EXP3604C Cumulative Final Exam Review Exam 1 Outline Intro to Cognitive Psych Evolution of Cognition Ch 1 8 28 9 4 Lectures Key Ideas for understanding Cognitive Psych perspectives Cognitive Psychology studies all of the discrete mental processes that enable any form of thought or behavior This can range from very basic processes Reaction Time The Sea Squirt To very complex processes Driving Reading Belief Systems Decision Making The thought process of chess experts Cognitive Psychology is highly analytical and detail oriented Ultimate why vs Proximate how Causes Ultimate Causes are concerned with the Evolutionary reasons to why a cognitive process or phenomenon exists What adaptive value did it have How does it function to increase the fitness of an organism Proximate Causes focus less on the WHY and more on the HOW How are you able to read and understand this sentence Proximate explanations in cognitive psychology largely take an Information Processing perspective Cognitive processes happen in a series of sequential stages At each stage something new is added to our understanding of that info An eventual response is the outcome of this series of stages and operations Mind as a Kluge Kluge Gary Markus A system especially a computer system that is constituted of poorly matched elements or of elements originally intended for other applications A clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem Adaptations vs exaptations Cognitive functions are a mix of adaptations to specific needs and exapations new uses built onto these adaptations Hippocampus Memory Existing functions can be used in novel ways but these exaptations may look glitchy because of their original use Ex Stereotyping Categorization processes Ex Getting ready for School on a Saturday proceduralization Localization of function modularity The Mind is largely modular Soft Modularity Specific adaptively relevant tasks are handled by specific brain regions networks Also called Localization of Function Evolution is stingy Evolution is stingy Neural tissue is very expensive Human brains comprise 2 of our body weight but demand 20 of our caloric energy New neurons brain regions are expensive Therefore evolutionary pressures cause cognitive functions to be just good enough rather than optimal Newer parts are the first to be de prioritized EXP3604C Hierarchical Organization of information processing Within brain regions different areas process and contribute different pieces of information which are organized hierarchically into a larger whole We can learn to process and recognize all kinds of things because of association area activity The idea that stimuli are processed in multiple stages and brain regions that build from less complex edges orientation lines to more complex object recognition reasoning illustrates this principle of cognitive neuroscience Sensation and Perception Ch 2 Supplemental Reading hallucinations 9 9 9 11 9 16 Lectures Sensation vs Perception Two ways for information to enter the mind Through recall retrieval memory Through sensory systems vision hearing touch smell taste proprioception Perceiving what the world is like is a multi stage process Hierarchical Organization Function of sensation perception Sensation The detection and basic sensory experience of environmental stimuli such as sounds objects and odors Perception The process of integrating organizing and interpreting sensations in meaningful ways Sensation without perception and vice versa What s the difference between sensation and perception Ex Stroke victim saw pixels not numbers Sen w o Perc Ex Prosopagnosia or face blindness Sen w o Perc Ex Phantom Limb pain Perc w o Sen Ex A blind person seeing with their hands activates vision centers Perc w o Sen Absolute Threshold vs Just Noticeable difference Our sensory systems seem to be designed to care more about relative thresholds or sensing changes Weber s Law The Just Noticeable Difference between two stimuli depends on the intensity of the original stimuli In other words we don t perfectly sense the objective qualities of stimuli instead they are sensed in relation to other stimuli Ex Pebble vs Rock Sensory adaptation aka habituation The decline in sensitivity to a constant stimulus We adjust to the lights smells of a room even though they may be initially sensed as intense Perception is SELECTIVE Some info gets non consciously filtered Transduction Not all energy can be sensed not all can stimulate sense receptors The process by which energy from the environment gets sensed encoded into a neural signal We don t sense radio waves television waves or ultraviolet light though they re all around us We don t hear the full soundwave spectrum dogs hear higher elephants lower If these we very survival relevant we would Vision early perception Perceiving what the world is like is a multi stage process 30 different brain regions contribute to vision each by adding their own piece of info to the bigger mental picture Hierarchical organization of the visual pathway Front of the eye lens cornea pupil simply focuses light onto retina EXP3604C Bipolar Ganglion Cells initially organize encode info from the rods cones Ganglion axons optic nerve Thalamus further encodes info sends it to correct area of visual cortex where specialized areas handle color edges distance and motion Encoding of retinal image from sense receptors to V1 cells 200 million cells in primary visual cortex aka V1 striate cortex create a neural image A neurally encoded representation of the stimuli hitting the retina Different cell columns respond to different stimulus properties stripes edges curves angles width movement brightness color Respond preferentially to one eye or the other Respond preferentially based on where in visual field stimulus is located 3 evolutionary questions for perception to solve What is it object recognition How far is it from me especially Where is it going motion We figure this out through both Bottom up vs Top down processing Middle vision Loosely defined stage of visual processing the intersection of Bottom up Top down processes After basic features have been extracted from the image early vision primary visual cortex Before object recognition and scene understanding higher order perception Goal to organize elements of a visual scene into groups that we can then recognize as objects What vs where pathways What shapes size object facial recognition color Where orientation in space depth motion Bottom up vs Top down
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