key idea of introspection
observe youself as you are doing a number of tasks, restore it, quantify it, and use it to draw conclusions on things that the individual has concious information of
problems with introspection
difficult to verify because it is private events (in your head), and only relies on the end product not the process
key idea of behaviorism
If you can’t see it, don’t bother talking about it (talk about a stimulus and response, nothing else)
problems with behaviorism
cannot account for diversity of human behavior, limitation to observable behaviors isn’t considered to be scientefic, and behaviorism was a complete flop for applied issues during WW2
cognitivisim problems
cannot directly observe mental processes, must infer what is going on in the mind
key idea of cognitivism
cannot observe mental processes and must infer what going on between the stimulus and the elicited response
cognitive resolution
revolting against what the behaviors say and wanted to know what is going on in the brain itself (work on information processing, cognitive psych)
key idea of neuroscience
studying the nervous system to understand its structure, function, development, and pathology
subtraction method
Was used to detemine the length of specific components inmental processing
donders method
an experiement using the subtraction method that allows for the time required for different stages of mental processes to be measured
bottom-up processing/perception (data-driven) general definition
starts with raw sensory input, builds perception from basic features to develop a complex understanding (data driven)
top down processing/perception (conceptually driven) general definition
uses existing knowledge, expectations, and context to interpret sensory information, working from general context to specific details (concept-driven)
steps of top down processes
cognitive processes (language, memory, expectations, knowledge), identification/recognition
steps of bottom up processes
distal stimuli (real world), sensation, perception, identification/recognition
what are the four Gestalt principles?
proximity, similarity, good continuation, and closure principles
proximity principle
things that are close together tend to go together
similarity principle
similar things go together
good continuation principle
if lines intersect, we assume the line continues on
closure principle
if one object is including another object, we assume the one being occluded is still a full object behind it (just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it just magically disappears)
feature analytic approach
The visual cortex breaks stimuli into smaller components, recognition is based on the detection of distinctive features, objects are defined by their unique set of features
What are the three cell types?
simple cells, complex cells, hypercomplex cells
simple cell defintion and function
The receptive field responds to a linear stimuli at a particular orientation
complex cell defintion and function
The receptive field responds optimally to a stimulus at a particular orientation and moves in a particular direction
hypercomplex cell defintion and function
The receptive field becomes optimally responsive to movement, length, and orientation (still more selective than complex cells, “end-stopped cells”)
