Samenvatting hoofdstuk 1: introduction
What is cognitive psychology?
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of how people and animals process information. >> how the mind represents
and uses information about the outside world.
Cognitive psychology seeks to answer that broad question (how do you deal with all this information?) and is the study of
how humans (and other animals):
Acquire information
Store information in memory
Retrieve information
Work with information to reach goals
>> deal with mental representations: inner representations such as an image or a verbal concept of some external reality.
History and approaches
Plato >> compared memory for information to writing on a wax tablet, which if not rubbed smooth by time could be read
off, as in recall. Forgetting was the equivalent of the wax tablet becoming illegible.
The ancient world connected vivid images with the objects to be remembered to a sequence of familiar places such as
rooms in your house >> To remember a long list of facts or points. Mnemonic >> a learning device to aid memory.
Associationism
17th century – 19th century
Empiricist philosophers held that all knowledge came from experience and that ideas and memories were linked by
associations. (Locke, Hume, Mill)
Locke >> two unrelated ideas could become associated if they often were actively considered close together in time
Introspectionism
Second half of the 19th century
Focused on nature of conscious experience and sought to break down complex experiences into elementary sensations.
>> ‘classical introspection’ > specially trained participants gave a verbal account of their sensations in the terms of mode,
quality, intensity, duration and feeling. But the method was of limited application, could only be applied to some mental
processes. And no one could get the same results as Wundt when the experiments were redone in a lab.
Behaviorism
Abandoned the attempt to look inside the mind and took only observable behavior and stimuli as its data. It aimed to be a
psychology without reference to internal cognitive processes.
Watson >> all mental phenomena could be traced to behavioral activity. Bv: thinking was actually slight movements of
muscles in the tongue and larynx (Box 1.4).
BOX 1.4: the curare experiment. >> curare = paralyzing. Scott M Smith took curare to see if he could still think when
paralyzed. He was “clear as a bell” during the experiment, even though he could not move anything.
Tolman>>rats and other animals could be usefully seen as having goals and mental representations or mental maps that
aided in learning the layout of mazed containing food rewards (Box 1.5) !! zie hoorcollege voor uitleg
Behaviorism was less applicable to complex menta phenomena such as reasoning, problem solving, decision making and
language.
Information processing: the cognitive revolution
Information processing approach >> is a metaphor for understanding mental activity, based on computing.
>> inspired by the development of programmable digital computers that began to appear in the mid-1940s.
Computers could be programmed to carry out numerical procedures. But it could also be programmed to carry out non-
numerical problem such as playing chess, suggesting medical diagnoses given symptoms and automatic translation
,between languages. Computer programs to solve suitable problems could be seen as comparable to strategies that
humans might use to solve the same problems.
Simulation: a program which expresses a model of human thinking >> should be distinguished from AI
Artificial intelligence: the attempt to program computers to carry out complex tasks such as medical diagnosis,
planning, using natural language.
Internal representations: mental representations of external objects and events
Mental operations: inner actions manipulating mental representations
Connectionism: models simulate basic learning and perceptual phenomena by mean of a large network of simple units
organized into input, output and internal units. The units are connected by excitatory or inhibitory links of varying
strengths through which activation flows.
Basic components:
A set of processing units
Weighted connections between units
A learning strategy
Backwards propagation: a way of modifying weights on the links between units in a connectionist network, in response to
errors, to obtain the desired output.
The functional level of analysis
Information processing approach focusses on ‘mental software’ >> questions about functions and functional properties.
Despite scepticism among functionalists, there has been a growing trend within cognitive psychology that pays attention
to the findings of neuroscience and considers the underlying brain hardware that allows cognition.
Cognitive neuroscience
Brain basics
Left & right hemispheres are connected by the corpus
callosum. The brain has 4 main sections: frontal lobes,
parietal lobes, occipital lobes and temporal lobes. Deeper
inside the brain: thalamus, hippocampus, amygdala. Base
of the brain: cerebellum. These structures are composed
of neurons.
Cognitive neuropsychology
>> examines the effects of brain damage on behavior, with a view to
identifying how psychological functions are organized.
>> traced back to Paul Broca (Broca’s area = speech production)
Phrenologists sought to infer from bumps in the skull how well
developed the underlying brain areas had become >> not how it
works.
Human cognitive neuropsychology ahs found the localization
assumption useful in interpreting effects of brain damage, and the general notion of localization underlies much
neuropsychological research.
>> particular interest: double dissociation in which patients can be found with opposite patterns of impairment in two
functions
Brain imaging
Two main categories
1. Structural imaging > static anatomy
2. Functional imaging > brain activity over time
Magnetic resonance imaging is a high-definition method for structural imaging using strong magnetic fields.
Electroencephalography (EEG) is a functional brain imaging method showing waves of electrical activity from scalp
recorders.
, Event-related potentials (ERPs) are a functional brain imaging method recording electrical activity during repeated
stimulus presentations.
Positron emission tomography (PET) is a functional imaging method which uses positron emissions from radioactive
glucose to indicate areas of increased blood flow in the brain.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is a method of imaging brain activity that uses oxygenation levels of blood
flow and has good temporal and spatial resolution
CP Samenvatting hoofdstuk 2: perception
Introduction
Perception: our sensory experience of the world.
Perception stands between sensation – energy is transformed into brain signals – and cognition – mental representations
of the world and our goals are used to reason and plan behavior.
Visual illusions provide clear evidence that our perceptual systems do not always faithfully represent the physical world.
Fundamental concepts
From physical world to perceptual representation
Problem of perception: the physical world is ‘out there’ & our mental world has its home base inside our head.
Inverse-problem >> describes why even for the best sensory organs perception cannot typically guarantee a faithful
representation of the physical world. The world is 3D, and this 3D world is projected onto our eyes to become two
dimensional images. Inverse problem >> these two dimensional images do not have enough information to specify the
exact 3D world that created them.
Principles and theories of perception
The flow of information: bottom-up and top-down
processing
Bottom-up processing: the original sensory input is transformed in an
uninterrupted cascade of transformations feeding forward the
information, one transformation following the other until the final
representation is obtained. >> data driven processing. Bottom-up
processing holds that what we experience is an inevitable consequence of
what sensation strikes our eyes, ears or skin.
Top-down processing: involves connections between the higher levels
and the lower levels. There are feedback connections that mediate the
transformations with higher-level information. Top-down processing holds that this perception will be substantially
changed by what we expect to experience.
Perceptual organization: likelihood principle
Likelihood principle >> states that the preferred organization of a perceptual object or event will be the one which is most
likely. A statistical view is appropriate for evaluating our perceptual input to determine what er are experiencing.
Bayesian decision theory: 3 components >> likelihood (represents all of the uncertainty), prior (represents the knowledge
one has about the scene before even looking at the image), decision rule (adds flexibility to the general framework to
model behavior)
Information processing approach
Ecological psychology >> perception works in a largely bottom-up fashion by exploiting regularities in the visual world that
are termed invariants (properties of the three-dimensional object being viewed that can be derived from any two-
dimensional image of the object).
Direct perception: refers to the bottom-up process by which objects and their function are recognized.
For any information-processing device to be completely understood it must be understood at three different levels:
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