Cognitive Psychology Introduction to the field. Why Cognitive Psych? Fun Applications Both fun &...

Cognitive Psychology

Introduction to the field

Why Cognitive Psych?

• Fun

• Applications

• Both fun & applications are fueled by basic research questions

Fun

• Deep Blue = 1/2 million moves per second. What goes on in Kasparov’s head?

Fun

• Deep Blue = 1/2 million moves per second. What goes on in Kasparov’s head?

• Why is it you can’t remember what you just got up to do, but you can’t forget commercials from childhood?

Look at the rabbit.

This is the problem of reference

• Reid had the same problem w/ “I sleep all right!!!”

Fun

• What goes on in Kasparov’s head?

• Why can’t you forget commercials from childhood?

• Parents say “Rabbit.”

• “Why did John roller skate to McDonald’s last night?”

Fun

• What goes on in Kasparov’s head?

• Why can’t you forget commercials from childhood?

• Parents say “Rabbit.”

• “Why did John roller skate to McDonald’s last night?”

• Dragon illusion

Dragon Illusion

Applied

• Pilots make errors. Why? Why can’t they be perfect?

Kish Airlines crash, Feb. 11, 2004

From http://baddesigns.com

Applied• Why do pilots make errors?• Is it possible for repressed memories to be

recovered?

Applied• Why can’t pilots be

perfect?

• Can repressed memories be recovered?

• What’s the best way to make memories long-lasting?

And 2,018 others on Amazon

Applied

• Why can’t pilots be perfect?

• Can repressed memories be recovered?

• What’s the best way to make memories long-lasting?

• Document translation

Document translation

Jingle bells, Jingle bells, jingle all the wayOh what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh

Into German, then back into English

Document Translation

Jingle bells, Jingle bells, jingle all the wayOh what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh

Into German, then back into English

Jingleglocken, jingleglocken, jingle completely.Oh which fun it is to ride into a horse-opened sleigh.


Rudolph the red-nose reindeer had a very shiny noseAnd if you ever saw it, you would even say it glows.

Into Italian, then back into English


Rudolph the red-nose reindeer had a very shiny noseAnd if you ever saw it, you would even say it glows.

Into Italian, then back into English

Rudolph the red-nose reindeer has had a nose a lot polishes,And if you never saw it, you would even say that she emits light.


You better not shout ,You better not cry, You better not pout I’m telling you why, Santa Claus is coming to town.

Into Spanish, then back into English


You better not shout ,You better not cry, You better not pout I’m telling you why, Santa Claus is coming to town.

Into Spanish, then back into English

You would improve the clock towards the outside,You would improve not the shout,You would improve not the codfish. I is saying to him Papa Noel is coming to the city.

Applied

Why can’t pilots be perfect?Can repressed memories be recovered?What’s the best way to make memories long-lasting?Document translationHow can we make virtual reality displays look natural?

Basic• Pilots make errors. Why? Why can’t they be

perfect?

• Deep Blue can examine more than 1/2 million moves per second. What is going in Kasparov’s head?

• What is the nature of expertise?

Basic

• Is it possible for repressed memories to be recovered?

• Why is it you can’t remember what you just got up to do, but you can’t forget commercials from childhood?

• How does forgetting work?

Basic

• What’s the best way for memory to be long-lasting?

• Small child sees a rabbit hopping by, and parents say “Rabbit.”

• At any given moment there are many things that we might learn. How does the mind pick one (or more) of them?

Basic

• How can we make virtual reality displays look natural?

• Shape constancy illusion.

• Why does vision sometimes break down?

Goal of Cognitive Psychology: to explain basic processes of thought

Simple example:

Cognitive perspective

• Think about what had to happen in order for you to answer that question.

“How many handsdid Aristotle have?”

Speech Interpretation

Speech interpretation

• Segmentation--where are the breaks between words?

• Where are the breaks between phonemes?

• Variability in phoneme production between speakers



Interpretation ofquestion

Interpretation of question

• Word order dramatically changes sentences. Compare “John wished he had jumped higher” and “He wished John had jumped higher”

• Surrounding context also matters: Compare “He smiled” and “He slowly took out the gun. He smiled.”




Find answerin memory

Find answer in memory





Make decision:answer or not?

Answer or not

How confident am I that I know the answer?

What happens if I don’t answer?

Is this a trick? (Psych. Classes are full of tricks.)






Phrase theanswer

Phrase the answer

• *Two

• He had two hands

• I’m not sure, but I’m guessing two

• Two--what’s it to you?






Phrase theanswer

Create motorcommands to lips, tongue, etc

Create motor commands

• Degrees of freedom problem

• Serial order problem

Summary: this shows basics of cognitive perspective

• Emphasizes information and how it is transformed

• Think in terms of stages in which information is transformed

• Stages communicate with one another, but one stage doesn’t know what the other is doing.

Where did this approach come from?

Greek philosophy

• How you acquire knowledge (perception)

• How you maintain knowledge (memory)

• Whether knowledge is innate or learned

Good questions!

• Answers were pretty bad

• Democritus: perception = small particles fly into your eye.

• Aristotle agreed. Also thought women have fewer teeth then men, mice die if they drink in the summer.

• Socrates: all knowledge is innate.• Plato: perception is unreliable, therefore only logic

is reliable and experiments are pointless.

Assumptions Greeks Made

• The world can be understood & predicted

• Human are part of this world

• Explanations should be of this world

Dark Ages

• Almost nothing happened--decline of intellectualism

• Rise of feudalism

• Greeks dominated by Romans

• Increasing emphasis on the soul, not the intellect.

Renaissance

• Philosophers consider the mind again, mostly in the nativist/empiricist debate

• Other topics taken up, but usually in service of this debate

• Memory (for the empiricists to show the mechanism by which experience is the teacher)

• Perception (to show that perception, which feels innate, is actually learned).

Introspectionism

• First attempt to apply scientific method to thought (1880s).

Wundt Titchener

• First attempt to apply scientific method to thought (1880s).

• Wilhelm Wundt. Bradford Titchener

• Goal: description of the contents of consciousness; find irreducible “elements of consciousness.

• Method: introspection.

Problems

• Only covers conscious processing--”imageless thought” controversy

• Poor reliability between subjects

• Watching a mental process changes it

• Hard to relate to physiology

Response: Behaviorism

• 1913, John Watson• Tenets:

• Observables only• Theory must be parsimonious• Break behavior down into irreducible concepts.

Behaviorism took off during the 1910’s and dominated American psychology through the mid-1950’s

Behaviorism’s success

Behaviorism produced some interesting results, unlike introspectionism.

Cognitive Psychology Introduction to the field. Why Cognitive Psych? Fun Applications Both fun &...

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