PSYCH 2H03
● Coffee mental experience but don’t necessarily ‘feel’ coffee.
● In essence, how do I know this is real?
● There is more than what meets the eye.
● Topdown processing produces cognitive expectation affects sensing.
● Note: imaginary illusions
● Visual system imposing organization; making assumptions.
● Motion sensitive neurons are firing thus brains interpret it as moving.
● Psychophysics > regular & measurable relation between environmental energy & mental processes?
● Ernst Weber > ‘amount of physical energy necessary to produce sensation change is proportional to the original physical energy’
● Gustav Fechner > mathematical theory based upon Weber’s
● Mental experience is measurable
● Note: Wilhelm Wundt, Edward Titchener, & William James: ‘armchair psychologists’; introspection. Importance of intentionality to conscious thought i.e. Metronome experience (one rhythm other another)
● Behaviourism (stimulus responses)
● B.F. Skinner > theoretical observed constructs in any science are only meaningful.
● John Watson > conscious experience is subjective therefore unreliable, unverifiable, & not necessary to refer to psychological praises.
● Emergence of Cognitive Psychology:
● Richard Tolman > Internal thought is a necessary construct.
● e.g. Rats must have a cognitive map in order to have a target location.
● Psychophysics gain mechanism credibility as a way to study the mind.
● Contemporary psychology is thoroughly mechanistic.
● Immanuel Kant > What are the underlying steps of mechanisms within the brain that lead to this behaviour? (Kantian logic)
● Psychology > explanation of the unknown by comparison to the known; extensive use of models, analogies, and metaphors.
● Is the mind like a computer?
● Knowledge is acquired, retained and used > not simply a copy of sensory input.
● Memories are very malleable.
● Computer: (Metaphor)
● Environmental energy > information
● Psychological processes: coding, representation
● Memory > storage and revival
● Cognitive models:
Detection of stimuli > Storage, transformation of stimuli > Production of responses
Stimulus > primary memory (forgotten) > secondary memory
● There are effects of concurrent articulation
● > distractions will produce a less chance of memory retention
● > task irrelevant sounds are inferring; consistent w/ model
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Cognitive psychology > sensory input is transformed, reduced, retained, stored, used…
The brain is very modular > how overlapping is it?; widely distributed processes and networks. Areas of the brain are more specialized.
Cell responses within receptive fields; lateral inhibition, edge enhancement.
Usually won’t respond if outside of receptive field.
Similar to sudden onset of stimulus.
Visual systems want contrast.
Scintillating grid: lateral inhibition
Split brain patient: corpus callosum cut, left hemisphere sees right visual field. (language is within the left hemisphere) thus can only verbalize it. Using the left hand (right hemisphere) sees left visual field (manually searching)
Very precise differences within the brain; may be variance at a smaller level.
Fatigue of motion receptors
Top down processing facilitating the motion of the storm clouds
Within actuality, the picture is still
Assumptions are made by our perceptual system
Necker Cube illusion > imposing organization
A pattern is a complex configuration of sensory signals
Associate sounds with semantics, otherwise words would be unrecognizable
V4
Specialized for colours and complex shapes
IT
Large receptive fields, responsive to objects
Visual stream is divided into the dorsal (where, motion, action) & ventral stream (what, object) Higher level thinking can change lower level perception
Bottom up (data driven) and top down (conceptually driven) processes both contribute to pattern recognition
Gestalt
