Cognitive Psychology
Chapter 1
Introduction

Introduction

Cognitive psychology is concerned with how the mind represents and uses information about the outside world.
The study how humans (and other animals)

• Acquire information
• Store information in memory
• Retrieve information
• Work with information to reach goals

In all these cases we are dealing with mental representations.

Information is taken in through perceiving what is attended to, and is stored initially in short-term or working memory.
Then selected items are retained in long-term memory through learning processes and form knowledge that can be represented in a variety of ways.
Later, stored information may be retrieved if it has been retained, or it may turn out to be forgotten.
Perceived and recalled information shapes skilled actions on the environment and enters into problems solving, reasoning and decision processes.
Information can be shared with others via language and frequently involves an emotional aspect.

History and approaches

Mnemonics: a learning device used to aid memory.

• The method of loci. → Relies on associating a visual image with the object to be remembered, and placing these images in a familiar location or along a familiar route.
• The keyword method → used when learning a foreign language vocabulary. The learner makes an association between the unfamiliar word and a familiar word in the native language that sound like the unfamiliar word. The use of an interactive visual image underlies the mnemonic effect. Imagery can be a useful mnemonic device.
• The phonetic number system (or major system) → commonly used by memory experts, increases memory capacity of numbers. This system converts numbers into constant sounds, which can then be made into words, and potentially viewed as mental images.

Spatial learning are of particular importance for such techniques.
Mnemonic techniques allow us to create associations between unrelated pieces of information. But they are less likely to help us complete meaningful task specific memory tasks.

Associationism

Empiricist held that all knowledge came from experience and that ideas and memories were linked by associations. Closeness in space as well as in time fosters associations also.

Introspectionism

Wundt tried to analyze normal perceptions into simpler sensations which combined to give the perception.

Behaviourism

This approach abandoned the attempt to look inside the mind and took only observable behavior and stimuli as its data. This approach essentially aimed to be a psychology without reference to internal cognitive processes. The focus was on learning and particularly about how behavioral responses could be predicted form knowing the history of rewards and punishments following behavior in response to particular stimuli.

Mental maps:

Cognitive Psychology
Chapter 3
Attention and consciousness

Attention and consciousness have the idea of selection in common.
We attend to particular aspects of information hitting our senses and seem consciously aware of only a limited view of the world at any one time.

Attention

Attention is a limited resource that is deployed to facilitate the processing of critical information.

External attention: selecting and controlling incoming sensory information (like features, objects, spatial locations, sensory modality and time points).
Internal attention: selecting control strategies and maintaining internally generated information. It involves regulating our internal mental life so we can achieve our goals (like task rules, responses, long-term memory and working memory).

The attention system: can be seen as independent from processing systems and it utilizes a network of anatomical areas that carry out functions that are specified in cognitive terms.
Three basic components:

• Alerting
• Orienting (type of external attention)
• Executive function (type of internal attention)

• The alerting system is comprised of brain areas in the brainstem and frontal cortex that are responsible for achieving a state of arousal.
• The orienting system includes brain areas in frontal and partial cortex that direct our processing resources to incoming information and includes areas such as the frontal eye fields that are involved with rapid strategic control of attention.

This orienting system is external attention since it has the function of orienting our sensory processing to incoming information.
The frontal eye fields are found in the frontal cortex and are involved with the generation and control of eye movements.

• The executive system includes the anterior cingulate cortex, regions along the medial frontal cortex, parietal cortex and additional regions in frontal cortex.
  The executive system is related to internal attention since it is critical for control of starting tasks and sustained maintenance of performing a task.

The altering system is a kind of ‘on’ switch that organizes our behavior for when a event might occur.
The orienting and executive systems on the other hand are important for organizing our behavior in response to what is happening in the world and what we should be doing.

Early theories of attention

The cocktail party problem: describes how we successfully focus on one speaker in a background of noise and other conversations.
But, our ability to tune into one speaker can be broken by certain sounds.

Filter theory

A filter is used to block irrelevant information so that only the important message would reach a central channel for further processing.
To goal is to get the important information on a piece of wire (information

Cognitive Psychology
Chapter 5
Long-term memory

Three important aspects of long-term memory processes:

• Long-term memory processes are not disturbed throughout the brain. Damage to particular areas within the temporal lobes will cause profound long-term memory loss. Particular brain regions are responsible for long-term memory function.
• Long-term memory encompasses a number of different abilities and some learning may be possible after damage to the system.
• memory is separable form language, perceptual and other cognitive functions.

Memory and amnesia

Amnesia revers to the amnesic syndrome. A pattern of memory loss characterized by impaired long-term memory and spared short-term memory.
General characteristics:

• Short-term memory is intact
• Memory for language, and concepts is largely intact.
• There is a severe and lasting anterograde amnesia (memory for events after the onset of the amnesia will be impaired).
• There will be a retrograde amnesia, of variable extend. The patient will have loss of memory for events prior tot the onset of amnesia.
• Skill learning, conditioning and priming will be unaffected. The patient will also be able to engage in skills acquired prior to the onset of amnesia.

Ribot’s law:
Recently formed memories are more susceptible to impairment that are older memories.
Wechsler Memory scale: a widely used neurocognitive assessment that measures visual memory, auditory memory and working memory.

Causes of amnesia include effects of brain surgery., infections, head injuries or stroke, conditions such as Korsakoff’s syndrome, and injury.

Korsakoff’s syndrome: brain dame related to thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency. It generally occurs following prolonged alcohol abuse in per-disposed individuals. It is associated with damage to the thalamic, mamillary body and frontal brain areas.

In patients with amnesia, language and concepts are generally intact. The person can answer a question and can understand what a particular object is, and what it does.
However, most of our knowledge about the world and about language is laid down early in life.
One of the problems with testing patients with amnesia is being sure that the information was stored in memory in the first place.

Long-term potentiation (LTP): a mechanism that is inferred from animal models. LTP is a long-lasting increase in the strength of synapses that occurs with repeated stimulation.
Long-term depression (LTD) or depotentiation: a weakening of synapses.

The structure of LTM

There are different kinds of LTM.

When we call something in mind, we are using short-term memory, but all of the memories that we have, whether

Cognitive Psychology 
Chapter 7
Concepts and knowledge representation

Introduction

Concepts: mental representations of classes of items.
When we treat distinct objects as the same as other distinct objects.
To represent all the distinct object that make up the categories concerned.

Dealing in concepts rather than in distinct individual objects is clearly an efficient way to work and emerges as an inevitable result of who the brain responds to stimulation, in that similar stimuli evoke similar activation patterns and by association will arouse similar memories and action tendencies.

Concepts allow us to organize information in long-term semantic memory very efficiently into hierarchical structures.

Overall, our long-term knowledge about the world is based on concepts and relations among concepts. Also, representations of current situations are in terms of concepts.

All higher-level mental concepts involves imagining possible actions in terms of concepts.

Visual images convey information as to what an object looks like and the image associated with a concept would seem likely to be important in using that concept.

Imagery: the mental representations of sensory properties of objects, experienced as like perceiving the object but with less vividness than in reality.

Theories of conceptual representation

Despite the pervasive role of concepts in cognition, there is no universal agreement on the best way of define concepts in a whole.

Definitional approach

Some concepts are well defined and clear black and white definitions can be given.
Well-defined concepts are the essence of formal subjects such as mathematics and are sought throughout sciences.
Concepts are typically formed from combinations of features that are themselves concepts. Each of these requires its own definition and within a given legal system each would have its own clear criteria.

Many and perhaps most everyday concepts are not so well defined and exhibit a degree of fuzziness. The lack of definitions can have important real life consequences.

Since most concepts that we work with in everyday life are not well defined, a major part of this area of study concerns alternative ways in which ill-defined concepts might be represented and used.

Prototype approaches

Introducing prototypes

Everyday categories have members that vary markedly in how typical they are.
If all concepts were purely definitional and well defined then all examples would be equally representative and decisions about category membership would be clear cut. But over many everyday categories, people reliably judges some examples as more typical of the category than others.

A number of aspects of performance with concepts are

Cognitive Psychology
Chapter 9
Problem solving

Problem: a situation in which you have a goal but do not know how to achieve it.
Thinking: a process of mental exploration of possible actions and states of the world.

Problems and problem types

Problems can be said to arise when a person or animal has a goal but does not have an immediately available way of reaching the goal.
Problems can be classified in terms of a few broad characteristics:

• Degree of definition
• Whether an adversary is involved or not
• Whether extensive knowledge is needed or not.
• Whether the time scale of the problem is long or short.

There are a number of ways we classify problems based on these characteristics which help us to group different types of problems together for understanding and research.

• Well defined
  A problem in which starting conditions, actions available and goals are all completely specified
• Ill-defined
  A problem in which starting conditions, or actions available or goals are not completely specified.

We then determine whether specialized knowledge is required to solve a problem. Making them:

• Knowledge rich
  Problems that require extensive specialist knowledge
• Knowledge lean
  Do not require specialist knowledge

Finally, we consider whether the type of problem involves a rational opponent.
Problems can be classified as:

• Non-adversary
  Problems in which the solver is dealing with inert problem materials with no rational opponent
• Adversary problems
  Problems in which the solver has to deal with a rational opponent (as in board games)

Some problems are large scale and require months or years of effort.
Some are small scale and can be tackled within minutes.

Brief history and background

Gestalt approach

Problem solving as much like perceiving a new pattern in an ambiguous drawing.
The key process was one of changing the way the problem was seen, in other words restructuring the way the problem was perceived.
Changing how one represents a problem.

Insight: a restructuring of a problem that makes the solution obvious and understandable.

No trial and error.

Barriers to insight

Two important barriers to insight

• Set
  A tendency to persist with one approach to a problem
• Functional fixity
  A difficulty in thinking of a novel use for

Cognitive Psychology
Chapter 11
Reasoning

Reasoning: the cognitive process of deriving new information from old information.
People who can correctly derive new information by reasoning do well on tests of general ability or intelligence and in turn do better in education and in the occupational world.

Deductive reasoning

Deductive: drawing logically necessary conclusions from given information.
Inductive: the process of inferring probable conclusions from given information.

In deductive tasks, people are required to determine what conclusions, if any, must follow when they are given statements that are assumed to be true.
Premises: statements assumed to be true from which conclusions are drawn.
Valid arguments: those in which the conclusions must be true if the permisses are true.

Deductive reasoning is of two types:

• Propositional reasoning: reasoning about statements connected by logical relations such as ‘and’ ‘or’ ‘not’ ‘if’
• Syllogistic reasoning: reasoning about groups/ sets using statements connected by logical relations of ‘some’, ‘none’, ‘all’, ‘some not’

Propositional reasoning

Propositional logic is a set of rules devised by logicians which enable valid arguments to be developed.

Inference rules: rules for reaching a conclusion given a particular pattern of propositions, e.g. modus pones, which states that given ‘if p then q’ and ‘not q’ we can infer ‘not p’.
Can be used to derive correct conclusions from patterns of propositions, such that different patterns trigger different inference rules.
Three examples:

• Modus pones.
  If p then q. p → q
• Modus tollens
  If p then q. not q → not p
• Double negation
  Not p → not q

Two main mistakes or fallacies when arguing from conditionals:

• Affirming the consequent:
• Denying the antecedent

Suppression effects

It has been suggested that what are usually classes as fallacies in conditional reasoning could result from misinterpretations of the premises.
The importance of premise interpretation and how surrounding context can affect interpretations ans so influence reasoning.

Mental logic approaches

People have mental logic rules that they can apply to solving reasoning problems.
People generally have available a set of mental inference rules (or schema’s in their terminology) that permit direct inferences when the schema conditions are met.
The schema typically match some rules of logic but may not include others.
The mental rules/schemas may also include fallacious inferences, such as denying the antecedent. Thus, schemas may or may not match the formal inference rules.
Schemas can take the form of ‘premises→ conclusion’.

Ratings of problem difficulty would depend on the

Cognitive Psychology
Chapter 13
Language comprehension

How we understand speech and written language.
Understanding requires accessing semantic information and appreciating the meaning of words, the intention of the utterance, and sometimes the non-literal meaning.
The objective is to understand what is being communicate.

At lower levels the processes involved in speech perception (the process by which we convert a stream of speech into individual words and sentences) and visual word differ markedly.

• Speech presents us with a virtually continuous signal of sound from which we must decipher words, phrases sentences and meaning.
• Speech is a rapidly decaying signal and is often encountered in less than optimal conditions.
• Speech is not simply a string of precise phonemes. Sounds blend into each other and are affected by previous and subsequent sounds within utterances, as well as factors specific to the speaker.

Speech processing is a fast, accurate and automatic process. Once we have acquired language, we readily understand a spoken utterance.
The speed with which the task is achieved does not reflect the complexity of the process.

Word recognition is the starting point for language comprehension and understanding language is the key of much of higher cognition.

Understanding speech

Prosody: the rhythm, intonation and stress patterns in speech.
Aspects of an utterance’s sound that are not specific to the words themselves.

While we perceive a sequence of words within the stream of speech, the speech signal itself is not produced as discrete units.
There are few clear boundaries between words in spontaneous speech and sounds blend together as they are produced so that phonemes differ as a function of the other sounds used.

• Words in speech are not presented as distinct units as occurs when we reader-b-

The speech sounds produced by a single speaker vary with context.
There are further differenced when we consider: individual differences, differences in accent, and changes over time.
Factors such as speech rate, the speakers age and sex, as well as the amount and type of background noise affect the acoustic form of a spoken word.
The sounds we produce change with age and they change as societies change.

A speaker may produce as many as 150 words per minute, with each word spoken in, on average 400 milliseconds.
When someone is speaking quickly, this rate can double.
Speech occurs at a rate of 10-15 phonemes per second, and can be understood at rates as fast as 50 phonemes per second for artificially speeded speech.

In this magazine, the useful summary for the first year psychology course cognitive psychology is bundled.