What I have learned

UW-Whitewater's 351 Cognitive Psychology

[skinnerse24]

Module 14

Hello and welcome to the final module! This week all we had to do was make sure we did watch the week 13 view and answer a discussion board! Other than that we are done with this course for the semester, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did and maybe I will see you for another course another time! Until then good luck!

[skinnerse24]

Module 13

Hello and welcome back to module 13! One more module and we are almost done! This week was a fairly easy week, a bit more than we’ve been used to but that’s fine!

This week we started with Dr. Charles Fernyhough’s interview titled Hearing Voices. One thing I found interesting within the video was he ended up saying that 5-15% of the population will experience hearing voices at some point in their lives, but this is usually connected with severe mental illness. 

From here we had an lecture on language from the professor.

There are different language areas in the brain, these include: -Broca’s Area -Wernicke’s Area -Geschwind’s Territory -Primary Auditory Cortex (Heschel’s Gyrus)

Then there are levels of language representation, these are: -Discourse -Syntax -Words -Morphemes -Phonemes

Phonemes are speech sound units aka the phonetic alphabet.

Morphemes are the building blocks of words.

Syntax are patterns of relations between word classes, and depends on the function of morphemes.

Broca’s aphasia-trouble with morphemes (in, and, of) Wenickle’s aphasia0 trouble with context morphemes

Lexicon Triangle Model

and of course my professor’s Integrated Neural System for Mental Simulation

After this we watched a TedTalk called the Birth of a word and the speaker was Deb Roy. I didn’t have much to say about this video, it was interesting, but I wasn’t overly excited or anything about it, but feel free to watch it for yourself!

We then moved onto assignment 2!

First for assignment 2 we read The Voices in Your Head: Why do people talk to themselves and when does it become a problem? by Jerome Groopman. This was an interesting article because it normalizes hearing voices in your head to a certain extent, but there are times it could become a problem when you don’t recognize the voice.

Then we read Inner speech speaks volumes about the brain written by Mark Scott. This was interesting because in the article they mentioned locating where the voice in our head comes from. 

Finally we watched either What Causes The Voice In Your Head? published by Thoughty2 or Understanding Corollary Discharge under 2 mins published by Martin Ng on YouTube.

That was it for this week, as always I will share the review sheet for this week and I will see you at the next one for the final module! See you then!

[skinnerse24]

Module 12

Hello and welcome back! This is going to be a very easy and simple week as we just reviewed the previous lecture (see module 11) and we had a few things to kinda “play” with. So lets dive in!

First things first we reviewed our previous lecture and then we moved on to play with the BioMotion Moving Point Light Display. Now what this is a moving light we can adjust the sliders on and see the difference between the way people walk, such as a nervous woman or a happy man. It was interesting to me because you get an idea of how people walk depending on different sliders. For examples:

From this we got to watch the Biology in Motion with Nikolaus Troje published to the QueensUCanada YouTube Page. Where it is the creator of the moving light display describing it and explaining how it works. 

From there we read an article called Point-light biological motion perception activates human premotor cortex written by Ayse Pinar Saygin, Stephen M. Wilson, Donald J. Hagler Jr, Elizabeth Bates and Martin I. Sereno. With this article we got to see how the moving light display activates the human premotor cortex. This is because observation of others actions is known to also evoke activity in motor and premotor areas in the frontal cortex.

Other than a discussion post that is all we had for this week, as always I will share our review sheet and I will see you for module 13!

[skinnerse24]

Module 11

Hello and welcome back this week was yet another easy week of just a video lecture and review sheet. This week was just on motor cognition so I will highlight what I feel is important and share the review sheet!

Motor Cognition

We started with the importance of the motor system in human behavior. Basically motor cognition allows humans to play instruments, crochet, build and more!

But, motor cognition is processing in which the motor system draws on stored information to: -plan and produce our own actions -to anticipate, predict, and interpret the actions of others -used to perform some types of reasoning and problem solving -often involves mental imagery to run “mental scenarios” that allow you to “see what would happen if...”

According to my professor, the solutions could be: 1. the brain starts to learn the structure of the world 2. the brain learns to unconsciously predict the world 3. the brain’s predictions are corrected by the world 4. the brain learned from its mistakes (to make better predictions)

We then revisit the two processing pathways and predictive coding theory.

We then have a motor hierarchy in our brains.

(Images from the PowerPoint lecture directly)

From here we go to motor intentions, there are three types of probabilistic belief 1. Likeihood belief = based on incoming sensory information 2. Prior belief = based on previously learned information 3. Posterior belief = combines these to make a “best guest” prediction

That was basically it for module 11, as always I will share the review sheet and I will see you for module 12!

(Sorry review sheet is a little derpy, it doesn’t go well converted from PDF to word doc back to PDF)

[skinnerse24]

Module 10

Hello and welcome back, this week was a mini spring break for us so all we had was a lecture video and review sheet, so lets dive in!

This week’s PowerPoint was on decision making and conflict. This was a fun and easy lecture to go through, it was helping us how to figure out how to make better decisions while thoroughly thinking it through, we talking about Utility Effect/Curve, and other effects of decisions and how they are based on our own metal representations.

Lets start, one of the best ways to make a decision is to write down all of your options and make a pro/cons list, or as shown by my professor a pros/cons decision tree.

But then there are two different models of decision making. There is normative and descriptive. Normative models describe the optimal method for making decisions. Descriptive models describe how people actually make decisions. They occasionally will overlap each other but more often then not they will not overlap.

From here we talked about the normative approach which ended up including the expected utility model. This mentions that each decision has costs and benefits you have to consider. With this one, we have to examine all the choices and then we pick the one that either benefits us or whatever we are working on the most while having very little cost. An example of this looks like:

(source is the lecture PowerPoint)

From there we talked about the certainty effect.

The certainty effect basically is that people just prefer sure gains, and they just dislike sure losses and they tend to over rely on certainty.

Then our decisions are based on mental representations. -Not by the situations we encounter -This is called “prospect theory” -But always relative to a reference point (getting better or worse?) -Rather than based on final outcomes -Then we evaluate prospects using heuristics -Simple, efficient rules or mental shortcuts -Rather than expected utility

That was basically it for this lecture, as always I will share our review sheet and I will see you for module 11!

[skinnerse24]

Module 9

Hello and welcome back to another short and easy week! This week we only had one lecture to watch which recovered the Phonological loop, some frontal lobe damage, and the Wisconsin Card Test, all of which I cover and then some, so lets dive in!

To start we were asked who is in charge of cognition, and the reference was made to Mini-Me, and if you don’t know who that is you’re in luck. 

source

Mini-Me is an Austin Powers reference but, he doesn’t have anything to do with this other than his name. This Mini-me knows what to do and helps us do it.

From there it was the phonological loop again, precise biological mechanisms, done without a ‘supervisor’ and computational modeling.

We then talked about frontal lobe damage. A main example of this is Patient W.R. They had a bilateral frontal brain tumor and the effect of this was lack of interest in life events, they did not feel grief and they didn’t have any plans for their future.

Damage to the frontal lobe like they had could lead to other problems as well. Such as anger, inappropriate behavior, poor planning and judgement, and even apathy and lack of motivation.

From here we talked about several neuro-physical tests, such as the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test.

The Wisconsin Card Sorting Tests has a few things within it including: -”Set Shifting” or executive attention -multiple possible sorting rules -once Ss discovers the rules E changes it -See how long it takes Ss to shift to new rule -Frontal patients can find original rule, but have difficulty shifting -”perseverative errors”

Other than that there wasn’t a whole lot for module 9 so as always I will share the review sheet and I will see you for module 10!

[skinnerse24]

Module 8

Hello and welcome back to a very short module 8! This is where we talked about working memory and long-term memory some more so lets dive in!

First things first we talked about the modal model of memory which has 3 sequential stages and basically says that short-term memory exists to serve long-term memory.

Picture Source

From there we discussed problems with the Modal Model, I am going to share these word for word, the original source is my professor so none of the wording is mine.

Modal Model Problems -In this model of memory, the goal and purpose of memory is to “graduate” into long-term memory (knowledge).         -But is this all the short-term memory is for? -Short term memory is just a stepping stone to long-term memory. It’s a passive storage area that briefly hold limited information        -But is short-term memory really passive? -Also, short-term memory comes before long-term memory (in sequence)       -But, neuro-psych patients w/out short-term memory can have long-term memory.

From here we very briefly touched on working memory and went into the phonological loop. 

We discussed this a little more and that was it for this module, I as always will share the review sheet and I will see you for module 9!

[skinnerse24]

Module 7

Hello and welcome back! This was a slightly long module and I hope you’ll stick around with me as I explain things terribly, so lets dive in!

Assignment 1:

We started with another lecture by the professor and we discussed the different types of memory. I found this section to be interesting because my memory is honestly really bad already so I was curious to see what I may possibly find out from this. There are two kinds of long-term memory including declarative memory and non-declarative memory. We also went over several types of memory loss including, retrograde amnesia and anterograde amnesia. 

That was it for assignment 1 so onto assignment 2!

Assignment 2:

From there we did a two day self administered memory test. This was done with a list of numbers 1-40 and a automated PowerPoint that walked us through word association. So the first time I did it was at night, and it takes you though to see what the associations are going to be and then they ask you to remember and write down the other half. First time I got 17 out of 40 right so not a good sign. The next time we did it was the morning after and that day was 22 correct. So I did slightly better this time but I am sure others would do a lot better than I would. From there we entered our scores on a ‘quiz’ and we had an article to read.

The article we read was called  Individual Differences in Working Memory Capacity Predict Sleep-Dependent Memory Consolidation written by Kimberly M Fenn and David Z Hambrick. Here we learned a little bit about working memory capacity and long term memory. One of the more important thing I learned from this is that there is strong evidence to suggest that our working memory capacity reflects our ability to retain attention during online ask performances. Which I could totally see because I do not have a great working memory and I have trouble retaining attention during online things.

From here we had a discussion post and then we moved onto assignment 3!

Assignment 3:

From here we have another video lecture this one was on encoding and retrieval. It was really short so not much to cover on it.

Other than a brief discussion post that was it for assignment 3 and that was the end of module 7, as always I will share the review sheet and I will see you for module 8!

[skinnerse24]

module 6

Hello and welcome back to module 6! This week we had a lot of reading but it wasn’t too bad, we also had a few video’s to watch as well! So lets dive in!

Assignment 1:

We had another video lecture taught by the professor, this one was titled “Knowledge and Representation.” This was an interesting lecture in which we learned what role knowledge has in cognition and the fact that there are three formats of representation as well. Within cognition and knowledge, behaviors can emerge from beliefs and desires. Then the three formats of representation end up being mental imagery, feature records, and amodal symbols.

The lecture was it for assignment 1, didn’t have a discussion or anything else, so on to assignment 2!

Assignment 2:

To begin this assignment we watched a TedTalk called Aphantasia: Seeing the world without a mind's eye and the speaker is Tamara Alireza. I had found this TedTalk to be really interesting because it lead me to discover something about myself I didn’t really know was missing. Aphantasia is the inability to visualize mental images in your head. This is something I used to have when I was a younger child, I had such a wild imagination and now that I am older, I seem to have lost it and I could not pin point when but as it turns out I’m not alone. If you wish, feel free to watch it below!

From here, we had seven articles to read, now I am not going to go though and describe them all to you, but I will absolutely share them with you if you wish to read them! Twitter taught me I have no visual imagination written by Nicole Gallucci Experience: I can't picture things in my mind written by Mia Tomova How strong is your mental imagery? It might depend on how 'excitable' your neurons are written by Sherry Landow Screen-time influences children's mental imagery performance written by Sebastian P. Suggate and Philipp Martzog What can science tell us about mediums who hear voices? written by Dr. M. Vince Use Imagination to Up Your Game with Performance Imagery written by Dr. Peter M. Vishton Does Knowing God Just Take Practice? written by James Woods

From there that was it, and then we moved onto assignment 3.

Assignment 3:

For the start of this assignment we were supposed to read the Wikipedia page on CleverBot, but considering I had used CleverBot in the past when I was younger, and I feel Wikipedia is a very unreliable source I decided not to and went straight with playing with the bot. Now what we were told to do is, that we are supposed to continue talking to the bot until it misunderstood us. It did not take to long, if I remember correctly it had asked what my favorite animal was and I replied ‘sloth’ in which it told me that was a color. Now you can get CleverBot to say and do other very interesting things but keep in mind it can be vulgar and offensive depending on things, so please use caution when doing so. If you want to play with CleverBot yourself, you can do so here.

From there, we watched a video called The Chinese Room Experiment published by BBC Studio’s YouTube channel. Which I found to be quite interesting, it is hard for me to explain but as always I will share the video with you.

After that we just had a small discussion post and that was it for the assignment and module! As always I will share the review sheet with you and I will see you for module 7!

[skinnerse24]

Module 5

Hello and welcome back to module 5! This week was another fairly easy week we had two lectures from the professor which I will go over the key points and then we went to a website to try a Spatial Queuing program and then we did one of the most favorite things I’ve ever done, I’ll keep it to myself until I explain it, but it was one of my favorite things.

So, first things first we had a lecture on attention, which is ironic for me because my attention span is that of a squirrel. But we were told to pay attention (see what I did there) to specific parts of the lecture and those specific parts are the ones I will go over. If we were ever to lose our attention, there could be damage to our parietal lobe! Then there are of course two different kinds of attention one is exogenous control and the other is endogenous control. We also had Broadbent’s Filter Theory of attention which lead to the dichotic listening paradigm.

The next lecture was on a lecture called “How does the eye know were to go?” and this was all about our attention on people’s faces. During this lecture we were shown a picture of a younger girl and where about our eyes end up focusing on her. I feel like I focused on more than what was depicted but, I am sure everyone’s eye tracing would be slightly different.

We then moved on to a spatial queuing task which I honestly found hard, but I have to mega focus on which way is left and right and then after some time of all left or right I will get so used to that so when it switches I will still hit the wrong one. If you want to try it for yourself, you can find it here.

Other than our discussion post that was it for assignment one, assignment two had one of my favorite things I have ever done in a class and I am excited to share it all with you too.

Assignment 2:

For this assignment our first requirement was to look at a 3D painting of Starry Night which I absolutely loved, Van Gogh is one of my favorite artists and this was something that was actually quite easy for me. There were a few amazing things I noticed about this painting. One, you can see the ridges coming off of the canvas. Two, not every single part of the canvas is covered in paint, there are places you can see were not covered in paint at all. Finally, three, he did not use black at all, it is all different shades of dark blues and greens, but no shades of black. If you wish to check it out yourself, you can do it here, and I will share some screenshots of it that points out the details I mentioned.

From there we read an article called The Power of Patience written by Jennifer Roberts. This was a very interesting article to me especially thinking that we are very much an instant gratification society, so not many people have patience for things. One of the most though provoking things I read from the article stated that “just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean you have seen it.” I felt this was profound because going back to the Starry Night painting, I have looked at it dozens of times, but I have never truly “seen” it. I never knew the ridges in the paint were there, I never knew that there were gaps within the paint strokes, and I never realized that there was never any black in the painting, it was all dark greens and blues. Overall the article was good and I enjoyed it!

Other than that, that was it for this module, as always I will share the review sheet and I will see you for module 6!

[skinnerse24]

Module 4

Hello, and welcome back for module 4! This wasn’t too bad of a week of stuff, if anything for this week, it was more of a watch a lot of videos and learn type of week, so lets dive right in!

First things first we had to re-watch a small portion of the lecture from last module. We had to review the top down and bottom up processing, which if you don’t remember, or never saw, bottom up processing is driven by sensory information from the physical world, while top down processing is seeking and extraction of sensory information driven by our knowledge, beliefs, expectations and goals. Which we also had to re-listen to the part about predictive coding theory again as well, which basically predictive coding theory is seeing something that is incomplete and using what we already know about similar things and we use that to complete the picture.

Afterwards, we then moved on to Georg Kellers’ TedTalk titled How your brain predictions interfere with what you see. This video was very interesting  because predictions is something we do fairly often, almost anything we see or do we make predictions for but he goes into what happens when our brain makes a mistake. That was one thing I found to be quite interesting, and I am sure you will too.

Next video we watched, I feel like broke everything we know about people who are blind. This next video shows someone who developed the ability to use echolocation such as bats use since they cannot see well either. He demonstrates this during the video showing how he can ride a bike fairly well despite the fact that he cannot see. He also continues to explain how there are some federations that do not support his echolocation. It was very interesting to see how he interacts with the word despite being blind especially while riding a bike.

Next we moved onto a video about the McGurk effect, which is an auditory illusion. Now this was very interesting, it is the same sound no matter what, but looking at the different way his mouth moves leads us to hear different sounds no matter what. Even know that this is happening makes no difference in what we hear. That was something I found very interesting.

Other than our group chat discussion that was it for this week, as always I will share our review sheet and I will see you for module 5! 

[skinnerse24]

Module 3

Hello, and welcome back, this week we had three assignments all together and as always more things to do within them so lets dive in!

Assignment 1:

This week we started with a video lecture by the professor during this, we discussed perception, and what the problems of perception are and what the two processing pathways are as well. So with that, the two problems of perception are that there can be too much input for us to process and understand and there is more information in the world than we can even possibly hope to perceive. I also feel like this goes back to the fact that we are not easily able to multitask so if we attempt to take in too much information we may miss some important information. As previously mentioned as well there are two processing pathways as well. These are the bottom up processes and the top down processes as well. The bottom up process is driven by sensory information from the physical world while the top down process is active in seeking and extraction of sensory information by our knowledge, beliefs, expectations and goals.

Next, we watched another lecture from a different professor who was teaching under grads at MIT and this video was filmed in the spring of 2018. The video in general is called 1.2 - How Can We Study the Human Mind and Brain? Marr’s Level’s of Analysis and it was published by MITCBMM. Overall I felt the video was interesting and obviously the professor is really knowledgeable on the subject she is speaking on I just unfortunately did not take any notes on her lecture I just listened but I quite enjoyed her presentation and I am sure you will too.

That was it for our first assignment of course of the discussion post we did for this one that I usually do not share, but next is assignment 2!

Assignment 2:

This assignment was fairly easy, we had a few articles to read and our discussion post to answer. So it wasn’t too bad so lets dive in.

First article is called How do our brains reconstruct the visual world? written by Alex Burmester. The article itself was very interesting, it explains how our eyes works and how it pairs with the brain to give us our vison. I found it to be very interesting and informational. I was also lucky enough to learn a bit more about this in another class I am in as well! The author also included an interesting graphic as well which if you don’t want to read the article, I will share it below!

Next we moved on to read ‘Noisy’ neurons put a limit on visual perception, which was written by Adam Hadhazy. This article was also quite interesting and informational and I am sure you will enjoy it, so feel free to read it yourself!

We then moved on to the final article of this assignment which was called  Brain’s limits lead to unconscious choices in what we see and remember written by Melissa Healy. This article ended up explaining how our brains limit could also limit what we see and remember. But, with the brain doing this it’s all from an unconscious perspective, so its not anything we can truly control.

That is it for assignment 2 and now on to assignment 3!

Assignment 3:

We started off by reading Cognitive bias cheat sheet written by Buster Benson. This article goes through and explains what cognitive biases are and problems of biases and what could be possible solutions for them as well. One thing I loved about this article is the small comic it starts with because it is so true and it is what so many of us do! 

Source of the comic

Then we ended up looking at the cognitive bias codex, it starts with a basic bias and then goes into a more specific bias and then you get the answer of what the bias could be, not necessarily what it is.

Overall it is a very detailed wheel and a bit hard to read but it was definitely very interesting to look over especially since you tend to recognize some of the biases on there.

Overall that was it for this module, as always I will share the review sheet and I will see you for the next one!

[skinnerse24]

Module 2

We discussed three psychologists and their contributions to the field of psychology when it was still a young field and what they contributed to the field.

First, we are going to start with what is considered the most important study of Psychology:  Hermann Van Helmholtz(1821-1894): He was the psychologist who measured the velocity of impulse.

This is how he accomplished his measurement. He found it to be 55-80mph, and discovered that the mind could be measured by timing it.

Second, is the first study done on cognitive psychology: F.C. Donders(1818-1880): Donders had studied mental chronometry with a simple reaction time study. He had done this by setting up an experiment which would have the persons left or right food be shocked and then they would be immediately required to press the corresponding button. So, for example, if the persons right foot would be shocked, and then the person would press the right button indicating that their left food had been shocked. He found his results by subtracting Choice Reaction Time minus Simple Reaction Time which he figured to equal Pure Choice. The results would then reflect the duration of one component of mental processing. 

Finally, we have the discovery of localization, or the mind as a patchwork: Pierre Paul Broca(1824-1880): This was done when someone was brought to him, that he ended up calling “Patient Tan”. When Tan came in that is all he could say, is Tan. Shortly after he ended up dying and Broca decided to get an autopsy done on him. What he found during the autopsy was was that what he discovered to be the part of the brain involved in speech was practically gone!

We also ended up talking about cognitive neuroscience to an extent as well. Such as how damage to the dorsal region causes a deficit to the reach to grasp process of the brain but not the ability to name an object. But, damage to the ventral region of the brain causes a deficit to the ability to name an object but not the reach to grasp part of the brain.

For the second part of the assignment we watched the Transcranial Magnetic Simulation video and we get to see how stimulating a specific part of the brain with a magnet can alter our ability to speak properly. Now while this is a scary thought, luckily affecting our speech this way only affects it for a few seconds before we are able to talk normally again.

For the final important assignment for the week, we talked about the How to Do the Catch the Dollar Trick | Card Tricks. During the video we see someone attempt to catch a dollar from someone who drops it. In the video we see that no one is able to do it. Many of us in class speculated that no one was able to catch is because of our simple time reaction but, when we do it our selves we are able to perfectly catch it just fine. This is because our brain knows when we are going to drop it and immediately sends signals for our other hand to pinch and we catch it. I personally speculated that if held from a higher height, they would be able to easily catch it with little to no problem as well. I know another classmate found out if it was crumpled they were able to catch it easier as well.

Finally I will share our review sheet for the week, which this week just repeats the beginning of my post of the most important things found by psychologists.

Thank you for reading and I will see you in the next post!

[skinnerse24]

Module 1

First week of class, we learned what is Cognitive Psychology.

We talked about three different peoples perspective on what the mind is including: Plato, Aristotle’s, and Galen.

Plato (424 - 347 BC):The soul is non-physical/immortal, moved from body to body, vulnerable to angry Gods who could inflict insanity. Aristotle (383 - 322 BC): Body executes physical actions, “psyche” (soul) executes mental actions, psyche is the heart, is probably physical , Brain is for cooling blood. Galen (129 - 199 AD): The mind = The brain. He had used an atomically observation and experimental investigation.

We then discussed the birth of Psychology which started around the mid 1800s.

We also had the rationalist philosophy of mind , which was the mind acquires knowledge through reason. - Renee Descartes Empiricist philosophy of mind, which was the mind acquires knowledge via experience. - John Locke Introspection method , which was cataloging the mind’s elements by observing within. -Titchener Titchener also had a table of elemental sensations.

We now know there are a lot more than this but this was a fairly good start for the time period. We also learned that psychology is a young science with an old history, down below is a timeline showing the history of psychology:

Finally since this is cognitive psychology, we talked about what cognitive psychology is today: -The scientific study of the mind and -How do we: -perceive our environment -direct our attention -learn and remember -produce and understand language -ride a bike (yes, riding a bike) -judge, reason, and decide

Finally I will include our weekly review sheets, for each module which highlights the most important information that we have learned from each module.