Download Cognitive Processes PSY 334

Cognitive Processes
PSY 334
Chapter 1 – The Science of
Cognition
Study Aids
 On the course web page:

Copies of these Powerpoint slides.
 Textbook publisher student website:

http://bcs.worthpublishers.com/anderson7e/
 See pg 5, Chapter 1: How to study
effectively (PQ4R Method).

Pay special attention to the summary
statements highlighted between lines in the
textbook.
Early History
 Empiricism vs nativism (nurture vs
nature)
 Famous empiricists (nurture):

Berkeley, Locke, Hume, Mill
 Famous nativists (nature):
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Descartes, Kant
 Lots of philosophical speculation but no
use of the scientific method to answer
questions.
Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human
Understanding”
 This work was the beginning of British Empiricism.
 Locke sought a set of laws for the human mind, like
Newton’s principles of physics.
 Locke’s system is atomistic and reductionistic.
 Basic elements of mind are ideas.
 Ideas come from experience (Locke rejected
Descartes).
 The “blank slate, page of paper, tablet” comes from
Aristotle, but characterized empiricism.
 Ideas have two sources: sensation & reflection.
Locke & Ideas (Cont.)
 Sensations can be illusory or misleading.
 Ideas are either simple or complex. Simples ideas form
a complex idea in several ways:
 By combining several simple ideas into a single one.
 By seeing the relation between two simple ideas.
 By separating simple ideas from other ideas that go
with them – the process of abstraction.
 Locke’s idea about combination of ideas is analogous to
a chemical compound (from Boyle).
George Berkeley (1685-1753)
 Wrote three essays that radically extended Locke’s
philosophy into subject idealism (immaterialism).
 Berkeley argued that because all knowledge of the
world comes from experience, the very existence of the
external world depends on perception.
 Matter exists because it is perceived – matter does
not exist without a mind.
 The permanence of the world is thus proof of God’s
existence.
 His book on vision was better regarded in his time.
David Hume (1711-1776)
 Hume studied “pneumatic philosophy” (the name for the
science of mental life).
 People are part of nature so should be studied using the
methods of studying nature.
 He differentiated between impressions & ideas:
 When impressions & ideas occur together they
become associated with each other.
 3 kinds of associations: resemblance,
contiguity in time or space, cause-and-effect
relationship.
Rene Descartes
Ideas about the Ideas &
Passions
 Two major classes of ideas exist in the mind:
Innate ideas – inborn, time, space, motion, God.
 Derived ideas – arising from experience, based on
memories of past events (open pores stay open).
 Passions arise from the body and cause actions.
 6 primary passions (wonder, love, hate, desire, joy,
sadness) – other passions are mixtures of these.
 Animals do not possess minds so cannot think, be selfaware or have language – have no feelings.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
 The leading German epistemologist, Kant was a
subjectivist, nativist, rationalist successor to Descartes
and Leibniz.
 Kant wrote “A Critique of Pure Reason” saying that
empiricists forgot to ask how experience is possible.
 Certain intuitions or categories of understanding are
inborn and frame our experiences.
 This knowledge is a priori, whereas experiential
knowledge is a posteriori (known afterward).
 3 categories of mind: cognition, affection, conation.
Kant’s View of A Priori
Knowledge
 Concepts of space and time.
 Other intuitions, including cause and effect, reciprocity,
reality, existence and necessity.
 Higher faculties of reasoning are understanding,
judgment, reason.
 True science must begin with concepts established a
priori by reason alone and deal with observable objects
that can be located in time and space.
 Psychology lacks this so it cannot be a science.
Scientific Psychology
 Scientific study began in 1879:
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Structuralism – Wundt, Titchener and
systematic, analytic introspection.
Functionalism -- William James’ armchair
introspection.
 Behaviorism (1920):
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Thorndike – consciousness as excess
baggage.
Watson – consciousness as superstition.
Early Mentalists
 Gestalt psychologists (German):
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Wertheimer, Koffka, Kohler
 Critics of behaviorism:
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Tolman
 European psychologists:
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Bartlett – early memory researcher
Luria
Piaget
Mind for Behaviorists
Input:
Sensation
Output:
Behavior
What laws describe the relationship
between input and output?
Mind for Cognitive Theorists
Mental
Representations:
Input:
Sensation
Goals, Expectations,
Cognitive Maps
Processes
What happens inside the “box” to
produce the observed behavior?
Output:
Behavior
Three Important Influences
 Human performance studies in WWII –
information needed to train military.
 Artificial intelligence – thinking about
how machines accomplish things leads
to more analytical thinking about how
humans do.
 Linguistics – behaviorist principles could
not account for the complexities of
language use.
Pioneers of Cognitive
Psychology
 Information theory
 Donald Broadbent
 Artificial Intelligence
 Newell & Simon
 Linguistics
 Chomsky – new ways of analyzing language
 Miller -- psycholinguistics
 Neisser’s book “Cognitive Psychology”
Cognitive Science
 Cognitive psychology -- human thinking.
 Cognitive science studies both human
and machine thinking (artificial
intelligence).

Cognitive science includes philosophy and
neuroscience as well as psychology.
 Non-human (artificial) intelligence:


http://alice.pandorabots.com/
http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~asaygin/tt/ttest.html#talktothem
Information Processing
 The dominant paradigm
(approach) today in cognitive
psychology.
 A computer metaphor is used to
conceptualize mental activity:

Mental processes operate upon
mental representations
 “Ops

on Reps”
Flowcharted steps
A Functional Approach
 Mental activity is described in functional
terms.
 Brain location, brain processes and
neural representation are ignored.
How are Models Tested?
 Because no direct observation of mental
processes is possible, behavior is
studied.
 Measurement of response time is used
to deduce the steps performed.
Sternberg’s Paradigm:
397
Was “9” a part of this number?
9 would be a positive probe (target)
6 would be a negative probe (foil)
Sternberg’s Flowchart (Model)
Possibilities
 People look at the numbers one at a
time in sequence, stopping when they
get the answer.
 People look at the numbers one at a
time in sequence but continue until the
end before giving a response.
 People look at all three of the numbers
at once, responding when they
recognize the target number in the set.
What do people do?
If people looked at a set as a single
object, the data would be different.
Foil and target times
would be different if
people stopped
searching when they
found the correct
answer.
Concerns about Cognitive
Models
 Relevance – do lab-task processes
operate in the same manner in real life?
 Sufficiency – can simple theories explain
complex processes?

Cognitive architectures, computer models
 Necessity – does the mind actually work
as described by specific theories?

Cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive Neuroscience
 Pages 12-30 review basic concepts
about the brain.

If you have not taken PSY 210 and find
this material confusing, come see me.
 New methods permit study of normal
human functioning in more complex
tasks:


EEG
Imaging techniques – PET & fMRI
Review brain regions and localization
of function in the brain.
Parts of Neuron
Kinds of Neurons
Action Potential Demo
 http://outreach.mcb.harvard.edu/animati
ons/actionpotential.swf
EEG measures patterns of
brain activity.
Functional MRI (fMRI)
An fMRI scan
showing regions of
activation in
orange, including
the primary visual
cortex (V1, BA17).
Autism Affects Semantic
Processing of Abstract Words
Using FMRI to Confirm a Model
 BOLD – Blood Oxygen Level Dependent
response
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Measured in 3 different areas of brain: motor,
parietal region, prefrontal region.
Measured and plotted every 1.2 sec.
 Peaks in BOLD graph show when an area
of the brain was active (4-5 sec delay).
 Different components to a task can be
independently tracked.
The Task
Step 0 Step 1
Step 2
Measured in Three Areas
Motor
Prefrontal
Parietal
Notice that the peaks of
activity for each step occur in
the same order as the steps
do when solving the problem.
Other Approaches to Cognitive
Psychology
 Connectionism (neural net models) –
can higher level functions be
accomplished by connected neurons?
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Parallel distributed processing (PDP) -Rumelhart & McClelland
 Situated cognition – the ecological
approach
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Gibson’s affordances
Do we explain cognition in terms of the
external world or internal mind?