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Cognitive Psychology
• Many of the slides from Robert Cooper, Psychology
Professor, SJSU
Four great mysteries humans face
1) Why is there something
instead of nothing?
This is the domain of physics
and cosmology
1) How did life form?
This is addressed at the boundary between
Chemistry and Biology
3) Why is there so much
diversity of life?
This is the domain of
biology: Evolution
and natural selection
4) What is the basis of human intelligence and
consciousness?
Cognitive psychology and neuroscience
The Brain
The source of cognition
Weighs about 3 pounds
Damage to some parts result
in immediate death or
disability
Damage to other parts seems
to have no effect!
What brain parts are
important to cognition?
How do we discover the role
of each brain part?
Neurons
The brain cells that are responsible
for cognition are neurons
• Networks of neurons
have properties
different from single
cells
• Structure of
connections
determines final
pattern of responses
Output
Myelin is like insulation for the
cell’s axon
Ensures the signal generated by
the action potential is strong
Issues with Myelin related to
disease:
Physical problems: paralysis
Cognitive problems: memory
reasoning, judgement
Feedback
• Feedback in networks “clean up” noisy sensory
information to make it consistent with what our
systems expect
• In a very real way, what we see, hear, taste,
smell, touch and think is biased by our
network’s expectation
• A network’s expectation is established by its
connection synapses
• Excitation--inhibition
Development from infancy to
adulthood
Concept of Development
Cognitive processes
Perception
Attention
Learning and Memory
Language
Problem Solving
Role taking
Erikson’s theory of personality development
Moral Development
Concept of Development
• Cumulative change through the lifespan for which
there is a normative timeline.
• Both qualitative and quantitative changes occur
• Development is a constructive process
• Product of interaction between heredity and
environment (nature/nurture)
Thinking as Information Processing
• Information Processing Model
Memory
Information
Input
Perception
Attention
Processing
Storage
Output
Perception -- The Mechanism for Information
Input
• Naïve Realism
• Why it is wrong
• Dogs, bats, etc. and high pitched sound
• Butterflies and light
• Illusions and why we study them
• Waterfall illusion
• Temperature illusions
• Moon illusions
Waterfall Illusion
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLDKcZB8Eaw
Temperature Illusions
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/experiments/exp/a-hot-illusioninvestigating-temperature-sensation-and-adaptation/
Purple Brown Red Blue Green
Red Brown Purple Green Blue
Attention
• The world contains more information than we can
interpret of process
• The ability to deal with some stimuli and not others
is attention
• Part of attention seems to be due to mental effort
on your part
• Part of attention seems a natural side effect of
mental effort.
• Part of attention seems effortless