WEEK I Introspection Wundt and Titchener Wundt father of experimental psychology looking within a method in which people observe and record the content of their own mental lives and the sequence of their own experiences some thoughts are unconscious and this limits introspection data is hard to rely on Ex Why did introspection fail Researchers could not distinguish between true and false Behaviorism John Watson rewards and punishments Transcendental Method Kant begin with observable facts and move backward Ex A scientist infers the capacity of our memory system based on recognition accuracy across experimental conditions Ex cognitive psychology cognitive neuroscience and cognitive neuropsychology all use transcendental methods A researcher is testing two groups of rats Rats in Group 1 are placed in a maze with food in the same location every day for two weeks Rats in Group 2 are placed in the same maze every day for two weeks but only have food available on the last day of the two weeks How will the behavior of the two groups compare on the next day they are placed in the maze They both run to the food cognitive maps Reaction time Brain activity Accuracy Cognitive map a mental representation of a spatial layout Schema a mental framework used to interpret the experience as it happens Creativity of Language the ability to produce and understand sentences never encountered Chomsky argues that this creativity was incompatible with Skinner s behaviorist stimulus response approach Information processing computer language adopted to explain human cognition WEEK II NEURO REVIEW Dendrites incoming signal Axon term transm of signals When ap reaches axon term neurotransmitters released on synapse How does brain implement cognitive strategies What kind of computer is the brain Functional neuroanatomy of cortex Middle to front Damage of Werneckes Damage to Brocas loss of ability to understand language able to produce still able to understand unable to produce WEEK III Plato Allegory of the cave The Matrix what is real is simply electrical signals in the brain Systematic relationship between reality and the electrical activity in the brain Not always accurate Why It has to be created with sensory input Our image will get distorted and lost as it travels from the back of our eye What does the image look like at the back of the brain 2D numbers of brightness and location like a matrix starting point of perception WE DO NOT HAVE DIRECT ACCESS TO REALITY MIND HAS TO INFER The central problem of perception is finding the most likely causes of incompleteness What is perceived as real is a reconstruction an interpretation Eyes are like camera ears microphone What you perceive is your brain s guess We can only imagine reality Perception inverts the process that generated the sensory input to guess what reality caused the image to appear Illusions are the occasional mistakes of smart strategies for solving a problem that is so difficult that you can t always get it right Perception is like detective work or a medical diagnosis MEDICAL Symptoms sensory input Disease presence of an object which causes sensory inputs Diagnosis what we perceive Diagnostic procedures The process of perception DETECTIVE WORK Clues sensory input Suspect perp presence of an object which causes sensory inputs Detective s hypothesis what we perceive Detective work The process of perception Inference is drawing conclusions based on incomplete and imperfect observations Perception can be seen as inference Perception has to make informed guesses by drawing on sensory input based on prior knowledge Perception determines what reality is the most probably cause The brain calculates the probability of each hypothesis based on the sensory information Likelihood how probable the sensory observations if the hypothesis were true Prior probability how much do you expect the hypothesis based on prior experiences X Bayes rule POSTERIOR PROBABILITY Perception of slipperiness Prior hallway is slippery P slippery prior knowledge Studying illusions allows cognitive psychologists to find out the brain considers some over the other Inference is everywhere not only in perception Computational goal problem solution What is going on make use of ambiguous signals apply data to infer posterior WEEK IV probability Stroop effect Alerting and orienting Information that seems important steals our attention Resolve conflicts between competing attentional priorities executive attention Divided attention dividing a limited pool of cognitive resources between multiple tasks when we allocate some of our resources to thinking or talking we don t perceive things in our environment that would be otherwise obvious Less attention to process visual input Doing more things less well Functions of attention 1 Selective attention select inputs to focus on 2 Cognitive control what features you want to attend to stroop test example 3 Sustained attention keep processing info even if its unchanging 4 Alerting and orienting detect relevant inputs in the mind and orient the mind to them 5 Executive attention 6 Divided attention Attention is like a spotlight can highlight one thing in the room to make you see one thing and nothing else Selective one subject Divisible two dimmer spotlights Shiftable moving light Mechanisms of selective attention Mec 1 FILTERING I Overt Attention changing sensory input through observable behavior A Look at the things you want to attend to B Looking away from the things you don t wanna be distracted by II Covert Attention taking the input from senses and processing it through unobservable mental operations Covert Attention Filtering out distractions by inhibiting their processing At what stage of processing is unattended information filtered out Early selection hypothesis selection occurs before you process analyze information only attended input is analyzed unattended info receives little to no analysis never perceived this is dominated Broadbent s Filter model theory of early selection Testing this with a dichotic listening task what did you listen on right ear what did you listen on left ear Evidence for early selection theories Evidence against cocktail party effect people notice when their name is spoken at a noisy party even if they re not paying attention Anne Treisman s experiment participants are influenced by words in the unattended ear if their meaning fits the narrative of the story being illustrated in the attended ear Late