Search for notes by fellow students, in your own course and all over the country.
Browse our notes for titles which look like what you need, you can preview any of the notes via a sample of the contents. After you're happy these are the notes you're after simply pop them into your shopping cart.
Title: Cognitive Psychology
Description: Topics covered include visual processing and attention, semantic memory, episodic memory, concepts and categories, word recognition and reading, language production, thinking and reasoning, and cognitive neuropsychology
Description: Topics covered include visual processing and attention, semantic memory, episodic memory, concepts and categories, word recognition and reading, language production, thinking and reasoning, and cognitive neuropsychology
Document Preview
Extracts from the notes are below, to see the PDF you'll receive please use the links above
STUDY NOTES FINAL EXAM COGNITION
Week 6 Visual Processing
...
Our visual system takes in an
abundance of information and so our brain has developed mechanisms by which to filter the
information
...
* Selective visual information processing and eye movements
...
What we see, and what the brain receives, are two different
things
...
Visual attention illuminates a small part of the visual space around
you, where little can be seen outside of this ‘spotlight’, and it can be redirected flexibly to
focus on any object of interest
...
- Cortical filtering; fine details are only represented in central vision
-‐ Guided filtering; using eye movements, fine details are only represented in the
central vision and eye movements control where we are looking
...
We can measure eye movements using
camera-‐based eye trackers, which show saccades (small, rapid eye movements), and fixations
(pauses in eye movement indicating where a person is attending – approx
...
)
But what determines where we look? Mechanisms may be involuntary or voluntary:
-‐ Involuntary: stimulus salience (areas of stimuli that attract attention due to their
properties)
...
Colour, contrast, and
orientation are all relevant properties
...
Involuntary mechanisms are passive observation
...
Task demands can override stimulus
saliency; eye movements and fixations are closely linked to the action a person is about to
take
...
We do this through 3 types of attention:
1)
...
Being predated by a lion)
...
Endogenous attention: voluntary/task orientated; guided by top-‐down visual
signals, slow shifts in attention that are goal orientated; attention is given to a spatial location
anticipation (eg
...
3)
...
Attention and eye movements, whilst related, are not the same thing
...
Therefore, attending to something is not necessarily looking at it
...
Similarly, seeing something does not necessarily equal
attending to it
...
An experiment by Posner et al
...
This efficient processing
gives us better acuity, better recognition performance etc
...
Spatial visual
attention refers to how we allocate attention and locate objects or other information in
complex arrays or scenes
...
Our ease of search for a particular object is dependant upon conjunctions of features
...
This is because of conjunction of features
...
Basic features that stand out in displays can be colour, orientation, curvature, vernier offset
(misaligned), size, motion, shape, depth, and gloss
...
Binding is the issue of
integrating different kinds of information during visual perception
...
Visual processing of an object occurs in
widely distributed areas of the brain and proceeds through several stages, so that numerous
interactions among brain areas are involved
...
Colour, orientation) are
processed in parallel by pre-‐attentive processing, then focused attention is required to bind
features together, creating a percept
...
Illusory
conjunctions occur when features that should be associated with an object become
incorrectly associated with another
...
The task was to report numbers
followed by shapes detected
...
Asking observers
to focus on the target objects eliminated this effect
...
Patients show lack of focused attention and more incorrect
combinations of features
...
Attention moves across the visual field highlighting locations in space,
where the spotlight can scale in size
...
Object-based attention is attention directed towards an entire object, which can include
colour, shape etc
...
A study conducted by Egly et al
...
* Attention and the brain
Studies in monkeys where they were required to respond either to a fixated light or a
peripheral light, recorded neurons in the parietal lobe that responded when the monkey
attended to the peripheral light, but poorly when the monkey was not attending to it
...
Attentional enhancement is greater in higher visual areas visual hierarchy
Synchrony hypothesis dictates that neurons firing in response to the same object
synchronise with each other
...
* Perception without attention
Experiments by Li et al
...
* Attention and autism
A major symptom of autism is withdrawal from contact with people
...
An experiment by Klin et al
...
It showed that control (non-‐autistic) subjects looked at the
eyes of actors to determine emotional state, and looked in the direction a person pointed and
then at the face of the person who should reply
...
Week 7 Semantic Memory
Semantic memory is general knowledge that most people in your community would know; it
is not personal or specific
...
There is no
spatial or temporal context
...
Impairment of semantic
memory leads to an inability to comprehend meaning of words or pictures or express ideas,
eg
...
* Experiments on semantic memory organisation
Sentence verification task measures reaction time of subjects answering T/F to a question,
for example, A canary is a bird true or false
...
Sentence types can be set inclusion (a whale is a fruit) or property
attribute (a whale has seeds)
...
Data can be explained by many theories with very different
assumptions, and how do we know if the data reflects the structure of semantic memory, or
the task process? Further, is recognition of word meanings the same as object recognition?
Network models divides concepts up into nodes, where the relationship between concepts
are represented by links
* Network models
There are 3 types of network models:
1)
...
Much like a
phylogeny model, it is a computational model of semantic memory
...
Property attribute is stored nonredundantly at
the highest most general level
...
Beethoven has knees, Beethoven is human Humans have
knees
...
Some challenges to this model are made by Conrad (1972) who argued that RT data are better
explained in terms of frequency of co-‐occurrence of concept and property rather than levels
...
Another problem with the model is that RT did not always
mirror hierarchical relationship
...
It
displays within-‐category typicality effects, for example, a canary is a bird < an ostrich is a bird
...
2)
...
Concepts are organised
non-‐hierarchically, rather, links vary in associative strength/accessibility (which explains
typicality effect and lack of hierarchical effect)
...
Whenever a person sees,
hears, or thinks about a concept, the appropriate node in semantic memory is activated
...
The semantic priming effect is the finding that word identification is facilitated when there
is priming by a semantically related word
...
3)
...
It is a 2-‐stage process: first you determine the similarity of characteristics and decide
true or false (typicality effect)
...
In order to do this, we have defining and
characteristic features
...
Characteristic
features refer to elements usually found or inherent to category members but not necessarily
found in all, for example, ‘birds fly’ is characteristic because not all birds can fly (penguins)
...
For example, a true statement would be ‘A robin is a bird’ and a loose statement
would be ‘A bat is a bird because it can fly’
...
1
...
Bats have wings, but don’t have feathers and aren’t mammals
bats are not birds
...
This shows a dramatic and selective erosion of conceptual knowledge
...
non-‐living things)
...
There can be even
more category-‐specific impairment, such as preserved knowledge of body parts together with
impairment of living things, or a preserved knowledge about non-‐living things together with
impaired knowledge about musical instruments
...
He had intact language, normal verbal and performance IQ, but impaired visual
identification
...
especially an impaired knowledge of
living things and preserved knowledge of non-‐living things, although had more specific
impairments such as not being able to identify musical instruments
...
The organisation of concepts in the brain can be described by two different theories:
1)
...
Living things are distinguished from
each other on the basis of perceptual (visual) properties eg
...
Non-‐living things are distinguished from each other on
the basis of functional properties eg
...
This theory explains more common impairments with living things in terms of visual
properties being more frequent
...
2)
...
Different object properties are stored in different
brain areas
...
Semantic dementia patients show impairment in colour
recognition
...
They also displayed delayed-‐copy drawing; they draw
general properties (eg
...
Hubs provide us with an efficient way of integrating our knowledge of any given concept
...
Concept hubs are stored in the anterior temporal lobes, as
degeneration of ATL is evident in semantic dementia patients
...
* Why are categories useful?
Categories allow us to group similar concepts, generalise, and predict new concepts
...
They serve to cut down
the diversity of objects and events that must be dealt with uniquely by an organism of limited
capacity
...
Natural categories are those
that occur in natural language, for example, fruit, animal, tool, furniture, clothing etc
...
With artificial
category, features may be combined arbitrarily so there is no prior knowledge about what the
concept might be
...
For example, if a category member has the feature ‘has feathers’ it is also
likely to have the feature ‘has a beak’ but not the feature ‘has petals’
...
Characteristics of natural categories are fuzzy sets (ill-‐defined boundaries), family
resemblance, and internal structure (typicality and family resemblance)
...
For example, a study conducted
by McClosky & Glucksberg 1978 showed that subjects repeatedly linked chair and furniture as
a category pair, but there was disagreement about bookend and furniture being a category
...
Artificial categories do not have fuzzy sets;
either they are part of the category or they are not
...
Family resemblance score represents how much a feature has in
common with members of a family
...
Orange and apple were rated highly, but then
avocado and tomato were rated poorly
...
For example, a family resemblance score for swallow/robin/penguin shows
that there is greater sharing of attributes between swallow and robin than between either and
penguin, and therefore a greater FRS
...
A prototype is a member of a category having the highest family
resemblance scores
...
A category is therefore centred around a
prototype
...
For
example
Furniture
Superordinate
Chair
desk
lamp
basic-‐level
Armchair
office chair
subordinate
Basic-‐level category is the best balance between informativeness and distinctiveness; the
most inclusive level at which there are attributes common to many members of the category,
and few attributes that occur in other categories
...
The chair broke as opposed to the furniture broke), it is learned
early by children, and expressed economically (eg
...
)
* How do people categorise?
People categorise based on similarity-‐based views (prototype, exemplar view) and theory
(knowledge) based view
...
Any new instance is then
compared to the prototype
...
it may belong to based on commonalities
...
The exemplar view and prototype view make similar predictions
for natural categories due to the internal structure of natural categories
...
The theory/knowledge
based view suggests that categorisation is based on a theory developed from instances,
unlike the other two views, which assume categorisation is based on similarity
...
The reason for this phenomenon is that pizzas vary in size, whereas
20-‐cent coins do not
...
Week 9 Word Recognition and Reading
...
Writing was invented only
about 5400 years ago
...
About 10% of adults in Aus
...
However, reading is highly automatic
...
Reading
is an important skill
...
Reading is a highly skilled behaviour, and is largely automatic
...
* Research methods in reading research
There are a umber of ways in which to research reading ability
...
Indirect measures of automaticity include interference
tasks (stroop effect) and priming
...
Word identification is fairly automatic, and automatic processes are obligatory/unavoidable
...
Priming is an implicit memory effect in which exposure to one stimulus influences a response
to another stimulus
...
For example, if a person reads a list of words including the word table, and is later
asked to complete a word starting with tab, the probability that he or she will answer table is
greater than if they are not primed
...
* Word recognition
The Interactive Activation model (McClelland & Rumelhart 1981) is the basis of almost all
models of reading
...
This is the feature level
...
Other
word units are inhibited
...
Activated word units increase the level of
activation in the letter-‐level units for the letters forming that word
...
Slot coding is one of the problems with the IAM
...
This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself, but the
word as a whole
...
So the slot-‐code assumption of the IAM wrongly
predicts similarity
...
*Automatic retrieval of phonology
Is phonology retrieved automatically in silent reading? Frost (1998) had a strong phonology
hypothesis that phonological representation is a necessary product of processing printed
words, and that phonological processing is mandatory (obligatory)
...
Eg
...
Rastle 2006 meta-‐analysis showed that word
processing is faster when preceded with phonologically identical nonword primes than by
primes similar in spelling but not phonology, for example RT is faster for target word CLIP
when prime is PLIP, and slower for KLIP
...
* Reading Aloud
Within different languages (English, German, Italian, French etc) individual phonemes
(smallest unit of sound) are represented y graphemes
...
Orthographic depth refers to the tendency for words to be ambiguous
...
Some words have irregular mappings, such as PINT and MINT,
they should rhyme but they don’t
...
There are reading words and pseudowords
(nonwords that have letter strings that could be a word)
...
Most skilled readers can read both irregular words and pseudowords correctly
...
PINT is a word
but it violates the rule about mapping grapheme to phoneme
...
The Dual-Route Cascaded Model has key assumptions individuals use both the non-‐
lexical (Route 1) and the lexical paths (Routes 2/3) when reading aloud
...
Dyslexia is in impaired reading ability that can be acquired (due to brain damage; previous
literate individuals lose ability to read) or developmental (individuals who always struggled
with learning to read)
...
Surface dyslexia is intact word reading but poor reading of irregular words (PINT, PLAID)
...
Deep
dyslexia is similar to phonological dyslexia, but also includes semantic errors (read TULIP as
ROSE)
...
Shows
that there is a strong association between impaired semantic knowledge and surface dyslexia
in semantic dementia patients; if semantic knowledge is intact, they can read irregular words
...
Particular problems with reading unfamiliar words and
nonwords belived to be associated difficulty in grapheme-‐phoneme conversion
...
Semantic reading
errors and difficulty reading unfamiliar words may be caused by damage to grapheme-‐
phoneme conversion and semantic systems
...
Recovering deep dyslexics usually become phonological dyslexics
...
* Eye movements in reading
We read at the rate of about 4 words/sec (250 words/min)
...
Eye movements during reading include
-‐ Saccades; typically take 25-‐30ms, we tend to move about 7-‐8 characters, during a
saccade you ‘see’ nothing at all
...
-‐ End-‐of-‐line sweep; we make a single long saccade from the end of one line to the
beginning of the next
...
Saccades are rapid jerks, ballistic (once initiated their direction cannot be changed), take 20-‐
30 ms to complete, span roughly 8 letters/spaces in distance, are separated by fixations
lasting 200-‐250 ms, and does not allow information extraction from the page during (only
during fixations) perceptual span
...
*)% of
content words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and 20% of function words such as articles
(the, a), conjunctions (and, or), and pronouns
...
Assumptions of Spritz were to alter optimal recognition
points (ORP) and eliminate saccade eye movements by using rapid serial visual presentation
(RSVP)
...
Spritz aimed to present words offset slightly to the left of centre
...
As for RSVP reading,
comprehension and memory fails at rapid RSVP rates (about 500 wpm), esp
...
There is little theoretical basis that Spritz would work
...
* What is language production?
In what contexts do we produce language? Speech output and writing, but what are the
differences between the two? Speakers typically know their audience, generally receive
moment-‐by-‐moment feedback from the listener, generally have less time to plan (more
spontaneous); writers typically have direct access to what they have written so far (more of a
conscious, self-‐monitored process)
...
Grice’s components for effective communication include
-‐ Co-‐operative principle (speakers and listeners must try to be cooperative)
-‐ Maxim of quantity (the speaker should be as informative as necessary, but not more
so)
-‐ Maxim of quality (the speaker should be truthful)
-‐ Maxim of relation (the speaker should say things that are relevant to the situation)
-‐ Maxim of Manner (the speaker should make his/her contribution easy to
understand
...
Ervin-‐Tripp (1979) believes that two people talking over each
other is very rare
...
Sacks,
Schegloff & Jefferson (1974) believe that people in a conversation tend to follow certain rules
by looking at the speaker the speaker making hand signals or filling pauses with meaningless
sounds if they intend to continue
...
Question followed by an
answer
...
Mutual beliefs,
expectations and knowledge of communication means that the speaker may expect the
listener to volunteer information if there’s a perceived problem with common ground
...
Generally, communication requires excessive cognitive processing
...
They can consist of
consonants and/or vowels, and the English language has around 40 phonemes
...
Less than 10%
of these languages have extensive descriptions and that means our current language
knowledge is based on approx
...
Morpheme: is the smallest unit that carries meaning; the average speaker knows about
80,000 morphemes
...
Bound morphemes add on, for example, ‘s (cats), -‐er (bigger)
...
Words, phrases, and sentences follow from there up the hierarchy
...
The tip-of-the-tongue experience,
as described by William James (1893), shows errors occur frequently in picture naming,
especially when the word does not occur very often in everyday life
...
He quickly rejected the idea of a psychological
cause, finding explanations with the help of psycholinguistics
...
Examples of errors are
-‐ Anticipations; saying bake my bike instead of take my bike
-‐ Preservations; saying he pulled a pantrum instead of he pulled a tantrum
-‐ Exchanges; saying getting your model renosed instead of getting your nose
remodelled
-‐ Substitutions; saying where is my tennis bat instead of where is my tennis racquet
...
It is an acquired disorder of language as a
result of brain damage and the breakdown happens at a time where language has been fully
acquired
...
For example, there are many possibilities of ‘how’ speaking can break down
...
Errors in language may be semantic or may be phonological
...
!
Phonological word
Phonetic
encoding
SYLLABARY
Articulation
Variables that influence our spoken word production include (Alario et al
...
-X
...
, Laganaro, M
...
, Frauenfelder, U
...
, & Segui, J
...
ow complex a picture is and how m&any separate
-‐ Visual Complexity: determines h Predictors of picture naming speed
...
41
visual Nickels, L
...
(1995)
...
This variable is
features have Aphasic naming: What matters? Neuropsychologia, 33(10), bject
•
located at the recognition system level
...
- Image Agreement: determines if perceived object can be mapped to an image we
hold in our visual memory
...
This variable is located at the level of recognition
system
...
A fork) but
others can be ambiguous
...
Frequency is strongly correlated with age-‐of-‐
acquisition and familiarity
...
-‐ Familiarity effects: are strongly correlated with frequency variable; affected by
individual exposure to a word (in a profession for example), but does not necessarily involve
production of the word itself, but exposure to the object itself (eg
...
There are two types of familiarity and ratings
can be based upon presentations of concepts or words (familiarity of object vs
...
This
effect is not included in Alario et al
...
Observed
effects are that high familiarity affects speed and accuracy positively
...
Usually the words you learnt first, are more accessible than words
learnt later in life
...
-‐ Word length effect: long words take longer to be spoken than short words and
according to the model this variable becomes relevant after the lexical word form has been
accessed
...
Mine, pine, line) than others
...
The Logogen-‐Model (box and arrow model): Logogen-Model (“box-and-arrow model”)
The
The Logogen-Model (“box-and-arrow model”)
(e
...
, Ellis Young, 1988; Morton, 1969, Patterson & Shewell,1987) (e
...
, Ellis & Young, 1988; Morton, 1969, Patterson & Shewell,1987)
&
Spoken word
production
Written word
production
Speech errors from unimpaired and impaired speakers give evidence for different and
separate processing steps in language production
...
There is a 2-‐step (meaning step 1, form step 2) in production of
language
...
Week 11 Thinking and Reasoning
Why is thinking and reasoning important? The prevalence of autism (reporting) in the
population has increased exponentially over the past few decades
...
Researchers believe that the increase in
diagnosis is due to changes in diagnostic criteria
...
A lot of the data
reported was made up and there were many ethical problems and there was conflict of
interest
...
A larger
study disproved the findings supporting any kind of link between autism and vaccinations
...
Even though this link can’t possible be true, people still believe it and do not vaccinate
their children
...
2014 aimed to increase vaccination stats
...
Other interventions had no effect either way
...
For example; the pen was on the right side
of the suicide note, but the person was left handed, therefore it is more likely they were
murdered! Not deductively valid but inductively strong
...
Inference is
valid if conclusion follows necessarily from the premises given
...
Modus ponens is a type of inference – if told all bananas are yellow and there is
a banana, the banana must be yellow
...
Studies showed
that 97% of people made this type of inference
...
If p then q,
not q, therefore not p
...
Types of inferences that are incorrect, or errors, do not necessarily follow
...
If p then q and we
have q, therefore p
...
Denying the
antecedent is also a deductive error; all bananas are yellow and this is not a banana so
therefore not yellow
...
Studies show 55% of people make
this error
...
Most people would turn over the correct card to test this statement, therefore, they
were able to apply modus ponens
...
This led to the idea that when people are completing these
kinds of tasks, they apply pragmatic rules
...
age/gender) must be satisfied
...
Evidence for pragmatic rules
come from Cheng & Holyoak (1985) study on envelope stamps and cholera on form
...
We need to disregard problem content and prior beliefs and disregard everyday
meaning of same terms
...
Reasoning relates to science in that any scientific observation can never be proven to be true,
because no matter how many observations seem to agree with it, it may still be wrong, and
therefore scientists should focus on falsification (eg
...
Lunar
geologists spent most of their time trying to confirm their own hypothesis but were happy to
falsify other people’s hypotheses (Mitroff 1974)
...
Falsification impractical if evidence isn’t
decisive
...
* Judgements and Heuristics (rule of thumb)
Mood heuristics: a study asked students two questions
...
How happy are you these days?
Followed by 2
...
The study found that there was no correlation when in order of 1
and 2 but high correlation if asked 2 then 1
...
It depends on both the number retrieved and the ease of retrieval and can lead to
errors because factors other than frequency affect availability
...
Ross 1979 showed that availability heuristics affects amrital
relations ask questions about contribution to household; should add up to 100% if people
are accurate but usually adds up to more than 100%, therefore, someone always thinks they
are doing more than they really are because when they clean they remember but you don’t
remember when others clean
...
Representativeness heuristic: estimating the probability on the basis of similarity; eg
...
Base rate neglect: ignoring the fact that the probability of something being in a particular
class depends on how common that class is
...
Using the base rate
creates a causal narrative
...
Jane likes to read so is
be a bank teller or a bank teller who is a member of a book club?
another$proposition$
Bank
teller"
Book
club
member"
The conjunction of the two propositions provides a more compelling argument for probability
but the effect disappears if the conjunctions aren’t coherent
...
first impressions count
...
If we present a person with positive description
first and then negative (intelligent, kind, assertive, stubborn, critical, envious) we are more
likely to see them favourably than if we presented them as negative first and then positive
(envious, critical, stubborn, assertive, kind, intelligent)
...
Knowing less makes it easier to fit everything into a coherent narrative
...
People expect chance shooting to include many more alternations
...
In future, those
points are more likely to be closer to the population average
...
For example, oxytocin
nasal spray does not improve social qualities in autism but parents who thought their kid was
receiving it reported the greatest improvement
...
Understanding of the problem may differ from experimenters
...
Many “errors” are rational in
social context
...
* What is cognitive neuropsychology?
Cognitive neuropsychology is the study of deficits in memory (amnesia), vision
(object/face/colour recognition) and language (aphasia)
...
Deficits can be
-‐ developmental; failed to develop normally
-‐ acquired; result of brain injury later in life
Three reasons to study cognitive deficits are to understand the deficit, for diagnosis and
treatment, to understand where cognitive functions are localised in the brain, and to
understand normal cognition
...
* Definitions and methods
CN is interested in deficits and functions of the mind, not the brain
...
The
brain is the hardware that implements the representations and computations
...
Methods involved in CN look at any aspect of cognition (visual, language, audition, attention
etc) and individual case studies of dissociations and errors
...
There is large variability in
deficits across individuals, and this variability can be informative
...
Single dissociation: pattern of results in which one task or cognitive ability (eg
...
Ability to recognise
objects) is intact or much less impaired
...
) to
determine if actual impairment
...
Strong
evidence that the two functions are cognitively separate (eg
...
* Example case studies
Case study 1: Visual perception
Study conducted by Zihl et al
...
A stroke produced bilateral lesions of
occipital cortex
...
Pt saw the world as a serried of snapshots and couldn’t cross the
road because couldn’t judge movement of cars
...
In order to
determine the normal visual perception system explaining LM’s dissociations we need to
make inferences about the normal system based on how it breaks down
...
All faces looked the same and perception of non-‐face
objects was normal
...
A study conducted by Moscovitch et al
...
Immediately saw face in a painting but did not notice until later that face is
made up of animals
...
Pt had difficulty naming pictures of only some types
of objects (better at recognising living things compared to non-‐living things)
...
Visual
perception
Movement
perception
Form
perception
Faces
Objects
Inanimate
objects
Living
things
Case study 2: Spelling
Case PW (Rapp et al
...
Leads to question do we access a phonological (spoken) representation in
our minds before an orthographic (written) representation? PW good at drawing picture but
not at spelling out word of the name of drawing
...
Within a single
domain or task, errors made by an individual reveal information about the underlying system
...
1994) was a 62 yo with left hemisphere stroke affecting parietal
lobe
...
For example, when prompted with SHELL
wrote SHEEL, when prompted with NEEDLE wrote NEDDLE, PRETTY wrote PREETY etc
...
CCVCCV structure
...
When prompted with PARK would read PART, QUICK would read QUIET, HUMID would
read HUMAN etc
...
Common error was misreading of last 2/3 letters of the word
...
Primary method of study is case
studies which give us key insights from dissociations and errors and are strengthened by
converging evidence from other subfields
Title: Cognitive Psychology
Description: Topics covered include visual processing and attention, semantic memory, episodic memory, concepts and categories, word recognition and reading, language production, thinking and reasoning, and cognitive neuropsychology
Description: Topics covered include visual processing and attention, semantic memory, episodic memory, concepts and categories, word recognition and reading, language production, thinking and reasoning, and cognitive neuropsychology