sternberg2016cognitive: Cognitive Psychology
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- tags
- Cognitive Science
source :
- authors
- Sternberg, R. J., & Sternberg, K.
- year
- 2016
Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive Psychology Defined
Cognitive psychology is the study of how people perceive, learn, remember, and think about information.
Consider some examples of topics/question in cognitive psychology:
- Why do objects look farther away on foggy days than they really are?
- This discrepancy can be dangerous, even deceiving drivers into having accidents.
- Why do many people remember a particular experience (e.g, a happy moment or an embarrassment during childhood), yet forget the names of people whom they have known for many years?
- Why are many people more afraid of traveling in planes than in automobiles? After all, the chances of injury or death are much higher in an automobile than in a plane.
- Why do you often remember people you met in your childhood but not people you met a week ago?
- Why do marketing executives in large companies spend so much company money on advertisements?
- One reason could be the availability heuristic (we make judgments on the basis of how easily we can call to mind what we perceive as relevant instances of a phenomenon).
Cognitive psychologists hope to learn how people think by studying how people have thoughts about thinking. The progression of ideas often involves a dialectic (a developmental process where ideas evolve over time through a pattern of transformation). In a dialectic:
- A thesis is proposed: A thesis is a statement of belief. Overtime people will notice apparent flaws in the thesis
- An antithesis emerges: An antithesis is a statement that counters a previous statement of belief.
- A synthesis integrates the viewpoints: A synthesis integrates the most credible features of each of two (or more) views.
If the synthesis seems to advance out understanding of a subject, it then serves as a new thesis.
Is computer science, specifically machine learning and reinforcement learning, evolving dialectically?
Philosophical Antecedents of Psychology: Rationalism versus Empiricism
Historians of psychology trace the earliest roots of psychology to two approaches to understanding the human mind:
- Philosophy seeks to understand the general nature of many aspects of the world, in part through introspection (the examining of inner ideas and experiences).
- Physiology seeks a scientific study of life-sustaining functions in living matter, primarily through empirical (observation-based) methods.
Plato and Aristotle are the first big influencers in the thinking modern psychologists, and many other fields. They disagreed how to investigate ideas:
- Plato was a rationalist believing that the route to knowledge is through thinking and logical analysis.
- Aristotle was an empiricist believing that we acquire knowledge via empirical evidence.
Both approaches have their place in modern psychology. Rationalist theories without connection to observations gained through empiricist methods may not be valid, where mountains of observational data without an organizing theoretical framework may not be meaningful. These two approaches became more prominent with the French rationalist Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and the British empiricist John Locke (1632-1704). The two ideas were synthesized by a German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), arguing both rationalism and empiricism have their place. Both must work together in the quest for truth, many scientists accept this view.
Psychological Antecedents of Cognitive Psychology
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Understanding the Structure of the Mind: Structuralism
Structuralism was the first major school of thought in psychology. This seeks to understand the structure (configuration of elements) of the mind and its perceptions by analyzing those perceptions into their constituent components. They sought to deconstruct the mind into its elementary components, and how those elementary components work together to create the mind.
Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) was a founder of the structunalist school of psychology. Introspection was an important tool in Wilhelm’s research, which is a deliberate looking inward at pieces of information passing through consciousness. This had some challenges:
- people may not always be able to say exactly what goes through their mind or may not be able to put it into adequate words.
- what they say may not be accurate
- people are asked to pay attention to their thoughts or to speak out loud while they are working on a task may itself alter the processes that are going on.
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Understanding the Processes of the Mind: Functionalism
Functionalism serves as an alternative to structuralists, and seeks to understand what people do and why they do it. They held that the key to understanding the human mind and behavior was to study the processes of how and why the mind works as it does, rather than to study the structural contents and elements of the mind. Functionalism lead to Pragmitism which believed that knowledge is validated by its usefulness.
- William James (1842-1910) was a leader in guiding functionalism toward pragmatism. His book Principles of Psychology (1890/1970) are a frequent citation for modern discussions on topics such as attention, consciousness, and perception.
- John Dewey (1859-1952) was another early pragmetist, who is primarily remembered for his pragmatic approach to thinking and schooling.
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An Integrative Synthesis: Associationism
Associationism examines how elements of the mind, like events or ideas, can become associated with one another in the mind to result in a form of learning
- contiguity: associating things that tend to occur together at about the same time.
- similarity: associating things with similar features or properties
- contrast: associating things that show polarities, such as hot/cold, light/dark, day/night
People:
- Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909): first experimenter to apply associationist principles systematically. He studied his own mental processes and learning. He made up lists of nonsense syllables that consisted of a consonant and a vowel followed by another consonant. He then took careful observations at how long it took to memorize the list. He studied how people learn and remember material through rehearsal.
- Edward Lee Thorndike (1874-1949): Held that the role of “satisfaction” is the key to forming associations. He termed this principle the law of effect (1905): A stimiulus will tend to produce a certain response over time if an organism is rewarded repeatedly for doing so. These ideas were the predecessors of the development of behaviorism.
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Its only what you can see that counts: From Associationism to Behaviorism
Behvorism focuses only on the relation between observable behavior and environmental events or stimuli. The idea was to make physical whatever others might have called “mental”.
- Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936): Studied involuntary learning behavior, specifically through Pavlovian control of a dog’s salvitory response.
Classical conditioning involves more than just an association based on temporal contiguity. Effective conditioning requires contingency.
Behaviorism may be considered an extreme version of associationism. It focuses entirely on the association between the environment and an observable behavior. According to strict, extreme (“radical”) behaviorists, any hypotheses about the internal thoughts and ways of thinking are nothing more than speculation.
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Proponents of Behaviorism
- John Watson (1878-1958): Often termed the “father” of radical behaviorism. He believed that psychologists should concentrate only on the study of observable behavior, and dismissed thinking as nothing more than subvocalized speech.
- B. F. Skinner (1904-1990): A radical behaviorist, believed that virtually all forms of human behavior, not just learning, could be explained by behavior emitted in reaction to the environment. He rejected mental mechanisms, and instead believed that operant conditioning–involving the strengthening or weakening of behavior, contingent on the presence or absence of reinforcement (rewards) or punishments–could explain all forms of human behavior.
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Criticisms of Behaviorism
- Behaviorism did not account as well for complex mental activities such as language learning and problem solving.
- Some psychologists wanted to know what went on inside the head.
- It often proved easier to use the techniques of behaviorism in studying nonhuman animals than in studying human ones.
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Behaviorists Daring to Peak into the Black Box
Behaviorists regarede the mind as a black box that is best understood in terms of its input and output, but whose internal processes cannot be accurately described because they are not observable. For example, a critic,
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Edward Tolman (1886-1959), thought that understanding behavior required taking into account the purpose of, and the plan for, the behavior. He believed that all behavior is directed toward a goal.
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Bandura (1977b) noted that learning appears to result not mearly from direct rewards for behavior, but it also can be social, resulting from observations of the rewards or punishments given to others. The ability to learn through observation is well documented and can be seen in humans, monkeys, dogs, birds, and even fish.
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The Whole is More Than the Sum of Its Parts: Gestalt Psychology
Gestalt psychology states that we best understand psychological phenomena when we view them as organized, structured wholes. According to this view, we cannot fully understand behavior when we only break phenomena down into smaller parts. For example behaviorists tended to study problem solving by looking for “subvocal processing” (they were looking for the observable behavior through which problem solving could be understood). Gestaltists studied insight, seeking to understand the unobservable mental event by which someone goes from having no idea about how to solve a problem to understanding it fully in what seems a mere moment of time.
We cannot understand perception of a flower merely in terms of a description of forms, colors, sizes, and so on. Similarly we could not understand problem solving merely by looking at minute elements of observable behavior.
Emergence of Cognitive Psychology
Cognitivism is the belief that much of human behavior can be understood in terms of how people think. It rejects the notion that psychologists should avoid studying mental processes because they are unobservable. This is a synthesis of earlier forms of analysis, such as behaviorism and Gestaltism. Like behaviorism it adops a precise quantitative analysis to study how people learn and think; like Gestaltism, it emphasizes internal mental processes.
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Early Role of Psychobiology
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Karl Spencer Lashley (1890-1958) (one of Watson’s former students) challenged the behaviorist view that the human brain is a passive organ merely responding to environmental contingencies outside the individual. Instead the brain is an active, dynamic organizer of behavior.
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Donald Hebb (1949) proposed the concept of cell assemblies as a the basis for learning in the brain. Cell assemblies are coordinated neural structures that develop through frequent stimulation.
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Noam Chomsky (1959) criticized Skinner’s 1957 framework for describing how language acquisition and usage could be explained purely in terms of environmental contingencies. In his article, Chomsky stressed both the biological basis and the creative potential of language. He pointed out the infinite numbers of sentences we can produce with ease. Even young children continually are producing novel sentences for which they could not have been reinforced in the past.
Is it possible that behaviorism can account for language? Instead of reinforcing sentences you are reinforcing proper uses of grammar and of words, and encouraging exploration? I wonder if this type of analysis exists in the literature.
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Add a Dash of Technology: Engineering, Computation, and Applied Cognitive Psychology
The interaction of psychology and computation was heavily influential to both sides.
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Donald Broadbent (1926-1993) became interested in cognitive psychology through a puzzle regarding AT6 aircraft. The planes had two almost identical levers under the seat: one to raise the landing gear, another to pull up the flaps. The pilots regularly mistook one for the other.
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John Watson became a successful executive in an advertising firm and applied his knowledge of behaviorism to reach his success. He directly used principles from cognitive psychology to attract customers to products.
Early cognitivists argued that traditional behaviorist accounts of behavior were inadequate precisely because they said nothing about how people think. Neisser defined cognitive psychology as the study of how people learn, structure, store, and use knowledge.
- Jerry Fodor (1973) popularized the concept of the modularity of mind. He argued that the mind has distinct modules, or special-purpose systems to deal with linguistic and other kinds of information.
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Cognition and Intelligence
The definition of intelligence used in this book:
- Intelligence: is the capacity to learn from experience, using metacognitive processes to enhance learning, and the ability adapt to the surrounding environment.
This definition is not cited, but discussed in the next section.
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What is Intelligence?
Intelligence is a concept that can be viewed as tying together all of cognitive psychology. A collection of definitions collected recently can be found (NO_ITEM_DATA:legg2007b), and a definition of machine intelligence from the same group (NO_ITEM_DATA:legg2007). In 1921, a group of respected psychologists were asked what intelligence was. The responses were highly varied, but most generally embraced:
- the capacity to learn from experience, and
- the ability to adapt to the surrounding environment
Again 64 years later, 24 cognitive psychologists with expertise in intelligence research were asked the same questions. They, too, underscored the importance of learning from experience and adapting to the environment. They also broadened the definition to emphasize the importance of metacognition–people’s understanding and control of their own thinking processes.
What is my personal definition of intelligence? I like the one presented above, but should think on this and come to some definition based on my own experience.
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Three Cognitive Models of Intelligence
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Carroll: Three-Stratum Model of Intelligence
According to the three-stratum model of intelligence, intelligence comprises a hierarchy of cognitive abilities comprising three strata (NO_ITEM_DATA:carroll1993)
- Stratum I: includes many narrow, specific abilities (spelling ability, speed of reasoning)
- Stratum II: includes various broad abilities (fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence, short-term memory, logn-term storage and retrieval, information-processing speed)
- Stratum III: a single general intelligence (sometimes called g)
The middle stratum is the most interesting to cognitive psychologists. The first is considered in behaviorist studies.
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Gardner: Theory of Multiple Intelligences
Howard Gardner proposed a theory of multiple intelligences, in which intelligence comprises multiple independent constructs, not just a single unitary construct. The theory distinguishes eight distinct intelligences.
Type of Intelligence Tasks reflecting this type of intelligence Linguistic Used in reading a book; writing a paper, a novel or a poem, and understanding spoken words Logical-mathematical Used in Solving math problems, balancing a check-book, solving a math proof, logical reasoning Spatial Getting from one place to another, reading a map, packing suitcases in the trunk of a car Musical Singing a song, composing a sonata, playing a trumpet, appreciating the structure of a piece Bodily-kinesthetic Dancing, playing basketball, running a mile, throwing a javelin Interpersonal Relating to other people, understanding another person’s behavior, motives, or emotions Intrapersonal Used in understanding ourselves–who we are, what makes us tick, and how to change Naturalist Understanding patterns in nature
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Sternberg: The Triarchic Theory of Intelligence
While Gardner emphasizes the separateness of the various aspects of intelligence, Sternberg tends to emphasize the extent to which they work together in his triarchic theory of human intelligence. According to the triarchic theory of human intelligence, intelligence comprises three aspects:
- creative abilities: used to generate novel ideas
- analytical abilities: ascertain whether your ideas (and those of others are good ones)
- practical abilities: used to implement the ideas and persuade others of their value.
According to the theory, cognition is at the center of intelligence. Information processing in cognition can be viewed in terms of three different kinds of components
- metacomponents: higher-order executive processes used to plan, monitor, and evaluate problem solving.
- performance components: lower-order processes used for implementing the commands of the metacomponents.
- knowledge-acquisition components: the process used for learning how to solve the problems in the first place.
Does ML/RL/AI have a unifying theory? What are the various theories of intelligence in machines? Are there any?
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Research Methods in Cognitive Psychology
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Goals of Research
Research goals include: data gathering, data analysis, theory development, hypothesis formulation, hypothesis testing, and perhaps even application to settings outside the research environment.
They go to describe the scientific method used throughout the science.
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Distinctive Research Methods
See table 1.2 in (Sternberg and Sternberg 2016) for more details.
Fundamental Ideas in Cognitive Psychology
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Empirical data and theories are both important.
Theories give meaning to the data, and data provides evidence for the theories. This is straightforward.
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Cognition is generally adaptive, but not in all specific instances.
The same processes that lead to perceive, remember, and reason accurately in most situations also can lead us astray. Our memories and reasoning processes, for example, are susceptible to certain well-identified, systematic errors.
- For example: we tend to overvalue information that is easily available to us. This makes cognitive processes more efficient, we do this even when this information is not optimally relevant to the problem at hand.
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Cognitive processes interact with each other and with non-cognitive processes.
Cognitive psychologists seek to study cognitive processes not only in isolation but also in their interactions with each other and with non-cognitive processes.
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Cognition needs to be studied through a variety of scientific methods.
There is no “right” way to study cognition. The more different kinds of techniques that lead to the same conclusion, the higher the confidence one can have in that conclusion.
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All basic research in cognitive psychology may lead to application, and all applied research may lead to basic understanding.
This is straightforward.
Key Themes in Cognitive Psychology
- Nature versus nurture
- Rationalism versus empiricism
- Structures versus processes
- Domain generality versus domain specificity
- Validity of causal inferences versus ecological validity
- Applied versus basic research
- Biological versus behavioral methods
Cognitive Neuroscience
Cognitive Neuroscience: the field of study linking the brain and other aspects of the nervous system to cognitive processing and, ultimately, to behavior.
We usually consider the brain at the top of the body’s hierarchy. But it also listens and reacts to the signals provided by other parts of the body making it reactive as well as directive. Currently, research is directed to study localization of function. Localization of function refers to the specific areas of the brain that control specific skills or behaviors.
Cognition in the Brain: The Anatomy and Mechanisms of the Brain
Nervous System: the basis for our ability to perceive, adapt to, and interact with the world around us.
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Gross Anatomy of the Brain: Forebrain, Midbrain, Hindbrain
These names come from the front-to-back physical arrangement of these parts in the nervous system of a developing embryo.
- forebrain: Generally the farthers forward, toward what becomes the face.
- midbrain: Is next
- /Hindbrain: Is the furthest back, near the back of the neck
The Forebrain: The forebrain is the region of the brain located toward the top and front of the brain. In comprises the:
- cerebral cortex: The outer layer of the cerebral hemispheres. It plays a vital role in our thinking and other mental processes.
- basal ganglia: collections of neurons crucial for motor function. Dysfunction of the basal ganglia can result in motor deficits (tremors, incoluntary movements, changes in posture/muscle tone, and slowness of movement.)
- limbic system: important to emotion, motivation, memory, and learning. Animals (such as fish) which have relatively undeveloped limbic systems, respond to the environment almost exclusively by instinct. Mammals have relatively more developed limbic systems, allowing them to suppress instinctive responses.
- septum: involved in anger and fear
- amygdala: plays an important role in emotion as well, especially anger and aggression
- hippocampus: plays an essential role in memory formation. People who have suffered damage to the hippocampus still can recall existing memories–for example, they can recognize old friends and places– but they are unable to form new memories.
- thalamus: Relays incoming sensory information through groups of neurons that project to the appropriate region in the cortex.
- hypothalamus: regulates behavior related to species survival: fighting, feeding, fleeing, and mating. The hypothalamus als is active in regulating emotions and reactions to stress, interacting with the limbic system.
The Midbrain The midbrain helps to control eye movement and coordination. The midbrain is more important in nonmammals where it is the main source of control for visual and auditory information. In mammals these functions are dominated by the forebrain. Some structures:
- reticular activating system (RAS): a network of neurons essential to the regulation of consciousness and vital functions such as heartbeat and breathing. Both the RAS and thalamus are essential to our having any conscious awareness of or control over our existence.
- brainstem: connects the forebrain to the spinal cord.
The Hindbrain The hindbrain comprises the medulla oblongata, the pons, and the cerebellum.
- medulla oblongata: Controls heart activity and largely controls breathing, swallowing, and digestion.
- pons: serves as a kind of relay station beacause it contains neural fibers that pass signals from one part of the brain to another.
- cerebellum: controls bodily coordination, balance, and muscle tone, as well as some aspects of memory involving procedure-related movements.
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Cerebral Cortex and Localization of Function.
Cerebral Cortex: An extremely important component of human cognition. Forms a 1-3 millimeter layer that wraps the surface of the brain like the bark of a tree wraps around the trunk. The cortex has many creases or convolutions to greatly increase the surface area of the cortex: Sulci small grooves, Fissures large grooves, Gyri are bulges between adjacent sulci or fissures. The cortex comprises ~80% of the human brain.
It seems like the two hemispheres of the brain are specialized, and it seems the left side of the body is controlled by the right side of the brain and visa-versa. Although this is not always the case. For instance, information from the right nose goes to the right side of the brain, and vision from the right eye goes to both sides of the brain.
Corpus callosum: a dense aggregate of neural fibers connecting the two cerebral hemispheres.
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Hemispheric specialization
Not important for my purposes. The gist is that the two sides contribute more to certain tasks/behaviours and this has been tested by studying patients with brain damage/lessions. There have also been studies on patients undergoing a severing of the corpus callosum (usually to diminish seizures in epileptic patients), showing the participant’s hemispheres could no longer communicate (thus leading to the two halves of the body/perceptual stream) working semi-independently.
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Lobes of the Cerebral Hemispheres
There are four lobes (primarily for anatomical convenience) defined by large fissures on the cortex. These lobes have particular functions defined for them, but they also do interact. The separation is not meant to be definite, but instead convenient for discussing parts of the structure.
Frontal Lobe: Towards the front of the brain (towards the face). This is associated with:
- Motor processing
- Higher thought processes (reasoning, problem solving, planning, and judgment (NO_ITEM_DATA:stuss2011))
- Tends to be involved when sequences of thoughts or actions are called for
- Speech
- prefontal cortex: Region towards the front of the frontal lobe is involved in complex motor control and tasks that require integration of information over time (Mangun, Gazzaniga, and Ivry 2002).
- Primary motor cortex: A key part of the frontal lobe specializing in the planning, control, and execution of movement (particularly of movement involving any kind of delayed response).
Parietal lobe: The upper back portion of the brain
- Somatosensory processing: receives inputs from the neurons regarding touch, pain, temperature sense, and limb position (Mangun, Gazzaniga, and Ivry 2002).
- Consciousness and paying attention
Temporal lobe: directly under your temples
- Auditory processing
- Comprehending language
- retention of visual memories and matches new things you see to what you have retained in visual memory.
Occipital lobe: towards the back of the brain.
- visual processing (color, motion, location, and form)
- Visual cortex: key for processing the visual stream. The right side of the brain processes the left side of the receptive fields of both eyes.
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Neuronal Structure and Function
Neurons: and individual neural cell. Transmits electrical signals from one location to another in the nervous system.
The neocortex contains the greatest concentration of neurons in the brain w/ 100,000 per cubic millimeter.
Parts of the neuron:
- Soma: contains the nucleus of the cell, is responsible for the life of the neuron and connects the dendrites to the axon.
- Dendrites: are branch-like structures that recieve information from other neurons, and the soma integrates the information. Learning is often associated with the formation of new neuronal connections.
- Axon: is a long, thin tube that extends from the soma and responds to the information, when appropriate, by transmitting an electrochemical signal, which travel to the terminus, where the signal can be transmitted to other neurons.
- Myelin: is a white, fatty substance that surrounds some of the axons of the nervous system. Some axons are myelinated (surrounded by a myelin sheath), which insulates and protects longer axons from electrical interference.
- Nodes of Ranvier: small gaps in the myelin coating along the axon, which serve the increase conduction speed.
- Terminal buttons: small knobs found at the ends of the branches of an axon that do not directly touch the dendrites of the next neuron.
- Synapse: the juncture between the terminal buttons of one or more neurons and the dendrites.
- Neurotransmitter: chemical messengers for transmission of information across the synaptic gap to receiving dendrites of the next neuron.
Viewing the Structures and Functions of the Brain
EEG, MRI, etc…
Brain Disorders
Stroke, Brain Tumors, etc… Not really interesting to me.
Intelligence and Neuroscience
Again, not of interest for me. Discussing neruonal attributes that may lead to an index of “intelligence”.