Cognitive Psychology

evidence for phonological store - WMM

BADDLEY PRESENTED 4 LISTS WITH WORDS THAT SOUND THE SAME AND ALSO SOME WORDS THAT WERE SEMANTIC SIMILIAR. pp had to recall them results shown that there was a large effect on phonological similaritity whilst there was no effect on semantic which shows the different components

explain the central exectuive, phonological store

Central executive - A hypothetical attention-controlling system involved in the coordination of the visuo-spatial sketchpad and phonological store. phonological store - auditory information.

what does cognitive psychology study?

Cognitive Psychology studies the scientific mental processes. So, it does not study/observe behaviour. Questions that tend to rise from cognitive psychologists is what goes through someone's mind that causes behaviour. Behaviour is not irrelevant but it is used to make inferences about mental processes.

how do we research specific damages in the brain?

DISSOACIATIONS are an experimental method in neuropsychology. There are two types of disassociations. Single dissaciation - we use an experimental condition and a control group. the experimental person would have an injury to a specific location. they will try to identify what they can do and what tehy cant do e.g. if they can comprehend speech and if they can produce speech. then for the control group they would have someone who can do both tasks. DOUBLE DISSOCIATION - this is a stronger experimental method. they use two participants with two different problems and they are able to conclusively demonstrate the two functions are localized in different areas of the brain

desrcibe each component in atkinson and shiffrins memory model

Sensory memory - stimulis from outside enters, they dont last long unless you focus on it. if focused they will go to the... SHORT TERM MEMORY - CAPACITY 7+-2, information lasts about 30 seconds. if not rehearsed then it will be forgotten LTM - for information to reach the LTM then the process of rehearsal maintenance needs to be done and it needs to be encoded. LTM has unlimited capacity and its there permantly

explain treisman attenenuation theory - attention and describe a research study

EARLY SELECTION THEORY it describes that information is not filtered out but weakened and deemphasized. however due to the limited capacity it does not reach the STM study: dichotic listening task where they were asked to shadow one message and tap when they heard the target word. results had shown a higher percentage rate for the detection in shadowed ear than not.

what is event related potentials?

EEG typically used to measure ERPS. its an experimental psychology. the PP needs to enageg in an acitivity to see where the brain activity occurs.

structalism VS functionalism

Structuralism - in order to understand what we do; we must understand the structure of the mind by analysing its consistent components. - Wilhelm Wundt. The methods used are introspection - looking inward and reporting on pieces of information passing through consciousness ) e.g. simple sensations ,images, feelings) Functionalism - in order to understand what we do; we must understand of the functions of the mind rather than its content.- William James. Methods include observations and experiments to understand the functions/purpose of the mind. E.g. understanding why people feel fear rather than what is it like to feel fear ( structuralism). both theories are no longer used today

sir goldfrey disgareed with Spearmans Intelligence theory. What did he say? what did thurstone also say

He believed that there are other factors such as motivation. you can be intelligent but you must have the motivation to apply it and express their intelligence

what study was used to explain top down processing

LLOYD JONES,2005 participants were shown a set of three fruits. 2 were its normal colour whilst a banan was coloured pink. The participants were asked to state the fruit and the colour out loud. the second condition consisted of the same task however, 2 fruits had unconventional colours, but the banana was the same and the 3rd fruit was its natural colour. results had shown, the third fruit ( plum) was stated the fastest, the banana was next due to it being the same colour but the strawberry was shown as red then blue which participants took the longest to state, This demonstrates the effects of mental representations on our behaviour and is evidence for mental processes to occur, which is in line with what cognitive psychology is trying to explain.

limitations for atkinson and shiffrins STM store

Limitation - The unitary STM is limited in explaining the mental processes required to retain items in STM and transfer these into LTM. It suggests there is one store ( unitary STM) which takes information from any form of sensations and really does not tell you much about the mental processes.

what is MRI and what are the saftey considerations?

Magnetic resonance imaging. it measures the brain structure and is mainly used for clinical aspects. Yo can measure the size and the volume and see the grey and white matter. it is useful to detect developmental changes as wel as lesions in the brain - saftey considerations? - pacemakers and metal implants not allowed including no dental work and even old tattoos.

where does cognitive psychology origniate from?

The origins of cognitive psychology dates far back to the Greek Philosophy. Two Greek Philosophers, Plato and his student Aristotle have profoundly affected modern thinking in cognitive psychology and beyond. Plato and Aristotle differed in their view of nature of perceived reality. These views reflect the different approaches taken by philosophy and physiology.

those who perform better on reasoning tasks - what does their brain show through a PET SCAN?

They tend ot show less blood flow and glucose uptake. greater neural activity is associated with higher IQ

what study was a turning point from behaviourism to cognitive psychology?

McNamara et al (1956) - conclusively realised that it needs a congitive explanation to explain all findings. Experiment by McNamara et al. (1956): how quickly rats would learn the location of a t maze. The rat at the bottom of the maze and there was a reward on the left side of the T. How long will it take for the rat to learn where the food is located. At first, they allowed the rat to interact with the environment by themselves to. Eventually they put the rat in a cart and directed it to the right direction and then to the left direction. The behaviourist predicated that the rats who interacted with the environment with themselves were able to identify where the food was. The results showed both conditions were useful. This needs a cognitive explanation. They believed the rats had a cognitive map. This overall showed that you can hold mental representations which increased their learning just as much as stimuli/response chain.

what is fMRI

Measure of brain function- this looks at the brain activity - blood oxygen level development they tend to use this scanner when the participant is carrying out a task. it has good spatial resolution but poor temporal resolution due to the slow blood flow however it is good to use when needing to look further into the brain

Perceptual Load Theory

We can either do early or late selection, it depends on the cognitive load of the task. Low load tasks allow us to do late selection while high load tasks require most of our resources and force us to use early selection. perceptual load can enhance attention

what is a mental representation

a representation (schema) implemented in the brain to support cognition. // internal image a mental representation = it an entity X represents an entity Y after the process of entity P ( mental transformation) - week 1 check the diagram.

late selection theory

a theory of attention proposed by Deutsch and Deutsch in which selection occurs at the response stage, after all incoming stimuli have been processed for meaning. he believes all information is fully analyzed and due to limited capacity there are some info that is lost however, there is evidence which contradicts the late selection theory

Computational approach to cognition

aims to explain how a physical system produces flexible intentional behaviour in reation to the environment via improverish sensations 1. Mental representations work computationally (Y transformed into X via P). 2. Behavioural experiments used to understand these representations based on behaviour (output). 3. Functional 'box and arrow' models describe mental representations.

what are meant by these terms when we process information? serial parallel bottom up top down

are different ways in which we process information • Serial: One process is completed before the start of another one. (typically oversimplified). For example, multi-tasking. Some people struggle to multitask and prefer to take a serial process which allows the individual to complete the tasks one at the time. • Parallel: Multiple processes are completed simultaneously (typically used and effective in highly practiced tasks).However, in other instances people can multitask. • Bottom up: Processing that is directly influenced by environmental stimuli. Can happen when it the environment affects your body. E.g. touching some thing hot leads to your body responding to it by taking your body away. • Top down: Processing that is influenced by the individual's mental representation (previous knowledge and expectations). E.g. if I told you in everything in this room is coloured red, then your mind will be influenced to see red.

what is focused attention

attending to one source of info and ignoring every other stimuli

what is the difference between behaviourism and cognitive psychology?

behaviourism follows this stimuli/response chain. ignoring the 'black box' AKA the brain. Skinner mentioned that the brain is too complex to study. on the other hand cognitive psychology studies the cognitions/mental representations directly and doesnt observe behaviour. however use behaviour as inferences.

What is the recency effect?

better recall for items at the END OF THE LIST. recency effect - evidence that STM is qualitatively differnt kind of memory store than LTM

what are cognitive neuro science basic methods for studying the brain?

brain damaged patients - this is through cognitive neuropsychology which is a traditional method brain imaging techniques - cognitive neuroscience. this is a more modern brain imagining technique using fMRI and EEG scans.

What are Broca's and Wernicke's areas?

broca deals with speech production whilst wernickes area deals with speech comprehension.

what is chunking in memory?

clustering individual elements into groups  e.g. 07 566 247 967 you break the phone number up to remember it

What is visual transduction?

conversion of light to neural signals by visual receptors

what is sensory coding?- vision

converting important features of the environment into neural messages understood by the brain. also known as TRANSDUCTION Our senses "boil down" floods of information into a stream of useful data.eseentially when we are looking our vision only fucoses on certain and relevant data. It uses sensory coding, it converts important features of the data.

anthrolopolocial metaphor

definition of intelligence which goes beyond society, and it looks at culture. culture is central to defining to what is intelligent. is someone who is smart and successful in one culture going to be smart and successful in anothe?

what are the three perceptual systems and describe them

extroception - perception of external stimuli proprioception - perception of our body and limbs,including their location in space;movement interoceoption - perception of internal bodily signal such as our heartrate,respiration functions. this is opposite to exteroception.

attention has 2 components what are they?

focused attention and divided attention

what are sperlings experiments on memory

he presented 12 letters briefly. results showed that pps only remembered 3-5 letters which is quite a lot! he akcnowledged the serial affect - when you show people a list of words they will end up remembering the ones at the beginning and the end. people will struggle to remember the ones in the middle.

episodic buffer

how information in stm makes it to ltm. it intergrates information in mutiple formats e.g. spatial and verbal

what is meant by mental processes and what metaphor is it usually explained by

informational processing. the brain is used as a computer metaphor. the input of information is converted into a mental code. then the internal mechanisms use this code to figure out a response which leads to an output/behaviour

passive attention

involuntary and stimulus directed attention

what is atkison and shiffrins memory model?

it is a basic model which shows how memory is processed in the brain.

what does epsistemology mean

it means the theory of knowledge and it investigates the origin of nature and the limits of human knowledge. empricism is a form of epistemology

what is the broadbents filter theory for attention

processing information occurs early in processing based on physicaly characteristics. all sitmulis go through the sensory register but then there is a selection filter this is where there is a limited capacity ( STM) and the brain has to choose the important things. such as physical prperprties

intelligence - mapping out different abilities

rather than looking at the lumps and bumps of people, they looked at the bility factors of an individual. so if they are good at memory they may have a large vocab and may learn faster

primacy effect and LTM

rehearsed items have a better chance of being stored in LTM

What is perceptual constancy?

seeing objects the same size, even if the retina changes. there is always a size constanty

what are sensations and perceptions?

sensation is the stimulation of sensory receptors and transmission of sensory information to the CNS - this is a physioiological state perception- a mental process by which sensations are organised and interpreted to form a mental representation of the world - this is a psychological state

jean piaget - 4 stages of development of knowledge and intelligence

sensory motor - refining innate reflexes preoperational stage - language acquisition concrete operational - conservation formal operational stage - systematic problem solving skills

describe the senses threshold - light

so what is the minmum stimulation necessary to detect a particular stimulus. in other words how much light do we need to detect light? how much light does a lifeguard need to save someone? our thresholds are different to one another. e.g. our hearing threshold will be different to a dog/cat etc. this can have implications for mental health in ways that may we ignore other peoples thresholds and sensitivity

two theories for visual attention and describe study

space based theory - we move our attention to parts of the visual field ( SPOTLIGHT AND ZOOM LENS METAPHOR) object based theory - we move our attentnion to objects participants were asked to look at a photo of a house/man if they PP saw both they had spaced based attention if they only saw one of them then they would have object based metaphor

spearmans 'g' - intelligence

spearman believed that specigic abilities do not capture essence of intelligence. instead he prposed 'g' which represents a single mental energy. you need mental energy to peform well in all tests

Visuo-spatial sketchpad (VSS)

sub division of WMM - thinking of things e.g. how many windows do you have at home

What is sensory adaptation?

tendency of our sensory cells to become less responsive to a stimulus that doesnt change. e.g. when we wear clothes we dont constantly feel it and our neurons dont constantly send signals to our brain. otherwise it would drive us insane.

atkinson and shiffrin had been critiqued for their memory model and therefore BADDLEY created WORKING MEMORY MODEL which has mutiple components

the WMM focuses on STM the idea there is a central executive, phonological loop,visual spatial pad and the episodic buffer A Multi Component Model

what are the basic mechanisms - how do we get a picture of a MRI scan?

the brain is composed of 75% of hydrogen. Hygroden atoms have magnetic properties and it works well with an MRI scan. the magnetic field inside the MRI scanner aligns all hydrogen atoms in the same direction. the person with the coil around the head then sends a radiofrequency pulse for a short time which disrupts the alignment. the RF pulse turns off and the hydrogen atoms bounce back releasing energy. the energy is released to the computer and the computer turns it to an image.

What is Gestalt psychology?

the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. it had a holisitic perspective. We must look at things as a whole rather than seperated and in bits. If we look at things seperatly then it becomes more complicated. it paved away for cognitive psychology

does having a large head size correlate with intelligence?

there is a weak positive correlation in experiments to suggest this. however, there are contradicting arguments to suggest otherwise. for example, albert einstens brain was seen to be smaller than an average. however, Taxi London study suggests wother wise as they have a larger hippocampus and better navigation skills

describe the ROD and CONE in the retina.

they are important PHOTOCELLS.the rod picks up the light and helps us distinguish between light and dark. there are CONES which are sensitive to colour. You need LIGHT to see the COLOUR. the cone acts only when the rod acts.

why are mental representations of a tiger thought differently in everyone?

they are subjectively characterised from ambiguous sensory information abou the world that is stored in our brains. someone could have a mental representation of a realistic tiger, someone could think of a black and white tiger, whilst others could have a mental representation of a cartoon tiger

what did they find out about dichotic listening?

they found that people were able to only attend to one ear, however they were only able to pick up mainly physical characteristics. they were not able to remember the content of the unattended ear. this meant that the unattended information did not reach the LTM and that our memory works like a bottleneck but does it lose the information early or after?

Brain stimulation - (TMS) transcranial magnetic stimulation what are the strengths and limitations

this is a method for producing temporary focal brain " lesion" - disruption via head coil. it is a way to be able to disable parts of the brain temporarily + results speak to causual relationships between brain function and behaviour +non invasive - may cause discomfort -only affects cortical areas.

what is active attention

this is a voluntary form of attention which is goal directed

EEG - electroencephalography scan. what does it do???

this is not an imaging technique but it is a physiological brain technique. - measure of the brain function, the basic mechanisms consiist of recording electrical activity from small electrodes place on the skull, it mainly looks at the neurons activity. also linked with ERP

can we elimante the recency effect?

usually not. but if you introduce a short delay when need to recall it can eleimante the recency effect completely. this means the recency effect mainly works on STM

what five senses can we use to percieve the external world

vision hearing smell taste touch

what is our most dominating sense?

vision - vision overrides any other sensory

Focused visual attention

vision is our most dominating sense.

What is the primacy effect?

when we try to memorise the first couple items we try to rehearse them which means we can remember them more. REMEMBER THE FIRST COUPLE WORDS FIRST

cognitive neuropsychology strengths and limitations

+ influential in informing theories of language and memory through double dissociations + allows establishing a causual realtionship between impaired brain areas and behaviours - individual differences- some people might not speak much due to their personalities

strengths and limitations for MRI and fMRI

+ noninvasive technique + high spatial resolution + ability to measure brain structure and mental activity - not everyone can use it due to saftey issues -VERY EXPENSIVE

what are the strengths and limtitations for experimental methods

+ well controlled, good internal validity + results provide insights into HOW and WHY people process information in certain ways - good for educational settings + results have let to influential theories for mental activity - ecological validity- many studies tend to be remembering words such as the stroop test. this critiued because you cannot infer someone not passing a test when it is not a day to day task. - demand characteristics - indirect measures - unable to look inside the black box

strengths and limitations for EEG

+high temporal resolution +safe and low cost - poor spatial resolution - sensitive to background noise

How does cognitive psychology study mental processes?

Relies heavily on experiments. they use systematic manipulations which influence mental processors. and measure it through behavioural measurements

geographical metaphor - attention how did francis map out the human mind

16th century francis gall looked at the lumps and bumps on the head. the skull takes place of the brain, the surface of the skull can beread as an accurate index of psychological attitudes and tendecies

what are the factors that influence primacy?

- Presentation rate: Slower presentation enhances ability to recall items. - if the word was shown longer then you would remember easily - Word frequency: More frequently encountered (familiar) words are easier to recall. - Imageability: Words that are easier to visualize are easier to recall (concrete vs abstract words). - easy to visualize and easier to recall later. E.g. abstract and concrete words. - Age: Younger adults remember more than children/elderly. - Physiological state: Drugs such as marijuana and alcohol impair memory performance. Even time of day can affect their memory.

wha

1) aphasias - disorder of language. 2) agnosias - disorders of perception 3)apraxias - disorders of movement. they are able to talk and see but are unable to move.

describe how we see colors - anatomy

1) we perceive information from the eye through the optiic nerve and it then reaches the lateral geniculate nucleus and reaches the visual cortex ( summary) 2) the light enters thes through the pupil and the iris regulate the size of the pupil. the iris is a muscle which dialect the pupil depending on light exposure. 3)the light reaches the retina which is the back of the eye. any information receieved here is seen upside down. it projects it on the FOVEA which sees things in great detail. there is also a blind spot, anything that falls in here is not percieved

word length - memory baddly study

5 words were represented in order list one started off with simple words whilst the last list started off with longer words with more syllables. results shown that the first list was much easier to recall

divided attention

multitasking and focusing on different things

mutiple factor theories - intelligence and hieracrchal theory

mutiple factor theories believes that people can have different strengths and waeaknesses across mutiple abilities. Guildford argued there could be up 180 different factors hierarchal theory proposes the idea that there are 9 important factors that compromise intelligence. he believed Crystallised and fluid abilities were one of the most important

dichotic listening

participants are exposed to two verbal messages simultaneously and are required to answer questions posed in only one of the messages

baddley and hitch dual task study

particpants were asked to remember strings of digits whilst performing a reasoning task. results - reasoning time increased with digit load - error rate does not increase at all - you can simulataneously work with other acitvites