Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Reed- Ch 1 &3

Stephen Reed- Cognition Chapter 1 Notes

• Cognition: the acquisition of knowledge.

- Psychologist who study cognition are interested in pattern recognition, attention,

memory, visual imagery, language, problem solving and decision making (I.e. the
use of knowledge not only the acquisition-p. 2)

• Purpose of this book is to provide an overview of the field of cognitive psychology

• Cognitive psychology: the study of the mental operations that support people’s
acquisition and use of knowledge

- Ulric Neisser’s definition: “cognitive psychology refers to all the processes by

which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered
and used.”

- Neisser’s reference to sensory input implies that cognition begin with our
contact with the external world.

- Transformation of sensory input means that our representations of the world is

not just a passive registration of our physical surroundings but an active
construction that can involve both reduction (lost info) and elaboration (when we
add to sensory input).

- Information must be used ; this is the last part of Neisser’s def.

• Memory: storage and recovery of information

- Distinction between storage and recovery implies that the storage of info does
not guarantee recovery (e.g. “tip of the tongue”)

• Human information processing: the psychological approach that attempts to

identify what occurs during the various stages (attention, perception, short-term
memory) of processing information.

- Cognitive psychology is often called human information processing

- Information-processing approach attempts to identify what happens during

these stages.

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• Sensory store: the 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.

- Sensory store for vision lasts only 1/4 of a second (250 milliseconds)

• Pattern recognition stage: information in the sensory store is lost at the end of this
time unless it can be identified in the pattern recognition stage.

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

• Selection stage: the stage that follows pattern recognition and determines which
information a person will try to remember

• Short-term memory (STM): memory that has limited capacity and that lasts only
approximately 20-30 seconds (duration) in the absence of attending to its content.

• Long-term memory (LTM): Memory that has no capacity limits and lasts from
minutes to an entire lifetime.

• Bottom-up processing: the flow of info from the sensory store toward LTM.

• Top-down processing: the flow of info from LTM toward the sensory store.

• Stimulus-response approach (S-R): experimenters record how people respond to

stimuli without attempting to discover the thought processes that cause the
response.

- Proposed by Watson (‘24) in Behaviorism; it had a major negative impact on

cognitive psychology as it proposed only studying what could be directly
observed in a person’s behavior.

- The problem with S-R approach is that it does not reveal exactly what the
person does with the info presented in the stimulus.

• Information-Processing approach, by contrast, seeks to identify how a person

transforms info between the stimulus and the response.

• Broaden and Sperling’s models had import influence on subsequent information-

processing theory: Broadbent on models of auditory attention and Sperling on
visual recognition

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Higher Cognitive Processes (lower cognitive processes are those that are
automated requiring less consciousness and vice-verse for higher)

• Artificial intelligence: the study of how to produce computer programs that can
perform intellectually demanding tasks.

• Plan: a temporally ordered sequence of operations for carrying out some task

- Plans and the Structure of Behavior argued that much of human behavior is
planned.

- Alt def to plan: a list of instructions that can control the order in which a
sequence of operations is to be performed.

- Plan is analogous to computer program

- Consists of a hierarchy of TOTE units

• RAND seminar- major impact on integrating the work on computer simulation w/
other work on human information processing

• TOTE: Test-Operate-Test-Exit, a new unit different from S-R units

• There was a behaviorism movement in the US that was surpassed by the cognitive
revolution

• Cognitive science: the interdisciplinary attempt to study cognition through such

fields as psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics,
and anthropology.

- The study of intelligence in humans, computer programs, and abstract theories

with an emphasis on intelligent behavior as computation

• Cognitive neuroscience: the study of the relation between cognitive processes

and brain activities

- Where cognitive operations occur in the brain

• Four lobes of the cerebral cortex: Frontal lobe (planning of movements, some
aspects of memory, inhibition of inappropriate behaviors), Parietal lobe (body
sensations including touch), Temporal lobe (hearing, advanced visual processing/
understanding language and visual patters like faces), and Occipital lobe (vision/
primary visual cortex ) p.9

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- Damage to the occipital lobe (no pattern perception or awareness of visual info);
damage to parietal lobe (impairment to identify objects by touch and clumsiness
on the opposite side of the body damaged); damage to temporal lobe (interfere
with memory);

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI): a diagnostic technique that uses

magnetic fields and computerized images to locate mental operations in the brain

• Positron-Emission tomography (PET): a diagnostic technique that uses radioactive

tracers to study brain activity by measuring the amount of blood flow in different
part of the brain.

• Event-related potential (ERP): a diagnostic technique that uses electrodes placed

on the scalp to measure the duration of brain waves during mental tasks

• A limitation of spatial imaging techniques is that they do not provide the kind of
precise temporal info important in analyzing many cognitive tasks in which
fractions of a second are theoretically important

• Frontal activation is important for encoding the meaning of individual words

whereas temporal activation is more important for the integration of word
meanings to obtain the overall meaning of phrases and sentences.

• Ch 1 presents a brief overview of the information-processing approach to the

study of cognition

• Ch 2- 3 on pattern recognition and attention are concerned with perception

• Theories of attention are needed to explain performance when too much

perceptual info arrives at the same time.

Ch. 3

• Primary goal of attention research is to understand which is info is selected, how it

is selected and what happens to both selected and unselected info

• External attention refers to attending to objects in the environment or to specific

features of those objects: features, objects, spatial locations, sensory modality,
time points

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• Internal attention refers to regulating our internal mental life such planning what to
eat for dinner: task rules, responses, LMT, working memory

• Ch 3 discusses external attention- the focus on perceptual objects rather than on

trains of thought

• Perception’s selective nature is necessary to keep us from becoming overloaded

w/ too much info

• Part 1 of Ch3 concerns theories that try to locate the stage at which this selection
occurs

• Bottleneck theories: they assume that selection is necessary whenever too much
info reaches a bottleneck- a stage that cannot process all of it

- A theory that attempts to explain how people select info when some
information-processing stage becomes overloaded with too much info

• Concentration: investing mental effort in one or more tasks.

• Mental effort: the amount of mental capacity require to perform a task

• Capacity theory: a theory proposing that we have a limited amount of mental effort
to distribute across tasks, so there are limitations on the number of tasks we can
perform at the same time

- Ex: Rumelhart’s model of feature recognition slows as the number of items

increases because of limited amount of attention must be distributed over more
patterns

• Difficult increases as the pitch of the 2 speakers becomes more similar or if they
stand closer together.

• Broadbent’s Filter model: the proposition that a bottleneck occurs at the pattern
recognition stage and that attention determines what info reaches the pattern
recognitions stage

• Limited capacity perceptual channel: the pattern recognition stage of Broadbent’s

model which is protected by the filter (attention) from becoming overloaded with
too much perceptual info

• A limitation of the filter model is that the sensory store would have to last fairly
long to operate as proposed; otherwise, the info would decay before it could be
recognized

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• Treisman’s attenuation model
• Shadow: an experimental method that requires people to repeat the attended
message out loud.

• Contextual effect: the influence of the surrounding context on the recognition

patterns. THis raised questions about the filter model

• Threshold: the minimal amount of activation required to become consciously

aware of a stimulus

- 2 important characteristics: they vary across words and they can be

momentarily lowered by the listener’’s expectations

• Treisman’s model consists of 2 parts: selective filter and a “dictionary”

- Filter distinguishes between 2 messages on the basis of their physical

characteristics such as location , intensity or pitch but it does not completely
block out the unattended message it merely attenuated it.

- Recognition of a word occurs in the dictionary if the intensity of loudness of the

word exceeds its threshold

• Attenuation: a decrease in the perceived loudness of an unattended message

• Important words have permanently low thresholds

• Deutsch-Norman Memory Selection Model

• Broadbent and Treisman placed the bottleneck at the pattern recognition stage

• Deutsch and Deutsch as well as Norman place the bottleneck after pattern
recognition. Thus not a problem of perception but of selection into memory after
perception occurs.

• These models are called late-selection models: proposal that the bottleneck
occurs when info is selected for memory

• It is more difficult to select info based on meaning than on pitch or location which
leds to the hypothesis that more mental effort (capacity) is required for late
selection after pattern recognition than for early selection before pattern
recognition

• Capacity vs bottleneck models

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• Capacity theories are concerned with the amount of mental effort required to
perform a task (p. 52)

• Kahneman argued that a capacity theory assumes there is a general limit on a

person’s capacity to perform mental work.

- Kahneman’s model was designed to supplement bottleneck models not replace

• Both capacity and bottleneck models predict that simultaneous activities are likely
to interfere with each other but they attribute the interference to different causes

- Bottleneck: interference occurs because the same mechanism (speech

recognition) is require to carry out 2 incompatible operations

- Capacity: interference occurs when the demands of 2 activities exceed available

capacity. Depends on the total demands of the task

• Capacity models assume that a person has considerable control over how this
limited capacity can be allocated

- Driving and talking is an example. When you hit traffic you tend to stop talking
and focus on driving as the driving demand is greater

• Allocation of capacity: when a limited amount of capacity is distributed to various

tasks

• When the supply of attention does not meet the demands the level of performance
declines (p. 53)

• Kaheman’s model assumes that the amount of capacity available varie with the
level of arousal

- Arousal: a physiological state that influences the distribution of mental capacity

to various tasks

• Very high levels of arousal can interfere with performance

• Yorkers and Dodson’s law that performance is best at intermediate levels of

arousal

• Enduring dispositions reflect the rules of involuntary attention // an automatic

influence to which people direct their attention

• Momentary intention: a conscious decision to allocate attention to certain tasks or

aspects of the environment.

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• Multi mode theory: a theory proposing that people’s intentions and the demands of
the task determine the information processing stage at which info is selected
(Johnston and Heinz)

- The observer can adopt any mode of attention demanded by or best suited to a
particular task

• Subsidiary task: a task that typically measures how quickly people can react to a
target stimulus to evaluate the capacity demands of the primary task. P.56

• Late semantic mode of selection: Deutsch and Deutsch- know the meaning of the
words to categorize them

• Multimode theory predicts that more capacity is required to perform at late

mode of selection

• It also predicts that listening to 2 lists should require more capacity than listening
to and shadowing one list which should require more capacity than listening to no
lists

• Selective attention requires capacity and that amount of amount of capacity

required increases from early to late modes of selection. P.56

• A person can increase breadth of attention but only at a cost in capacity

expenditure and selection accuracy

• Attention is as flexible as suggested by the multimode theory- a person at least

has the choice of how best to use it

• Psychologists have demonstrated that with sufficient practice some tasks can
become so automatic that they do not appear to require any of the precious
capacity postulated by a capacity theory

• Automatic Processing-performing mental operations that require very little

mental effort

- Occurs without conscious awareness

• Task vary considerably in the amount of mental effort required to perform them
with some requiring very minimal capacity as they are so well practiced and
routine

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• Much of what we do is determined not by deliberate choices but by features of the
environment that initiate mental processes that operate outside of consciousness
(Barg and Chartrand)

• An advantage of automatic processing is performing routine activities w/o much

concentration or mental effort

• Poster & Snyder 3 Criteria to determine if a skill is automatic: 1) occurs w/o

intention; 2)doesn’t give rise to conscious awareness; 3) doesn’t interfere
with other mental activities

- Riding a bike
- Reading
• Stroop effect: the finding that it takes longer to name the color of the ink a word is
printed in when the word is the name of a competing color

• To what extent are our conscious intentions and strategies in control of the way
info is processed in our minds?

• Automatic processes occur without intention which can result when we don’t
want it to (a nuisance)

• Automatic processes are advantageous and allow us to perform complex skills

that would otherwise overload our limited capacity

• Automatic encoding: Hasher and Zacks proposed a theory that distinguished

between 2 kinds of mental activities: effortful processes (those that require
considerable effort/capacity) and incidental learning (those that require little or
none)

• Incidental learning: learning that occurs when we do n9ot make a conscious effort
to learn

• Frequency info: data that specifies how often different stimulus occur

• Spatial info: data about where objects occur in the environments

• Temporal info: data about when or for how long events occur

• Hasher and Zacks proposed 5 criteria that distinguish between automatic and
effortful processing p. 59-60: intentional vs incidental learning;

• Knowledge of frequencies allows us to develop expectancies about the world

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• Automatic processing is usually achieved only after expensive practice

• LaBerge and Samuels: the ability to acquire complete, multi component skills like
reading depends on the capability of automatic processing

- Their criteria for a skill being automatic is that it can be completed while
attention is directed elsewhere p.62

• Identifying the features of a letter is an initial component skill for successful

reading

• Words require less capacity to recognize if we recognize the word as a unit rather
than a string of individual letters

• Less capacity is require to recognize a frequent word as the reader does not pay
attention to the individual letters this means more capacity to comprehend
meaning of the sentence

• Driving requires divided attention to more than one event when the driver carries
on a conversation while driving

• 85% of cell phone owners use them while driving

- 4x likely to be in an accident which is comparable to driving w/ a blood alcohol

level above the legal limit

• Hands free devices don’t alter this. An interference occurs as a result of the mental
demands of talking on the phone not using a hand

• Attentional demands of cell phone that inference with performance

• Drivers did not encode the visual info as they were distracted by the conversation

• Processing language decreases the amount of activity in the occipital lobe used to
encode visual info and decreases the parietal lobe which controls other skills
involved in driving p. 66

• LaBerge and Samuels suggested that acquisition of complex multi component

skills depends on the ability to carry out some skills automatically without attention

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