Several cognitive processes occur simultaneously or very close in time o Impossible to specify which process

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1 Chapter 1 Plato Attention: mental focus on stimulus Perception: interpreting sensory information Pattern Recognition: classifying stimulus into a category Memory: storage facilities and retrieval of conigition Recognition: see as familiar Recall: determine from previous experience Reasoning/problem solving: techniques and strategies to figure things out Knowledge representation: knowledge accumulated in a life time Language: verbal sounds (nonverbal cues/signals) Decision making: deal with a situation Several cognitive processes occur simultaneously or very close in time o Impossible to specify which process Memory storage is like writing on a wax tablet Mind is an aviary where birds are flying, and memory is catching a bird, sometimes you catch, sometimes only nearby bird Empiricism Locke, Hume, Stuart Mill o Locke: Tabula Rasa blank slate o Hume: mind is in the body Empiricism: Knowledge comes from experience empirical information collected from senses Recognizes difference in genetics, but human nature is malleable and changeable. People are the way they are because of previous learning Association: mechanism of learning (Locke). Two distinct ideas or experiences that join because they occur to be presented at the same time. Environment plays a role in determining one s intellect and abilities Natvism Plato, Descartes, Kant Nativism: Role of native ability in learning and acquisition of abilities Differences in original, biological endowment Cognitive functions built in and hardwired like short term memory. Qualim: essence of the mind

2 Structuralism Wundt, Titchener, Baldwin Wundt: first institute for research in experimental psychology want to discover science of the mind: laws and principles of our conscious o Wundt wanted to find the mental elements to describe complex mental phenomena Principles of Physiological Psychology James Baldwin: first psychological laboratory in Canada o Mental development in children, influence on Piaget Introspection: what is the mind made of influenced by a lab setting, cannot abstract pure essence (many extra variables). Report on basic elements of consciousness, not internal perception but experimental self observation Wundt method: Present observers with stimuli and ask to describe conscious experiences raw materials of consciousness were sensory o Conscious thought or ideas could be defined in four properties Mode: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory Quality (colour, shape texture) Intensity Duration Wundt believe that people could detect the inner workings of mind, structuralism: is focus on the elemental components of mind conscious experience Structuralism: Elemental components of the mind Functionalism William James The Principles of Psychology o Explanation of our experience why does our mind work the way it does? Functionalism: the way the mind works has great deal to do with function Habit: flywheel of society, mechanism to keep behaviour within bounds o Inevitable and powerful force avoid bad habits, establish good ones seize on opportunities to act on resolution and to put fort effort to keep the faculty of effort alive. Do not allow exceptions Functionalist drew on Darwin evolutionary theory and extend to biological conceptions of adaptions Functionalist study in real life situation belief that organisms in whole real life tasks should be subject. (contrast with structuralist who believe lab setting is needed for true nature of the mind) Function more important than content Behaviourism Classical conditioning, instrumental conditioning (Pavlov, Thorndike) Rejects introspection - untestable

3 References to unobservable and subjective mental states and processes were banished study of behaviour Introspection is subjective, and unable to resolve disagreements. Watson regarded mental phenomena as simple physiological responses. Banishing mental phenomena was not helpful, but encouraged thinking measures and methods helped develop more protocols. BF Skinner believed in mental images, and they were subjects of study and were not different from behaviourial events. o Rejected mental representations (internal depictions of information), which he says are merely internal copies of external stimuli Triggered by external stimuli, functional relationship Gestalt Psychology Wertheimer, Koffka, Kohler 1. Psychology had to be analyzed and studied in their entirety and not its parts 2. Mind imposes structure and organization on stimuli, and organizes into whole rather than discrete parts. 3. Melody is not individual sounds -> melodic lines 4. Rejected functionalism, behaviouralism, and structuralism. 5. Expectations and biases o Tolman: scientist that concluded research on rats that context matters: expectancy. Individual Differences Sir Francis Galton Inspired by Darwin s natural selection. Inheritance of intellect (intelligence, smartness, eminence) Used of a mathematical analysis, using statistics test and questionnaires inspire present day innovations. Studied mental imagery The Cognitive Revolution Series of psychological investigation, rejection of behaviourist assumption that mental events and states did not exist and were beyond scientific study Series of new psychological investigation post WW2 o Mainly a rejection of behaviourist assumption that mental events were beyond study since they did not exist. o People came to accept that mental events and states could be studied scientifically. 1. Human factors engineering

4 o o o o Engineering ways to design equipment to suit the capabilities of those handling it account for human cognition (ie. Machine design) Person-machine system: machinery operated by a person must be designed to interact with physical, cognitive and motivational abilities Influence of engineers and psychologists on each other Humans termed as communication channels limited capacity processors of information. o A person can only do so much at once o George Miller, magical number 7 a) number of unrelated things without counting b) number of unrelated things that can be immediately remembered c) absolute discrimination of objects is example of human limits 2. Behaviourism failed to adequately explain language o Chomsky: children do not learn language through reinforcement and imitation as Skinner says. o Parent respond to content than form o Children do not hear the problems o Chomsky suggested underlying language ability is a system of rules called generative grammar allow speaker to construct and listener to understand. o Language is not consciously accessible, but operate implicitly 3. Localization of Function o Certain neural functions reside in a specific brain area to support a certain function o Donald Hebb: building of cell assemblies were constructed over time to form functions (connections between cells) (ie, visual perception) o Hubel and Wiesel: specific cells in visual cortex of cats were specific to certain stimuli (lines and shapes) o Further study on cat learned that early experience affect development of nervous system. 4. Information Processing o Development of computers and AI systems around WW2 o Mathematician Alan Turing wrote a paper describing universal machines and how it solves problems o Psychologists and computer scientists to use the computer metaphor o Computers are fed data like how people acquire information o Structures and processes are needed to allow storage o Recode information transform, rearrange, adding or subtracting, deducing to store. o Information is stored symbolically to be retrieved later

5 o System of interrelated capacities serial processing based on the nature of representations and processes that operate on them. Detection of Incoming information Visual/Olfactory/Audition Register Recognition into Short Term Memory Rehearsal to be sent to Long Term Memory Categorization/Recoding/Reorganization/Manipulation Response Output Trends in Study of Cognition Common question of nature of the mind and cognition o Processing, Acquiring, Storing, Transmitting, Representing information Multiple fields joined together to form a field known as cognitive science Study based on the assumption of level of representation (the stuff between input output) how information is represented rather than cells or culture. Clinical method to study cognitive issues cognitive neuropsychology (deficits in brain damaged individuals) Milner/Goodale: patient who could make visually guided motor movements but impaired in testing of spatial vision o Vision for action, and vision for perception are different neural substrates. Prosopagnosia: inability to remember faces (patient PH example) Study of cognitive neuropsychology allow understanding of how processes function and gain insight to heal brain damange Streimer/Danckert use prism adaptation to shift visual attention to alleviate symptoms of people who cannot attend to certain portions of visual field. General Points Structuralism: elementary units and processes of mind Functionalist: purpose and context of cognitive processes Behaviourist: testable hypothesis and avoid unresolvable debates Gestalt: understand whole process and not individual units Galton: individuals differ in cognitive processing. Developments in many fields have uncovered processes by how information is represented, stored and transformed. Research Methods in Cognitive Psychology 1. Naturalistic Observation: watching people in familiar everyday contexts. Observer is unobtrusive to avoid disrupting or altering behaviour Ecological validity: things studied happen as they really do occur and not under a lab setting. Doesn t require great resources and do not require formal volunteers.

6 Disadavantages: o Lack experimental control: cannot isolate cause of different behaviours or reactions. o Recordings are subjective and depends on manner of recording what is being recorded and how long and often (Biases made distort results) 2. Introspection Wilhelm Wundt: observe own mental processes (think aloud) Benefit: own reaction and behaviour may give insight into experience and influencing factors more complete picture Disadvantage: biased in own cognition motivated to perform and distort observations (not acting who they actually are) In difficult tasks, may be hard to observe and record at the same time. General Points 3. Controlled Observation and Clinical Interviews Researcher have more influence over settings by standardizing the setting and manipulate specific conditions to see how participants react. Clinical interview: ask participants open ended question, and follow up questions based on responses. (Introspection is a free flow response) 4. Experiments and Quaisi-Experiments True experiment: experimenter manipulates one or more independent variables and observe how measures change. Between subjects design: different experimental participants are assigned to different experimental conditions and researcher look for difference between 2 groups Within subjects design: investigator compares performance of the SAME participant. Use of random assignment Quasi-experiments: studies which have random variables as factors, more than one independent variable Disadvantages: laboratory setting may prevent participants from behaving normally cannot capture real world phenomenon. Tasks studied may not be related to real life or relevant. 5. Neural underpinnings Before second half of 20 th century, studies were done on autopsies Since 1970s, various brain imaging can be done to study brain brain imaging

7 1. Cognitive psychologists use a variety of approaches (trade off of benefit and drawbacks in what they want to study) 2. No research design is perfect. Antecedents of Cognitive Psychology Galton: Why do people differ? (individual differences) Hebb: What kind of disruptions accompany specific kinds of brain damage? (physiology) Titchener: What are the basic building blocks of consciousness (structuralism) James: Why does the mind have the operations it does? (functionalism) Koffka: What organization does the mind impose on different configurations of simple stimuli? (Gestalt) Skinner: How is behaviour affected by context? (behaviourism) Broadbent: What leads to maximally efficient use of machines? (Human factors engineering) Paradigms of Cognitive Psychology Paradigm: intellectual frameworks that guide investigators in studying and understanding phenomena 1. Informations Processing Approaching o Analogy between human cognition and computerized processing of information o Cognitions are a flow of information through a system (mind) o Received Stored Recoded Transformed Retrieved Transmitted o Goal is to find the stages, and figure out how they work o Interrelated capacities everyone is different o Information is stored symbolically for easier retreival o Rooted in structuralism to find the basic capacities and processes (computer science) 2. Connectionist Approach o A.k.a. parallel-distributed processing - connectionism o Models depict cognition as a network of connections among simple and many processing units. o Units are compared to neurons, and transmit electrical impulses and underlie sensation and muscle movement neural network o Each unit is part of a bigger network and there are levels of activation at all time depends on input from environment or other unit that is connected to it o Units are weighted as negative or positive o Negative = inhibition, positive = activation

8 o Modified by learning Rooted in structuralism (neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience) Information processing happens in discrete stages serially Connectionist models happens in parallel Connectionist model do not require a central processor, but different patterns of activation account for various processes Knowledge is stored as connections and learning occurs when new connections are established to affect the weighting of each Feldman/Ballard argue that brain is made up of many neurons neurons do not pass on huge amounts of symbolic information but rather connect to large amounts of similar units Information processing provide explanation at more abstract level, while connectionist model are more about subsymbolic level (how they are carried out by the brain) Cognition will be understood best by uncovering the basic mechanisms of processes underyling cognition, which are stable across situations and can only be revealed in a lab setting. 3. Evolutionary approach Perceiving 3D and understand/produce language are great achievements cognitively. (AI researchers cannot program these tasks) Human mind is biological and evolved over generations, and so it responds to pressures to adapt to environment. Humans have specialized areas of competence produced by evolutionary heritage Specialized purpose mechanisms that fit a certain context or class of problems Ancesors most significant issue is social issues creating and preserving social contract need to reason (costs/benefit) and detect cheating. Understanding evolutionary pressures as they fit our ancestors is easier than considering other equally plausible ones 4. The Ecological Approach Activities are shaped by culture and in the context it occurs Difference with situation and controlled setting (Lave) o Multiple answers o Constructed by the self o Personal goal in real life

9 Smilek/Kingston: attention in every day situation. o Art and sports scene and monitor eye movements as they describe pictures however, fixations were committed to eyes and face of people - eye gaze, head position, body position and situational context are cues used to figure out gist and mainly intentional state of others. Functionalist and Gestalt rooted. o Functionalist: purpose served by cognition o Gestalt: context of every day life Naturalistic observation General Points Information processing: focus research on functional aspect of cognition Connectionist: focus on underlying hardware global cognitive proceses are described by an information processing model Evolutionary approach: questions how a cognitive system of function has evolved over generations. Ecological approach stresses the need to consider the context Not all research fit into a paradigm neatly. Lecture 1 Tolman rat maze (Gestalt psychology) cognitive behavourism 3 groups of rats learn a T maze Group 1: food at goal box Group 2 & 3: removed at goal box After 10 days of running and learning maze o Group 1 performed best, decreased errors per day o Group 2 & 3 made insignificant improvements On 11 th day, Group 2 given food o Believed they have to catch up to Group 1 On 12 th, day, o Group 2 performed better than Group 1 Tolman argues group 2 and 3 have been learning even without reward, and on 12 th day reward allows them to show what they learned after an incentive. Class experiment Does context matter? scrambled words (dependent variable measured) Independent variables: same time, same anagram, same setting, etc. Only lacking random assignment

10 Hypothesis was given context, solve more than no context: true Building a connectionist model: Listening to a song and picking out certain lyrics associated with certain concepts in popular culture concepts are interconnected.