Cognitive Processes PSY 334

1
Cognitive ProcessesPSY 334

• Chapter 1 The Science of Cognition

2
Study Aids

• On the course web page
• Copies of these Powerpoint slides.
• Textbook publisher student website
• http//bcs.worthpublishers.com/anderson7e/
• See pg 5, Chapter 1 How to study effectively
  (PQ4R Method).
• Pay special attention to the summary statements
  highlighted between lines in the textbook.

3
Early History

• Empiricism vs nativism (nurture vs nature)
• Famous empiricists (nurture)
• Berkeley, Locke, Hume, Mill
• Famous nativists (nature)
• Descartes, Kant
• Lots of philosophical speculation but no use of
  the scientific method to answer questions.

4
Lockes Essay Concerning Human Understanding

• This work was the beginning of British
  Empiricism.
• Locke sought a set of laws for the human mind,
  like Newtons principles of physics.
• Lockes system is atomistic and reductionistic.
• Basic elements of mind are ideas.
• Ideas come from experience (Locke rejected
  Descartes).
• The blank slate, page of paper, tablet comes
  from Aristotle, but characterized empiricism.
• Ideas have two sources sensation reflection.

5
Locke Ideas (Cont.)

• Sensations can be illusory or misleading.
• Ideas are either simple or complex. Simples ideas
  form a complex idea in several ways
• By combining several simple ideas into a single
  one.
• By seeing the relation between two simple ideas.
• By separating simple ideas from other ideas that
  go with them the process of abstraction.
• Lockes idea about combination of ideas is
  analogous to a chemical compound (from Boyle).

6
George Berkeley (1685-1753)

• Wrote three essays that radically extended
  Lockes philosophy into subject idealism
  (immaterialism).
• Berkeley argued that because all knowledge of the
  world comes from experience, the very existence
  of the external world depends on perception.
• Matter exists because it is perceived matter
  does not exist without a mind.
• The permanence of the world is thus proof of
  Gods existence.
• His book on vision was better regarded in his
  time.

7
David Hume (1711-1776)

• Hume studied pneumatic philosophy (the name for
  the science of mental life).
• People are part of nature so should be studied
  using the methods of studying nature.
• He differentiated between impressions ideas
• When impressions ideas occur together they
  become associated with each other.
• 3 kinds of associations resemblance,
• contiguity in time or space, cause-and-effect
  relationship.

8
Rene Descartes
9
Ideas about the Ideas Passions

• Two major classes of ideas exist in the mind
• Innate ideas inborn, time, space, motion, God.
• Derived ideas arising from experience, based on
  memories of past events (open pores stay open).
• Passions arise from the body and cause actions.
• 6 primary passions (wonder, love, hate, desire,
  joy, sadness) other passions are mixtures of
  these.
• Animals do not possess minds so cannot think, be
  self-aware or have language have no feelings.

10
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

• The leading German epistemologist, Kant was a
  subjectivist, nativist, rationalist successor to
  Descartes and Leibniz.
• Kant wrote A Critique of Pure Reason saying
  that empiricists forgot to ask how experience is
  possible.
• Certain intuitions or categories of understanding
  are inborn and frame our experiences.
• This knowledge is a priori, whereas experiential
  knowledge is a posteriori (known afterward).
• 3 categories of mind cognition, affection,
  conation.

11
Kants View of A Priori Knowledge

• Concepts of space and time.
• Other intuitions, including cause and effect,
  reciprocity, reality, existence and necessity.
• Higher faculties of reasoning are understanding,
  judgment, reason.
• True science must begin with concepts established
  a priori by reason alone and deal with observable
  objects that can be located in time and space.
• Psychology lacks this so it cannot be a science.

12
Scientific Psychology

• Scientific study began in 1879
• Structuralism Wundt, Titchener and systematic,
  analytic introspection.
• Functionalism -- William James armchair
  introspection.
• Behaviorism (1920)
• Thorndike consciousness as excess baggage.
• Watson consciousness as superstition.

13
Early Mentalists

• Gestalt psychologists (German)
• Wertheimer, Koffka, Kohler
• Critics of behaviorism
• Tolman
• European psychologists
• Bartlett early memory researcher
• Luria
• Piaget

14
Mind for Behaviorists
Input Sensation
Output Behavior
What laws describe the relationship between input
and output?
15
Mind for Cognitive Theorists
Mental Representations Goals, Expectations,
Cognitive Maps Processes
Input Sensation
Output Behavior
What happens inside the box to produce the
observed behavior?
16
Three Important Influences

• Human performance studies in WWII information
  needed to train military.
• Artificial intelligence thinking about how
  machines accomplish things leads to more
  analytical thinking about how humans do.
• Linguistics behaviorist principles could not
  account for the complexities of language use.

17
Pioneers of Cognitive Psychology

• Information theory
• Donald Broadbent
• Artificial Intelligence
• Newell Simon
• Linguistics
• Chomsky new ways of analyzing language
• Miller -- psycholinguistics
• Neissers book Cognitive Psychology

18
Cognitive Science

• Cognitive psychology -- human thinking.
• Cognitive science studies both human and machine
  thinking (artificial intelligence).
• Cognitive science includes philosophy and
  neuroscience as well as psychology.
• Non-human (artificial) intelligence
• http//alice.pandorabots.com/
• http//www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/asaygin/tt/ttest.htm
  ltalktothem

19
Information Processing

• The dominant paradigm (approach) today in
  cognitive psychology.
• A computer metaphor is used to conceptualize
  mental activity
• Mental processes operate upon mental
  representations
• Ops on Reps
• Flowcharted steps

20
A Functional Approach

• Mental activity is described in functional terms.
• Brain location, brain processes and neural
  representation are ignored.

21
How are Models Tested?

• Because no direct observation of mental processes
  is possible, behavior is studied.
• Measurement of response time is used to deduce
  the steps performed.

22
Sternbergs Paradigm

• 3 9 7
• Was 9 a part of this number?
• 9 would be a positive probe (target)
• 6 would be a negative probe (foil)

23
Sternbergs Flowchart (Model)
24
Possibilities

• People look at the numbers one at a time in
  sequence, stopping when they get the answer.
• People look at the numbers one at a time in
  sequence but continue until the end before giving
  a response.
• People look at all three of the numbers at once,
  responding when they recognize the target number
  in the set.

25
What do people do?
26
If people looked at a set as a single object, the
data would be different.
Foil and target times would be different if
people stopped searching when they found the
correct answer.
27
Concerns about Cognitive Models

• Relevance do lab-task processes operate in the
  same manner in real life?
• Sufficiency can simple theories explain complex
  processes?
• Cognitive architectures, computer models
• Necessity does the mind actually work as
  described by specific theories?
• Cognitive neuroscience

28
Cognitive Neuroscience

• Pages 12-30 review basic concepts about the
  brain.
• If you have not taken PSY 210 and find this
  material confusing, come see me.
• New methods permit study of normal human
  functioning in more complex tasks
• EEG
• Imaging techniques PET fMRI

29
Review brain regions and localization of function
in the brain.
30
Parts of Neuron
31
Kinds of Neurons
32
Action Potential Demo

• http//outreach.mcb.harvard.edu/animations/actionp
  otential.swf

33
EEG measures patterns of brain activity.
34
Functional MRI (fMRI)
An fMRI scan showing regions of activation in
orange, including the primary visual cortex (V1,
BA17).
35
Autism Affects Semantic Processing of Abstract
Words
36
Using FMRI to Confirm a Model

• BOLD Blood Oxygen Level Dependent response
• Measured in 3 different areas of brain motor,
  parietal region, prefrontal region.
• Measured and plotted every 1.2 sec.
• Peaks in BOLD graph show when an area of the
  brain was active (4-5 sec delay).
• Different components to a task can be
  independently tracked.

37
The Task
Step 0
Step 1
Step 2
38
Measured in Three Areas
Motor
Prefrontal
Parietal
Notice that the peaks of activity for each step
occur in the same order as the steps do when
solving the problem.
39
Other Approaches to Cognitive Psychology

• Connectionism (neural net models) can higher
  level functions be accomplished by connected
  neurons?
• Parallel distributed processing (PDP) --
  Rumelhart McClelland
• Situated cognition the ecological approach
• Gibsons affordances
• Do we explain cognition in terms of the external
  world or internal mind?