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A-level/ University Comprehensive overview of cognitive psychology

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All lecture notes and partial readings from Psych111 on cognitive psychology suitable for 1st-year university and A-level students

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  • 8 april 2022
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What is thinking?
 Thoughts = Representations
 Thought is a mental 'state'
 Representations can be processed/transformed
 Thinking = activation / transformation of representations
 Thoughts as ‘mental states or representations

Analogue representations = Mental pictures
Symbolic representations = Concepts and Ideas

What is Cognitive Psychology?
The study of mental operations that support people’s acquisition and use of knowledge
Cognitive psychology = aiming to understand human cognition by observing the behaviour of people performing
various cognitive tasks

Cognitive processes (especially cognitive biases)
 Can be used more broadly to include brain activity and structure as relevant understanding for human
cognition
 Play an essential role in the development and successful treatment of mental health problems
 Social psychologists assume that cognitive processes help to explain social communication
 Cognitive neuroscience uses information about behaviour and the brain to understand human cognition
fMRI etc, or electrophysiological techniques to record electrical signals generated by the brain
 Patterns of cognitive impairment by brain-damaged patients can inform us about normal cognitive
functioning and the areas of the brain responsible for various cognitive processes

Thinking About the Mind
 Rene Descartes (1956-1650)
Dualism
The mind-body problem:
 The relationship between mental and physical properties

 David Hume (1711-1776)
 Account of the mind as machinery

 William James (1842-1910)
 The principles of psychology
 The “thought stuff”

The First Cognitive Psychologists
 Franciscus Donders (1818-1889)
 First cognitive psychology experiment (1868)
 Response time (RT) experiment on mental chronometry
 Simple RT vs choice RT
 Quantified mental effort

 Hermann Von Helmholtz (1821-1894)
 Unconscious inference
 Prior experience shapes unconscious processes

 Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909)
 Quantified memory decay as a ‘forgetting curve’ (1885)
 Proportion savings = (initial repetitions) − (relearning repetitions)
(Initial repetitions)
 Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)
 Established the first laboratory of scientific psychology in Leipzig
 Studied mental imagery, consciousness, basic properties of the senses (RT measures)
 Structuralism
Analytic introspection = Participant’s description of their experience to a given stimuli

 Max Wertheimer (1880-1943)
 Gestalt theory (with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Kohler)
 Perceptual experience occurs holistically, E.g., WWF, NBA, NBC

The Birth of Modern Cognitive Psychology
A meeting at MIT in 1956
 Noam Chomsky presented his theory of language
 George Miller discussed the magic number 7 +/- 2 in short term memory

What are Key Concepts in Cognitive Psychology

,Modularity = Clusters of processes that are functionally independent from other clusters
 Domain-specific and domain-general
Bottom-up processing = Processing which is directly affected by a stimulus
Top-down processing = Influenced by an individual’s knowledge (past experiences and expectations)
Serial processing = Only one process occurs at any moment in time; one process must be finished before another
can start
Parallel processing = Processing in which two or more cognitive processes occur at the same time
 More likely to use this when performing a highly practised task than a new one, E.g., dual task & executive
function

What are Task Processes
 Miyake et al (2000)
Studied:
Stroop task (name the colour in which words are presented)
Anti-saccade task (visual cue – not looking at the cue and inhibiting the response and looking in the opposite
direction)
Atop-signal task (categorising words as rapidly as possible but inhibit their response when a tone sounds)
 Found that all three tasks involved similar processes
 They used complex statistical techniques to extract what was familiar to the three tasks (inhibitory
process)

Approaches to Study Cognition
Behavioural approach = relationship between stimuli and behaviour
Measures:
 Reaction time
 Response error
 Verbal protocol
 Behavioural observation
 Measures of cognitive processes = Mental rotation, Mental scanning, and imagery

Physiological approach = relationship between physiology and behaviour
Measures:
 Neural activity (e.g., fMRI, EEG, PET, MEG)
 Eye movement
 ANS (autonomic nervous system)

Mental Processes = Aspects of Cognition
 Perception
 Attention
 Memory
 Language
 Reasoning and decision making/problem solving

Cognitive Psychology = understanding human cognition using behavioural evidence
 Since behavioural data is also crucial in cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology, the influence of
cognitive psychology is large

Cognitive Neuropsychology = Studying brain-damaged patients to understand normal cognition
Cognitive Neuroscience = Using evidence from behaviour and the brain to understand human cognition

Computational Cognitive Science = Developing computational models to further our understanding of human
cognition
 These models increasingly consider our knowledge of behaviour and the brain

The Complexity of Cognition
Attention = only attend closely to some of your surroundings; you do not notice the person next to your friend.
Even though both are in the visual view, what causes you to know the other person hardly?

Techniques for Studying the Brain
Single-unit recording/ single-cell recording
 Insert a micro-electrode 1/10,000th of a mm in diameter into the brain to study the activity of single
neurons
 Very sensitive, like electrical charges of one-millionth of a volt can be detected
 Invasive technique for studying brain function, permitting the study of activity in single neurons

Event-related potentials (ERPs)
 The same stimulus is presented repeatedly, and the pattern of electrical brain activity is recorded by scalp
electrodes (averaged to produce a single waveform)
 Allows us to work out the timing of various cognitive processes
 Poor spatial resolution

, Positron emission tomography (PET)
 Brain scanning technique based on the detection of positrons; it has reasonable spatial resolution but poor
temporal resolution

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
 A technique based on imaging blood oxygenation using an MRI machine
 Provides information about the location and time course of brain processes

Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (efMRI)
 Form of fMRI in which patterns of brain activity associated with specific events (e.g., correct vs incorrect
responses on a memory test) are compared

Magnetoencephalography (MEG)
 Non-invasive brain-scanning technique based on recording the magnetic fields generated by brain activity

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)
 The coil is placed close to the participants head, and a very brief pulse of current is run through it
 This produces a short-lived magnetic field that inhibits processing in the brain area affected

Early Definition of Attention
In clear and vivid form, taking possession by the mind of one of many possible simultaneous thoughts.
Focalisation, the concentration of consciousness, are of its essence.
Implies withdrawal from some things to deal effectively with others” (James, 1890)
 Control things through attention
 Attention is invaluable in everyday life

Focused attention = Studied by presenting individuals with two or more stimuli inputs at the same time and
instructing them to respond to only one

Divided attention = Studied by presenting at least two stimuli at the same time
 Differs from focussed attention as individuals are instructed to respond to all stimuli, e.g., multitasking, a
skill which is increasingly important in today "24/7" world
 Studies of divided attention provide helpful information about our processing
 limitations and the capacity of attentional mechanisms

External attention = The selection and modulation of sensory information

Internal attention = The selection, modulation, and maintenance of internally generated information such as task
rules, responses, long term memory, or working memory (Chun et al, 2011)
 Connection to Baddeley’s working memory model is important
 The central exclusive component of working memory is involved in attentional control and plays a
significant role in internal and external attention

Most attentional research suffers from 3 limitations:
 Emphasis is placed on external attention rather than internal attention
 Participants focus on most laboratory studies is determined by the experimenters' instructions
 We attend to in the real world is determined by our current goals and emotional states

Modern Definitions of Attention
The mental process of concentrating effort on a stimulus or mental event
 Limited mental resource

The complex, multifaceted phenomenon
 Involves multiple brain areas
 Involves both selective attention (or focused attention) and divided attention
Strongly related to memory, inhibition, and consciousness

Cocktail Party Effect = Focused Auditory Attention
 Cherry (1953) and Moray (1959)
Reported real-life examples of attention capture
How can we follow just one conversation when several people are talking at once?

Sound segregation = The listener decides which sounds belong together and which do not
 After segregation has been achieved, the listener must direct attention to the sound source of interest and
ignore the others
 McDermott (2009) stated that auditory segmentation is much more complex than visual segmentation
 There is a considerable amount of overlap of signals from different sound sources in the cochlea, whereas
visual objects tend to occupy different regions of the retina

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