the human mind.
Ebbinghaus was curious about the mind and how it could remember things
confronted people with meaningless syllables and observed how long it took them to
remember them.
Ebbinghaus proposed a measure called savings; (original time to learn the list) –
(time to re-learn the list after the delay)
longer delays result in smaller savings.
Savings curve; shows that memory drops rapidly for the first two days after the initial
learning and then levels off this curve was important because it demonstrated that
memory could be quantified and that functions like the savings curve could be used
to describe a property of the mind.
James’ observations were based not on the results of experiments but on
observations about the operation of his own mind
Watson finds behaviorism; the strict study of stimulus response or input-output
relationships.
- Introspection as a method is rejected
- Observable behavior, not consciousness is the main topic of the study
Watson’s ideas are closely associated with classical conditioning as originally
studied by Pavlov.
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, for Watson, what is going on in our head, either physiologically of mentally, is
irrelevant. The only thing he cared about was how pairing one stimulus with another
stimulus affected behavior.
Skinner introduced operant conditioning, which focused on how behavior is
strengthened by the presentation of positive reinforces, such as food or social
approval.
one general critique was that a simple stimulus-response theory cannot explain
that people often respond to different aspects of the same stimulus event, and which
aspect that is, is not known until the response is made.
Tolman placed a rat in a maze and let him search for food
Tolman stated that when the rat initially experienced the maze it was developing a
cognitive map; a conception within the rat’s mind of the maze’s layout.
Chomsky saw language development as being determined not by imitation or
reinforcement, but by an inborn biological program that holds across cultures.
Chomsky’s idea that language is a product of the way the mind is constructed,
rather than a result of reinforcement, led psychologists to reconsider the idea that
language and other complex behavior such as problem solving and reasoning can be
explained by operant conditioning. Instead, they began to realize that to understand
complex cognitive behaviors, it is necessary not only to measure observable
behavior but also to consider what this behavior tells us about how the mind works.
In 1950 there is the cognitive revolution; a shift in psychology from the behaviorist
stimulus-response relationships to an approach whose main thrust was to
understand the operation of the mind.
Some psychologists proposed the information-processing approach to studying
the mind – an approach that traces sequences of mental operations involved in
cognition.
the operation of the mind can be described as occurring in a number of stages.
Dichotic listening experiment
Input the sounds of both the attended and unattended messages
Filter lets through the attended message and filters out the unattended message
Detector records the information that gets through the filter.
Artificial intelligence (John McCarthy); making a machine behave in ways that
would be called intelligent is a human were so behaving.
Structural models; represent structures in the brain that are involved in specific
functions.
such models, however, do not tell you how these structures are involved in the
specific functions that cognitive psychologists are interested in, no matter how
detailed they are.
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,Process models represent the processes that are involved in cognitive mechanisms,
with boxes usually representing specific processes and arrows indicating connections
between processes.
these boxes symbolize a process that could be carried out by any number of
different structures working together.
Sensory memory holds incoming information for a fraction of a second and then
passes a selection of this information to short term memory this has a limited
capacity and holds information only for seconds. Subsequently, some of the
information in short-term memory can be transferred to long-term memory this is a
high-capacity system that can hold much more information and for longer periods of
time.
Long term memory consists of;
Episodic memory memory for events in your life (like what you did this weekend)
Semantic memory memory for facts (such as the names of people)
Procedural memory memory for physical action (such as how to ride a bike).
Spacing and interleaving, repeated presentation and reviewing of information
facilitates learning and improves memory when distributed over time (spacing),
repetition of information may initially lead to slower learning but will ensure more
durable retention.
Research suggests that intermixing different topics within a particular domain
(interleaving) will not deteriorate but actually improve performance.
interleaving requires students to discriminate between topics, problems and
concepts.
Retrieval based learning; retrieving information from memory increases the chance
that the same information will be retrieved again in the near future retrieving
makes the remembered information more retrievable.
Chapter 2
Cognitive neuroscience; the study of the physiological basis of cognition
Levels of analysis refers to the idea that a topic can be studies in a number of
different ways, with each approach contributing its own dimension to our
understanding.
The discovery that individual units called neurons were the basic building blocks of
the brain was the centerpiece of the neuron doctrine- the idea that individual cells
transmit signals in the nervous system, and that these cells are not continuous with
other cells as proposed by the nerve net theory.
Neuron;
- Cell body metabolic center of the neuron, it contains mechanisms to keep
the cell alive
- Dendrites receive signals from other neurons
- Axons transmit signals to other neurons
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, Synapse; a small gap between the end of a neuron’s axon and the dendrites or cell
body of another neuron.
Neurons are not connected indiscriminately to other neurons, but form connections
only to specific neurons this forms groups of interconnected neurons, which
together form neural circuits.
In addition to the neurons in the brain, there are also neurons that are specialized to
pick up information from the environment, such as the neurons in the eye, ear and
skin receptors.
Resting potential; stays the same as long as there are no signals in the neuron (-
70MV)
When the neuron’s receptor is stimulated so that a nerve impulse is transmitted
down the axon as the impulse passes the recording electrode, the charge inside
the axon rises to +40 millivolts compared to the outside as the impulse continues
past the electrode, the charge inside the fiber reverses course and starts becoming
negative again until it returns to the resting potential this impulse, which is called
the action potential lasts about 1 millisecond.
When the action potentials reach the synapse at the end of the axon, a chemical
called a neurotransmitter is released this neurotransmitter makes it possible for
the signal to be transmitted across the gap that separates the end of the axon from
the dendrite or cell body of another neuron.
in contrast to action potentials, synaptic transmission is not an electrical transport
of signals but a biochemical one, and thus follows different principles.
Principle of neural representation; states that everything a person experiences is
based not on direct contact with stimuli, but on representation in the person’s
nervous system.
this idea of representation is extremely important in cognitive psychology, because
one approach to understanding cognition is to consider how our experiences are
represented both in our mind (measured behaviorally) and in the brain (measured
physiologically).
Different neurons in and near the visual cortex feature detectors because they
responded to specific stimulus features such as orientation, movement and length.
this knowledge that neurons in the visual system fire to specific types of stimuli led
to the idea that each of the thousands of neurons that fire when we look at a tree for
example, fire to different features of the tree.
- Neurons in the visual cortex respond to simple stimuli like oriented bars
- Neurons in the temporal lobe respond to complex geometrical stimuli
- Neurons in another area of the temporal lobe respond to hand shapes or faces
Neurons in the visual cortex that respond to relatively simple stimuli send their axons
to higher levels of the visual system, where signals from many neurons combine and
interact; neurons at this higher level, which respond to more complex stimuli such as
geometrical objects then send signals to higher areas, combining and interacting
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