PSY200

• Donders did the very first cognitive psych experiment and showed that you cannot measure one's decision making process directly but can infer from one's behavior (reaction times)
• Which psychologist studied simple reaction times vs choice reaction times?

  Donders
• William James focused on observations based on the functions of his own mind,
• William James was an early American psychologist who focused on thinking, cognition, and attention. He made the first psychology textbook
• What did Tolman's maze experiment tell us about the rat's mind?

  The rat repeated the same response, so something other than "stimulius-response" was occurring (cognitive map)
• What did Donders do?

  Measured response time to a stimulus through the comparison of simple and choice tasks
• What was the significance of Donders experiment?

  Mental processes cannot be directly measured, but inferred
• What procedure did Wundt use which was criticized as not reliable as it varies from person to person?

  Analytical introspection
• Who's/which experiment provided the first 'quantitative' measure of how the mind operates?

  Ebbinghaus
• Who tested how rapidly information that is learned is forgotten through the use of a savings curve?

  Ebbinghaus
• What did Ebbinghaus's curve say about human memory?

  Reduction in savings with increasing delays indicates that forgetting occurs rapidly over the first 2 days and more slowly after that
• Which psychologist focused on observations based on the functions of his own mind instead of experiments?

  William James
• Name 3 modern physiological approaches to study mental process?

  fMRI, EEG, TMS, neuropsychology (double dissociation), tDCS, PET
• What did Saffran measure in his infant experiment?

  Listening time for whole and part words
• What results did Saffran conclude about the infants?

  Infants' interest in stimuli can be correlated to if they have already "learned" it (higher for unlearned)
• Saffran concluded what?

  That infants are capable of learning translational probabilities to segment sounds into words within just 2 minutes of training. This tells us our perception of language depends on top-down knowledge (what we already know)
• What did Saffran's experiment tell us about about perception?

  Perception is highly dependent on the viewer's top-down knowledge
• Which theory of perception is the most different from others?

  Gestalt principles of organization (uses bottom-up processing)
• What was measured in Gauthier's experiment?

  Neuronal response time in the FFA
• FFA response for Greebles after training will still be slow after training?

  False
• What is the ultimate conclusion about FFA and face processing?

  Neurons in the FFA respond strongly to faces because we have a lifetime of experience perceiving faces
• Lesioning in the temporal lobe makes the task of object discrimination difficult?


  True
• What is Bayesian inference?

  The use of initial beliefs (prior probability) and likelihood of events for perception
• What is Helmholt's theory?

  We make perceptions based on unconscious inference which is based on the likelihood principle
• What was Gestalt's theory of perception?

  We use laws of perceptual organization which is intrinsic and experience is not the key driver
• What are the 4 approaches to perception?

  Helmholtz theory of unconscious inference, Gestalt's principle of organization, taking regularities of the environment into account, and Bayesian inference
• Lesioning in the parietal lobe makes the tasks of landmark discrimination difficult?

  True
• Describe Ungerleider and Miskin's ablation experiment and how they used brain ablation method to demonstrate what are where streams in the cortex?

  They removed different parts of monkey brains and used the double dissociation method to determine that the what pathway (determines what an object is) goes through the temporal lobe and the where pathway (determines location of object) is affected by the partial lobe
• What are the 3 models of attention?

  early, intermediate, late selection
• What is different about early and late selection models?

  When selection occurs. Late selection occurs after the meaning of the information is analyzed, early selection occurs before the meanings are analyzed
• According to the load theory of attention, what are the 2 factors selection depends on?

  Processing capacity and perceptual load
• Overt attention is?

  Making eye movements
• How is overt attention is determined by stimulus salience?

  Bottom up processing
• How is overt attention determined by scene schema and task demands?

  Top down processing
• What is same object advantage?

  Responses are faster for cued locations and for uncued locations in the same object
• What type of attention phenomenon occurs when we miss things when they are clearly visible?

  Inattentional blindness
• Which attention phenomenon occurs when we miss obvious changes in a scene?

  Change blindness
• What is the process by which individual features of an object are combined to create perception of a coherent object?

  Binding
• What type of visual search task would a patient with Balint's syndrome not preform well in?

  Conjunction search (where's waldo)
• What is electrophysiology?

  Techniques used to measure electrical responses of the nervous system