Cognitive psychology unit 1

• Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of how the mind encodes, stores, and uses information
• Cognition is relevant to all aspects of life, including navigating traffic, studying for an exam, deciding to end a long-term romantic relationship, making health-related decisions during a pandemic, and developing artificial intelligence
• Scope of cognition includes perception, attention, memory, reasoning, and decision making
• Approaches to cognitive psychology vary, from highly controlled experiments isolating mental processes to broader studies understanding how cognitive processes operate in the real world
• Cognitive psychology uses objective measures of behavior to test how the mind encodes, stores, and uses information about the environment
• Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is used to treat depression, anxiety, alcohol and drug misuse, eating disorders, and severe mental illnesses by focusing on recognizing and changing faulty ways of thinking
• The mind is an information processor that encodes, transforms, stores, interprets, and acts on information
• Cognition studies mental representations, which are encoded and stored information about the environment, and the computations performed on these representations
• David Marr proposed three levels of analysis for perception and cognition: computational, algorithmic, and implementational
• Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of how the mind encodes, stores, and uses information
• Cognition is relevant to all aspects of life, such as navigating traffic, studying for an exam, making decisions, and developing artificial intelligence
• Scope of cognition includes perception, attention, memory, reasoning, and decision making
• Approaches to cognitive psychology vary, from highly controlled experiments to broader studies that aim to understand cognitive processes in the real world
• Cognitive psychology uses objective measures of behavior to test how the mind encodes, stores, and uses information about the environment
• Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is used to treat depression, anxiety, alcohol and drug misuse, eating disorders, and severe mental illnesses
• The mind is an information processor that encodes, transforms, stores, interprets, and acts on information
• Cognition studies mental representations, which are encoded and stored information about the environment
• David Marr proposed three levels of analysis for perception and cognition: computational, algorithmic, and implementational
• Perception:

  • The ability to recognize and interpret information from the senses
  • For vision, the retina's blind spot is filled in by our minds
  • Visual illusions demonstrate our minds filling in missing information
• Perception depends on what information the mind chooses to use from our five senses

  • Bottom-up information includes sensory information from each sensory system, sensation, and transduction
  • Top-down information includes knowledge and expectations that influence and enhance our interpretation of sensory input
• Context shapes perception

  • Top-down information facilitates object recognition
  • Experience shapes perception by informing us that objects are illuminated from above, shadows are important for depth and spatial relationships, and unconscious inference involves educated guesses based on visual clues
• The visual brain makes predictions

  • Predictive coding predicts what input the eyes are about to receive
  • Context can serve as a source of perceptual predictions
• Some researchers believe beliefs, knowledge, and motivations can change perception

  • Cognitively impenetrable perception is not influenced by beliefs, knowledge, or motivation
• Object segmentation:

  • Visually assigning the elements of a scene to separate objects and backgrounds
  • Bottom-up cues can be insufficient for a computer to distinguish objects
  • Animals use camouflage to take advantage of the lack of clear boundaries between objects
• Figure-ground organization:

  • Not clear which side of the boundary belongs to an object (or figure) and which side belongs to the background (or ground)
• Seeing despite blocked views:

  • Occlusion occurs when views of objects are partially blocked by other objects
  • Brain infers or "fills-in" missing information through amodal completion
  • Boundary extension involves remembering pictures as having extended beyond their edges
• Inverse projection problem:

  • Input to our retina is 2-D and must be converted to a 3-D representation
  • Top-down information is needed to disambiguate the possibilities
• Perceiving a Three-Dimensional World:

  • Binocular disparity means the closer something is, the greater the difference between what your two eyes see
  • Monocular depth cues help construct a 3-D understanding of the 2-D image on the retina
  • Object and size constancy involve recognizing objects despite different orientations and perceiving stable sizes despite changes in image size
• Color and Light Constancy:

  • Color constancy factors in differences in illumination when shaping color perception
  • Lightness constancy factors in illumination conditions when perceiving brightness
• Object recognition:

  • Object recognition is challenging due to variation in shape, orientation, and lighting conditions
  • Agnosia refers to trouble recognizing objects and matching them to correct categories and labels
  • View-based and structural approaches are used for object recognition
• Mental Imagery:

  • Mental imagery is the act of forming a percept in the mind without sensory input
  • Aphantasia is the inability to form mental images
  • Mental rotation involves comparing and matching rotated images
• Depictive versus propositional explanations of mental imagery:

  • Depictive explanation represents mental images like real images coming through the eyes
  • Propositional explanation holds mental images in a post-perceptual, abstract way, similar to a linguistic description
• Imagery and spatial neglect:

  • Spatial neglect involves patients who cannot visually attend to objects on one side of their visual fields
  • Dissociations between "what" and "where" in mental imagery mimic the what/where dissociations found in perceptual abilities
• Cognitive neuroscience is the interdisciplinary study of the neural mechanisms of cognition and behavior
• Focuses on the role of brain mechanisms
• Many clinical problems and behavioral disorders are linked to brain disorders
• Different parts of the brain serve different functions
• Principle that different brain areas serve different perceptual and cognitive skills
• Examples: fusiform gyrus -> prosopagnosia; hippocampus -> memory loss
• Specialized areas must work together