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Table of Content
HC1: Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 2
HC2: Fundamentals of Cognition ............................................................................................................................ 4
HC3: Human Error (Performance Variability) ........................................................................................................ 10
HC4: Human Computer Interaction ...................................................................................................................... 13
HC5: Drugs and Food............................................................................................................................................. 20
HC6: Game-based cognitive training ..................................................................................................................... 24
HC7: Cognitive Psychology in the Courtroom ....................................................................................................... 33
HC8: Aging and Individual Differences .................................................................................................................. 39
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Applied Cognitive Psychology
HC1: Introduction
Applied cognitive psychology (ACP) = how can we improve daily life?
→ Cognitive psychology important in ACP, interested in concepts such as perception, attention,
understanding, remembering, decision making, motivation, emotion and action planning.
ACP is about applying cognitive psychology to the real world
There are many different fields in which ACP is important:
• Education = e.g., How can you motivate yourself to read that
textbook instead of the buying the summary?
• Work place = e.g., What is the influence of sleep or diet on
human performance?
• Industry = e.g., What can we do to prevent human errors in
industry?
• Transportation = e.g., What can we do to prevent pilot error?
• Military = e.g., How can we ensure soldiers are aware of all
mission critical information?
• Justice = e.g., How can we evaluate the accuracy of witness
statements in court?
• Care and cure =e.g., How can we improve / maintain vitality in
the elderly?
• Health = e.g., How can meditation influence our mental and
physical fitness?
• Leisure = e.g., How to push (it to) the limit?
The ACP model = to systematically approach problems and analyze them in an thorough way
CORE: outcome = cognition x environment
Goal: How to improve everyday human life?
Cognition = think about cognition in a very broad way, such as memory, attention, flexibility, inhibition,
motivation, enjoyment, planning, creativity, risk aversion, etc.
Environment = can refer to a specific organizational setting (e.g., university or hospital), a digital environment
(e.g., a website or a phone) or tools (e.g., hammer (simple) or cockpit (complex)). All these environments have
different properties that determine how we interact with them
Goals = e.g., vitality, productivity, performance, happiness, safety, etc. Goals are defined by multiple aspects.
Indicators = all the things that we can measure, evaluate or use to determine if a goal is reached
→ are we reaching our goals or not? And to what degree?
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→ e.g., in air traffic safety, indicators would be accidents, errors or emergencies. But also the reaction
times of pilots could be tested in simulations (bad results indicate bad performance). Moreover, one
can also ask the pilots directly if they for example enjoy their work.
Factors = what we can change/manipulate. To improve performance on the indicators. Two categories:
1. Change in cognition = improving cognitive functions (e.g., brain training, operating instructions or
situational awareness)
2. Change in environment = making the environment more user friendly (e.g., change design, layout or
responsiveness)
→ After implementing factors, look at the influence of this on the indicators (e.g., are there fewer crashes?)
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HC2: Fundamentals of Cognition
In this lecture we are focusing on the ‘Cognition’ part of the ACP model. Cognition refers to human information
processing. Human information processing can be depicted as follows:
So human information processing consists of 3
components:
1. Perceptual encoding = receiving any kind of
sensory input which can come from the
outside world or from your own body
2. Central processing = manipulate and
understand the sensory input
3. Responding = decide whether or not to
respond. If so, initiate the relevant motor
commands and execute the response by using
your body
There are different types of processing in this model. Responses can be very fast (innate responses, such as
responding to a dangerous stimulus) or more complex (e.g., learning how to respond in traffic). This latter skill
is a skill that you had to learn, but when you do this often, it becomes more or less automatic
→ this automatization of a learned skill can be unwanted (e.g., for an air traffic controller). Because in
emergencies, you have to deviate from what you normally do. IMPORTANT: the more automatic
responses are, the harder it is to change these responses!!
7 domains of cognition were discussed in lecture 3:
1. Perception
2. Attention
3. Working memory
4. Long term memory
5. Decision making
6. Situational awareness
7. Emotion
Perception = any that has to do with senses that take in information (e.g., vision, taste, smell, etc.), but also
more somatic senses (e.g., being able to feel heat and cold, proprioception (= knowing where your body parts
are), etc.)
→ all these senses have neural pathways that take the information into the brain. This information
usually first goes to the thalamus before it is distributed to relevant parts of the cortex.
We are not very interested in ACP in the lowest levels of processing. But there are phenomena that you should
be aware of, because they can have unwanted effects (e.g., in building websites, you don’t want people do get
motion sickness from the design). Examples are:
Hering grid = lateral inhibition in Motion-after-effect = adaption to Color-after-effect = adaptation to
retina motion colors
Perception can be important in ACP for example in cockpit design. In a cockpit, there are certain things that
stand out. These are buttons with a high visual saliency (= things that stand out in terms of brightness, color
and contrast).
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Two types of processing:
1. Bottom-up processing = a property of an object grasps your attention (e.g., saliency)
2. Top-down processing = the perception is driven by our expectations, beliefs or context of the
environment (e.g., vs. (so the difference between the 13 and B)
→ top-down is still an automatic response, but it is not driven by the properties of the object
itself, but by something inside your brain
→ sometimes it is difficult to capture what drives perception (i.e., bottom-up or top-down). Most of the time
perception is driven by a combination of top-down and bottom-up processing. Examples:
Here, A and B are the same color. However, we think that the object casts a shadow
and therefore it must darken the color and we perceive it to be lighter than it
actually is.
Another example of a combination of top-down and bottom-up processing is showing a picture of what looks
like Obama for a split second. We might recognize the person as Obama, but when looking at the picture
longer, the picture has been edited.
This means the following: When information quality goes , the top down influence goes
→ this happens when there is for example noise or lack of time
Bridge from perception to attention:
What happens when we are overwhelmed by a large amount of perceptual information?
→ Broadbent’s Attentional Filter = early selection (or filter) on attended channel and physical properties
This filter is either based on bottom-up (e.g., saliency) or top-down (e.g., what we direct our attention
to) influences
→ thus, we already strip out most of the information very low in the processing chain
However, not much support for the Broadbent’s Attentional Filter. This is because there is at least some
semantic processing is taking place. Examples:
1. Cocktail party effect = when you suddenly hear your name at a party
2. Dichotic Listening Task = when 2 different lists of words are presented in each ear, and the task is to
only remember the words presented to one ear. Then, you won’t be consciously be able to recall
words presented to the unattended side. However, when giving a priming task, the behavior of the
person will be influenced by the words presented on the unattended side.
Attention = being aware of something and thereby ignoring other things; according to William James, attention
was almost synonymous with consciousness. Two different types of attention:
1. Overt attention = refers to any physical change that allows you to focus on something (e.g., head turn
or saccade)
2. Covert attention = refers to attention that is not directly related to any observable physical change
(e.g., spotlight of attention (= Posner task; eyes should be in the center, and you should identify an
image; with incongruency, accuracy and RT drop; in this example, attention is influenced by the
direction of the arrow)
