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):

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 self-

aware 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:

Structuralism – Wundt, Titchener and

systematic, analytic introspection.

Functionalism -- William James’ armchair

introspection.

Behaviorism (1920):

Thorndike – consciousness as excess

baggage.

Watson – consciousness as superstition.

Early Mentalists

Gestalt psychologists (German):

Wertheimer, Koffka, Kohler

Critics of behaviorism:

Tolman

European psychologists:

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

Input:

Sensation

Output:

Behavior

What happens inside the “box” to

produce the observed behavior?

Mental

Representations:

Goals, Expectations,

Cognitive Maps

Processes

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:

3 9 7 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.

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

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

Parietal

Prefrontal

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?

Parallel distributed processing (PDP) -- Rumelhart & McClelland

Situated cognition – the ecological approach

Gibson’s affordances

Do we explain cognition in terms of the external world or internal mind?