Alvin

McLean, Ph.D. Professor amclean@j8u.edu 925-969-3599

Introductions
Alvin McLean, Jr., Ph.D.
Ph.D.-Psychophysiology and Clinical Psychology

(University of Wisconsin-Madison) Postdoctoral Fellowship in Neuropsychology (University of Washington School of Medicine) Assistant Professor, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine-U.W. School of Medicine Healthcare Corporate Experience
Executive Director-Brain Injury Rehabilitation Treatment Center SVP Clinical Services, Medical Informatics-ParadigmHealth Co-Owner, CHCServices

Introductions
Who are you?
How many years have you been in the program? Clinical experience to date? What do you want to do with your PsyD? Clinical practice Academia/research Consulting Business Any prior coursework in Cognitive Psychology?

Upon completion of the course, students will be able to:

Demonstrate the ability to understand and critically

evaluate history, theory, research methodology, and the emerging trends in cognitive psychology and cognitive science. Demonstrate the ability to understand and critically evaluate history, theory, research methodology, and the emerging trends in the eld of aective basis of behavior. Demonstrate the ability to understand how the two areas of cognitive and aective bases of behavior integrate.

Grading will be based on students performance on: Four Quizzes Final Examination Group Presentation ( in lieu of critical literature review)

Group Presentation

Group chooses a research publication of interest in the areas of either cognitive psychology or the aective bases of behavior Group divides the paper into the following sections and one member reports on each section:
Introduction (background, previous studies related to the

area of study) Methods (methodology of the study) Results ( Analysis performed; statistical signicance) Discussion ( implications of the ndings and determination of whether the ndings are consistent with previous ndings

Sources of Studies to Review

Reader Textbook-look at the reference section of one of the chapters and identify a study that seems interesting and look up the publication in the online library Review of recent copies of the journals related to the cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience or emotional behavior
Journal of Cognitive Psychology Advances in Cognitive Psychology Cognition and Emotion Cognitive Neuroscience Cognitive Neuropsychology

Cognitive Psychology
Scientic study of mental processes Simply put it is the study of thought Behavior is examined by cognitive psychologists the same

way that physicists infer the force of gravity from the behavior of objects in the world. Mental Processes: remembering, attention, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions Thinking is something that is constantly happening, yet we rarely stop to think about it

Omnipresence of Cognitive Processes

Perception and Sensory Memory Organize and interpret incoming information (e.g., rst lecture) Sensory memory holds information, like an information buer, just long enough to determine whether it seems worthwhile Attention Set of processes through which you focus on incoming information Ability to attend is exibleTrail Making B Test Attention is also limited

Challenges of Cognitive Psychology

Often times, the processes involved in cognition are complex and hidden from view Take a moment and think about all that is happening around you (perception, attention, memory, reasoning) Complexity examples Stroop eect Described by J.R. Stroop in 1935 Name of word interferes with naming of the color some stimuli inuence us even when we dont want them to do so

Stroop Color Test

History of Cognitive Psychology

1st cognitive psychology experiment, 1868

Franciscus Donders, Dutch physiologist, ophthalmologist Used mental chronometry

Measures time-course of cognitive processes Measured reaction time: time b/w presentation of stimulus and persons response to that stimulus Simple reaction time Choice reaction time (push one of two buttons in response to a stimulus) Inferred mental process of perception Mental response cannot be measured directly, but can be inferred from behavior (choice reaction time simple reaction time = length of time to make a decision) All research in cognitive psychology deals with inferred mental processes

Helmholtzs Unconscious Inference

Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (August 31,

1821 September 8, 1894) was a German physician and physicist. He developed the ophthalmoscope; proposed theories of object perception, color vision, and hearing Theory of unconscious inference: Some perceptions are the result of unconscious assumptions that we make about the environment; past experiences with objects may impact our perceptions Two sheets of paper exercise

 Hermann Ebbinghaus (January 24,

1850 February 26, 1909) was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory, and is known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing eect. He was also the rst person to describe the learning curve.

History of Cognitive Psychology

Ebbinghaus learned lists of nonsense syllables (e.g., DAX,

QEH) Why nonsense syllables? Did not want actual words to inuence his ability to memorize or recall certain words Repeated lists and noted how many repetitions it took to repeat the list with no errors; this was called savings method Waited a period of time and then relearned the list Computed a savings score Savings = [(initial repetitions) relearning repetitions]/ initial repetitions; then multiply by 100 for a % Forgetting curve (see Figure) Measured behavior to infer processes of memory

Wilhelm Wundt
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (16 August 1832 - 31 August 1920 )was a

German physician, psychologist, physiologist, and professor, known today as the father of experimental psychology. 1879, founded rst laboratory of scientic psychology at the University of Leipzig, in order to study the mind scientically Carried out reaction-time experiments Developed analytic introspection Procedure used in which trained participants described their experiences and thought processes elicited by stimuli presented under controlled conditions Problematic: introspection did not seem to reveal the structure of thought; results from dierent laboratories often disagreed

History of Cognitive Psychology

(January 11, 1867 August 3, 1927) was a British psychologist who studied under Wilhelm Wundt. Titchner is best known for creating structuralism Structuralism-An attempt to describe the structures that compose the mind. Consciousness can be analyzed as sensations and feelings that form the structures of the mind. To get at their data, structuralists used introspection to get at what was happening in the mind and to understand what one was thinking and feeling. This was inuenced by the early sensory biologists

Edward Bradford Titchener, D.Sc., Ph.D., LL.D., Litt.D.

History of Cognitive Psychology

William James, M.D.-1890s (Harvard University) advocate for the area of psychology called functionalism.

Functionalism-arose in the U.S. in the late 19th century as an alternative to structuralism. Structuralism was concerned with the anatomy of the mind, whereas, functionalism focused on the function of the mind. Functionalism referred to the study of how a mental process operates. It also referred to how the mental process functions in the evolution of the species, what adaptive property it provides that would cause it to be selected through evolution. Functionalism was also inuenced by Charles Darwin.

Decline and Rebirth

John Watson and Behaviorism Developed new approach to psychology by studying actual behaviors in their own right and not worrying about consciousness Argued behavior is observable and objective Studied impact of stimulus conditions on behavior (stimulus-response) Most famous study: Little Albert B.F. Skinner Studied operant conditioning: believe reinforcements, not free will, determined behavior Published book on verbal behavior that claimed language developed through imitation and reinforcement

Noam Chomsky, Linguist Disagreed with Skinner, and believed language development was inborn and held across cultures Defended his theory with Children say sentences they have never heard Incorrect grammar Realization that to understand complex cognitive behaviors need to consider how the mind works in addition to S-R Rise of the Information Processing Metaphor Broadbents ow diagram depicted the mind as processing information in a sequences of stages Information processing models conceive of cognitive activities as involving a series of steps, procedures, or processes that take time (e.g., 1/10 second)

Modern Approaches to Study the Mind

Behavioral Approach Measure behavior and explain cognition in terms of behavior e.g., reaction time Measuring mental rotation exercise (see Figures) Physiological Approach Measure both behavior and physiology and explain cognition in terms of physiology; e.g., reaction time and brain wave activity or brain activation Davachi experiment-see Figure (words that were remembered on the memory test had more brain activity when words were rst exposed

History of Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology is one of the more

recent additions to psychological research, having only developed as a separate area within the discipline since the late 1950s and early 1960s following the cognitive revolution initiated by Noam Chomskys 1959 critique of behaviorism and empiricism.

The Cognitive Revolution

The cognitive revolution is the name for an

intellectual movement in the 1950s that began what are known collectively as the cognitive sciences. The relevant areas of interchange were the combination of psychology, anthropology, and linguistics with approaches developed within the then nascent elds of articial intelligence, computer science and neuroscience.

The Cognitive Revolution

The cognitive revolution put forth a A key idea in cognitive psychology that by studying and developing successful functions in articial intelligence and computer science, it becomes possible to make testable inferences about human mental processes. This has been called the reverse- engineering approach. By the 1970s behaviorism as a paradigm in psychological theory had lost favor and by the 1980s the cognitive approach had become the main line of research investigation in psychology.

History of Cognitive Psychology

The cognitive approach was brought to

prominence by Donald Broadbents book, Perception and Communication in 1958. Since then, the dominant paradigm has been the Information Processing model of cognition that Broadbent put forward (i.e., thinking and reasoning about mental processes, envisioning them as software running on a computer that is the brain.

History of Cognitive Psychology

Other publications that have been inuential in the cognitive revolution include: George Millers 1956 Psychological Review article, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two-still one of the most highly cited papers in psychology; Noam Chomskys 1959 Review of Verbal Behavior by B.F. Skinner and Elements of a Theory of Human Problem Solving by Newell, Shaw and Simon; Ulric Neissers 1967 book, Cognitive Psychology.

History of Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychologys major contribution to

Articial Intelligence and psychology in general is the notion of a semantic network. One of the rst cognitive psychologists, George Miller is known for dedicating his career to the development of WordNet, a semantic network for the English language. This work began in 1985.

History of Cognitive Psychology

The cognitive psychological way of conceiving mental processes has pervaded psychology more generally over the past few decades, and it is not uncommon to nd cognitive theories within social psychology, personality psychology, abnormal psychology, and developmental psychology. The application of cognitive theories to comparative psychology has driven many recent studies in animal cognition.

Areas Within Cognitive Psychology

During the course of this class, we will explore

some of the following areas within cognitive psychology including:

Cognitive neuroscience Attention, perception Memory Problem solving Judgment and decision making Creativity

Cognitive Science
Cognitive Science Study of the mind (mental processes) as carried

out by many dierent disciplines Disciplines: cognitive psychology, and research on the mind within the elds of computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, anthropology, articial intelligence, and philosophy See Figure

Current Trends Cognitive Psychology

There are currently three main approaches in

cognitive psychology:

Experimental cognitive psychology, Computational cognitive psychology, and Neural cognitive psychology

Current Trends Cognitive Psychology

Experimental cognitive psychology treats

cognitive psychology as one of the natural sciences and applies experimental methods to investigate human cognition. Psychophysical responses, response time, and eye tracking are often measured in experimental cognitive psychology.

Current Trends Cognitive Psychology

Computational cognitive psychology

develops formal mathematical and computational models of human cognition based on symbolic and sub-symbolic representations, and dynamical systems

Current Trends Cognitive Psychology

Neural cognitive psychology uses brain

imaging (e.g., EEG, MEG, MRI, PET, SPECT, Optical Imaging) and neurobiological methods (e.g., lesion patients) to understand the neural basis of human cognition. The three approaches are often inter-linked and provide both independent and complementary insights in every sub-domain of cognitive psychology