Cognitive test 1

• Study of the mind
• Includes: perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, thinking and deciding

A system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals

• Reaction time vs. "choice reaction time" 
• RT task: stare at a point on the screen and push a button when you see a light flash
• Choice reaction task: 4 lights come on and you have to press the button that corresponds with the light
• Average choice RT was 1/10

• Broke mental processes into elements
• Trained patients to describe their mental processes in relation to the elementary mental elements
• Didn't find anything useful but it was important work

• Taught first psychology class at Harvard
• Wrote first cognitive psychology book 
• Was good at observing his own self but not others
• Did not do any experiments

Didn't care about how you feel, but about what you do

• Operant conditioning
• Behavior strengthened through reward

• Let mouse run through maze 
• Put cheese at one end of maze, mouse can get to it no matter where he starts
• Must mean that the mouse learns a map that he follows to get the cheese

• Skinner wrote "Verbal Behavior" 1957
• Claimed that all behavior is based on operant conditioning

• Chomsky said nah bitch (1959)
• Learning is done through a universal process 
• Evident through grammatical errors, unreinforced speech

• Shift from stimulus response of behaviorism toward attempts to understand inner workings of the mind 
• Ideas based around the creation of the computer

Attention shadowing- listen to two different streams of music, told to listen to only the right side and had to repeat what they were hearing (reported that they couldn't understand what they were hearing from the left side)

• Made a new flow chart for the information processing
• Input- Filter- detector- memory

• Can we make a computer do something that we would call intelligent if it was a human
• Simon Newell made logic theorist to solve math problems

• Physical stimuli coming to the brain 
• ex. light waves, sound waves, tastants, odorants, temperature/pressure

How brain's processing, organization and interpretation of sensory input shapes our conscious experience of the world

• Image on the retina is ambiguous (flat), so we perceive it as the thing that is most likely based on what we've already experienced 
• Likelihood principle, unconscious inference (we make inferences based off experience- unconscious/rapid)

• Brain uses innate principles to organize things as a whole, not just parts
• Had 4 principles: good continuation, pragnanz/simplicity, similarity, figure and ground. 
• Said that principles are innate and there is very little room for personal experience

• Swooping lines make you assume that something is one thing
• Ex: seeing a rope in a pile makes you think there is one rope bc it is tangled around itself

Simplest thing that could have made it probably did

See similar objects as part of a whole

Knowing what is the foreground and background in something you're focusing on

• Things are most likely to be the way they are based off what you've seen before
• ex. Looking at lighting can change how we see things

Ideas about how things should fit into the world

• Prior probability- our initial belief about the probability of an outcome
• Likelihood- extent to which available evidence is consistent with the outcome
• Combined prior probability and likelihood to see the chances of something happening

Is there space in the brain for change based on experience

• Visual cortex is not innate
• Kittens lived in darkness for, expect for being placed in box with either horizontal or vertical stripes. After three months, the kittens were put in light and did not have the visual experience of control kittens. Additionally, they were unable to see the opposite stripes of what they had been exposed to during experimentation

• 1. Object discrimination
• Monkey shown novel object 
• had to recognize object when presented with 2 things
• Received reward
• Required perception of "what" 

• 2. Landmark discrimination
• Uses cylinder as landmark for food 
• Required perception of "where"

• Temporal lobe- what pathway (Ventral stream)
• Parietal lobe- where pathway (dorsal stream)

Interaction takes more motor skills than perception bc you are participating in the action

• She was unable to match configurations (what pathway) but when told to put mail in the slot she was able to do it without problems (Where pathway) 
• Had damage to the temporal lobe

• Early selection theory 
• Done using dichotic listening
• Participant could understand the message of the attended audio stream, but could only identify the sex of the speaker for unattended audio

• Message enters sensory memory
• Unattended message is filtered out at beginning
• Only attended message reaches director and makes it into memory

• There is another level of filtering before unattended message is entirely thrown out so that you can make sure to not miss something important 
• Ex. if someone says your name in a conversation that is not being attended to

If two streams of audio are playing at once, alternating between numbers and words, the participant will remember the words even though they were alternated between ears

• "Leaky filter" model 
• Things aren't getting filtered, but are attenuated based on what you should be listening to

• Order of what is attenuated to:
• 1. low level attenuation
• 2. Language
• 3. High-level information

Unattended messages are still passed along, but weaker

Things are not entirely filtered 

• McKay study: 
• Participants listen to a message, another word was played (not attended to)
• Participants then drew a picture of the message based on the word that was unconsciously listened to 
• Ex: They threw rocks at the bank yesterday (river or money)

• Processing capacity- total amount of information a person can handle
• Perceptual load- Difficulty of the task 

The greater your perceptual load is, the less room you have for distraction

• The more focused you are, the less distracted you will be. Except for strong task-irrelevant stimuli like 
• name
• Someone staring at you
• Text tone
• Baby crying

• When attending to one thing prevents you from attending to another
• Can be audio and visual

• When doing an easy task, a participant can detect a tone being played
• Difficult task- tone not detected

Simons and Chabris-

We think that we are seeing/attending to everything going on (difficult for people to see when things change if they are not actively paying attention)

Automatic processing- processing occurs without intention, at the cost of only some cognitive resources

You cannot divide attention when process becomes automatic

Responsible for mind wandering

• Hoe features come together to create perception of a coherent object
• (You don't see things individually)

Object --> preattentive --> Focused attention --> perception

• Preattentive- each individual component
• Focused attention- combines things into one experience

• Conjunction- combination of two or more features in the same stimulus
• Illusory conjunction- when an object takes the features of another

if you don't have enough time to bind things properly, you will get illusory conjunctions (giving one thing the features of another thing)

Easy- what is the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness 

Hard- how does our brain alone create reality

Sentience- individual experience, we cannot know if someone else is sentient

Access to information- the ability to report that we have conscious thought but not describe the underlying processes

Self knowledge- our ability to be consciously aware of ourselves

Moment by moment subjective experience

• When picture of house superimposed over face is flashed quickly, the participant will see it was either a face or a house 
• Either FFA or PPA activate depending on what they see

something you're not paying attention to can be attended to unconsciously bc of your underlying processes

Participants were given either a drink or no drink on beginning experiment. Then were primed with either thirst or another non related word 


Participants primed with thirst (had not had drink) drank more kool aid afterwards

Participants were given random words and asked to make sentences. Participants who were given the old people priming words walked slower when leaving

Cortical damage makes the person consciously blind, but if you hold something in front of them they are able to grab it

Other parts of the visual cortex let them see unconsciously

Looking at MRI, there is neural activity 10 secs before an action is done. If you delay a video of someone doing an action, they will think they chose to do the action later. Do we really have free will?

We don't choose what we want to do, but we choose what we DON'T want to do 

If you tell a participant to stop doing an action before the 200 ms mark they will be able to reverse their decision. 

Told participants to step on pedal, could do it whenever they felt like it as long as the stop sign was not up.

The left hemisphere makes reasoning behind actions (even if the reason is not true) 

Gazzanniga says that all conscious awareness is due to post hoc awareness (only aware of what you did after you did it)

Consciousness depends on active brain circuits

In patients with hemineglect, they are not aware of what they lost. 

In split brain patients- the brain is not connected so the hemispheres work independent of themselves

When a neuron codes for one particular thing

Neuron codes for a generic thing (ex. Face)

Only a small number of neurons activate for something

Ability for speech is partially lost but comprehension is intact

Ability for speech is intact but there is no comprehension

One stimulus activates multiple areas in the brain

The extent to which activity in two brain regions is connected

Tested by looking at resting state functional connectivity