1 Chapter 1 Studying The Mind What is the Mind Two definitions of the Mind 1 The mind creates and controls mental functions such as perception attention memory emotions language deciding thinking and reasoning 2 The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals Cognitive Psychology Goal Determining the properties and mechanisms of the mind is what Studying the Mind Early Works in Cognitive Psychology cognitive psychology is about Donder s Pioneering Experiment How long does it take to make a decision Two different tasks 1 Reaction Time A light was shown and the participant was asked to push a button when they saw the light 2 Choice Reaction Time Two lights were shown and the participants were told to push a button if the light was on the left or push a different button if the light was on the right Results The choice reaction time took one tenth of a second longer than the normal reaction time so he concluded that it takes one tenth of a second to decide to push a button Ebbinghaus s Memory Experiment What is the time course for forgetting Savings Curve He looked at random three number sequences and tested his memory for them He concluded that memory drops rapidly for the first few days then levels off 20 Minutes 60 percent 1 Hour 45 percent 1 day 35 Percent 2 days 28 percent 31 days 26 percent Wundt s Psychology Laboratory Structuralism and Analytic Introspection He created the first psychology lab with the goal of studying the mind through Structuralism Structuralism Definition Our overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience Sensations Wundt wanted to create a periodic table of the mind of sensations and he wanted to do this through analytic 2 introspection Analytic Introspection Definition He would train participants to describe their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli Failed This goal never worked but he pioneered the academic study of psychology William James Principles of Psychology He wrote at a textbook at Harvard on psychology not by doing experiments but by introspections about his own mind Abandoning the Study of the Mind Watson Founds Behaviorism John Watson rejected the study of the mind and started to only look at behavior Little Albert Experiment Every time the baby saw the rat the a loud noise was made and after a few times the baby reacted just by seeing the rat and not the noise Classical Conditioning Paring one stimulus to another changes the response to the before neutral stimulus Skinner s Operant Conditioning Operant Conditioning Behavior is affected by the presence of reinforcement Setting the stage for the Reemergence of the Mind in Psychology Edward Tollman Conducted an experiment Placed a rat in a maze and always put food in the B alleyway so the rat understood that and went to allway B but one time he started the rat in a different alleyway and the rat still went to B because the rat had a cognitive map of the maze Cognitive Map cognitive A conception of the maps layout used the word The Rebirth of the Study of the Mind Introduction Information Processing Approach Definition an approach that traces the sequence of mental operations involved in cognition Inspired by the computer Introduction to the Digital Computer Flow Diagrams of Digital Computers Because computers worked in stage like ways some people 3 thought that the mind could also work in stage like ways Flow Diagram for the Mind A study was done in which participants were told to listen to sound of only one ear even though sound was played to both ears And the participants were able to only listen to the ear they chose to listen to this lead to the first diagram of the mind Conferences on Artificial Intelligence and Information Theory Input Filter Detector Memory There was a conference that Dartmouth College on the creation of artificial intelligence and two scientist created a computer program called Logic Theorist that was able to do so Logic Theorist Cognitive Revolution It was able to create proofs for mathematical theorems It took place in the 1950 s and it is when the study switched from behaviorism to studying the mind again It became official in 1967 when a textbook called cognitive psychology came out Researching the Mind Introduction Cognitive psychologists use both behavioral and physiological approaches to study the mind Memory Consolidation From a Behavioral Perspective Memory Consolidation Definition Category of processes that stabilize a memory trace after the initial acquisition Experiment Two groups were told to remember certain letters then one group was told to quickly learn another list and the other group and time in between The group that had to learn the next list quickly remembered only 20 of the first list and the second group remembered 48 Two groups learned lists and one was able to go to sleep the other was not The group that was able to sleep remembered much more than the group that couldn t sleep Experiment 2 Memory Consolidation from a Physiological Perspective Through an fMRI experiment they were able to see that the hypothalamus was is better use for the participants that got sleep same experiment as listed above 4 Chapter 2 Cognitive Neuroscience Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to give the basic principles of cognitive neuroscience Cognitive Neuroscience Definition the study of the physiological basis of cognition Neurons The Building Blocks of the Nervous System The Microstructure of the Brain Neurons 19th century anatomists stained the brain and observed a Nerve Net Nerve Net Definition it was a complex pathway for conducting signals in the brain and it was an uninterrupted network without stops Camilo Golgi he developed a new staining technique that stain only a small part of the brain Ramon Cajal He used the Golgi technique of staining and used it on baby brains so he was able to see that neurons were separate which placed the building blocks for the neuron doctrine He also discovered that there are neurons that pick up information from the environment and are located in the skin eye ear etc And synapses and the idea behind why neurons are connected Neural Circuit Neuron Doctrine individual cells transmit signals in the nervous system and that these cells are not continuous with other cells as proposed by the nerve net theory Receptors they are similar to brain neurons but they have a specialized receptors that pick up information