BIOL 350 Chapter 1-13: Chapter 1-13: PSYC 221 Textbook Notes from 4th Edition
2 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Chapter 1 - Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
• Donders had first cognitive psychology experiment.
• Wundt opened the first laboratory of scientific psychology.
o Structuralism.
o Periodic table of the mind.
o Did this with analytic introspection.
• Ebbinghaus and the savings curve to measure forgetting.
o Quantitative methods of mental processes.
• James reported observations from his own experiences.
o First psychology textbook; some observations still valid today.
• Chomsky and innate language skills.
• 1950s is cognitive revolution.
• McCarthy was the first one to look at artificial intelligence.
• Newell and Simon created the logic theorist.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
• Beilcok talked about chocking under pressure and related this to working memory.
o The advantage HWM subjects have vanish under high load conditions.
o More likely to choke under high pressure.
Chapter 2 - Cognitive Neuroscience
• Doing both behavioural and physiological experiments - Levels of analysis.
• Used to think that the nerve net was continuous back in the day.
o Neural doctrine then came from Ramon y Cajal.
• The Principle of Neural Representation: Everything a person experiences is based not on direct
contact with stimuli, but on representations in the person's nervous system.
• Feature neurons respond to specific stimulus features such as orientation, movement, and
length.
• Population coding is different patterns of firing. Seems more plausible than specificity coding
(one neuron for each face).
o However, sparse coding occurs when small groups of neurons are involved.
• Broca's area in frontal lobe, Wernicke's area in temporal lobe.
o Showed localization of function.
• Double Dissociation: Occurs if damage to one area of the brain causes function A to be absent
whilst function B is present, and damage to another area causes function B to be absent whilst
function A is present.
• Fusiform face area is in the fusiform gyrus under the temporal lobe.
• Indoor and outdoor scenes activate the parahippocampal place area (PPA).
• Extrastriate body area (EBA) is activated by pictures of bodies and parts of bodies (but not by
faces).
• Huth and other showed with brain imaging that voxels are activated for different things and
they were able to show locations on the brain where the indicated categories are most likely
to activate the brain.
• Distributed Representation: The idea that specific cognitive functions activate many areas of
the brain.
o Goes with localization - rolling red ball.
• Diffusor tensor imaging (DTI) measures how water diffuses along the length of nerve fibres -
nerve tracts determined.
• Adrian, who recorded the first signals from single neurons, determined that action potentials
remain the same size as they travel down an axon and that increasing stimulus intensity
increases the rate of nerve firing.
• The structures that create the pain matrix are, together, an example of the neural network.
Chapter 3 - Perception (pgs. 51-84)
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
• Inverse Projection Problem: The task of determining the object responsible for a particular
image on the retina. It involves starting with the retinal image and extending rays out of the
eye.
• Computers also struggle with viewpoint invariance.
• Need both bottom up and top down processing to perceive an image.
• Top down:
o Perceiving objects - multiple personalities of a blob.
o Hearing words in a sentence - speech segmentation.
o Experiencing pain - used to be direct pathway model, but evidence from war and
placebo effect show that it might be due to attention or expectations.
• Hemholtz's Theory of Unconscious Inference:
o Realized that the image on the retina is ambiguous - Likelihood principle came about
where we perceive the object which is most likely to have caused the pattern of stimuli
we have received.
• Judgement by unconscious inference.
• The Gestalt Principles of Organization:
o Originated from Wundt's structuralism - they REJECTED this.
• Apparent movement could not be explained by this - sensations don't explain this
and the whole is different from the sum of its parts. Perceptual organization came
from this saying.
o Principles:
• Good continuation.
• Pragnaz: Every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way that the resulting structure is
as simple as possible.
• Similarity: Similar things appear grouped together.
• Etc.
o Max Wertheimer described these principles as 'intrinsic laws'.
• Modern perceptual psychologists have introduced the idea that perception is influenced by
our knowledge of regularities in the environment.
o Physical regularities - light from above assumption.
o Semantic regularities - scene schema - Stephen Palmer (kitchen scene then flashing a
loaf of bread, then mailbox and drum).
• Bayesian Inference determined by prior probability and the extent to which the available
evidence is consistent with the outcome (likelihood).
o E.g. Mary and the cold, heartburn, or lung disease diagnosis of her friend.
o This reinstates Helmholtz's idea - that what is most likely to have created the stimulation
we have received - in terms of probabilities.
• Four conceptions of object perception:
o Helmholtz's unconscious inference.
o Gestalt Laws of Organization.
o Regularities in the environment.
o Bayesian inference (mathematical procedure).
o Gestalt is different because it sees the perceptions as being more hardwired.
• Why are there more neurons that respond to horizontals and verticals? - maybe theory of
natural selection.
o Influenced a lot by experience-dependent plasticity.
• Kittens raised only seeing verticals ignored horizontals.
• Greebles vs. faces.
▪ Showed that neurons in the FFA are so good at responding to faces because
they've seen so much of them all their lives.
• The interaction between perceiving and taking action:
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
