Definitions
The collection of mental processes: perceiving, remembering, thinking, and understanding as well as the act of using those processes
Cognition
Human behaviors that make up Cognition
Perception, sensation, perception, decision making, attention, memory, thinking and problem solving, emotional processing, neuro cognition
What are the main structures of a neuron?
Difference between Sensation and Perception
- Sensation: the physical stimulus taken in from the environment and translated into neural signals
- Perception: the organization, identificication, and interpretation of neural signals coming from an initial stimulus
What are the three theories of attention?
Attention as a bottleneck, attention as a mental capcity and resource, attention as a spotlight
Stimuli input → Stimuli Processing → Perception → Prior knowledge, experience, expectations
Bottom-Up Processing
Three ways in which mental activitiy is studied by psychologists and scientists
Human Experimentation, Computer Analogies, and Cognitive Neuoscience
Division of the Brain
Frontal Lobe, Prefrontal Lobe, Occipital Lobe, Parietal Lobe, Tem
What is inverse perception?
The problem of retrieving all of the visual information about the 3D environment (the distal stimulus) using only the more limited information contained in the 2D image (the proximal stimulus) projected on the retina of the eye
What is Saccade?
Shifting attnetion by moving where your gaze is pointed; shifting focus
a stimulus is represented by a pattern of lots of neurons
Groups of neurons are working to encode a piece of information
Population Coding
- William Wundt's area of Psychology
- focuses on how different areas of the mind work and interact with eachother
- The first scientific category of Psychology
Structuralism
What are the two forms of Neural Communication
Electrical potential and chemical
Figure Ground, Closure, Nearness or Proximity, Similarity, Good Continuation, Common Fate, Pragnanz or Simplicity
Gestalt's Grouping Laws
Describing the Shadowing Test by Cherry 1953
Listen to two streams of spoken messages, Each stream is presented separately to one ear, Instructed to attend to one of the stream of spoken messages, Ex. attend to right ear, Ignore and filter out the other stream, Repeat the “attended message” out loud immediately as it is being presented, Used to ensure attention...
- disruption or decreased ability to attend to something in one half of the visual field
- Disengaging attention from the ipsi-lesional side (same side of lesion)
- Shifting attention to contra-lesional side (neglected side of the space)
Hemispatial Neglect
Cons of Introspection
- Requires training to report only immediate experience
- Very subjective in how someone report, making it harder to generalize
- Stimulus error
What is the story of Phineas Gage?
Survived an accident in which a large iron rod was driven completely through his head, destroying much of his brain's left frontal lobe, and for that injury's reported effects on his personality and behavior over the remaining 12 years of his life—effects sufficiently profound that friends saw him (for a time at least) as "no longer Gage"...
How do we recognize objects in the environment (clue: bottom-up driven theories)?
- Template matching theory
- Feature integration theory
- Recognition by component theory
Describe the Stroop effect
Priming: a word activiates its meaning in memory, causes processing to slow down as a the brain has to ignore the "prime memory" as it may contradict true meaning. Ex: the word "Blue" written in red font
Complete separation of processes, damage to one area does not affect one process and vice versa
Double Dissaciation
What jump started the cognitive revolution, and why?
- The invention of the computer
- Researchers thought the brain operated in a similar manner of internal processing to a computer, and could perform more through studies
Describe Structural/Functional MRI, EEG, and ECoG
- captural image of structure/function
- measures how the brain reacts to information and how quickly
- Direct recordings from the brain (opening up the skull) reacting to stimuls, shows when and where
What are the traits of the "What" (Ventral) pathways and the "Where" (Dorsal) pathways ?
What: Identifies the object, Occipital to temporal, Sometimes called perception pathway, Agnosia
Where: Locates the object, occipital to parietal, sometimes called the action pathway, Ataxia
What is Inhabition of Return?
People are slower at responding to stimuli at a previously cued location. People are slower to respond to a change in an area that was recently searched. It encourages orienting towards novel locations and hence might facilitate foraging and other search behaviors. (Attention goes to the most interesting part)