WHAT IS COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY?

1. WHAT IS COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY? BME CogSci MA Spring 2014

2. Cognition: Information processing • visual information • optical illusions • auditory information • cocktail party phenomenon • tactile information • attention • multi-tasking, • selective attention (How many times do players in white shirts pass the ball?) • change blindness • consciousness

3. Ames room

4. Cognition: Information processing • storing and organising info in memory • false memories • forgetting a phone number as soon as you’ve dialled it • retrieving info from memory • tip of the tongue phenomenon • mental representation, imagery

5. Object versus representation Magritte, This is not a pipe. 1929

6. Steps of information processing (Reed 2008)

7. Steps of information processing (structures and processes)

8. Sensory store or sensory memory (SM) • That part of memory that holds unanalyzed sensory information for a fraction of a second, providing an opportunity for additional analysis following the physical termination of a stimulus.

9. Filter • That part of attention in which some perceptual information is blocked (filtered) out and not recognized, while other information receives attention and is subsequently recognized

10. Pattern recognition • The stage of perception during which a stimulus is identified

11. Selection • The stage that follows pattern recognition and determines which information a person will try to remember

12. Short-term memory (STM) • Memory that has limited capacity and that lasts only about 20–30 seconds in the absence of attending to its content

13. Long-term memory (LTM) • Memory that has no capacity limits and lasts from minutes to an entire lifetime. The organization of information in LTM affects the ease of its recall.

14. Cognition: Using information • categorization • male vs. female face • navigation • communication • reasoning • decision making • the Monty Hall problem • switching queues in the supermarket • problem solving • creativity • expertise

15. Cognition, neuroscience and artificial intelligence • processes in the mind • behavioural studies Behaviourism • eye movements Info processing • reaction time Info processing • computer simulations Computer analogy • processes in the brain • post mortem examinations • EEG • brain imaging technology • replicating these processes in inanimate systems • modern artificial intelligence, robotics

16. How did it all start?

17. Ancient Greece • Plato • storing something in memory is like having our thoughts stamped on a wax tablet • the mind is an aviary, trying to remember something is like trying to catch one of the birds

18. Donders 1868 (modernized) Goldstein, 2011

19. Ebbinghaus 1885 Delay: a few minutes to a month Goldstein, 2011

20. William James • Principles of Psychology 1890 • Analytic introspection • observation of the operation of his own mind • the steps in solving arithmetic problems • observing reactions and behaviour in specific situations

21. Behaviourism • Pavlov (1849 – 1936) • conditioning: dogs salivated when they heard the bell that preceded the presentation of food • Watson, Behaviorism 1924 • Skinner, Verbal Behavior 1957 • “Mental” processes are not observable, so their study cannot be objective • Psychologists should only study what they can directly observe • Stimulus – Response reflexes: association between the environment and an observable behaviour • Based on these observations, the laws of behaviour can be defined • Skinner’s operant conditioning: reward or positive reinforcement can affect behaviour. Virtually all learning can be explained by this process (including language)

22. The mind as a computer • Turing machine (Alan Turing, 1950) • a machine that processes symbols one step at a time

23. Turing’s challenge: intelligent machine Copeland, 2000 alanturing.net

24. Eliza • Weisenbaum 1966 • the first attempt to pass the turing test • “psychotherapist”

25. Create intelligent machines by mimicking the human mind • Conference in 1956 organized by McCarthy • Title of conference: Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence (first use of term)

26. Artificial intelligence • Create intelligent machines • that understand language • understand logical operations • play chess… (Newell, Shaw & Simon 1958) • View thought processes as a computer programme • Describe human behaviour as a sequence of operations on symbols • language learning cannot be explained by operant conditioning since language is based on a system of abstract rules that allow the production of sentences never heard before (Chomsky 1959)

27. Two notes on artificial intelligence • “the mind is a computer” is a metaphor • two approaches to “intelligent” systems: • the brute-force approach: achieve good performance without trying to simulate human thinking e.g. a chess programme that considers a very large number of moves in a very short time and selects the best • the simulation method: study human thinking and programme the computer to use the same strategiese.g., a chess programme imitating a grand master’s strategies

28. The cognitive revolution • “The task of a psychologist trying to understand human cognition is analogous to that of a man trying to discover how a computer has been programmed.”(Neisser, Cognitive Psychology 1967) (Neisser coined the term) • much of human behaviour can be understood in terms of how people think, of internal mental processes

29. Theory development • Theory, hypotheses • e.g, human genetics governs most aspects of human behviour (nature) • Contrasting theory, hypotheses • e.g., mostly our environment determines our behaviour (nurture) • Test hypotheses: empirical observations, inferences • New theory, possibly a combination of the two you started with • e.g., both nature and nurture play a role

30. What’s wrong with the girl’s inference? Girl: When your tooth falls out, you put it under the pillow, and then the fairy comes, and then she takes the tooth and gives you some money. It happened four times already! Every night for a week my tooth fell out, and every night I’d put my tooth under my pillow, there was a shiny coin the morning after. Boy: No, your mum comes in the middle of the night and puts it there. It’s not the truth fairy at all. Girl: Well, yes, your mum puts the money underneath your pillow, but it’s the tooth fairy that gives her the money in the first place. (Quinlan & Dyson 2008)

31. What’s wrong with these claims? • A thermos is intelligent because it knows when to keep the liquid in it hot and when to keep it cold. • The human body is intelligent because its starts sweating when it gets too hot. • mental states • mental representations • mental processes

32. Some key themes • nature vs. nurtureIs knowledge innate or acquired? • domain-specificity vs. domain-generalityAre mental processes specific to a given domain of cognition (e.g., language or numerical reasoning), or do they apply across domains? • e.g., do we have different processing systems for faces, numbers, names etc? • mental events and neurophysiological eventscan we find a simple relationship between them?

33. Applications • Education (memory, attention, creativity, expertise) • Justice system (witness credibility: false memories, language, face recognition; criminal behaviour or cognitive deficit) • Business (decision making, worker skills, customer demands, stock market processes) • Medicine (disorders of perception, memory, attention etc.) • Industry (robots, smart phones, search engines, image processing, user-friendly engineering) • Advertising (language, memory, perception, decision making) • Road safety (optical illusions, attention)

34. Books • Recommended reading:Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. • Recommended textbooks: • Stephen K. Reed, Cognition: Theory and Applications, 2009 8th Edition.Wadsworth • Bruce Goldstein, Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience, 2011. Wadsworth • Philip Quinlan & Ben Dyson, Cognitive Psychology, 2008. Pearson

35. Lab sessions • Presentations based on reading materials • Experiments • Online Psychology Laboratory Class ID: 6215 • various other websites • Methodological issues • experimental design • data analysis • Slides: http://cogsci.bme.hu/~ktkuser/KURZUSOK/BMETE47MN05/2013_2014_1/