Psychology 100 - Midterm #1

Front 1

Cognition

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The scientific study of thought, language, the brain - the study of the mind

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It's an important debate on whether we were born with or ____ knowledge

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aquire

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Louis XIV

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Believed people are born knowing French - we speak different languages depending on environment

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Watson

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Father of behavioralism

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Watson's 4 Tenants of Behavioralism

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1.) Any branch of natural science must concern itself with the prediction of natural events
2.) Science can only study that which can be observed
3.) Mental states and private experiences cannot be verified
4.) Behavior alone is the subject of true scientific study

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Skinner

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Absolute Behaviorlist - - took Watson's ideas and incorporated them into academic framework. Used experiments with stimuli and measured responses - believed parents encourage language by saying "that's a good sentence"

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Chomsky

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studies the way that children learn language and how language is structures - believed children learn language

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Active Processing

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Selecting to listen to, or pay attention to things that are important to us

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Even if a stimuli is not presented to us we are still...

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thinking

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Neurocognition

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The study of when or how events in the brain occur in response to cognitive processes

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Tulving

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Tulving discovered we have different kinds of memories - memories for facts and autobiographical memories - discovered by researching man with motorcycle injuries

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Functions of the Nervous system

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Reception, Reaction, Integration

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Reception in the nervous system

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receive information coming in from all 5 senses

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Reaction in the nervous system

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We react through our muscles

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Integration in the nervous system

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Mediates receptions and reaction - check to see that nothing else is burning

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Excitation

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Conducted further into the nervous system, via bubdkes if fibers

Stimulus to receptors to nervous system to afferent fibers

Command to act/respond -> Efferent fibers

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Reflex

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An automatic response - never goes up to the brain - happens in the spinal column

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Cell Body

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Contains the nucleus and all typical things of cell bodies

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Axon

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A place where information flows down the neuron

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Terminus

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The ends of the axons that react with with the dendrites of the next axon

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Dendrites

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The ends of the axon that receives information and sends it down the axon and out the terminal branches which are linking up with another set of dendrites in the next neuron

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Neurons communicate through the...

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Synaptic Region -- various charged particles come out of one end and connect with the next neuron -- this is all or nothing

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Central Nervous System

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Composed of the brain and the spinal cord

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Peripheral Nervous system

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Everything but the brain and the spinal cord

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Afferent neurons

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Sensory neurons specific to particular areas - neurons that are going to the brain - take information from from sensory receptor cells to spinal cord

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Efferent Neurons

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Motor Neurons in the brain, spinal cord and body - Take messages from the brain that have information on how to respond

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Interneurons

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Mediates between sensory and motor neurons

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Hindbrain

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Controls many automatic processes - heart beat, temperature, respiration

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Cerebellum

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Controls balance and information from our bodies

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Midbrain

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In charge of basis processes - eye movement and sleep

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Thalamus

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Reception area for optic nerve - ears and skin

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Hypothalamus

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Controls biological urges - feeding, drinking, and maintaining temperature

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"Fishers"

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Bumpy folds that provide that most surface area to the brain

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Motor Cortex

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Involved in motor output - it checks what is going on in the environment

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Somatosensory Cortex

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Where sensory information comes in

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Broca's area and Wernicke's area

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Involved with language, producing and perceiving it

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2 sides of the brain attach at the ....

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Corpus Collasum

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Seizure

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The behavior caused by a huge amount of electrical activity in the brain that is coursing back back and forth

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Sensation

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Physical Energy being converted into a neural code -- wavelenghts hitting our eyes and being turned into excitatory processes in neurons

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We can which wavelenghts?

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380 to 720 nanometers

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Cornea

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Protects the eye

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Lens

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Changes shape in response to the light

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Process of sight

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Info comes in and hits the back of the eye (the retina) and there are special cells that transform light wavelenghts - via rods and cones

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Optic Nerve

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Where the information goes up to the brain

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Rods

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Operate best in less light, darkness - they are very thin - maximally sensitive to sorting out what things are - like seeing a thin line

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Cones

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Operate best in bright light - sensitive to color

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Fovia

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Area with highest concentration of rods, most capable of picking out small differences between things in the environment

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Black Region

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The area of the eye that is not receiving information and is black

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Perception

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a psychological phenomenon, not physical or physiological --- How we come to understand the objects and events in the external reality around us

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Perceptual Intelligence

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The idea that knowledge we bring to a situation plays an important role in perception

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Bottom up Processing

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Processing that begins with stimulation of the receptors

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Top Down processing

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Processing that involves a person's knowledge - guides you on what to see

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What is the first thing we do when we look at something?

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Identify what we are looking at from the background

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figure-ground perception

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Making a decision on what is the figure and the background

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Gestalt Principles of Perceptual Organizaion

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How we figure out psychologically what the figure is - "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts"

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Word Superiority Effect

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Letters are easier to recognize when they are contained in a word, compared to when they are alone or in a nonword

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Feedback Activtion

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The activation that is sent from word units back to each of the letter units for that word

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Why is the interactive activation model important?

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It proposes a mechanism that is consistent with what we know about neural firing - excitation is sent from level to level, just as in neurons

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Preattentive Stage

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Happens automatically and doesnt require any effort or attention by the perceiver - this is the state in which the object is analyzed into its features

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Illusory Conjunctions

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The combination of features from different stimuli

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Focused attention stage

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In this stage, the features are combined and we perceive the object

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Focused attention Stage

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During this stage the observer's attention plays an important role in combining the features to create the perception of whole objects - this eliminates illusory conjunctions

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Geons

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3D volumes - Biederman proposed that they are 36 different geons. Geons have the property of being able to be identified when viewed from different angles

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Properties of Geons

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View Invarient Properties - Properties that remain visible even when the geon is viewed from many different angles

Discriminability - Each geon can be distinguished from the others from almost all viewpoints

Resistance to Visual noise - we can still perceive geons under noisy conditions such as fog or low lighting

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Basic message of recognition by Components Theory

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If enough information is available to enable us to identify an object's basis geons, we will be able to identify the object - shows that we can recognize objects based on a relatively small number of basic shapes

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Proximity

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We consider things that are close together as part of the same item

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Similarity

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This occurs when objects look similar to one another, we often perceive them as a group or pattern

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Good Continuation

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This occurs when the eye is compelled to move through one object and continue to another object - we tend to look for what flows in the environment and piece things together that are adjacent to each other - camouflage

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Closure

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If we have separate pieces of an item that are not attached to one another, we tend to impose meaning, closure, onto the object as a whole - like when an object is incomplete or a space is not completely enclosed

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Binocular cues

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Uses information given from the disparity between your two eyes to determine depth of the object you are looking at - depends on how different the 2 images in each eye are

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Linear Perspective

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The perspective that as things get farther away, they get more narrow - railroad tracks

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Relative Size

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The idea that images which are larger are close to us than images which are smaller

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Interposition

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When we make decisions about whether things are close or near by whether they are covering up something else

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tecture gradients

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the idea that things that are closer to us tend to have more definition than things that are further away

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Displacement over time

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You can tell that something is moving because as time passes it changes places in your retina over time

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Induced movement

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Something else is moving and because of its movement we tend to make judgments about how we are stationary and the other thing is moving

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Perceptual Organization

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The organization of elements of the environment into objects

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Gestalt Psychologist

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Studied perceptual organization

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Structuralism

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Involves adding up sensations

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The laws of Perceptual organization

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A series of rules that specify how we perceptually organize parts into wholes

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Laws of Pragnanz "Good Figure"/law of Simplicity

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Every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as possible

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law of similiarity

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Similar things appear to be grouped together

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Law of good continuation

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Points that result in straight of smoothly curving lines that are seen as belonging together - follow the smoothest path

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Law of Proximity/Law of Nearness

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Things that are near to each other appear to be grouped together

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Law of Common Fate

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Things that are moving in the same direction appear to be grouped together

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Law of Familiarity

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Things are most likely to form groups if the groups appear familiar or meaningful

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Heuristic

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A rule of thumb that provides a best-guess solution to a problem

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Algoritm

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A procedure guaranteed to solve a problem

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Occlusion Heuristic

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When a large object is partially covered by a smaller occluding object we see the larger one as continuing behind the smaller occluder

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Transition Probabilities

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The chances that one sound will follow another sound

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Statistical Learning

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The process of learning about transitional probabilities and about other characteristics of language

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All the knowledge we accumulate about the environment is stored in

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neurons - this shapes the way that neurons function

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Experienced-Dependent Plasticity

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How neurons gain their properties

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Attention

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The process of concentrating on specific features of the environment or on certain thoughts or activities - usually leads to exclusion of other features of the environment

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Attention Perception

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Paying attention to something increases the chances you will perceive it

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Attention memory

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You are more likely to remember something later if you are paying attention to it when it first occured

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Attention language

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Reading a sentence involves paying momentary attention to the words in the sentence after one another

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Solving Problems

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Your success in solving problems depends on what aspect of the problems captures your attention

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Attention is very...

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Versatile, but also very limited

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Attention is a...

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Cognitive process that allows us to process a limited amount of information from the enormous amount of information that is available and is a conscious and unconscious process

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Automatic Attention

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No Conscious Control - It is an automatic way of dealing with stimuli that are coming in

Minimal effort - It demands little or no effort on the cognitive system

Speed - These processes are performed relatively quickly

Parallel Process - You can do it at the same time you are doing other things

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Controlled Attention

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Requires Conscious Control - You must pay attention to every step

Effort - Used many cognitive resources

Speed - It takes a relatively long time

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When you do something automatically, you...

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Combines steps into a single procedure - such as reading (instead of sounding out words)

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Selective Attention

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The ability to focus on one message and ignore all others

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Dichotic Listening

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When one message is presented to the left ear and another message is presented to the right ear

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Speech Shadowing

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The procedure of repeating a measure out loud to ensure that the participants are focusing their attention on the attended message

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Shadowing is easier if

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one is louder than the other

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People are aware of what in the unattended ear

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changes from male to female or language to tone, but not any change in content

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The cocktail phernomenon

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The ability to pay attention to one message and ignore all other messages

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Broadbent's filter Model and Early Selection - Early Selection

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As soon as you get the information you filter it