Chapter 1:

What is cognition

➔ Mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.
➔ Study how we think. It's concerned with our inner mental processes, such as attention, perception, memory, action
planning, and language.
➔ How we process information.

Information Theory
➔ Information processing is the idea that information reduces uncertainty in the mind of the receiver.
➔ Information theory posits that information provided by a particular message is inversely related to the probability of
its occurrence. The less likely it is, the more information it conveys
➔ describes how our brains filter information, from what we're paying attention to in the present moment, to what gets
stored in our short-term or working memory and ultimately into our long-term memory

Limitations on Information Processing

1. Time Limitation
➔ Hick (1952) and Hyman (1953). Demonstrated that it takes time to translate a visual signal. Having
people press a key or a verbal response by using small light stimuli, where they had to press a key or
give a vocal l response.
➔ The more information a visual signal conveys, the longer it takes for the viewer to make an
appropriate response.

2. Capacity Limitation
➔ Capacity limitation for the amount of information that it can handle within a fixed period of time.
➔ Webster and Thompson (1953). Ex. BA427, pencil, beard, camera or tower.
➔ The flow of information to the brain takes time to occur
 ➔ There are limits to the nervous system's capacity for information processing

Models of Information Processing

➢ Two Classic Models

1. Broadbent’s Filer Model

➔ The idea is that information processing is restricted by channel capacity- as suggested by Shannon
(1948) and Shannon and Weaver (1949).
➔ Broadbent (1958) argues that the whole nervous system can be regarded as a single channel with
limits to the rate at which it can transmit stimulus information.
➔ Overlading of this limited capacity channel is prevented by a selective device or filter, which allows
only some of the available incoming information to enter the system.
2. Waugh and Norman’s Model of Information Processing
➔ Came from Waugh and Norman (1965).
➔ Upon being stimulated, we experience a primary memory, which then can either be forgotten or go to
the Rehearsal, which then can either go back to the primary memory or the secondary memory.
➔ Primary and secondary memory distinction came from analysis of the Brown-Peterson Task.
➔ In the Brown Peterson Task, participants are given a set of items to remember and then a number
from which they immediately begin counting backward by three.
➔ Waugh and Norman pointed out that primary memory makes it possible to immediately and
accurately recall our most recent experiences.

Atkinson-Shiffrin information processing model

➔ stimuli from the environment are processed first in sensory memory, storage of brief sensory events, such as
sights, sounds, and tastes. It is very brief storage—up to a couple of seconds. We are constantly bombarded with
sensory information.
 ➔ The model proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin describes memory as a mechanism that involves processing
information through a series of stages, which include short-term memory and long-term memory. It is called the
modal model because of the great influence it has had on memory research.

Apollo Robbins
➔ study human behaviour in an unconventional way: by picking pockets.
➔ The art of misdirection is about how somebody else can control your brain. By doing this, they can pull mind
games/tricks on you.
➔ How easy it is to throw someone off guard/distract them. They showed the audience that anyone can be distracted
and confused enough where they could potentially be pickpocketed.
➔ Attention is a powerful thing. Like I said, it shapes your reality.”

Ecological Validity
Ecological Validity
1. Psychologist J.J Gibson (1950-66)
➔ Gibson argues that the stimuli used by information-processing psychologists in their experiments were often
impoverished in comparison with the information available in the real world.
➔ He argued for an ecological approach to perception that would describe environmental stimulation at the
appropriate level.

➔ Gibson believed that the meaning of objects and events can be perceived as affordances. Define as “simply what
things furnish, for good or ill.
➔ Gibson theory- Information pickup, learning means becoming progressively more attuned to what the environment
affords us.

2. Neisser Model (19760)

 ➔ Proposed a cyclical model of cognition in which the perceiver possesses a schema that represents
what he or she expects to find in the environment and that directs his or her exploration of it.
➔ The perceptual cycle begins with a schema that brings the perceiver into contact with new information
that he or she can use to correct schema.
Cognitive Ethology
➔ Offers concrete and specific suggestions for carrying out studies in the real world in a way that will complement
laboratory-based research.
➔ Kingston, Smilex and Eastwood (2008).

Metacognition and Cognitive Psychology

➔ Metacognition is the term for knowledge about knowledge that is knowledge about the way that cognitive
processes work.
➔ The process of thinking about one's own thinking and learning. Metacognition: intentional thinking about how you
think and learn.

Chapter 2
Anatomy
➔

Double dissociation
➔ Different patients with damage to different areas of the brain show opposite patterns of
performance on two task.

Localization of function
➔ The idea is that there is a direct correspondence between specific brain parts.

Two Laws: Shepherd ivory franz- expert on ablation (1874-1933)

 1. Law of mass action
➔ Learning and memory depend on the total mass of brain tissue RATHER THAN THE PROPERTY OF
INDIUDALL CELLS remaining.
2. Law of equipotentiality
➔ Although some areas of the cortex may become specialized for certain tasks, any part of an area can, within
limits, do the job of any other part of that area.
➔ Lashley (1890-1958).

Lateralization of function

➔ The notion that the two hemispheres of the brain might house different cognitive
➔ functions - in case of language
➔ Paul Broca (1824-1880)
➔ Discovered that left hemisphere play a special role in language
➔ Differences between the functions in the hemispheres are not absolute

aphasias

imaging
Temporal resolution
➔ Essentially, how accurately an imaging method can measure when something that
➔ happens in the brain
Spatial resolution
➔ How accurately an imaging method can measure where something happens in the brain
➔ Brain imaging methods cannot have good temporal and spatial resolution.
➔ Most electrical measures of brain activity have excellent temporal resolution.
Ex. Electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potentials (ERP)

Electroencephalography (EEG)
 ➔ Used to record the electrical activity of neurons by placing electrodes on the
➔ surface of the scalp
➔ Generated by dendrites in neurons close to the surface of the cortex
➔ Signals penetrate the skull and scalp before picked up by the EEG
➔ Important because the skull and scalp dampen and smear these electrical signals
➔ before reaching the electrodes on the scalp, making it hard to point out where
➔ they came from

Event-related potentials (ERP)

➔ Used to study brain behaviour relationships
➔ Ex. Measuring how quickly the brain process faces
➔ Grand average ERP
➔ Helps pull out the brain's average response to a face over the 100 trials
➔ Most functional brain imaging methods have excellent spatial

Positron emission tomography (PET)

➔ Participants will perform some cognitive task
➔ Brain areas engaged in the task will require more glucose and oxygen
➔ Subtraction methodology
➔ The leftover amount of oxygen and glucose between face and the object
➔ viewing tasks
➔ Based on our knowledge that, the brain is never doing nothing

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

➔ Measures the magnetic properties of hemoglobin in blood
➔ Neurons in a brain region that become active will require more oxygen
➔ Blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD)
➔ Signal measured during fMRI
 ➔ BOLD that is left over is the signal linked to viewing faces
➔ Significant activity in the fusiform face area (FFA)

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)

Virtual lesion
- Allow us to examine what cognitive functions are disrupted when the brain area is inactive and
- observe if they return to normal when the region is no longer disrupted

Chapter 3:
Synaesthesia
➔ A neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway (for example, hearing) leads to
automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway (such as vision). Simply put, when
one sense is activated, another unrelated sense is activated at the same time.

Illusions
-

Cognitive, perceptual theories

Dorsal ventral
Gestalt Psychology
➔ emphasizes that the whole of anything is greater than its parts. That is, the attributes of the whole are not deducible
from the analysis of the parts in isolation.
➔
Lesion and Function
Perception basics
localization of function (specific to Chapter 3)
sensory functions
Chapter 4:
Task-switching
❖ an executive function that involves the ability to unconsciously shift attention between one task and another. In
contrast, cognitive shifting is a very similar executive function, but it involves conscious (not unconscious) change
in attention

Attention Types
- Selective Attention
- Attending to one thing while ignoring ongoing information from others. Top-down processing.
- Divided attention
- Paying attention to more than one thing at a time
- Sustained attention
- Maintaining focus over long periods of time
- Spatial attention
- Attention across spaces
- Temporal attention
- Attention across time
Intentional
➢ The phenomenon of not perceiving a stimulus that might be literally right in front of you unless you are
paying attention to it (gorilla suit)
➢ Focusing so much that you are unable to see any changes
➢ Top-down processing
Change Blindness
➢ Failure of the bottom-up processing.
➢ Difficulty detecting changes in similar, but slightly different, scenes presented one after another. The
changes are often easy to see once attention is directed to them but are usually undetected without

Stroop effect and automaticity

Strop Effect:
 ❖ Our tendency to experience difficulty naming a physical color when it is used to spell the name of a different colour.
❖ it takes longer to name the ink color of a word name when the name and color are different than when they are the
same

Automaticity
❖ Control of one's internal psychological processes by external stimuli and events in one's immediate environment,
often without knowledge or awareness of such control; automatic phenomena are usually contrasted with those
processes that are consciously or intentionally put into operation.

localization of function (specific to Attention)

Chapter 5:
Baddeley and Hitch WM (compared to A-S Info Processing & Crystallized and Fluid Intelligence)
➔ Alan Baddeley and Hitch(1986, 1989)
➔ The temporary storage and manipulation of information is assumed necessary for a wide range of complex
cognitive activities.
➔ Phonological loop
- Verbal and auditory information
- keeps auditory information active in consciousness for the purpose of immediate problem-solving

Deja Vu:
Uncanny sensation: you've already experienced something, even when you know you never have.

Butcher on the bus:

Occurs when one believes that a person is familiar (often upon seeing their face in an atypical context) while failing to
recall any information about that person whatsoever.
Tip of the tongue:
A state in which one cannot quite recall a familiar word but can recall words of similar form and meaning.
Serial position effect:
Tendency to remember the first and last items in a list better than those in the middle. The serial position effect is a
form of cognitive bias, and it includes both the primacy effect and the recency effect.
Digit span:
a measure of verbal short-term and working memory that can be used in two formats: Forward Digit Span and
Reverse Digit Span. This is a verbal task, with stimuli presented auditorily and responses spoken by the participant and
scored automatically by the software.

Chapter 6:
Consolidation and Flashbulb Memories,
Encoding Specificity,
MPI,
False Memories,
Source Monitoring,
War on ghosts: Deep or surface structure,
Levels of Processing,
Amnesia Timeline

Chapter 07:
Analog and Propositional Coding
❖ Analog form of representation hypothesis
- The hypothesis that a mental image embodies the essentail relationships of the things it repreesent.

Egocentric vs Allocentric,
Mnemonic Strategies,
Synaesthesia (imagery),
Auditory Imagery

Chapter 09:
Linguistic Relativity,
Future vs Futureless,
Hesitation Pauses,
Conversational maxims,
Ambiguous Sentences,
Inner/Egocentric Speech,
Terminology

Chapter 10:
Anatomy of Problem-solving,
Flexibility and Rigidity

❖ Einstellung effect is the tendency to respond inflexibly to a particular type of problem; also called a rigid set.

❖ Negative transfer is the tendency to respond with previously learned rule sequences even when they are
inappropriate.
❖ Strong but wrong routines are overlearned response sequences that we follow even when we intend to do
something else.

Flexibility–Rigidity and the Brain

❖ •Intact left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) function is critical for successful water jar performance (Colvin,
Dunbar, Grafman, 2000).
❖ It is necessary to inhibit obvious moves in order to make
Impasse
-

Problem-solving strategies

❖ Algorithms
- a step-by-step procedure that, by following certain "rules" produces a solution.
- can be used to help identify individuals with a greater risk of mental health issues
- they guarantee an accurate answer. However, they aren't always the best approach to problem-solving,
❖ Heuristics
- shortcut strategies that people can use to solve a problem at hand. These "rule of thumb" approaches allow
you to simplify complex problems, reducing the total number of possible solutions to a more manageable
set.
- Heuristics also don't guarantee an effective solution
❖ Trial and Error
- involves trying a number of potential solutions to a particular issue, then ruling out those that do not work. If
you're not sure whether to buy a shirt in blue or green, for instance, you may try on each before deciding
which one to purchase.
- good strategy to use if you have a limited number of solutions available
❖ Insight
- Insight can occur when the problem in front of you is similar to an issue that you've dealt with in the past.

Problem-solving and obstacles

❖ the mental process that people go through to discover, analyze, and solve problems.
❖ Assumptions:
- When dealing with a problem, people can make assumptions about the constraints and obstacles that
prevent certain solutions. Thus, they may not even try some potential options.
❖ Functional fixedness:
 - This term refers to the tendency to view problems only in their customary manner.7 Functional fixedness
prevents people from fully seeing all of the different options that might be available to find a solution.
❖ Irrelevant or misleading information:
- When trying to solve a problem, it's important to distinguish between information that is relevant to the issue
and irrelevant data that can lead to faulty solutions. The more complex the problem, the easier it is to focus
on misleading or irrelevant information.
❖ Mental set:
- A mental set is a tendency to only use solutions that have worked in the past rather than looking for
alternative ideas.
- A mental set can work as a heuristic, making it a useful problem-solving tool. However, mental sets can also
lead to inflexibility, making it more difficult to find effective solutions.

Chapter 11:
Illusory Correlation
❖ The mistaken belief that events go together when in fact they do not.
❖ Chapman & Chapman, 1969
❖ Suggest that judgments of how frequently two events occur together depends on availability.
confirmation bias
❖ Only seek for evidence that fits their thought.
❖ The tendency to seek confirmatory evidence for a hypothesis
❖ Peter Wason,
❖ the tendency of people to favor information that confirms or strengthens their beliefs or values and is difficult to
dislodge once affirmed

Heuristics and examples

❖ Is a rule of thumb or shortcut that works in come situations but can mislead us in others
❖ Rule of thumb, mental short cut

1. Representative Heuristic
 - When judging possibilities, people often rely on the similarity or representativeness of some of the
items in question
- occurs when we estimate the probability of an event based on how similar it is to a known situation. In
other words, we compare it to a situation, prototype, or stereotype we already have in mind.
- Example: thinking that because someone is wearing a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase, that they
must be a lawyer, because they look like the stereotype of a lawyer
2. Availability Heuristic
- When judging the frequency of an event, one does so by assessing the ease with which instances or
occurrences can be brought to mind
- relies on immediate examples that come to a given person's mind when evaluating a specific topic,
concept, method, or decision
- Example: plane crashes can make people afraid of flying. However, the likelihood of dying in a car
accident is far higher than dying as a passenger on an airplane
3. Recognition Heuristic
- Choose the recognized alternative (if only one is recognized)
- a bias wherein humans place a higher value on something they recognize rather than something
unfamiliar.
- example : if someone is creating an investment portfolio, they will be more likely to invest in stocks
with familiar names than unfamiliar ones and will perceive these recognized stocks are less risky.
4. Fluency Heuristic
- Choose the alternative that is recognized more quickly
- if one object is processed more fluently, faster, or more smoothly than another, the mind infers that
this object has the higher value with respect to the question being considered.
- Example: shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names tend to significantly outperform those
with hard-to-pronounce names

Logic (premise types)

➔ The first type is called a "major premise," which is a statement that expresses a general principle or assumption. ...
 ➔ The second type is called a "minor premise," which is a statement that applies the major premise to a specific
situation or case.

Intuitive Statistics
❖ Law of large numbers
- The larger the sample, the closer a statistic will be to the true value
❖ Law of averages
- A fallacy based on the assumption that events of one kind are always balanced by events of another kind
❖ Gambler’s fallacy
- The mistaken belift that an events that has not occurred on several independent trials is more likely to
happen on future trials.

Generative Problem
❖ Participants are told that the three numbers 2, 4, 6 conform to a simple relational rule that the experimenter has in
mind, and that their task is to discover the rule by generating sequence of three numbers. The experimentar tells
them each time whether the rul ehas been followed.
❖ Is one that requires us to actively generate ( rather than passively receive) the information that needed to slove it.
❖ Wason and Jonson- Laird 1960,1977, 1972

Validity and Believability of Syllogisms

❖ A conclusion is valid if its true in all cases in which the premises are TRUE.( Validity)
❖ syllogistic reasoning have demonstrated a nonlogical tendency for people to endorse more believable conclusions
than unbelievable ones. This belief bias effect is more dominant on invalid syllogisms than valid ones, giving rise to
a logic by belief interaction.