
Chapter 1: the science of the mind
- Cognition: what we know, what we remember, how we think
The scope of cognitive psychology
- Cognitive psychology is the study of the acquisition, retention and use of knowledge
- Suggestion: cognitive psychology can help us understand capacities relevant to virtually every moment of our lives
A brief history
- Introspection is the only way to study thoughts, if you yourself record the content of your own mental live and the sequence of your own experiences (Wundt & Tichener) o Limitation: you can’t report unconscious thoughts, nor the processes of thought; it can’t be tested through falsification; raw data can’t be placed in plain view
- Behaviourists: behaviour can be observed, so can stimuli, thus the interaction between stimuli and behaviour can be objective observed and reported o Limitation: subjective entities such as beliefs, influence the way we act so they cannot be excluded
- Cognitive revolution → Transcendental method/ inference to best explanation (Kant): you begin with observing the facts and then work backward from these observations, search for the underlying cause for the effects o Indirect testing: visible effects from an invisible cause (e.g. electrons) o Reproducing and varying experiments to test hypotheses
Research in cognitive psychology: an example
- WM holds info in an easily accessible form, so that the info is instantly available when you need it (remembering the first words of a long sentence) o Span test: letter span is approximately 7-8 letters → limited size of the WM, WM influences observable performance (measures the combined capacities of the rehearsal loop and the central executive)
- Working memory system (Baddeley & Hitch) o Central executive
o Articulatory rehearsal loop: sound-like errors occur in span tests
§ Subvocal speech (inner voice)
§ Phonological loop (inner ear): auditory representation of the info to be held in storage
- Concurrent articulation task: span test while simultaneously making a sound, which leads to the unavailability of subvocal speech (measures the capacities of the central executive), performance drops to about 4-5 letters o With visually presented items, concurrent articulation eliminates sound-like errors because the use of the articulatory loop is blocked by the sounds your making → articulatory suppression
- Anarthria: an inability to produce overt speech, due to neurological damage
o People with anarthria do show sound-like confusions in their span data, indicating that they also use the phonological loop, which means that actual muscle movements aren’t necessary for subvocalization → inner speech relies on the brain areas responsible for planning and controlling the muscles movements of speech and not on the muscle movements themselves
Summary page 26
Chapter 2: The neural basis for cognition
The visual system
- The cornea and lens focus the incoming light so that a sharp image is cast onto the retina o When the muscles surrounding the lens tighten, they create the proper shape, by bulging somewhat, for focussing on objects nearby. When the muscles relax, the lens becomes flatter, allowing the proper focus for items further away
- Photoreceptors on the retina o Rods: sensitive to much lower levels of light and so play an essential role in semidarkness, or when you’re trying to view a fairly dim stimulus; they are colourblind, they just distinguish between different intensities of light
o Cones: less sensitive, need much more incoming light to operate; are sensitive to colours differences; allow us to discern fine detail
§ Cones that prefer short wavelengths
§ Cones that prefer medium wavelengths
§ Cones that prefer long wavelengths o Fovea is the centre of the retina, which contains the most cones, the farther away from the centre the lesser cones present
- Photoreceptors stimulate bipolar cells, which in turn excite ganglion cells, that are uniformly spread across the entire retina but all of their axons converge to form the optic nerve: the nerve tract that leaves the eyeball and carries info to various sites in the brain. It first goes to the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), which lies in the thalamus, from there info is transmitted to the primary projection area for vision: the occipital lobe.
o Lateral inhibition: cells which are activated, inhibit the activity of neighbouring cells
§ Leads to stronger responses from cells detecting the edge of the surface → edge enhancement: the edges of an object are easiest to detect, which helps to discern the shapes contained with the incoming visual info
- Single-cell recording: recording of the moment by moment pattern of the electrical changes within a single neuron o Firing rate in various circumstances can be used to figure out what job the neuron does within the broad context of the entire nervous system
o Receptive field: the size and shape of the area in the visual world to which this cell responds
- Multiple types of receptive fields (Hubel & Wiesel):
o Dot detectors: cells that fire at their maximum rate when light is presented in a small, roughly circular area in a specific position within the field of view
o Centre-surround cells: light presented to the central region of the receptive field leads the neuron to fire at maximum rate, whereas light presented at the surrounding ring causes a firing rate below rest. When the light is presented to both the surrounding and the centre, it fires at resting rate
o Edge detectors: cells that fire at their maximum rate when a stimulus containing an edge of just the right orientation appears within their receptive fields, the further the edge is from the cells preferred orientation, the weaker the firing will be
- Parallel processing: in the visual system many different kinds of analysis are going on simultaneously, which enables fast processing and mutual influence among multiple systems is possible o Area V1, the site on the occipital lobe where the info from the LGN first reaches the cortex, contains the full ensemble of cells for every possible stimulus
o Area MT contains cells acutely sensitive to direction and speed of movement o Area V4 contains cells that fire most strongly when the input is of a certain colour and a certain shape - Cells in the optic nerve:
o P cells: provide the main input for the LGN’s parvocellular cells and appear to be specialized for spatial analysis and the detailed analysis of form
o M cells: provide the main input for the LGN’s magnocellular cells and appear to be specialized for the detection of motion and the perception of depth
- What system: the pathway which passes activation from the occipital lobe to the cortex of the temporal lobe; plays a major role in the identification of visual objects o Visual agnosia: the inability to recognize visually presented objects, hardly any disorder in recognizing visual orientation or reaching
- Where system: the pathway which passes activation from the occipital lobe the parietal cortex; performs the function of guiding our action, based on the perception where an object is located o Lesions: difficulty in reaching, but no problem in object identification
- Akinetopsia: damage to the visual motion system, inability to report the speed or direction of a moving object
- Binding problem: the task of reuniting the various elements of a scene, elements that are initially dealt with by different systems in different parts of the brain o Spatial position: the reassembling of different kinds of info can be done based on the location where the stimulus was located
o Rhythm
§ Neural synchrony: if the neurons detecting a vertical line are firing in synchrony with those signalling movement, then these attributes are registered as belonging to the same object, if they are not in synchrony the features are not bound together
o Attention
§ Conjunction errors: correctly detecting the features present in a visual display, but making mistakes about how the features are bound together
§ Synchronized neural firing is only present when the specific stimulus is attended
Chapter 3: Recognizing objects
Form perception
- Ventriloquism: when we see a dummy’s mouth moving, and hear a voice at the same time, we assume the voice belongs to the dummy, even if it isn’t so
- Form perception: the process through which you manage to see the basic shape and size of an object
- Object recognition: the process through which you identify what the object is o Essential whenever you need to apply your knowledge to the world o Crucial for learning
- Gestalt psychology: the perceptual whole is often different from the sum of its parts, due to organization contributed by the perceiver
- Necker cube: a reversible figure, that can be perceived in different configurations, your perception goes beyond the information given by the Necker cube, by specifying an arrangement in depth o Neutral with regard to perceptual organization
o Figure/ground organization: the determination of what is figure and what is the ground is neutral (vase versus two profiles facing each other) - The Gestalt principles:
o Proximity: you assume elements that are close to each other to be parts of the same object
o Similarity: you assume elements that resemble each other to be parts of the same object
o Each of us imposes our own interpretation on the perceptual input, but we all tend to impose the same interpretation, because we’re all governed by the same rules
- The features themselves depend on how the form is organized by the viewer, and so the features are as much in the eye of the beholder as they are in the figure itself → our interpretation of the input sometimes seems to happen before we start cataloguing the input’s basic features, not after, the features you find depend on how the figure is interpreted à parallel processing of features and interpretation
Object recognition
- Two types of influence on context:
o Stimulus driven/bottom-up influences: influences coming directly from the stimulus itself, that is the features that are in view
o Knowledge driven/expectation driven/top-down influences: influences that rely on your knowledge
- Recognition o Might begin with the identification of visual features in the input pattern, the vertical lines, curves, diagonals and so on
o Focussing on features might allow us to concentrate on what is common to the various presentations of for instance the letter A
Integrative agnosia: impaired in task that require the judgement how the features are bond together to form complex object, while identifying the simple features is relatively well preserved
- Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS): disruption to the parietal lobe has no impact on performance when people were searching a display for targets defined by a single feature, however it did slow performance when they were searching for a target defined by a conjuncture of features
Word recognition
- Tachistoscopic presentations: brief displays of stimuli, each stimulus is followed by a poststimulus mask, which serves to interrupt any continued processing that people might try to do for the stimulus just presented o Familiarity increases the recognition of the stimulus o Repetition priming increases the recognition of the stimulus
- Two-alternative forced-choice procedure o Word-superiority effect: words themselves are easier perceived than isolated letters o Participants are more accurate in identifying letters if those letters appear within a word (DARK is presented, have you seen an E or K?), as opposed to letters appearing all by themselves (K is presented, have you seen an E or K?)
o A context effect occurs when the letter is presented in a non-word which is easy to pronounce and looks like the English strings, a context effect doesn’t occur when the letter is presented in a random string of letters
§ Pronounceability: easily pronounceable strings provide a context benefit, and are better recognized
§ Englishness: the degree to which the letter sequence in the string conforms to the usual spelling patterns of English, the more English-like the string, the easier it is to recognize and the greater the context benefit
Feature nets and word recognition
- Feature nets: there is a network of detectors, organized in layers, with each subsequent layer concerned with more complex, larger-scale objects. o The bottom layer is concerned with features, and the info flow would be bottom-up o A level at which the features form letters
o A layer of bigram detectors: detectors of letter pairs
§ Detectors likely involve complex assemblies of neural tissue
§ The detector will fire as soon as its response threshold is reached
• Activation level dependents on o Recency: activation level will be higher at the start when the detector has fired recently → familiarity
o Frequency: activation level will be higher when the detectors have fired frequently in the past → priming
o Word level, the bigrams are combined to form words
→ Context allows you to make better use of what you see
→ The network is biased, inevitably favouring frequent letter combinations over infrequent ones, these errors tend to make the input look more regular than it is turning irregular spelling into more frequent combinations
- Distributed knowledge: the knowledge about bigram frequencies is represented in a fashion that’s distributed across the network and detectable only if we consider how the entire network functions
Descendants of the feature net
- The McClelland and Rumelhart model (figure 3.16 page 103) o More efficient in identifying characters in context as opposed to characters in isolation
o Excitatory connections: features excite all relevant letters, which in turn excite all relevant words, which then excite the letters again
o Inhibitory connections: activation of a detector can serve to decrease the activation in other detectors at the same level, and levels above or beneath
o Allows more complicated signalling, both bottom-up and top-down o The detection of a letter sequence makes the network more sensitive to elements that are likely to occur within that sequence
- Recognition by components (RBC) model: is viewpoint independent, geons can be identified from virtually every angle of view o First level: feature detectors which respond to edges, curves, verticals and so on o An intermediate level with geons (geometrical ions), which might serve as building blocks of all objects we recognize
§ 36 different geons, just like the 26 letters in the alphabet o At a higher level of detectors geon assemblies are made, combinations of geons o Object model is activated by a representation of the complete recognized object, build out of geon assemblies
- Recognition via multiple views o People have stored in memory a number of different view of each object we can recognize, which means you can only recognize something if the current view is matched to one in your memory
§ If it doesn’t match, you have to rotate the current view to bring it in alignment with one of the remembered views, and this mental rotation will cause a slight delay in recognition
§ Recognition speed is viewpoint-dependent o Many neurons in the what pathway are indeed object-specific, crucially they are view-tuned
Different objects, different recognition systems?
- Prosopagnosia: inability to recognize faces, even though other visual abilities are intact o Fusiform face area (FFA) is also activated when subtle distinctions among objects are required
§ Activated when the task involves recognizing specific individuals within a category, and the category is an extremely familiar one
Face recognition o Depends strongly on orientation → impaired when the face is shown upside-down o Holistic perception: the recognition depends on complex relationships created by the face’s overall configuration, not on individual features
§ Composite effect: it seems hardly possible to identify both faces when the top half belongs to another person than the bottom half
Top-down influences on object recognition
- Priming a word using a context (top-down):
o The person needs to understand each word of the instruction o The person needs to understand the syntax of the construction o The person needs some common knowledge
- We cannot see object recognition as a self-containing process, knowledge that is external to object recognition I imported to and clearly influences the process
Summary page 115
Chapter 4: Paying attention
Selective attention
- Dichotic listening: different input in both ears, instruction to pay attention to one of both, the attended channel, and ignore the other, the unattended channel o Shadowing: they were asked to repeat back what they heard from the attended channel, to make sure they are paying attention
§ the unattended message is completely ignored, hardly anyone can tell whether it was English speech coming from the other channel or just jibberjabber
§ physical attributes of the unattended channel are heard, such as male or female voice, even though the participants seem oblivious to the unattended channel’s semantic context
§ cocktail party effect: words with some personal importance will be often noticed in the unattended channel, such as your name, or favourite restaurant
o Same goes for visual inputs: when you are told to focus on one thing in you visual view, you won’t even notice a gorilla walking through the screen
o Bottleneck theories: you erect a filter that shields you from potential distractors, desired info is not filtered out and so goes on to receive further processing. Not only do you block unattended stimuli, you promote the processing of desired stimuli
- Inattentional blindness: the failure to see a change, form point to shape, in the fixation target is caused by the fact that you don’t expect any shapes to appear and are not in any way prepared for them to appear
- Müller-Lyer illusion: geometric illusions, fins are used to influence how you perceive the length of a horizontal line (<----> or >----<) o Attention may be needed for conscious perception, but unconscious detecting of patterns in the world is possible without attention
- Change blindness: the inability to see a change right away, even if it is a quite large one o Central changes are detected sooner than peripheral changes, but they still need quite some alternations
- Early selection hypothesis: the attended input is identified and privileged from the start, so that the unattended input receives little analysis, the unattended input doesn’t make it into consciousness o Distractor stimuli receive little analysis and indeed fall out of the stream of processing at a very early stage
o Usually the case with very complex input
- Late selection hypothesis: all inputs receive relatively complete analysis, and the selection is done after all of this analysis is finished, the unattended input almost reaches consciousness but then selection is done and it isn’t remembered o People seem genuinely unaware of the distractors but are nonetheless influenced by them → selection is done after the distractors are perceived but before they make it into consciousness
o Usually the case with relatively simple input
- Perception requires primed detectors and this priming can come from two different sources 1. A simple matter of the stimuli you have encountered in the past (recently or frequently), requires no effort and resources (hearing your name)
2. Controlled priming, dependent on your expectations, you won’t do this sort of priming for inputs you have no interest in and can’t do it for the ones you don’t expect as a result these inputs remain unprimed/unresponsive
o High validity priming causes a priming effect and an expectation effect, whereas low validity priming only causes a priming effect (is purely stimulus-based) → high validity priming results in faster responses than low validity, which in turn does cause a faster response than the neutral condition
o Expectation-based priming takes longer to kick in than stimulus-based, stimulusbased is observed immediately after the prime, expectation-based takes roughly half a second to develop
o Stimulus-based priming has no coast in the misled trials, expectation-based leads to slower RTs in the misled trials → stimulus-based doesn’t take anything away from the other detectors, whereas expectation-based does
→ limited-capacity system
- Studies od spatial attention: the ability to focus on a particular position in space, and thus be better prepared for any stimulus to appear in that position o Spotlight: refers to movements of attention, not movement of the eyes
§ The benefits of priming occur prior to any eye movement, and so they cannot be the consequence of eye movements
§ In this view you pay attention to a position in space rather than an object o The control of attention depends on a network of brain sites in the frontal and parietal cortex, neural connections from these areas send activity to other brain sites that do the actual analysis of the incoming info. In this way expectations are supported by one group of brain areas and are used to modulate activity in other brain areas directly responsible for handling the input
Unilateral neglect syndrome: brain damage in the parietal cortex (usually right) leads the patient to ignore all inputs coming from one side of the body o Seems to support the space-based account of attention o Barbell rotation experiment:
§ Initially the person will prefer objects that fall in the red barbell which is on the right side of his visual field. However when the barbell turns, while the person watches, his focus will remain on the red barbell which is now on the left side of the visual field → object-based account of attention
§ Once the object is focused, it stays in attention regardless of its movement to the left half of the visual field → attention is both object-based and space-based - Feature binding:
o When searching for a single feature, the size of the search field doesn’t influence RT o When searching for a combination of features, set size has a large effect, the larger the set the slower the RT
§ Mental spotlight on one item a time seems the only way to find the correct combination of features → selectivity helps you solve the binding problem
Divided attention
- Divided attention will be easier if the various tasks are very different from each other, because different tasks are likely to have distinct resource requirements and therefor won’t compete with each other and won’t interfere with each other. However two different tasks always seem to interfere a little no matter how different they are o General energy source, from which all activities take some
o There is a mental mechanism required for selecting and initiating responses, including bot physical responses and mental ones → response selector
o Executive control: a mechanism that sets goals and priorities, chooses strategies and directs the function of many cognitive processes
§ Needed whenever you want to avoid inferences from previous habit 1. Works to maintain the desired goal in mind, so that this goal will prevail your choice of strategies and actions
2. Inhibits automatic responses, helping ensure that these responses won’t occur
- De prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays a crucial role in goal maintenance, when damaged o Perseveration error: a tendency to produce the same response over and over, even when it’s plain that the task requires a change in response
o Goal neglect: failing to organize their behaviour in a way that moves towards their goals → in their day to day live they use routine and habits to get by
Practice
- Practice diminishes resource demand o Relying on habits causes reduces the demand of the executive control o When a task is well known the memory trace is already there so the response selector is only needed to launch the overall routine
Summary page 157
Chapter 5: The acquisition of memories and the working memory system
- Memory
o Acquisition o Storage/encoding o Retrieval
The route into memory
- Modal model (figure 5.1 page 166) o Sensory memory: briefly storage of the input in the raw sensory form § Iconic: visual
§ Echoic: auditory o STM: info is stored here, while you’re working on it, some is transferred to LTM (later this becomes WM)
• Differences between WM and LTM: size of the stores, the ease of entry, the ease of retrieval and WM is dependent on current activity, while LTM is not
- Free recall procedure:
o Serial position: U-shape curve describes performance on a 30 item test list
§ Recency effect: the last few words don’t get bumped out of the WM, and items in WM are easy to retrieve
§ Primacy effect: memory rehearsal causes the first words to be transferred to
LTM, words in the beginning of the list are more often rehearsed
o Delay with an interpolated task eliminates the recency effect, but doesn’t change the primacy effect, thus these effects are explained by different memory systems
o Delay without an interpolated task doesn’t affect either one of them o Slowing the list presentation improves retention of all the pre-recency items but does not improve the recency effect
o fMRI scans suggest that memory for early items on the list depends on brain areas that are associated with LTM
A closer look at WM
- Digit span task: WM holds 7 ± 2 chunks o Chunking does need attention, therefor less attention is available for rehearsal o Chunking can improve with practice, WM cannot
- Operation span: a procedure explicitly designed to measure WM when it’s working o Reading span: read aloud a number of sentences and recall the final words
§ Efficiency with which the WM operates
§ People with a higher span should have an advantage in tasks that require the coordination of different pieces of info
§ People with a higher span seem less likely to have their minds wander and so are more likely to keep their thoughts on task
WM system:
1. Articulatory rehearsal loop: holds sequences of acoustic or speech-based items 2. Visuo-spatial sketchpad: responsible for the temporary maintenance of visuospatial information
3. Central executive: selects and manipulates material in the subsystems, serving as a controller
- The central executive:
o Govern the sequence of thoughts and actions o Select the steps needed for the implementation of plans o Rise above routine, and tune words and deeds to the current circumstances
Entering LT storage: the need for engagement
- Two types of rehearsal
1. Maintenance rehearsal: focus on the to-be-reminded items themselves, with little thought about what the items mean or how they are related to each other
§ In many settings it doesn’t provide LT benefits whatsoever
2. Elaborative rehearsal: linking the material being rehearsed to other material in memory, both within the set of items being learned and beyond
§ Is vastly superior to maintenance rehearsal for establishing info in memory - fMRI studies show that activity is needed to lodge info into the LTM and higher levels of this activity lead to better memory
- Intentional learning: deliberate learning with an expectation that memory will be tested later on, the intention to learn adds little to performance o The learning strategy does add to performance: the approach matters
- Incidental learning: learning in the absence of any intention to learn o Shallow processing: capital letters or not o Moderate processing: does the word rhyme with a cue word
o Deep processing: does the word fit into a particular sentence, meaning is important
→ deeper processing leads to better memory
The role of meaning and memory connections
- Attention to the meaning of the to-be-remembered input may help you by virtue of facilitating retrieval of the memory later on, it is about the storing rather than remembering o Connections to existing knowledge
o Elaborate encoding improves memory: words are better remembered when they appear in more rich, elaborate sentences rather than simpler ones → more connections are made, which lead to more retrieval paths
Organizing and memory
- Memories are better when there is an order discovered within the material, if an organisation can be found in the material then this will lead to good memory
- Mnemonic strategies: techniques to ‘improve’ memory, based on organization of the to-beremembered material o Create a word out of the first letters of the words to be remembered
o Mental imagery
o Peg-word systems: an external skeleton for the to-be-remembered words - Multiple links:
o Info is deeper processed when you use multiple links to understand it o More retrieval paths, so info is easier retrieved later on
Summary page 197
Chapter 6: Interconnections between acquisition and retrieval
Learning as a preparation for retrieval
- Retrieval of info from memory can be done by either recall or recognition
- Context-dependent learning o The context in which you learn has to be present at retrieval to be able to use the connections made in the specific context
o Not the physical context matters, but the psychological one
o Context-reinstatement: improved memory performance if we re-create the context that was in place during learning
§ Retrieval cues result in better performance when the cue matches the processing at the time of learning → deep but unmatched is inferior to not so deep but matched
- Encoding specificity: connections can change the meaning of what is remembered because in many setting memory plus this set of connections has another meaning than memory plus that set of connections o What is preserved in memory is some record of the target material and also some record of the connections established during learning
The memory network
- The network contains nodes, which are tied to each other by associative links o Spreading activation
o Retrieval cues can influence the activation spread, by providing a second activation input
o Context reinstatement also causes a second input to the memory, making it more likely the right memory will be activated
o Semantic priming: by searching and finding the word bread in memory, al the nodes around it will receive activation from the word bread, such as butter, which is already slightly activated and therefor doesn’t need much more to reach its threshold and therefor the response to butter will be quicker
Different forms of memory testing
- Recall: we are presented with a retrieval cue which that broadly identifies the we seek, but then we need to come up with the info on our own, depends heavily on the memory connections
- Recognition: info is presented to you, and you must decide whether it is the sought-after info or not
Source memory: recollection of the source of your current knowledge (such as remembering the picture that came to mind when you saw the word) → remember
- Attribution of familiarity → know
- Capgras syndrome: patient has detailed, complete, accurate memories of the past but no sense at all at familiarity, and so faces seem hauntingly unfamiliar(source memory is present, but there is no attribution of familiarity)
- Remember/know distinction: the difference between remember and know is shown by a direct test, a simple recognition or recall test, followed by an indirect-test, the lexicaldecision: primed words result in better scores due to implicit learning of the words, which causes people to know the words whereas they cannot remember seeing them before
- Word-stem completion: participant complete a word-stem in a sudden way, which can be influenced by priming, of which they, again, have no explicit knowledge
- Explicit memory is tested with direct testing, recall and recognition tasks
- Implicit memory is tested with indirect testing, such as lexical-decision and word-stem completion tasks
- False fame experiment: with a 24h delay, you don’t remember that the name that sounds familiar actually sounds familiar because you read it aloud from a list shown to you 24h prior, so you falsely identify the name as being famous to explain this familiarity feeling you get
- Illusion of the truth: sentences that were heard earlier, where more likely to be judged as true, even though at presentation these were already false and maybe even identified as so, but with a lack of explicit memory about the sentence it is just the familiarity of the sentence that influences judgement→ familiarity increases credibility
- Source confusion: the familiarity of a face in the line-up is falsely identified as the person in the original crime, while in fact the person’s face was shown in a mug shot three days after the crime took place
- Sense of familiarity without source memory: remembering that it is familiar, but not being able to remember why it is familiar; correctly judge familiarity, but make a mistake in judging source
Theoretical treatments of implicit memory
- Processing pathway:
o the sequence of detectors, and the connections between detectors, that the activation flows through in recognizing a specific stimulus
o the sequence of nodes, and connections between nodes, that the activation flows through during memory retrieval
- Processing fluency: the speed and ease with which the pathway will carry activation I increased by the use of that pathway
§ Lexical-decision test: a word that is seen before, has a warmed-up pathway, and as a result the path’s functioning will be more fluent next time you see the word, causing your response to a primed word to be faster than you response to a novel word
o People are sensitive to the degree of processing fluency: when a stimulus was easy to perceive they register a vague sense of specialness
o Specialness will be interpreted as familiarity and attributed to the ‘correct’ source
A stimulus will seem familiar when (figure 6.10 page 226):
o You have encountered the stimulus before
o Because of that prior encounter, you are now faster and more efficient in your processing of that stimulus → processing fluency
o You detect that fluency, and this leads you to register the stimulus as somehow distinctive or special
o You try to figure out why the stimulus is special and you reach a particular conclusion o You may draw a further conclusion about when and where you encountered the stimulus
- Figure 6.11 page 227
Amnesia
- Retrograde amnesia: disrupted memory for things learned prior to the event that initiated amnesia, such as blows to the head
- Anterograde amnesia: disrupted memory for experiences after the onset of amnesia, the conversation stays in mind as long as its ongoing, when interrupted all experiences of the conversation disappear o Korsakoff’s syndrome: caused by thiamine deficiency
→ explicit memory is gone, but patients do seem to have intact implicit memories, which means that implicit learning is possible, only the patient will never know
- Damage to the hippocampus, with the amygdala intact: fear response to blue light, with no recollection which of the lights had been accompanied by the boat horn → implicit, appears normal on indirect memory tests, but seems amnesic an a direct memory test
- Damage to the amygdala, with the hippocampus intact: reports that the blue light had been accompanied by the boat horn, but the fear response is absent → explicit, appears normal on direct memory tests, but seems amnesic an a indirect memory test
Summary page 234
Chapter 7: Remembering complex events
Memory errors: some initial examples
- Recall is often in line with expectations and not necessarily with reality
Memory errors: a hypothesis
- Transplant errors:
o a bit of info encountered in one context is transplanted into another context o elements that were part of your thinking get misremembered as if they were actually part of the original experience
- Intrusion errors: other knowledge intrudes into the remembered event, this can for instance be due to understanding
- DRM procedure: when a list of words is presented which has a theme word, the theme word is just as likely to be recalled as any of the other items on the list, even though the theme words was never on the list at all!
Schema: summarizes the broad pattern of what is normal in a certain situation o Supplement what you actually remember with a plausible reconstruction based on your schematic knowledge, to fill in the gaps and help you recall the event → schemas will make the world seem more normal than it really is and will make the past seem more regular than it actually was, you have the tendency to regularize the past
o Bartlett: elements that fit within the frame remain in memory, elements that don’t are left out or changed
- False memories are easier to plant when:
o The false memories are plausible
o You don’t just hear about the false event, but instead are urged to imagine how the suggested event unfolded → imagination inflation
- Misinformation effect: memories are being influenced by misinformation received after the episode was over
Avoiding memory errors
- It is believed that confident recall is likely to be accurate recall o Our confidence in memory is often influenced by factors that have no impact on memory accuracy
§ Feedback highly influences confidence, where it cannot influence accuracy since it is given after the answer
§ Emotion influences false memories just as much as real ones
§ Generally true memories are often based on remembering whereas false ones are based on knowing, but the opposites also occur
§ Generally accurate memories are more rapidly recalled than false ones
Forgetting
- Failure in acquisition: when you are introduced to someone new, and barely pay attention to his name, you won’t learn it in the first place rather than you very rapidly forget
- Retention interval: as the passage of time between the initial learning and subsequent retrieval increases, the likelihood of forgetting increases as well o Decay: with the passage of time memories fade; connections between memories need to be constantly refreshed
o Inference theory: new learning interferes with older learning, the passage of time is correlated to forgetting, but doesn’t cause it
§ New memories erase older ones
§ New memories get interwoven with the old ones, so that it gets hard to discriminate between the two memories
o Retrieval failure (due to a change of perspective)
§ TOT phenomenon is a form of partial retrieval failure
- Cognitive interview: emphasizes on context re-instatement, and therefor provides a diverse set of retrieval cues, the more cues provided the greater the chance of finding a successful cue → undo retrieval failure
Autobiographical memory
- Three important factors:
o Self-reference effect: the memory advantage for materials pertaining to the self, instead of just being a witness
§ Self-schema: people recall their past attitudes, the past status of their romantic relationship and their health in a fashion that emphasizes consistency and thereby makes the past look more like the present than it actually was
§ Positive view o Emotion helps you remember
§ Consolidation: memories are biologically cemented in place, a process which is promoted by emotions (emotions trigger the amygdala which in turn increases activity in the hippocampus, where consolidation takes place)
§ Emotional events are likely to be important, so you’ll pay close attention
§ You ten to mull over an emotional event → rehearsal
§ But: emotions colour and narrow your attention
§ Flashbulb memories): memories of a dramatic experience that are very detailed and apparently highly accurate, retain despite the passages of time
• If the event has a direct influence on your life, you are more likely to remember it correctly
o Long delay is generally associated with a greater amount of forgetting
§ After about three years forgetting stabilizes, so that a quite large amount of info can still be remembered many years later (such as the names of your classmates)
§ Permastore: a state in which memories are essentially immune to the passage of time, more likely if the material is very well learned
§ Reminiscence bump: a tendency in participants over 40 to show a high rate of recollecting personal experiences from their late teens and twenties
Summary page 277
Chapter 8: Concepts and generic knowledge
Definitions: what is a dog?
- Family resemblance: characteristic features for each category, features that many category members have, rather than a perfect description with defining features, where there always is an exception
Prototypes and typicality effects
- Definitions set boundaries for a category, if a test case has certain attributes it is inside the boundaries, when a test case doesn’t have the defining attributes it is outside the category
- Prototype theory: the best way to identify a category, to characterize a concept, is to specify the centre of the category rather than the boundaries → all judgements are made based on the perfect prototype
o Graded membership: objects closer to the prototype are better members of the category than objects farther from the prototype
o Sentence verification task: the speed in which a judgement is made about a sentence being true or false depends on the content of the sentence: a penguin is a bird takes longer than a robin is a bird → judgements are made based on prototype, the closer the item is to the prototype the faster the judgement is made
o Production task: name as many items of a category you can, items closest to the prototype will be named first
→ convergence in the production and sentence verification tasks: items with faster RTs in the sentence verification task, are more likely to be named in the production task, which indeed suggests people make judgements based on a prototype
o Rating task: rate items on the basis of how much they fit into their category (how birdy is this bird?) an items fits less well into a category when it is farther away from the prototype
- Basic-level categorization: there is a natural level of categorization, neither too specific nor too general, that you tend to use in your conversations and reasoning (people go to work by car, rather than people drive their Toyota to work)
- Conceptual knowledge is represented via a prototype and we categorize by making comparisons to that prototype
Exemplars
- Exemplar-based reasoning: the categorization isn’t made by general knowledge about the overall category but rather on a specific remembered instance, an example o The standard to which all objects are compared to is an example of the category that comes to mind, rather than a prototype
o Your response to a less common item of a category is slower due to the fact that you have to search longer to find an item in your memories that resembles the one you are presented with, the more common ones are primed, thus easier to find
o Naming more common fruits in the production test, is due to the pattern that is available in memory
- In identifying objects you use a combination of exemplars and prototypes o Prototypes provide an economical representation of what is typical for a category and there are circumstances in which quick summary is quite useful
o Exemplars provide info that is lost from the prototype: different setting will trigger different memories and thus bring different exemplars to mind (when looking for a present for a 4-year-old the exemplar will, in this case, easier lead to an idea than the prototype of present)
The difficulties with categorizing via resemblance
- Even though a penguin isn’t the most typical bird, we all now it is a bird. So the item may not be that typical but it is clear that it is part of the category → judgements can be made on some basis other than typicality
- Naturally occurring items can basically be modified beyond recognition, but they remain the natural objects they are (a lemon can be painted, made sweet and flat, but would still be a lemon), it is the deep features that matter rather than the current properties. The categorization therefor does not depend on its resemblance to a prototype, but on a web of other beliefs based on a broader understanding of the category
- The judgement about resemblance can be made on the properties of the prototype/example rather than its superficial attributes. The importance of a property or attribute varies from category to category, and it varies, in particular, according to your beliefs about what matters for that category
Concepts as theories
- Heuristic strategy: a strategy that gives up the guarantee of accuracy in order to gain some efficiency o Reliance on prototypes and exemplars will usually be accurate about whether an item belongs in a specific category or not most → typicality is related to membership of a category, because it provides a quick judgement, which isn’t always correct, but is most of the time
- Cause-and-effect beliefs are used to categorize and apply general knowledge to new items
- Abstract conceptual knowledge is intertwined with knowledge about what an object looks like (sensory) and how one might interact with the object (motor)
The knowledge network
- The links in the knowledge network are constituent knowledge themselves
- The further activation must travel in the network, the more time it takes. Therefor the closer related the info to be retrieved is, the less time it take to retrieve it o Nodes directly linked by an association (robin – bird) are quicker than the ones who are indirectly connected (robin – animal) - Different associative links?
o Isa links: equivalence relations o Hasa links: possessive relations
- Propositional network (Anderson): the network of knowledge is built of propositions, the smallest units of knowledge that can be either true or false (children love candy), the same proposition can be presented in various forms (candy is loved by children is still the same proposition) o Time and space are incorporated as part of the propositions o Figure 8.7 page 315
o Local representations: each node represents one idea, so that when that node is activated, you’re thinking about that idea, and when you’re thinking about that idea, the node is activated
- Connectionist networks rely on distributed representations: any idea is represented only by a pattern of activation across the network, the activation of a single node doesn’t mean anything, we can only learn what is being represented when we look at the simultaneous activation of many other nodes to find out what pattern exists throughout the entire network → parallel distributed processing (PDP) o PDPs are able to detect patterns in the input they receive, as a result they are able to generalize what they have learned to new variations on the pattern
o Connection weights: the strength of the individual connections between nodes, needs to be adjusted when learning
o Back propagation: when an error signal is received, the node gives feedback to the connections through which it came, and thus allows the entire network to make use of this feedback leading to the decrease of the mistake occurring again
Summary page 319
Chapter 9: Language
The organization of language
- The hierarchy of linguistic units: sentences are composed of phrases, which are composed of words, which are composed of morphemes, which are composed of phonemes (figure 9.1 page 325)
Phonology
- Categorizing speech sounds o Manner of production: distinguish sounds according to how the airflow is restricted § Air flow through the nose or not
§ Stopped airflow (p/b) versus continuing airflow (f/z/r) o Voiced versus non-voiced sounds
§ Voiced letters are produced by vibrations of the vocal cords (z/v/n)
§ Non-voiced sounds are produced by narrowing the air passageway within the mouth itself (f/s/t/k)
o Place of articulation: where the airflow is restricted
§ Bilabial sounds: produced by closing your lips (p/b)
§ Labiodental sounds: produced by putting your top teeth close to your bottom lip (f/v)
§ Alveolar sounds: produced by placing your tongue just behind your upper teeth (t/d)
- The complexity of speech perception:
o Phonemes that differ only in one production feature sound a lot alike o Speech segmentation: before you can identify phonemes, you have to find the boundaries between successive words and successive syllables
o Coarticulation: phonemes overlap, as a result you cannot point to a specific acoustic pattern and link it to a specific sound
o Variation from speaker to speaker - Aids to speech perception:
o Cohort model: words are a combination of sounds, the first sound decreases the possibilities, the second sound decreases the amount of possibilities even further → you seek a match between the sounds you hear and the words in your vocabulary
o Speech perception is guided by the knowledge of the context in which the word appears
§ Phonemic restoration effect: a sound in the middle of a word is been replaced by a brief burst of noise (legi*latures) , this is not noted when the word is read in a sentence, participant hear the entire word (legislatures), this effect is not present when the word is presented in isolation
o Categorical perception: you’re much better at hearing the differences between categories of sounds than you are at hearing variations within a category of sounds (a [d] sound is easier distinguished from a [t] sound than a [d] sound from a somewhat different [d] sound)
§ Graded membership pattern: test cases close to the [ba] prototype should be reliably identified as [ba], as we move closer to the [pa] sound the identification gets harder until at some point they are clearly closer to the
[pa] sound and can be identified as [pa]
→ you largely ignore the subphonemic variations and choose between the
[ba] or [pa] sound
o Plural endings are pronounced differently depending on the ending of the base noun
§ If the base noun ends with a voiced sound, the [z] ending is used
§ If the base noun ends with a non- voiced sound, the [s] ending is used
Morphemes and words
- Information about a word o Phonological representation: how does it sound, the sequence of phonemes o Orthography: the sequence of letters that spells the word o Syntactic representation: how the word is used in different sentences o Semantic representation: meaning
§ Referent: what words refer to
§ Knowing a word, is knowing the relevant concept
§ Generativity: the capacity to create an endless series of new combinations, all built from the same set of fundamental units
Syntax
- Phrase structure rules, such as a sentence must consist of a noun phrase (can include a determiner, some number of adjectives and the noun itself) and a verb (often consists of a verb followed by a noun phrase) phrase o Phrase structure rules are descriptive rules: rules characterizing the language as it is ordinarily used by fluent speakers and listeners
o Organization of a sentence by these rules, makes them easier to remember o Helps understanding the sentences, because syntax specifies the relationships among the words in each sentence
- Prescriptive rules: describe how language is supposed to be (don’t start a sentence with and), preferences of a particular group
- Linguistic universals: features shared by languages, rules are highly systematic and correlated, in that once you know one property of a language you can deduce others o If a language is SVO (subject verb object) it uses mostly prepositions, and question words are placed at the beginning of a sentence
o If a language is SOV, it has postpositions and question words are placed at the end of the sentence
Sentence parsing
- Parsing: we try to figure out the syntactic role of each word the moment it arrives o Temporary ambiguity → garden-path sentences
o Minimal attachment: new material should be attached to the syntactic representation we have so far to create the simplest legal structure possible → incoming material should be attached to the partial syntactic structure using the fewest possible nodes
o It is more likely to hear an active sentence than a passive one, we generally interpret a sentence’s initial noun as doer of the action and not the recipient
o Influenced by function words and various morphemes that signal syntactic role o Guided by background knowledge o The most frequent meaning of a word is assumed o Assumption that adjectives will be followed by nouns o You use the context in which you encounter a sentence
§ Conversational context
§ Extralinguistic context: the physical and social setting in which you encounter sentences (put the apple on the towel in the box)
o Prosody: the rise and fall of speech intonation (rhythm cues) and the pattern of pauses (pitch cues)
- Pragmatics: how language is ordinarily used
The biological roots of language
- Non-fluent aphasia: damage to the left frontal lobe, Broca’s area o Loss of vocabulary o Laboured and fragmented speech
o Articulating each word requires special effort
- Fluent aphasia: damage to Wernicke’s area o Free talk with little meaning
- Specific language impairment (SLI): no problems with the muscles needed to perform language, nonetheless patients are slow at learning language and have difficulty in understanding and producing many sentences throughout their lives. They are very impaired on tasks designed to test their linguistic abilities
- Over-regularization errors: the child has learned certain aspects of a word, but not that it can only be used in restricted contexts; learning that –ed is used to make a past tense of a verb and applying it to irregular verbs as well, learning that –s is udes to make a plural of a noun, and applying it to foot as well, learning that the contradiction of you are can be made by adding –n’t and applying it to I am as well
- Semantic bootstrapping: the child is born with linking rules, that enable them to relate syntactic categories to the semantic ones, therefor they can use their innate knowledge to form sentences once they have worked out whether a word is referred to an action or a thing
Language and thought
- Language influences cognition by shaping what you pay attention to: if a scene is described in an active way with an actor, attention is paid to that actor and therefor it is more likely you remember the actor and think about the actor
Summary page 361
Chapter 11: Judgment and reasoning
Judgment
- Making judgements:
o Frequency estimates: assessment of how often have various events happened in the past
o Attribute substitution (or availability heuristic): using easily available info that is plausible to substitute for the info you seek
§ Rather than making a judgement based on exact the frequency, you make it based on availability (how easy and quickly you can come up with relevant examples), the more available an example the more likely it has frequently occurred
§ Biased by memory organization (words starting with the letter r, are easier to find than the ones where the r is the third letter, yet there are more of the latter)
§ Rare events are more likely to be noticed, and there for better encoded in memory, which in turn makes them easily available
o Representativeness heuristic: probability which relies on the resemblance to earlier encounters
§ Gambler’s fallacy: when a coin landed on heads six time in a row, you suppose the probability of getting tails is bigger the seventh time, whereas in fact changes for heads and tails are equal → you assume category homogeneity, each subset of a category should have the same properties as the category overall
§ Make a conclusion about an entire category based on a single case
Detecting co-variation
- Conformation bias: the tendency to be more responsive to evidence that confirms your beliefs, rather than to evidence that might challenge your beliefs, which will lead to incompetent co-variation
- Base-rate info: how frequently something occurs in general, with neglect of this info also leading to incompetent co-variation o Base-rates are more likely to be taken into account when they are presented as frequencies rather than percentages or probabilities
o Sensitivity to base-rates increases if background knowledge leads people to see the meaningful linkage between the base-rate and the dimension being judged Dual-process models
- Dual-process model: system 1 is the fast and easy sort of thinking, system 2 the slower and more effortful thinking o Choice based: when people have to make a judgment that really matters they choose the slower and more effortful system, however evidence shows that system 1 is sometimes used even in matters of life-and-death, which indicates that it isn’t purely a matter of deliberate choice
o Evidence suggests that system 2 is only used if triggered by certain cues and only if the circumstances are right
o If the base-state data are presented as a frequency the likelihood of usage of system
2 increases o System 2 is more likely to be used, when the role of chance is more striking in a problem, with this people are more likely to pay attention to the quantity of evidence, on the idea that a larger set of observations is less vulnerable to chance fluctuations
o When educated in the right way, you are more likely to use system 2
Confirmation and disconfirmation
- Induction: the process through which you make forecasts about new cases based on the case you’ve observed so far
- Deduction: cases in which you start with claims or assertions that you count as given and ask what follows from these premises, what implications these claims have o Helps keep your beliefs in touch with reality - Conformation bias:
o Disconfirmation can be more informative than confirmation, you are more likely to find the rule in a set of numbers if you ask for things that disconfirm your theory
o Disconfirmation is often taken sceptically, whereas confirmation is taken at face value right away
o Disconfirming evidence is often remembered in a way that robs this evidence of its force, leaving beliefs unchallenged
o Belief perseverance: even when disconfirming evidence is undeniable, it isn’t used § You will seek for evidence in your memory which is in line with the feedback you got, so when you received negative feedback you only find memories which confirm this feedback
Logic
- Categorical syllogisms: a type of logical argument that begins with two assertions (premises), each containing a statement about a category (All M are B. All D are M.) they can then be completed with a conclusion that may (valid syllogisms) or may not (invalid syllogisms) follow from these premises (Therefor all D are B, which is a valid syllogism in this case) o Belief bias: people fail to distinguish between good arguments and bad ones, as a result they’ll endorse an illogical argument if it happens to lead to a conclusion they like, and reject a logical argument if it leads to conclusions they have doubts about
o Logical errors often are the result of a low-level matching strategy: a strategy of endorsing conclusions if the words match those in the premises
- Reasoning about conditional statements: the first statement provides a condition under which the second statement is guaranteed to be true (if X, then Y) o Belief bias
o Selection task: participants are shown four playing cards, each card has a number on one side and a letter on the other, the rule is: if a card has a vowel on one side, it must have an even number on the other side, which cards must be turned to put the rule to a test?
Decision making
- Strive for maximum utility o Subjective utility: the value a certain factor has to you
o Expected value = (probability of a certain outcome) * (utility of the outcome)
- The frame of the decision has an enormous impact o If the frame casts a choice in terms of losses, decision makers tend to be risk seeking o If the frame casts a choice in terms of gains, decision makers tend to be risk averse
- Choices are influenced by the frame of the questions and the evidence as well
- We make reason-based choices: the goal is simply to make the decision that we feel good about o Justifications are sought
o Reasons to make a decision change with the frame of the questions and evidence
- Regret often influences decision making: people are strongly motivated to avoid regret
- Somatic markers guide decision making: bodily arousal produced by anticipating events, which pulls you toward options associated with positive feelings and away from ones that trigger negative feelings o orbitofrontal cortex is the brain region that allows you to interpret your emotions and is crucial in the use of somatic markers
- Affective forecasting , the ability to predict your own emotions, is very poor: people underestimate their own ability to adapt and as a result work to avoid things that they’d soon get used to in the future
Summary page 441
Chapter 12: Problem solving and intelligence
General problem solving methods
- Problem solving as a search o Initial state: the knowledge and resources you have at the outset o Operators: actions that change your state when you move toward your goal o Path constraints: rule out some path solutions
o Problem space: the set of all the states that can be reached in solving the problem
§ Problem solving heuristic to choose the best option, without having to consider all the options available
§ (mental) pictures and diagrams
- Problem-solving heuristics o Hill-climbing strategy: at each point you simply choose the option that moves in the direction of your goal
§ Many problems though require that you briefly move away from your goal, only then, from this new position, the problem can be solved
o Means-end analysis: compare your current state to the goal state and ask what means do I have to make these more alike?
§ Breaks a problem into smaller sub-problems each with its own goal
Drawing on experience
- Problem solving via analogy: often a problem reminds you of other problem’s you’ve solved in the past, and so you can rely on your experience in tackling the current challenge o Focus on the deep structure, the principles governing the problem, rather than the superficial structure of the problem, to locate helpful analogies in memory
o People can only use analogies if they figure out how to map the prior case onto the problem now being solved
o Problem solving improves when people are encouraged to pay attention to the problems’ underlying dynamics
o Understanding the problem will help to use it in later problems that are alike
Defining the problem
- Ill-defined: no clear statement at the outset of how the goal should be characterized or what operations might be used to reach that goal o Define sub-goals
o Add structure by adding extra constraints and extra assumptions
- Inferences in solving the problem o Functional fixedness: the tendency to be rigid in how you think about an object’s function, which decreases the likelihood of solving a problem
o Einstellung: people get stuck in solving a problem due to the collection of beliefs and assumptions they made about the problem early on
§ Water jar experiment: by solving the problem the same way each time, you tend to use this solution even when a more direct option is available
o Thinking outside the box is often hard: people have a vast set that they try to solve the problem with
Creativity
- Creativity o Creative people have certain thing in common: prerequisites of creativity o Certain personality traits are needed to be creative, willingness to take risks and ignore criticism, an ability to tolerate ambiguous findings or situations and an inclination not to follow the crowd
o Motivation and pleasure in work rather than the promise of external rewards o Being in the right place in the right time
- Creative thought proceeds through 4 stages (Wallas) o Preparation: the problem solver gathers info about the problem
o Incubation: the problem solver sets the problem aside and seems not to be working on it, though he unconsciously might
o Illumination: some key insight or new idea emerges
o Verification: confirmed that the new idea really does lead to a problem solution, and the details are worked out
Intelligence
- IQ = (mental age / chronological age) *100, mental age was measured based on several different cognitive tasks
- WAIS (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale): tests to access general knowledge; a vocabulary and comprehension, perceptual reasoning scale includes visual puzzles; separate subtests access WM and speed of intellectual processing
- Raven’s progressive matrices test: hinges entirely on someone’s ability to analyse figures and detect patterns
- Reliability: test-retest reliability allows you to make good predictions about someone’s abilities in the future, but:
o Changes in environment can cause corresponding changes in IQ score
o Test-retest reliability is extremely high, but not perfect o Brain development can increase the IQ scores
- Validity: predictive validity: if intelligence test truly measure what they are supposed to measure, then someone’s score on the test should allow us to predict how well the person would do in setting that require intelligence
- General intelligence: there is a general factor that matters across the board of the IQ test, which means that all the subtests are correlated to each other
- Hierarchical model of intelligence (figure 12.17 page 477) o Moderate correlations between categories: general intelligence o High correlations within categories: more specialized intelligence
- Fluid intelligence: the ability to deal with new and unusual problems; reaches a peak in early adulthood and then declines steadily across the lifespan
- Crystallized intelligence: acquired knowledge, including your verbal knowledge and your broad repertoire of skills; usually increases with age
- The building blocks of intelligence o Smarter people have faster mental processes allowing them to perform intellectual tasks more quickly, and it would also give them time for more steps
§ Inspection time: the time someone needs to decide which of the two lines is longer, or which of tones is higher
o Parieto-frontal integration theory: what really matters for intelligence is the integration of info from all the different brain sites, and thus the coordinated functioning of many cognitive components
§ Smarter people have a larger WM capacity
§ Smarter people are able to maintain more complex task models: mental representation that reflects your understanding of the task’s goals, rules and requirements and, once constructed, provides an agenda for work on the task, defining the sequence of steps that must be taken
- Intelligence beyond the IQ test o Practical intelligence: the kind of intelligence needed for skilled reasoning in day-today settings
o People how have high score can ignore facts, are overconfident in their judgements, are insensitive to inconsistencies in their views, etc. which requires us to separate measures of intelligence and rationality
§ Rationality: the capacity for critically assessing info as it is gathered in the natural environment
o Emotional intelligence: the ability to understand your own emotions and others’, and also the ability to control your emotions when appropriate
o Multiple intelligences theory (Gardner): come from the Savant syndrome: individuals with a single extraordinary talent, but otherwise disabled to a profound degree § Linguistic intelligence
§ Logic-mathematical intelligence
§ Spatial intelligence
§ Musical intelligence
§ Bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence: the ability to learn and create complex patterns of movement
§ Interpersonal intelligence: the ability to understand other people
§ Intrapersonal intelligence: the ability to understand ourselves
§ Naturalistic intelligence: the ability to understand patterns in nature
The roots of intelligence
- Monozygotic twins resemble each other genetically more than dizygotic twins, and their IQ appears to resemble each other more as well →genetic factors play an important role in shaping IQ, this effect disappears when raised in impoverished families
- Environment also plays a role in shaping IQ, impoverished environments impede intellectual development and these effects are accumulative
- Flynn effect: IQ score increased at a rate of approximately 3 point per decade
Summary page 493
Applied Cognitive Psychology TCP
Fundamental versus applied research
- Fundamental Psychology: Understanding the Human Brain and Behavior - TCP operator: troubleshooter
Future perspective
- With aging, motor skills, learning ability and perception slowly deteriorate
- Information (via the internet) must be properly conveyed
- Comfort is important, the experience
Where can you encounter TCP?
- If an advertisement is fun, you keep watching more attentively, and the information has a better chance of getting into the viewer's memory
- Linking the joke to the brand name is very important, if this is missing there is very little chance that the link will end up in the memory - Purpose of applied research:
o Forming rules of thumb
o Good generalizing theories that can predict effects
Eye movements, conspicuousness and advertising
- Knowledge about the functioning of the visual system, knowledge about eye movements and insight into the viewer's task is necessary
Visibility
- Visual message must comply with:
o Visibility: something is visible when it is visible when the eyes are focused on it
§ Size: a detail must be large enough to be noticeable
§ Luminance contrast: higher luminance contrast is more readable (black/white
instead of . different shades of gray)
o Conspicuity: where in the field of view the object is presented, similarities with the rest of the field
Contrast
• Form
• Colour
• Size
Crowding/lateral masking is stronger if
• The flankers are more like the target object
• The flankers are closer to the target object
• The flankers and the object are further in the periphery The use of colors in visual communication
- Coding: for example the colors red, green and orange at traffic lights, they also have a location coding
- Interface: for example a road sign
- Luminance contrast can be used to ensure that color blind people can also use color differences
What do people like to watch
- Saccade: the movement that makes the eye look from one location to another o Subconscious saccades usually have a reflexive character, these are often aimed at conspicuousness in the scene, they are also often task-related
How do marketing people use this knowledge
- Placing a person looking in a certain direction, drawing your attention in that direction
- The viewing pattern depends on the assignment
- Banner blindness: when people are goal-oriented, banners are avoided en masse
Pop-out or search
- Banner blindness shows that if people are often exposed to eye-catching ads, they will use the attributes that make the ad stand out against the ad.
- Banner is the same style as the rest of the site, are often not seen as a banner so they are read as if it were part of the site and the advertising is read
Neuropsychological questions and methods
Introduction
- Clinical Neuropsychology:
o The field of science in which the relationships between the brain and behavior in patient-related research are studied
o The practical sector in which this knowledge is applied in the form of diagnostics, guidance and treatment
- Localizationalism: specific behavioral consequences of selective disorders in individual parts of the brain o Apraxia: impairment in performing previously learned actions or Visual agnosia: impairment in the understanding of sensory perceptions o Function differentiation (STM and LTM, verbal and non-verbal memory, episodic and semantic memory etc)
o The test measures the extent to which a person is able to perform a particular cognitive function, rather than measuring the impairment
- Holism: general behavioral consequences of disorders in the brain as a whole o One underlying common basic mental disorder in all forms of brain injury
o Equipotentiality and takeover of function by undamaged parts of the brain o Organic tests: detecting the consequences of hitherto invisible brain disorders
- Neuropsychological picture depends on:
o Etiology (local versus diffuse) o Type of damage o Extent and location of damage o Patient-related variables such as age, gender, etc. Types of questions
- Three types of neuropsychological questions
1. General and basic questionnaire: what is the patient's cognitive profile
§ Mapping disorders in behaviour, cognition and emotion
§ Explanation: to what extent do psychological and situational factors play a role
§ Prediction: what consequences for everyday life
§ Indication: treatment options and practitioners
§ Evaluation: subjective and objective improvements/deteriorations
2. Brain damage and/or abnormalities that have already been clearly demonstrated
§ What behavioral consequences
§ In case of previous neurological disease: what residual symptoms
3. Is there a brain abnormality and if so which one?
Explanation of the symptoms
- Imaging o EEG: high temporal resolution, but low spatial resolution
o ERP (Event-related potentials): one and the same stimulus is often presented, the activity is averaged over all trials, making it clear which brain activity is related to the stimulus, and which parts were only occasionally active by accident
o CT: three-dimensional image of the brain using X-rays
o MRI: The density of hydrogen atoms provides a detailed three-dimensional image of the brain, with high spatial resolution
o PET: radioactive tracer provides a detailed three-dimensional image of the brain, with high spatial resolution
o fMRI: measured changes in oxygen content and local changes in blood flow → which brain areas are involved in a particular function
o rsMRI (resting state MRI): mapping default networks
o DTI (diffusion tensor imaging): the degree of diffusion of hydrogen atoms in the brain is used for a three-dimensional image (hydrogen atoms behave randomly except near nerve pathways, where they bend . This creates a row of water molecules exactly along the nerve pathway all of which move parallel to the nerves)
Measuring Instruments
- Re-test study: provides an indication of the reliability as well as data for the size of the re-test effect, the improvement of scores with repeated testing without indicating an actual improvement in the underlying functional domain - Available neurological test:
1. Level and screening test: general estimation of intellectual functioning, Dementia screening, but realize that:
§ there are forms of dementia (eg 'frontal dementia') in which cognitive impairments are not prominent, certainly in the initial phase, and certainly not specifically in the memory domain;
§ that also when applied to brain diseases other than those for which developed, for example stroke, the actual level can be both underestimated (because scores can be lowered due to language and comprehension disorders) and overestimated (because there is often insufficient attention to executive functioning);
§ that most of these tests require corrections for the strong influence of age and education level;
§ that the generally satisfactory data on reliability and distinctiveness relate to the total scores, so that one has to be very cautious when interpreting item and sub-scores.
§ with these screening instruments the sensitivity is often (very) high, but this is at the expense of the specificity, so that a feeling of 'good versus bad' can be supported, but there can be no question of further interpretation in a differential diagnostic sense.
Dutch Reading Test for Adults (NLV): estimation of the pre-morbid IQ: the correct pronunciation of read words with an irregular spelling, starting points are:
§ knowledge of correct pronunciation correlates highly with education level and verbal intelligence;
§ in dementia, the 'technical' reading and pronunciation of words are undisturbed in the initial stages.
2. Specific test for cognitive functioning divided into functional domains (attention, speed of information processing, perception, memory and learning, language, spatial functions, executive functions, social cognition and directed action):
establishing a cognitive profile in which statements can be made about impaired cognitive functions among the spared functions § Attention:
Stroop test: maps selective attention, distractibility and ability to inhibit, attention to the color of the ink in which writing is written Bourdon test: maps long-term sustained focused attention, cross out each group of 4 dots on a sheet of 50 lines
§ Speed of information processing: psychomotor speed, simple info processing and complex info processing § Perception and visuospatial functions:
CORVIST: cortical vision screening test: after correction of normal vision impairment, a higher perception disorder?
VOSP: visual object and space battery
Benton facial recognition: facial recognition
Shephard rotation test: mental rotation
Seashore test: auditory recognition § Memory and Learning:
CVMT (continuous visual memory test): free from verbalisable material Fluency test: semantic memory test: list as many items as possible from a category
§ Language: distinction between language expression and language comprehension and between disorders at word or sentence level
§ Executive functions: executive functions, coordinating, controlling and planning functions
Wiscosin test: check whether the principle is correct, principle changes → perseveration errors
Tower of London: the correct arrangement of the blocks on the rods in as few steps as possible
Trailmaking test: connect the number (and letters) in ascending order § Targeted action
3. Test for emotional functioning, personality and attitudes
4. Clinimetric methods: the consequences of diseases and abnormalities
Interpolation Problems
- Test conditions:
o The patient understands and remembers the instruction
o The patient is willing and able to cooperate, and is able and willing to give a response or answer
o Tests require perception and some form of motor response and assume command of the Dutch language
- Pre-morbid functioning o If one wants to draw conclusions about acquired brain injury, information from before the tests is needed (qualitatively based on generalization, within the normal range for brain injury onset, NLV and education level and age
- Multiconditionality: other factors can influence the results of the tests
- Sensitivity and specificity o Sensitivity: how often an unfavorable test score occurs in people with the diagnosis
o Specificity: how often a favorable test score occurs in someone without the relevant diagnosis, often healthy subjects or sometimes patients with a different diagnosis
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