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• The mind

  Creates and controls mental capacity (perception, attention, memory) and creates a representation of the world we live in
• Cognition

  Our mental processes (attention, perception, memory)
• Donder's experiment

  Studies how long it took to make decisions by measuring reaction time

  1. Simple reaction - responding to a single stimulus

  2. Choice reaction - how long it takes to pick Conclusion: simple and choice reaction times reflect on the time needed for decision making. Extra time was needed for choice reaction → the time needed for processing and deciding between stimuli
• Wundt's experiment

  • Structuralism - aimed to find the structure of consciousness
  • He studied the basic elements: Sensations, feelings, images
  • He used analytic introspection but then came to the conclusion that the mind can't be directly observed only our behaviour and physiological responding
• Ebbinghaus

  • Wanted to see how fast info that is learned is lost over time
  • Saving - you retain/relearn something you learned before faster than the first time
  • Saving curve - more info is retained over time. Therefore less time is needed for relearning
• James was the first to write a psychology textbook
• Watson

  Behaviourism - behaviour is learned, is observable, and from experience
• Tolman

  • Cognitive map- mental layout of a setting
  • The rat was not responding to stimuli but processed the info and formed a mental representation of the maze = cognition not behaviourism
• Chomsky's critique on Skinner: Our ability to understand language and sentences is too complex to be explained by rewards and punishment. We are born with built in understanding of language
• Cherry's attention experiment

  1. Listen to sounds on each ear and then recall but can't. We can hear both sound but don't know the content (dichotic listening)

  2. Shadowing - recall that you heard
• Broadbent's flow diagram


  • Shows how we process information
  • It goes through a filter then detector then memory
  • Filter: lets thought the attached info
  • Detector: records the info to go to memory
• Nessier wrote the first cognition textbook and studied how info is taken by vision and held in memory
• Ramon y Cajal


  Early concept of interconnected neurons creating a nerve net, similar to a highway network. Streets are connected without stop signs, allowing for almost nonstop, continuous communication of signals throughout the network
• Neural net theory


  Abandoned in favour of neural doctrine (individual cells called neurons transmit signals in the nervous system)
• Techniques Ramon y Cajal used


  • Golgi stain
  • Brain tissue in baby animals
• Action potentials


  Size is not measured; it remains consistent. The rate of firing is measured (Rate Coding)
• Low-intensity stimulus


  Slow firing
• High-intensity stimulus


  Fast firing
• Principle of neural representation


  Everything a person experiences is based on representations in the person's nervous system
• Feature detectors


  Neurons that respond best to specific stimuli
• Specificity coding


  Represent specific features of stimuli
• Population coding


  A lot of neurons work together to look at more complex info
• Sparse coding


  Small number of neurons are fired for specific features
• Broca's aphasia


  Difficulties in speech and isn't fluent. The frontal lobe is affected
• Wernicke's aphasia


  Difficulty in understanding language and producing speech. The temporal lobe is affected
• Double dissociation


  When damage to one part of the brain causes function A to be absent while function B is present, and damage to another area causes function B to be absent while function A is present
• MRI


  Brain imaging technique
• fMRI


  Measures neural activity by identifying highly oxygenated hemoglobin molecules
• Fusiform face area (FFA)


  Responds specifically to faces. Damage to this area causes prosopagnosia (inability to recognize faces)
• Parahippocampal place area (PPA)


  Responds specifically to places (indoor/outdoor scenes)
• Extrastriate body area (EBA)


  Responds specifically to pictures of bodies and parts of bodies
• Neural networks


  Interconnected areas of the brain that communicate with each other
• Connectome


  Structural description of the network of elements and connections forming the human brain
• Structural connectivity


  The brain's "wiring diagram" created by axons that connect brain areas, as unique to individuals as fingerprints
• Functional connectivity


  How groups of neurons within the connectome function in relation to types of cognition, determined by the amount of correlated neural activity in two brain areas
• Common functions determined by resting fMRI


  • Visual
  • Somato-motor - movement and touch
  • Dorsal attention - attention to visual stimuli and spatial location
  • Exclusive control - higher level cognitive takes involved in working memory and directing attention during tasks
  • Salience - attending to survival relevant events in the environment
  • Default mode - mind wandering
• Default mode network


  Brain regions that are always active when individual is not engaged in any tasks. Mind wandering, introspection, self referential thinking
• Inverse projection problem

  • Having trouble figuring out the 3d world from a 2d image 
  • Computers have trouble understanding
  • Out brains can easily understand
• objects can be blurred r hidden

  • we can identify objects that are obscured / blurry
  • machines cant recognize or interpret incomplete objects 
  • humans nave prior Knowledge, context, pattern recognition
• viewpoint invariance

  • we are able to identify objects from different angles