Psych 258 Cognitive Psychology

Front 1

What is Cognitive Psychology

Back 1

The study of unobservable, unmeasurable mental events.

Front 2

Philosophical origins of cognitive psychology and descartes compromise.

Back 2

Empricism (ideas are learned) and Nativism (ideas are innate), Descartes created the first philosophy of the mind, his compromise is that the mind gets idea from experiences and are innate.

Front 3

Wundt's experiment

Back 3

First ever cognitive psychology experiments, inferences are made from the result. This experiment was done via the introspective method.

Front 4

Introspection successes and failures

Back 4

Success: It helped develop an objective method for assessing mental events

Failures: No consistency in results, and the training the introspectors recieved may have biased them to produce the same result.

Front 5

Behaviorism and Skinner, what they did to cognitive psychology and mentalism.

Back 5

Skinner believed that cognitive psychology should not be based on mentalism unobservable events of the mind. Psychology should focus on more scientific empiricism, so the study should only be done on behavior. Stimulus and Reaction.

Front 6

How did the Paired Associate List Learning test show that cognitive psychology was still relevant?

Back 6

The Paired Associate list learning test showed that memory was an unobservable mental events that was relevant in the study of behavior, because memory influenced how they responded to stimuli.

Front 7

Birth of Cognitive Psychology, why did computer science contribute? What is info processing theory? What did Chomsky do?

Back 7

Computers were used as a metaphor to describe the mind. The info processing theory is the idea that information in the mind is processed in a series of stages, like a computer. Chomsky challenged Skinner on the idea that language was learned, since he saw infants using their own types of grammer and words, and that language must be innate. S-R alone cannot explain acquisition of language.

Front 8

Atkinson-Shiffron framework of the mind.

Back 8

A way to show processing pathways, it is inclusive, so many mental event phenomena can be included.

Front 9

Evolutionary Psychology contribution to cognitive psychology.

What is the parrallel distributed processing model?

Back 9

Behavior is based on the brain structure. To understand the brain structure, you must understand the cognitive environment, because the brain structure evolved in response to the cognitive environment.

The parallel distributed processing model infers that info is processed through neural-like webs.

Front 10

Why is studying neural mechanism important for cognitive psychology? What evidence did Hubel and Wiesel find that showed why this was important.

Back 10

Since cognitive psychology is the study of unmeasurable, unobservable mental events, we must make inferences from measurements of observable behaviors. Studying neural mechanism and measuring them is one way of accomplishing this goal. Their study on a cat visual cortex, showed that certain cells did respond to line movement and c patterns.

Front 11

Neuroscience measurements methods

Back 11

FMRI - See which areas of the brain are activated

Event-Related Potentials - When neurons experience a stimuli, they convert it to an electrical signal via transduction, this signal has an event related potential, it can be used to measure brain activity

Neuropathology - Studying individuals who recieved damages to certain part of the brain.

Front 12

Neruopathology on the Brocca and Wernicke Area? What do these two do?

Back 12

Broca Area: People can understand speech, but not produce it

Wernicke Area: People can not understand speech, but they can speak.

Front 13

What is Hick-Hymen Law? How is it related to choice response task?

Back 13

The choice response task it the time it takes to response when choices are available. Each alternative increases uncertainty, while each info reduces uncertainity. The relationship between response time and amount of information is a linear function called the Hick-Hymen Law.

Front 14

The 3 arrangements of mental operations.

Back 14

Continious activation: A neuron does some processing, then passes it on to another neuron.

Stage activation: A group of neurons, a unit cooperate and do some processing, and when the operation is done, is passed to another group of neurons

Cascaded activation: Same as stage activation, except all the operation is done stimutaneously.

Front 15

What did the Letter matching task prove?

Back 15

When it cames to physically identical letters (AA), response time was much faster for them then name identical letter (Aa), suggesting that there is a different level of processing associated with name ID. Possible index of memory access time.