Notes - Professor: Erik Thiessen PDF

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Professor: Erik Thiessen...

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Important Course Information ● Dr. Erik Theissen ○ Office Hours: Tues. 2:30-4:00 (342D Baker) ● Grad TA ○ [email protected] ○ Office hours: Mon. 1:45-2:45 (Psych Lounge [third floor of Baker Hall]) ● 3 Modules ○ Brain and Perception ○ Memory ○ Language and Higher Learning ● Each module has 1-2 hw assignments and 1 exam ● Final exam at end of course ● Textbook ○ Cognitive Psychology Mind and Brain by Edward E. Smith & Stephen M. Kosslyn 8/27/2018 ● What is Cognitive Psychology ○ The study of cognition ■ Perception of objects ■ Memory ■ Attending to portions of events ■ Making decisions ■ Communicating with each other ■ Solving problems ● Why do we study humans? ○ Humans might actually be the most advanced cognitive system on the planet? ● CHECK THE SYLLABUS TONIGHT Chapter 1 ● Examples of animals with exceptional intelligence ○ Sir William Kepler's bulldog solved arithmetic problems ● Clever Hans the horse was renowned for knowing how to spell and do arithmetic ● Turns out he had just learned to detect micro expressions in humans to tell when he should tap his hoop or not for the goal of getting a treat ○ This is a case of anthropomorphization ■ Assigning human characteristics to animal behavior ■ Very dangerous to research on animal behavior ● The Researcher Effect - Mr. van Osten unintentionally skewed his data by giving away cues ○ The very fact of you being an observer, or even your test subject knowing you’re an observer can skew data ○ Rosenthal and Fode ■ One half of experimental group was given “bright” rats, and the other haf

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“dull” rats ● In reality, all the rats were the same ■ “Smart” rats outperformed “dull” rats of the course of next five days ■ Results due to fact that students with “bright rats” handled their rats more often and more gently ■ Conclusion: attitude towards rats influenced performance One observation may have more than one plausible interpretation To reduce any undetectable effects on data ○ Restrict opportunities to treat participants in different groups differently ○ Be as unobtrusive, objective, and undetected as possible, apparently ○ Experimenter-blind study - a study in which the person running the experiment doesn’t know which group is the experimental or control Two special participant cases ○ Hawthorne effect ■ Just the idea of being in a study made the participants perform better than baseline regardless of stimulus ○ Placebo effect ■ The tendency for participants to feel better if they know they are being treated, regardless of what ails them ■ For new medication, it has to be considered at least more effect than inert pills (placebos) Participant effects can be reduced by ○ Design experiment where participants undergo both control and experimental treatment ○ To combat lack of motivation, is make it appear that all participants are under same conditions ○ Double-blind experiment - an experiment in which neither the participant nor the researcher knows which group is the control and which group is receiving the experimental treatment When doing an experiment where you take a sample if the population, important not to be biased ○ Convenience sample - not representative of population ○ Survey/Volunteer ○ Random - best way to take an unbiased sample ■ Each type of individual has equal chance of being included in study ■ Whether or not a given individual is actually included is up to random choice, so I feel like data would still be skewed Wundt’s idea of contents of consciousness ○ By characterizing basic sensations ■ Hot, cold, blue, red ○ Finding rules where feelings are combined ■ Shape color texture Edward Titchener ○ Mental activity can be broken down into more basic operations

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○ Developed objective methods for assessing mental activity Introspection - internal perception ○ Looking within oneself to assess one’s mental activity Not everyone’s introspections are the same Oswald Kulpe ○ Mental images do not always accompany mental activity ○ A mental image is signaled by the experience of perceiving when the appropriate sensory input is absent ○ When participants were asked to weights, they were able to determine which was heavier by kinesthetic WIlliam James ○ “Functionalist” psychologists focused on the function of mental activity (rather than their nature) ○ Some methods are better suited to accomplishing tasks than others ■ Try to find what it is about that method that make sit more efficient in completing a task Conceiving of mental activity as an evolutionary state led researchers to start studying animal behavior Behaviorist - a person that believed psychology should not attempt to understand hidden mental events, if they even existed at all, but rather on the immediately observable: stimuli & responses ○ Specify ways in which stimuli lead to responses Behaviorism isn’t able to explain complex human behaviors like language ○ How are we able to perceive, remember, and make decisions Nevertheless, behaviorism made important discoveries about the nature of learning, ○ Revealed how animals use information to make choices Computing has contributed major hints into the inner workings of the brain, surprisingly

9/16/18 ● When looking at an object right side up or upside down ○ The light source is preserved and it seems like the light is shining down from below ○ It’s as if the world continues to look upright...