Unit 1

Introduction to Cognitive Psychology Philosophical concepts: nature vs. nurture; free will vs.
determinism; mind- brain-body Cognitive psychology-Emergence and current issues;

Perceptual processes: Visual and auditory recognition (object recognition, processing and object
recognition, face perception, speech perception);

Attention (kind of attention processes, neuroscience research on attention) and consciousness (about
higher mental processes)

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

- Cognition or mental activity is a term that refers to acquisition, storage, transformation and use
of knowledge
- Cognitive psychology refers to variety of mental activities
- It is a theoretical approach to psychology that emphasizes on peoples thought process and
knowledge
- Cognitive abilities operate together in a highly coordinated way to create our conscious
experiences
- Meta cognition: process of thinking about one's own thinking and learning.

PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTS

- Free will vs determinism

 Free will: The idea that individuals are in control of their destiny and make conscious
decisions that affect their behavior.
 Determinism: The idea that behavior is determined by forces beyond the individual's control
which can be both internal and external.
- nature-nurture
 cognitive psychologists take an interactionist position, believing that our behavior is influenced by
learning and experience (nurture) but also by our brains’ innate capacities as information processors
(nature).
- Mind brain body
 The mind is about mental processes, thoughts, and consciousness. The body is about the
physical aspects of the brain-neurons and how the brain is structured.
 Dualism:
 Typically humans are characterized as having both a mind (nonphysical) and a
body/brain (physical).
 Dualism is the view that the mind and body both exist as separate entities.
 Descartes / Cartesian dualism argues that there is a two-way interaction between mental
and physical substances.
 Descartes argued that the mind interacts with the body at the pineal gland.
 Materialism
  is the belief that nothing exists apart from the material world (i.e., physical matter like the
brain)
 materialist psychologists generally agree that consciousness (the mind) is the function of
the brain.
 Mental processes can be identified with purely physical processes in the central nervous
system, and human beings are just complicated physiological organisms, no more than
that.

Perception: uses previous knowledge to gather and interpret the stimuli registered by the senses by
combining aspects of both the outside world (the visual stimuli) and your inner world (previous
knowledge).

Visual object (or pattern) recognition

During visual recognition, you identify a complex arrangement of sensory stimuli, and you perceive that
this pattern is separate from its background. During object recognition, the sensory processes transform
and organize the raw information provided by sensory receptors. The sensory stimulus is also compared
with information in other memory storage.

The visual system

 Distal stimulus: is the actual object that is “out there” in the environment
 Proximal stimulus: the information registered on the sensory receptors
 During object recognition, we manage to figure out the identity of the distal stimulus, even when
the information available in the proximal stimulus is far from perfect. As object recognition
depends primarily of shape, rather than on color or texture. (For example: we’d identify a human
face even if it was in different color)
 Sensory memory: (also known as iconic memory or visual sensory memory) it is a large-
capacity storage system that records information from each of the senses and preserves an image
of a visual stimulus for a brief period after the stimulus has disappeared.
 The primary visual cortex in the occipital lobe is the portion of the cerebral cortex that is
concerned with basic processing of visual stimuli; there are at least 30 additional areas of the
cortex that play a role in perception.

Organization in the visual cortex

Gestalt psychology suggests that humans have basic tendencies to organize what they see; without any
effort, we see patterns, rather than random arrangements.

 Figure: distinct shape with clearly defined edges

  Ground: the region that is “left over”, forming the background
 Ambiguous figure-ground relationship: the figure and the ground reverse from time to time, so
that the figure becomes the ground and then becomes the figure again.
 Explanation for these figure-ground relationships have two components a) the neurons in the
visual cortex become adapted to one figure, such as the “face” or the alternative “vase” in the
vase-faces illusion; 2) furthermore, people try to solve such a visual paradox by alternating
between the two reasonable solutions
 Illusory (subjective) contours: we see edges even though they are not physically present in the
stimulus.
 Thus, our everyday ability to perceive scenes accurately by filling in the blanks leads to a
perceptual error.

Theories of visual object recognition

 Templates: visual system compares a stimulus with a set of templates, or specific patterns stored
in memory, then it notes which template matches the stimulus. However, we still manage to
recognize letters that differ substantially from the classic version of a letter, especially in
handwritten text. Which is why, perception requires a more flexible system than simply
matching a pattern against a specific template.
 Feature-analysis theory (mainly numbers and letters): proposes a relatively flexible
approach, in which a visual stimulus is composed of a small number of characteristics or
components and each of these visual characteristic is known as a distinctive feature. We store a
lot of distinctive features for each letter. And the theory proposes that distinctive features for
each of the alphabet letters remain constant, whether the letter is handwritten, printed, or typed.
 For example, the letter ‘R’ contains a curved component, a vertical line, and a diagonal line. The
visual system notes the presence or absence of the various features and then compares this list
with the features stores in memory for each letter.
 Research has shown that people require a relatively long time to decide whether one letter is
different from a second letter when those two letters share a great deal of critical features (P and
R).
 Problem: feature-analysis theories were constructed to explain relatively simple recognition of
letters and in contrast, the shapes that occur in nature are much more complex. Objects in
environment contain far more complex objects than recognizing letters.
 Recognition-by-Components theory (complex objects): specific view of an object can be
represented as an arrangement of simple 3-D shapes called geons and these can be combined to
meaningful objects.
  In general, an
arrangement of three geons gives
people enough information to
classify an object. This is essentially
a feature-analysis theory that
explains how we recognize three-
dimensional objects.
 Modification: the
viewer-centered approach
proposes that we store a small
number of views of three-
dimensional objects, rather than just
one view.
 When we see an
object from an unusual angle, and the object does not match with any stored in our memory. We
then mentally rotate the image of that object until it matches the one stored in our memory.
 This mental rotation may take a second or two, and we may not even recognize the object.

The distinction between bottom-up processing and top-down processing

 Bottom-up processing emphasizes that the stimulus characteristics are important during object
recognition. Specifically, the physical stimuli from the environment are registers on the sensory
receptors this information is then passed on to higher, more sophisticated levels in the system.
 The information starts from the most basic (or bottom) level of perception and it works its way
up until it reaches the more “sophisticated” cognitive regions of the brain. The combination of
simple bottom-level features help in recognizing more complex, whole objects.
 Top-down processing (the second or “higher-level processing”) emphasizes how a person’s
concepts, expectations, and memory can influence object recognition. We expect certain shapes
to be found in certain recognition to be found in certain locations, and we expect to encounter
these shapes out of our past experiences. These expectations help recognize objects very rapidly.
 These expectations at the higher (or top) level of the visual processing will work on their way
down, and guide our early processing of the visual stimulus.
 Top-down processing is strong when a stimulus is registered for just a fraction of a second, and
also when the stimulus is incomplete or ambiguous.
 For example: we recognize a coffee cup because of the simultaneous work of both processing:
1) bottom-up processing forces the register of component features such as the curve of the cup’s
handle; and 2) the context of a coffee shop encourages the recognition of the handle on the cup
more quickly, because of top-down processing.

Top down processing and reading

  Word-superiority effect: we can identify a single letter more accurately and more rapidly
when it appears in a meaningful word than when it appears alone by itself or else in a
meaningful string of unrelated letters. It is easier to recognize the letter p in plan than if it
would appear in a non-word such as pnla.
 Research has also supported that the context of a sentence facilitates the recognition of a word
in a sentence. People quickly recognize the word ‘juice’ in a sentence, “Mary drank her orange
juice”
 Since both the features of the stimulus and the nature of the context influence word recognition,
it means that both bottom-up and top-down processing operate in a coordinated fashion.
 The context effects can also induce reading speed, the previous letters in a word help in
identification of the remaining letters more quickly.
 While reading something written in a bad handwriting, we are more likely to use top-down
approach than bottom-up processing as compared to if we reading a neatly printed text.

Overusing top-down processing:

Change blindness

 We demonstrate change blindness when we fail to detect a change in an object or a scene

 When we perceive an entire scene, our top-down processing encourages us to assume that the
basic meaning of the scene will remain stable. This assumption is rational, and the mistaken
perception makes sense.
 Stranger-and-the-door study: this included a stranger asking an individual for directions. Right
in the middle of this conversation, two people – who are carrying a wooden door sideways –
walk between the individual and the stranger. When they have passed by, the original stranger
has been replaced by one of the door-holding strangers. Only half of the bystanders reported
that the stranger has been replaced. Many were still clueless when asked explicitly “did you
notice than I’m not the same person who asked you for directions?”
 Change is quickly identified if it is important.

Inattentional blindness

 When people fail to notice that a new object has appeared that is not consistent with their
concepts, expectations, and memory, people often fail to recognize this changed object (change
blindness) or this new object (Inattentional blindness).
 People are more likely to experience Inattentional blindness when the primary task is cognitively
demanding. In a study people were asked to monitor the number of passes and bounces made by
individuals playing basketball in a video. Shortly after the video began, a person dressed in a
gorilla suit wandered into the scene and stayed there for 5 seconds. Almost half of the
participants failed to notice this new object.

An important point of notice in these situations is that, the visual stimuli that people fail to notice are
often not high in ecological validity. Studies are ecological validity when the conditions of the study are
similar to the natural settings where these results will be applied (there usually aren’t people in gorilla
suits at basketball games, strangers asking for directions don’t just simply change into different people).

Visual system is fairly accurate in creating a “gist” of a scene, the focus is only on the information that
appears to be important, such as the proximity of an approaching bus as we cross a street and we ignore
unimportant details like a bird flying overhead. Thus, our cognitive errors can be traced back to a
rational strategy.

Face perception

 Researchers emphasize that most people perceive faces in a different fashion from other stimuli
 People are more accurate in recognizing a facial feature when it appeared within the context of a
while face, rather than in isolation
 When we recognize other objects like houses, by identifying the individualized features (like
windows) that combine together to create these objects but we recognize faces on a holistic basis
– that is, in terms of their overall shape and structure
 We perceive a face in terms of its gestalt (overall) quality that transcends its individual elements.
It makes sense that face perception has a special status, given the importance of faces in social
interaction.

Neuroscience research on face recognition

 People with prospagnosia cannot recognize human faces visually, though they perceive other
objects relatively normally. They report that various parts of a person’s face – such as a nose, a
mouth, and two eyes – seem independent of one another, instead of forming a unified, complete
face.
 During visual perception, information from occipital lobe travels to numerous other locations
throughout the brain, the most responsible location of face recognition is the temporal cortex.
Specifically, inferotemporal cortex, in the lower portion of the temporal cortex.
 fMRI (technique that obtains images of human brain activity) studies have shown that brain
responds more quickly to faces presented in the normal, upright position, in comparison to face
presented upside-down (face-inversion effect).
 Application: (whether people can accurately match faces to pictures) a study explored the
accuracy of supermarket cashiers who had been instructed to make judgment about ID photos,
specifically, the undergraduate students who were given credit cards that showed a color photo
of their faces. Each student was told to select some items at a supermarket and then present their
credit card to the cashier. The cashier could then decide whether to accept or reject the credit
card.
 When students carried a credit card that showed their own photo, the cashiers correctly accepted
the card 93% of the time. But when students carried a card that showed a photo of another person
– who looked fairly similar – they correctly rejected the photo only 64% of the time.
  Face identification in schizophrenia: individuals can identify facial emotion as accurately as
people in a control group (with no schizophrenia), when the two groups are matched for age,
gender, and intelligence, although individuals with schizophrenia typically take longer to make
these decisions.

Speech perception

Characteristics of speech perception

 Phoneme: is the basic unit of language (sounds like a, k, and th). English language uses between
40 and 45 phonemes, a number that includes both vowels and consonants.

Word boundaries

 During conversations in unfamiliar languages, words seem to run together in a continuous stream
with no boundaries to separate them. While it may seem that for the English language, that words
are more distinct, with clear spaces that identify as the boundaries.
 The actual acoustical stimulus of a spoken language however, shows no clear-cut pauses to mark
the boundaries. An actual physical event – such as a pause – makes a word boundary.
 We are rarely conscious that it is difficult to resolve word boundaries. Our speech recognition
system initially considers several different hypotheses about how to divide a phrase into words.
This system immediately and effortlessly uses our knowledge about language in order to place
the boundaries in appropriate locations.

Variability in Phoneme Pronunciation

 Speakers vary tremendously in the pitch and tone of their voices, as well as the rate of producing
phonemes.
 Speakers often fail to produce phonemes in a precise fashion.
 Coarticulation: while pronouncing a particular phoneme, the mouth remains in somewhat a
same shape it was in when the previous phoneme was pronounced. Additionally, the mouth is
preparing to pronounce the next phoneme; this means the produced phoneme varies slightly from
time to time, depending on the surrounding phoneme. For example the letter d in idle sounds
different than the letter d in don’t.

Context and Speech Perception

 Top-down factors also influence speech perception – we use our knowledge about language to
facilitate recognition, whether we are looking at objects or listening to speech.
 Phonemic restoration: people can fill in a missing phoneme, using the contextual meaning as a
cue. It is kind of an illusion; people think they hear a phoneme, even though the correct sound
vibrations never reach their ears.
 In a study, researchers played tape recordings of several sentences for research participants and
inserted a coughing sound (in the location of *). These spoken words were identical with one
exception: a different word was spliced at the end of the sentence.
  The sentences were:
o It was found that the *eel was on the axle
o It was found that the *eel was on the shoe
o It was found that the *eel was on the orange
 People typically heard the ‘‘word’’ *eel as wheel in the first sentence, heel in the second
sentence, and peel in the third. In this study, then, people were able to reconstruct the missing
word on the basis of a context cue at the end of the sentence, which occurred four words later.

Visual cues as an Aid to Speech Perception

 Information from the speaker’s lips and face helps to resolve ambiguities from the speech signal.
Similarly, a conversation could be heard and understood more accurately when we closely watch
the speaker’s lips instead of listening to a conversation over the phone.
 McGurk effect refers to the influence of visual information on speech perception, when
individual must integrate both visual and auditory information.
 The region of the cerebral cortex that gives rise to the McGurk effect is the superior temporal
sulcus which is located on the right side of the horizontal groove along the center of the temporal
lobe.

Theories of speech perception

Special mechanism approach (speech-is-special)

 Humans possess a phonetic module (or a speech module) which is a special-purpose neural
mechanism that specifically processes all aspects of speech perception; it cannot handle other
kinds of auditory perception.
 This module helps in segmenting blurred stream of auditory information so that one can perceive
distinct phonemes and words.
 This theory suggests that brain is organized in an unusual way, as this module does not rely on
the general cognitive functions; this is in dissonance with the theme of all cognitive processes
being interrelated.
 Categorical perception: when people listen to a series of ambiguous sounds (such as one
halfway between a b and a p) they either heard a clear-cut b or a p, rather than a sound halfway

The general mechanism approaches

 Speech perception can be explained without proposing any special module as humans’ use the
same neural mechanisms to process both speech sounds and non-speech sounds. Speech
perception is therefore a learned ability.
  Humans’ exhibit categorical perception for non-speech sounds too; research has demonstrated
that speech and music produce the same sequence of shifts in brain’s electrical potential.
 Another supportive evidence is that people’s judgments about phonemes are influenced by visual
cues and if that’s true (which it is), then we cannot argue that a special module handles all
aspects of speech perception.
 Speech perception proceeds in stages and it depends on familiar cognitive processes such as
feature recognition, learning, and decision making.

Attention: can be defined as a concentration of mental activity that allows taking in a limited portion of
a vast stream of information available from both the sensory world and memory

Divided attention

 A divided-attention task requires an individual to pay attention to two or more simultaneous

messages and respond appropriately to each of them. In this task, both speed and accuracy suffer
and this is especially likely when the tasks are challenging
 Multitask: trying to accomplish two or more tasks at the same time. This strains the limits of
attention, as well as the limits of working and long-term memory.
 Research does not support the illusion that people can multitask and the general guideline is that
people typically perform faster and more accurately when they work on one task at a time
 The use of cell phones (hand-held or otherwise) during driving or completing any other task
induced a form of inattentional blindness and their attention was reduced for information that
appeared in the center of their visual field.
 A divided-attention task requires people to try and pay equal attention to two or more kinds of
information. And a selective-attention task requires people to pay attention to certain kinds of
information, while ignoring the other ongoing information.
Selective-attention tasks

Dichotic listening

 A dichotic listening task requires participants to shadow (that is repeating after the speaker) a
message presented in one ear and while ignoring a message presented in other ear.
 Generally, it is possible to process only one message at a time but it is possible for people to
process the unattended message when a) both messages are presented slowly, b) the main task is
not challenging, and c) the meaning of the unattended message is immediately relevant.
 Cocktail party effect: during a social gathering, even while playing close attention to one
conversation, we may notice our name being mentioned in a nearby conversation
 When people’s attention is divided, they can sometimes notice characteristics of the unattended
message, such as the speaker’s gender and whether their own name is mentioned. And under
challenging conditions, they may not even notice whether the unattended message switched
languages.

The Stroop effect

 People take a long time to name the ink color when that color is used in printing an incongruent
word; in contrast, they can quickly name the same ink color when it appears as a solid patch of
color.
 The effect can be explained by the connectionist of parallel distributed processing approach – the
Stroop task activates two pathways at the same time; one by naming the ink color and other by
the task of reading the word. Interference occurs when two competing pathways are active at the
same time and as a result, task performance suffers.
 Second explanation: we’ve had more practice reading words that naming colors and the more
automatic process (reading word) interferes with the less automatic process (naming the color of
the ink).
 Emotional Stroop task: people are instructed to name the ink of color of words that could have
strong emotional significance to them and they often require more time to name the color of the
stimuli, presumably because they have trouble ignoring their emotional reactions to the words
themselves.
 People with phobic disorders (arachnophobia) are significantly slower on these anxiety-arousing
words (hairy, crawl) than on control (neutral) words. People without phobias show no such
difference.
 Attentional bias: describes a situation in which people pay extra attention to some stimuli. In an
emotional Stroop task, people pay less attention to the ink color of the words.

Individual differences between people with eating disorders and Stroop effect

 Researchers created a list of emotionally relevant words that referred to topic such as body
shape, body weight, and eating. They then matched these words with a control group of neutral
words, so that the two groups of stimuli were similar in both word length and word frequency.
 And a standardized test used for assessing the potential of developing eating disorders was used.
  The results showed that when women took much longer to read the words related to body-shape
as opposed to neutral words, they were more at a risk for developing eating disorders.
 According to the cognitive-behavioral approach, psychological problems arise from
inappropriate thinking (cognitive factors) and inappropriate (behavioral factors). This study
shows this relationship between these women’s potential for eating disorders and their thought
patterns about words related to body shape.

Visual search

 In visual search, the observer must find a target in a visual display that has numerous distracters
 The isolated-feature/combined-feature effect: people can typically locate an isolated feature
more quickly than a combined feature.
 If the target differed from the irrelevant items in the display with respect to a simple feature such
as color, observers could quickly detect the target.
 The feature-present/feature-absent effect: people can typically locate a feature that is present
more quickly than feature that is absent.
 When people are searching for a feature that is present, the target item in the display usually
captures their attention automatically, this “pop-out” effect is automatic, and researchers
emphasize that locating the target is a bottom-up process.
 When people are searching for a feature that is absent, the search time increases dramatically as
the number of irrelevant items increased and therefore, this kind of attention that emphasizes
both bottom-up processing and top-down processing. This task is substantially more challenging

Saccadic Eye Movements during Reading

 Very rapid movement of the eyes from one spot to the next is known as saccadic eye movement.
The purpose of this movement during reading is to bring the center of your retina into position
over the words you want to read.
 The fovea (the small regions in the retina) has better acuity than other retinal regions; therefore
the eye must be moved so that new words can be registered on the fovea.
 When you read a passage in English, each saccade moves your eye forward by 7 to 9 letters.
 However, a fixation occurs during the period between two saccadic movements. During each
fixation, your visual system pauses briefly in order to acquire information that is useful for
reading.
 Incidentally, you may think that you have a smooth, continuous view of the material you are
processing. However, your eyes are actually alternating between jumps and pauses.
 Perceptual span: refers to the number of letters and spaces that we perceive during a fixation. In
English, this perceptual span normally includes letters lying about 4 positions to the left of the
letter and not more than 8 spaces to the right of the fixation point.
 When the eye jumps forward in a saccadic movement, usually moves toward the center a word,
rather than to a blank space between words or between sentences.
  The eye also jumps past short words, words that appear frequently in a language, and words that
are highly predictable in a sentence, the size of the saccadic movement is small if the next word
in a sentence is misspelled or unusual.
 Good readers make larger jumps. They are also less likely to make regressions (move their eyes
backward to earlier material in the sentence) and they also have shorter pauses before moving
onward.

Explanations for attention

The orienting attention network

 This network is responsible for the kind of attention required for visual search, in which you
must shift your attention around to various spatial locations.
 Unilateral spatial neglect: when a person ignores part of his or her visual field
 People with damage in the parietal region (right or left hemisphere) have trouble noticing a
visual stimulus that appears in the alternate side of their visual field (right-left; left-right)
 To understand which regions of the brain are active during the orienting attention network
researchers use PET (positron emission tomography), researchers’ measure blood flow in the
brain by injecting the participant with a radioactive chemical just before they perform a cognitive
task. In the PET scan, the parietal cortex shows increased blood flow when they pay attention to
spatial locations and perform visual searches.
 It develops during the first year of life, by about 4 months of age when an infant can divert their
attention from an overstimulating situation and divert their attention towards a new object, like a
toy.

The executive attention network

 This task focuses on conflict; this inhibits the automatic responses to stimuli, the prefrontal
portion of the cortex is the region of the brain the executive attention network is active.
 This is involved during top-down control of attention. It begins to develop about the age of 3.
 Executive attention also helps in learning of new ideas and the location of the network overlaps
with the areas of your brain that are related to general intelligence.

Theories of attention

Early theories of attention

 People are extremely limited in the amount of information that they can process at any given
time.
 Bottleneck theories propose a narrow passageway in human information processing. This limits
the quantity of information to which we can pay attention; when one message is currently
flowing through a bottleneck, the other messages must be left behind.
  But these theories underestimate the flexibility of human attention and unlike these theories
propose, information is lose through many phases of attention, from the beginning through later
processing.

Feature-integration theory

We sometimes look at a scene using distributed attention, and we process all parts of the scene at the
same time; on other occasions, we use focused attention, and we process each item in the scene, one at a
time.

The basic elements

 Distributed attention: allows in registering features automatically and simultaneously. It is a

relatively low-level kind of processing and in fact, so effortless that we are not even aware of
using it. (isolated features)
 Focused attention: requires slower serial processing and one object is identified at a time
(combination of features)
 Illusory conjunction: is an inappropriate combination of features, perhaps combining one
object’s shape with a nearby object’s color.
 The human visual system actually processes an object’s features independently due to the
binding problem because it does not represent the important features of an object as a unified
whole (apple = spherical shape + red color) and focused attention acts like a form of glue, so that
an object’s shape and color stick together.

Consciousness

 The awareness that people have about the outside world, and about their perceptions, images,
thoughts, memories, and feelings
 It is associated with the kind of controlled, focused attention that is not automatic.
 Mindless reading: our eyes may move forward, but we do not process the meaning of the
material. In fact, the eyes move erratically rather than using the kind of normal saccadic
movements. We are not conscious of any higher mental processes, until we realize that we didn’t
remember any information from the text.
 Mind wandering: occurs when thoughts shift from the external environment in favor of internal
processing.
 We have little access to our thought processes; we may be aware of the product of the thought
processes but not the ‘process’. We are not aware of the step-by-step procedures in the motor
activities that have become automatic.
 Thought suppression: trying to eliminate the thoughts, ideas, and images that are related to an
undesirable stimulus.
 Ironic effects of mental control: describes how our efforts can backfire when we attempt to
control the content of our consciousness. For example: you are trying to not think about the boy
you have a crush on, but your bitch ass brain has another plans. The rebound effect – when
 people are instructed not to notice a painful stimulus, they are likely to become even more aware
of the pain.
 Blindsight: a condition in which an individual with a damaged visual cortex claims to not see an
object; however they can accurately report some characteristics of that object; such as location.
 They can report visual attributes such as color, shape, and motion
 Possible explanation: most of the registered information on retina travels to the visual cortex.
However, a small portion of this information travels to other locations in the cortex that are
located outside the visual cortex. A person with Blindsight can therefore identify some characters
of the stimulus – even with a damaged primary cortex – based on the information registered in
those locations.
 It suggests that visual information must pass through the primary visual cortex in order to be
registered in consciousness. However, suppose that some part of this information ‘‘takes a
detour’’ and bypasses the primary visual cortex. Then it is possible that the individual will not be
conscious of the visual experience. However, he or she may indeed perceive this stimulus.