Cognitive psychology part notes from lectures and book (syllabus)
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Course
Biological and cognitive psychology
Institution
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU)
These notes are for the cognitive part of biological cognitive psychology. They include a combination of the lectures of R. Godijn and his syllabus (9 chapters) that he wrote himself. There are a lot of visuals to remember the materials better. (tip: memorize the names of the researchers to use th...
Introduction Biological & Cognitive psychology
Lecture 1, chapter 1
Cognitive psychology study of the mind
o Functional explanations: process models
o Interaction of these processes
Biological psychology study of biological basis of the mind
o Focus on brain processes: structural models
o Interaction of brain areas
Historical foundations (cognitive psychology)
Late 19th century
o Studying psychology how do we study the mind?
o Wilhelm wundt (father of experimental psychology)
1979: first experimental psychology lab
Studied structure of the mind
Method: Introspection
Subjects get trained to look into their mind and report what they
observed
20th century: John Watson’s criticism
o Extreme variable results from person to person
o Results difficult to verify
Invisible inner mental processes
o John Watson: Behaviourism
Eliminate the mind as a topic of study, instead, directly observe behaviour
Interest in 1913-1950 shifted from content of consciousness to:
How behaviour shaped by experience
How reaction to environment
How change in behaviour after learning relation between stimuli
How behaviour changes through reward and punishment etc
Studies
o Ivan Pavlov (classical conditioning)
Dog can be conditioned to produce saliva(unconditioned stimulus) when bell
rings (conditioned stimulus)
o Watson: Little Albert (classical conditioning)
Conditioned a child to fear a rat,
loud noise (unconditioned stimulus) fear (unconditioned
response)
rat (conditioned stimulus) fear (conditioned response)
o Burrhus Skinner (late 1930) (operant conditioning)
Skinner box
With reward more likely to repeat behaviour
Language acquisition
reinforcement and rewarding if its correct
Criticism: Chomsky
o Humans have an innate (biological) ability to learn language
, This does not rely on reinforcement
o Chomsky’s view suggest behaviourisms has its limitation in
understanding human behaviour
o Edward Tolman(1948): cognitive map (spatial navigation)
Rats learned their way around a maze
This was not a behavioural response but mental map
Downfall behaviourism
o Limitations of reinforcements as driving force behind our behaviour
Cloud Shannon (1948)
o A mathematical theory of communication
o Computers: input processing output
o Mind: perceive the world (input) process use info to interact with our
environment (output)
o Cognitive revolution
o This study is different of behaviourisms thinking
Broadbent’s (1958) filter moder of attention
o Selective listening to speech
Subjects listen to separate messages (one on left ear, other on right ear)
o Non-repeated message not processed in terms of meaning
Later research shows processed to some extent
o Attention has capacity limit
o This study different of behaviourist way of thinking
Saul Sternberg (1966) short-term storage
o Memory task
Subjects had to remember set of
digits
Each trial a digit was presented and
subject had to determine quickly if it
was one of the digits in the set they remembered
Results: mean reaction time increases linearly
Evidence that all items in short-term memory are serially scanned before a
decision is made
Short History (Biological psychology)
Charles Darwin evolution theory
o Mental processes and brain regions evolved with specific function
Each species occupies specific niche and its nervous system has evolved to
be successful in this niche
o Survival and reproduction
o 2 techniques that were used to by 19 th century psychologists that helps us
understand the human nervous system ablation method and electrical
stimulation
Effect of electrical stimulation
o 17th century Luigi Galvani discovered that the electrical stimulation of a nerve of a
frog can make a muscle contract
Also possible in PNS and CNS
o Fritsch & Hitzig electrical stimulation different parts of a dog
, o Electrical stimulation only for animals because it requires removal of skull
But if patient agrees it can be done Wilder Penfield and his collegue
performed on epileptic patients to control epileptic seizures
With this it was possible to create functional maps of the brain
regions, in particular the sensory and motor parts.
o Electrical stimulation is useful for understanding brain functions, but it relies on a
form of introspection (relying on subjects report of experience)
Ablation method
o Pierre Flourens developed the ablation method
Taking a part of the brain and observe its effect
E.g. removing cerebellum resulted that balance and moto coordination were
affected
o Study by Mishkin and Ungerleider (early 1980s)
Removed posterior parietal cortex or inferior temporal cortex in monkeys
and had to do one of the two tasks
Landmark discrimination task
Monkey had to learn food was placed in covered foodwell that was
closest to an object
Spatial processing is needed
object discrimination task
single object and food was placed underneath
identify processing is needed
result: ablation of posterior parietal cortex impaired performance only in
landmark discrimination task and ablation of inferior temporal cortex
impaired performance only impaired performance on object discrimination
task
inferior temporal cortex important for identify processing
posterior parietal cortex important for spatial processing
o this method is invasive therefore only for animals
but we can compare in situations such as patients with brain damage
e.g. Damage in Broca‘s Area expressive aphasia
e.g. damage in Wernicke’s Area receptive aphasia
o language impairment
ablation can be used for epileptic patients when seizures become so
frequent and interfere with everyday functioning
patient Henry Molaison got a large part of medial temporal lobe billaterly
removed
consequences were dramatic:
o memory loss and could no longer form new long-term
memories
limitations of this study:
o precise extent of damage not entirely certain (unless
examined postmortem)
o if there are more regions damaged or partially damaged
it is not easy to determine functions
o always be careful of generalizing (there are many factors like
and disease history)
, speed of information processing
Herman Helmontz 19th century
Conducted on frog
o Response time of the muscle contraction depend on where the nerve the current
was applied the closer to the muscle, the shorter the reaction time
Donders substraction method
o Reaction time Go/nogo task – reaction time simple task = duration of stimulus
discrimination (estimate of the duration of the discrimination process)
o Method:
Create 2 identical tasks
Measure RT
Substract RT’s
o Problems: depends on assumptions about stages
o Strong assumption about stages being independent
Towards cognitive neuroscience
Mental processes are the result of activity in the nervous system
Long time dominance of body and min dualism now the mind is what the brain does
There are many technological developments
o fMRI, event related potentials, EEG etc
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