• Perception
•  Attention
•  Memory 
• Language
•  Problem Solving
•  Reasoning 
• Decision Making

Donders

(1868)

• first cognitive experiment 
• first scientific psychology lab
• inferring cognition by measuring behavior 
• measured reaction time 
  • simple reaction time: just reacting to the light 
  • choice reaction time: decide if it is on the right or left

Helmholz

(19th Century)

○ Unconscious inference

○ Infer much or what we know

○ It's not what we see, but we assume it was

Ebbinghaus

(1885)

• gave us forgetting curve
• interested in memory and forgetting
• tested on himself with nonsense syllables (dah,Lax,etc) using a memory drum (we'd use computers) 
• savings Method to calculate savings score 

Wundt 

(1879)

• structuralism: elements of experience called sensations
• Analytic Introspection: experiences/thoughts as response
• Stimulus Error: when you use a metaphor to describe 
  • Ex: chocolate-ie
  • was so of the feed back from the experiments he did with his students 
• Father of psychology, did experiments on  his students to try and get them to describe their sensations (like taste)
• structuralism:  elements of experience called sensations
  • structuralism died with him
• Analytic Introspection: experiences and thought as response.

Watson

(1920)

• Creator of behaviorism
• said you can't study the mind
• you can study observed behaviors
• give me any child and I can make them any profession i want 
  • Little Albert experiment
  • Classical conditioning

Pavlov

(1901)

• Classical Conditioning: forming new associations between stimuli-internal responses
• was not a behaviorist
• used dogs to get test classical conditioning, by measuring their biofeedback (saliva) 
  • the neutral stimulus was a bell that sounded when the dog's were fed

Skinner

(1950)

• He focused on stimulus response
• you can't study what's in the mind
• We learn Language through operant conditioning (reinforcement and Imitation)
• Operant Conditioning: using voluntary behaviors learned due to reinforcement of overt behavior
  • Reinforcement or Punishment: is determined by what has effect on behavior
    • positive reinforcement is the most powerful learning modality

Chomsky

(1959)

• Refuted Skinner's Idea's
  • children say things you never taught them and things that are incorrect therefore language acquisition is not just learned
• language is determined by inborn biology 

The Brelands

(1961)

• The Misbehavior Of Organisms (1961)
• Instinct Drift: you can't teach an animal something that is against their instincts and nature

Tolman

(1948)

• established Cognitive Maps: Animals form maps of where they've been
  1. mouse explore maze
  2. they were shown the food was just past a turn on a right corner
  3. then they were placed on the other side of the maze and they went straight left to food

Introduction of Digital Computers

and

Cognitive Revolution 

• Cognitive Revolution: went from behaviorist's stimulus-response to explain behavior
  • instead focused on operations of the mind
• Information Processing Approach: traces the sequence of mental operations in cognition
• now could use flow diagrams for digital computers
• more accurate timing clocks

Broadbent

(1958)

• Unattended info doesn't pass through filter
• less than 5% are better at multitasking then not
• during the cognitive revolution
• flow diagram:
• [image]

Cherry

(1953)

• Dichotic Listening task:
  • different info given to each ear and you are instructed to listen one ear
  • showed we can't split our attention

Behavioral Approach to Memory

• BA (review): studies the relationship between stimuli and behavior
• Memory Consolidation: the idea that memories need to be processed before they become strong enough to with stand interference (like additional new info)

•  
  •  memory from recent events are fragile
  • if processing is disrupted, and fails to be consolidated 
• George Miller and Pilzecker experiment showed we can remember 7 -/+ 2 item's
  • immediate new info group
  • delayed new info group

Physiological Approach

(including how they interpret memory)

Physiological Approach: relationship between physiology and behavior

•  
  •  
    •  
      • PET
      • EEG
      • fMRI
• Gais et al. (2007): the effect of sleep on memory consolidation
  • found those who slept after would remember better
• he would give two groups a list of words to remember group A would then go straight to bed and group B would go to bed a few hours later. 
  • using an fMRI he found differences in the brain activity between the two groups

• Toger shepard and J. Metzler (1971)
• visuospatial sketch pad: is the creation of visual images in the mind when the object isn't present
• the greater the rotation, the longer it took to solve for same object or different
• To solveis an example of visuospatial sketch pad

Atkinson-Shiffrin Model of Memory

(1968)

(different types of memory)

• Sensory: is an initial stage that holds all new info for seconds or fractions of a second
  • all/most info short-lived (decays quickly)
  • Persistence: sparkler's trail, or (anti) frames of a film all blend together 
• Short Term(STM): holds 5-7 items for about 15-30 sec.  
  • limited resources, time duration, capacity 
• Long Term(LTM): can hold a large amount of info. for years even decades

Cognitive Science

(What disciplines study cognition)

• conversion of energy to neural signals
• Transform energy from one form to the other

Action Potentials 

(How are they measured)

1. Neuron receives signal
2. Travels down axon to dendrites 
3. To measure you need a microelectrode

•  action potential is only possible is theThreshold level is reached
  • Measures the rate of firing:
    • Low intensity (ex:dim light) slow firing
    • High intensity (flashing lights) fast firing
• 1000 synapses per-neuron

• Excitatory: increases chance neuron will fire
• Inhibitory: decreases the chance the neuron will fire
• A Few Neurotransmitters:

  • Gamma Aminobutyric Acid (GABA)

    • Implicated in anxiety

    Norepinephrine

    • Respiration
    • Reactions
    • Alarm response
    • Implicated in
      •  panic
      • Depression

    Dopamine:

    • Pleasure and reward
    • Implicated in
      • schizophrenia
      • Parkinson's

    Serotonin (5HT):

    • Moods
    • Sleep
    • Appetite
    • Thought processes

Specific Function area's of the brain such as

•  
  • Perception,
  • Language

Primary visual cortex: responds to particularly oriented edges

• discovered by Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel

Responds to an oriented bar of light moving

• discovered by Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel

• respond to features that make up and object,
  • they all fire at the same time to
  • Neurons that respond to specific stimulus.
• Neural Code: the  way the patterns of  the neural firing represent the environment 

The idea that neurons specialized to just respond to a specific stimulus

•  
  • the grandmother cell would be a representation of specific stimulus
    • Ex: a persons face having its own neurons fire that fire when it is presented

A pattern of firing across many neurons. 

• Many cells firing at once to represent a object
  • distributed across many neurons instead just one

one function is present and another absent

• Single Dissociation: can be studied in one person
  • Ex: Damage to the brain in X area causes inability to A but you can still B. That's how we can narrow down the the area of the brain and it's function
• Double Dissociation: require two or more people
  • Damage to the brain area Y causes inability to B but not A. Then we get another person with damage to similar area of the brain and see what they can do and compare. 

Event-Related Potential (ERP)

• neuron firing is an electrical event
• measures by placing an electrode cap on the head
• use the average of many trials
• good for telling your brain waves at different states
• continuous and rapid measures
• Disadvantage is that it's not precise location

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

• measures the flow of blood to certain area's of the brain 
  • they do this by using a magnetic to follow the ferrous (iron) molecule 
• Uses Subtraction Technique: 
• no radio active dyes 
• 
  

Positron Emission Tomography (PET)

• Uses a radioactive tracer to measure the blood flow to certain area's of the brain
• uses subtraction technique

How does Experience change the brain?

Experience Dependent Plasticity: experience changes the brain

• Ex: can't weren't allowed to see horizontal lines from birth, then later in life couldn't see them
• Greebles: a computer created beings that have similar shape with a few different parts
  • new viewers saw more activity in the FFA when viewing faces than the Greeble
  • expert viewers: had similar activity in the FFA for both the Greeble and the face
• shows how environment can change the activity of the brain

Bottom Up Processing

pg.50

Perception that starts with stimuli to our senses and works its way to more complex processes

•  
  • Ex: we see then we make sense of what we see
  • Direct Perception Theories: 
    • not very aware of this style of processing
      1. identify the parts
      2. put together
      3. reorganizing 

Perception starts with the brain.

• it uses a person's knowledge, experience, expectations
• your brain fills in the blank
  • Ex: you can't grade your own paper because your mind doesn't read the mistakes

• Info. about the world (usually incomplete and full of noise)
• Receptor transducers energy into a neural response
• sensory nerve transmits to CNS
• thalamus processes and relays the neural response to the area's of the cortex

 Focusing on specific features, objects, or on certain thoughts or activities

• Average length of our attention span is 5 min. 7 sec.

The process of 

•  
  • Recognizing
  • Organizing
  • Interpreting
• Not exact copy of "the world"
• this is based off of your experiences and expectations 
• Direct perception (bottom-up)
• Constructive perception (top-down)
• old view: structuralism perception is adding up sensations
• new view:  Gestalt, group patterns according to laws of perception

• direct perception:(bottom-up)
  • parts identified, put together, and recognized
  • not very aware of the this type of processing
• constructive perception: (top-down)
  • gestalt
  • construct perception using info based on expectations
  • we are more aware of this style of processing

Feature Integration Theory (FIT)

1982

• Treisman and Schmidt 
  • combination of features from different stimuli
  • RM: patients with Balint's Syndrome
  • object > preattentive (ambient)> attentive (focal)> perception
• mostly bottom-up
• top-down processing influence processing when told what they would see

Perceive objects by perceiving elementary features

•  
  •  
    • Geon's three dimensional
      • discriminability: geon's distinguished from other Geon's
      • resistance to visual noise
      • distinct: 36 different ones
      • view invariance: different angels

• can't focus attention on individual objects
• high number of illusory conjunctions reported
  • when you aren't paying full attention and put things together wrong
  • Ex: 2 letters, each one a different color and the person would mix the color/letter

They tell how elements in the environment are organized or grouped together

• Law of good continuation: like a cord that can overlap but we still know it is one item
• Law of Pragnanz: the stimulus you see makes the simplest structure possible
• Law of Similarity: similar things are grouped together
• Law of Familiarity: things are more likely to form patterns if the groups appear familiar or meaningful
• Law of Common Fate: moving in the same direction

Heuristic and algorithm are also part of Gestalts laws

procedure guaranteed to solve a problem

•  
  •  
    •  
      • Slow
      • definite results

rule of thumb/your first and best guess

Provides best guess

• • • fast 
    • often correct
    • Light from above: people assume light comes from above, usual
    • Occlusion heuristic: object is partially covered is seen as continuing behind occluder

• Vision is the dominate sense
• Touch: a blend of tactile, kinesthetic (movement) and visual info
• McGurk Effect: when you combine what you see and what you hear
  • while reading you say what you are reading in conversation on accident

 input from one sensory systems produces experience in that modality

• Weak Synesthesia: warm colors 
  • mostly women 6 to 1
  • very rare less than 1 every 2000
  • maybe gentic

Illusory Percepts:

• Not always accurate
• Ponzo and Muller Lyer Illusions
  • lines have same size
  • but, due to depth in from linear perspectives

Blind-Sight:

Change-Blindness:

the influence of stimuli of which we are unaware, there is no real evidence to support this theory

• subjective threshold: participants said that saw nothing 50% of the time
• objective threshold: participants show could not have perceived the stimulus 
• subject-expectancy effect: believed they had improved in condition on tape lable

Scotoma (damage to the right visual cortex and no longer function) the patient is then blind to the left side

•  
  •  
    • both the eyes still work but the brain only processes half the info taken in

These neurons fire when you see someone doing something familiar, you mind shows action in the sections required for doing the task

• Pre-motor Cortex (frontal cortex)
• helps you to understand people
• if you are autistic your mirror neurons won't light up

A stimulus that is not attended is not perceived, even though a subject is looking directly at it

• if your not looking for it you won't see it
• dancing bear/gorilla 

Happens when shifting attention

•  
  • difficult to attend to next thing, directly after intended stimuli
  • affects items 200-500 ms later 

Selective Attention

(defined, applied, and describe)

An excluding of other feature of the environment

•  
  •  
    • limited capacity and timing
    • can be overt (consciously attending to info) and covert (some info grabs your attention)
• 3 Models: early, intermediate, and late
• A large fraction of info from the environment is ignored so we can further process other (more important) info

Dichotic Listening Task

(attributes of message to unattended ear)

Participants couldn't report the content of the message in unattended ear

•  
  •  
    • they could say a small part of the message
    • and the sex (M,F) of the voice
• Cocktail party effect: change in gender, tone, and personal info noticed 

1. Early Selection Model: (Broadbent's Filter model)

•  
  • when you first get info it is filtered before analyzed for meaning 
  • Sensory Memory (important to memory): holds all incoming info for a fraction of a sec.
    • sense memory> selective filter > Detector > Short Term 
    •  couldn't explain party effect 

Intermediate Selection Model

(leaky Filter model) 

• Treisman's attenuation Theory:
  • attended message can be separated from unattended message early in the info processing
  • attenuator: analyzes incoming message in tems of physical characteristics, language, and meaning
    • either full strength 
    • or weak
  • Dictionary Unit: contains words, each of which have thresholds for being activated
    • words that are common/important have low
    • uncommon words have a high thresholds threshold

McKay (1973) meaning fist then you are going to pay attention

• selection of stimuli for a final processing does not occur until after info has been analyzed for meaning
• dichotic listening;while they were unaware of hearing the message in unattended ear they would relate intended message to it
• bank (river or piggy) would depend on message in other ear
• Shadowing procedure: repeat what you hear in one ear but not hte other

Task Load

 (affect it has on performance in a Selective Attention Task)

the cognitive resources used for a task

High Load: almost all, none for other tasks

Low Load:few resources used, 

Flanker-Compatibility Task

(describe it's purpose)

used to mearsure the visual attention to high/low test

• focus attention on finding target so that distracter will not affect their performance
  • Low-Load: one potential target
    • reaction time longer for incompatible distracter
    • more resources available 
  • High-Load: distracter didn't affect reaction time
    • use all resources to process
    • no resources to process the distracter
    • the distracter doesn't matter because it can't lure any extra attention (so compatible or not doesn't matter)

• Low-load: expert's similar to non-experts (supports late selection)
• High-load: experts enough resources to process distracters (support early selection)
• though they had never seen this task, the high-load video games, subjects could do a new visual task at a low load level

practice to do two things that were difficult at first

• Spelke et al. (1976)
• test to read and categorize dictated words (chair-furniture)
• automatic processing occurs uses little/no cognitive resources
• Habit slip: is when you do an automatic processes when you don't need too

Stroop Effection 

(How it illustrates automaticity)

*one of the most sited psychological experiments

•  
  • name of a color and the ink used to write the word contradict one another
  • it takes longer to identify the color
  • reading the word is automatic

Schnider and Shiffrin (1977):

rules changed from trial to trial the action won't become automatic

•  
  • controlled processing: deliberate close attention, search slow and controlled
  • action slip: automatic actions
  • 100-car driving study

eye movement has been used to measure attention and perception 

• saccades: rapid movement of the eyes
  • not much info. going in during this movement
• fixation: short pauses on points of interest
  • when you organize your gaze 

area's that stand out and capture attention

•  
  • bottom up processing
  • color and motion are examples

typical scenes

•  
  • eyes movement determinded by task
    •  move eyes first then do task 

directing attention w/out moving the eyes

• respond faster to light at expedited location
• even when eyes kept fixed

location-based: moving attention from one place to another

Object based: your attention spread in the object and attention based on

•  
  • environment: static scenes or scenes with few objects
  • specific object: dynamic events

attention enhances neural responding

attention processing distributed across brain

Attentional Processing

(in Autistics and Non-autistics)

autism: w/draw of contact from other people

• their attn is in objects not people like most 
• can't find emotions in the face
• they can solve a problem when talking but not when actually put in problem

• John McCarthy (1950)
• Newell and Simon creators of logic theorist: a program that could create proofs of mathematical theorems that involved logic

Model Model

(1968)

• stimuli > short term> either long term or forget
• Modal Model:  (memory can never be filled)
  • Structural features:   
    • Acquire
    • Store
    • Retrieve Info
• Control Processes: 
  • Rehearsal: repeating it
  • Relate to self: it will be a stronger and longer memory
  • Attention

• 1,000 synapses per-neuron
• action potential is only possible is the Threshold level is reached

• Fusiform Face Area (FFA): responds to faces
  • Temporal lobe
  •  Damage causes Prosopagnosia
    • Prosopagnosiaf: can't recognize faces
• Parahippocampal Place Area (PPA): responds to indoor/outdoor senses
  • Temporal lobe
• Exrastriate Body Area (EBA) responds to bodies and parts of bodies
  • people with anorexia have less gray matter in this area
  • Occipitotemporal Cortex

• Broca's Area: 
  • in frontal lobe
  • when damaged, production of language/music/anything with rhythm is impaired 
  • produces slow labored speech, often jumbled
• Wernicke's Area: 
  • found in the temporal lobe
  • when damaged comprehension of language becomes impaired 
    • often when this area is damaged it is severely damaged making it hard to pinpoint exactly where the area is

• Audion Cortex
• Perceptual processing
• Language 
• Hearing
• Memory 
• Perceiving Forms
• Understanding Language
• Consolidation of Memory

• Touching
• Motion
• Temperature
• Pressure
• All sensations
•  Pain
• Attention

• Reasoning
• Planning
• Language
• Problem Solving 
• Thought
• Motor Function: rear of the frontal lobe

• used in forming memories 
• used in retrieving recent memories
• helps the parts of the brain communicate

Localization of Function: Occipital

• vision
• visualization

• Emotions
• Emotional Memories

• Processing Info
  • hearing
  • vision
  • touch senses
  • but not smell