Jan 04 Cognition

• Cognition is the function of understanding the processes that produce complex behaviors, including memory, language, and perception.
• Cognitive function is regulated by brain activity, which emerges from the connections of over 100 billion nerve cells in the brain.
• Cognitive research includes basic research, which aims to understand the world and its phenomena without regard to a specific end-use of this knowledge, and applied research, which aims to develop a solution to a problem.
• Hypothesis-guided research involves developing a theory and then testing it against evidence.
• Phenomenon-based research involves discovering an "effect" and then following up with research to understand the nature of the effect.
• The placebo effect is a phenomenon where fake treatments lead to improvements in people’s symptoms and functioning.
• Cognitive psychology is the study of behavior to understand the mind (mental processing).
• Neuroscience is the study of the brain and linking it to the mind, exploring which parts of the brain carry out functions we see behaviorally.
• Computational modeling involves building and modeling the mind-brain connection.
• The emotional enhancement effect states that emotional stimuli are more easily attended to and remembered than neutral stimuli.
• Behavioral experiments show focal memory enhancements for negative stimuli in an image (Loftus et al., 1987).
• Cognitive neuroscience of emotion involves studying the role of the amygdala in predicting memory for emotional but not neutral images (Dolcos et al., 2004).
• The advent of AI, represented by ChatGPT, is a significant development in cognitive research.
• "I want to know the reason that I think the way I do" represents functionalism
• Rationalism is to innate as empiricism is to acquired