Introducing Cognitive

Psychology
[Link] intentional blindness
[Link] change blindness
• Cognitive psychology studies how people
perceive, learn, remember, and think about
information. A cognitive psychologist might
study how people perceive various shapes, why
they remember some facts but forget others, or
how they learn language
• Why do objects look farther away on foggy days than they really are? The discrepancy
can be dangerous, even deceiving drivers into having car accidents.
• • Why do many people remember a particular experience (e.g., a very happy moment
or an embarrassment during childhood), yet they 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 well 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
History
• Cognitive psychology in some form has been a field of study for thousands of years. Early philosophers
addressed questions about cognition that are still relevant today.
• Aristotle suggested an early metaphor for the mind to explain how memory processes work. He proposed that
our memory could be envisioned as a wax tablet, with memories formed in the tablet like molds in hot wax.
The durability of the memory depended on different factors in the same way that the durability of molds in
wax can vary; if the wax tablet is heated, the form can become distorted or disappear
• As scientific methods were developed in other fields (e.g., physics, biology, chemistry), researchers began to
apply these methods to the study of the mind. The earliest psychological research can be described as
physiological studies designed to answer longstanding philosophical questions.
• Hermann von Helmholtz, a professor of physiology, conducted research on the speed of nerve conduction by
isolating the nerve fiber in the leg of a frog. After determining that nerve impulses travel approximately 90 feet
per second, he began rudimentary response time experiments with humans. He estimated human nerve
conduction to be about 165 to 330 feet per second .
• Gustav Fechner conducted some of the first experiments in psychophysics with the goal of devel- oping laws
of perception.
• In 1879, Wilhelm Wundt opened one of the first laboratories dedicated to psychological research at the
University of Leipzig. Considered one of the founders of psychology, Wundt studied conscious experience
through methods that involved systematic self-reports of a person’s thoughts. Wundt and other early
psychologists studied how people perceived sounds, colors, and other sensory experiences using
introspection. Their goal was to study consciousness “as it occurs.”
• Hermann Ebbinghaus, studied the processes of remembering and forgetting by testing his own memory
extensively to determine the savings in relearning that can be gained from previous exposures to information.
He measured the decline in his memory performance over time and thus mapped out the forgetting curve that
researchers still find in current studies measuring memory performance over time
• In the early to mid-twentieth century, the study of cognition fell out of favor in psychology with the rise in
popularity of the behaviorist perspective. Inspired by the scientific advances in physiology (such as the
Nobel prize-winning work on conditioned reflexes by Ivan Pavlov), prominent behaviorists John Watson and
B. F. Skinner argued that introspective methods were biased by the perspective of the subject.
 Although the behaviorist perspective was common in psychological research in the United States for almost half a century, in
Europe, work that acknowledged the existence and importance of mental events was being conducted by the Gestalt
psychologists in Germany. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget began studying the development of
children’s thinking. Sir Frederick Bartlett, an English experimental psychologist at the University of Cambridge, published a
book entitled Remembering in 1932 based on his work with memory for text.
• An important event that led to a return to a focus on cognition in psychology was an attack on the behaviorist approach to
language learning by the linguist Noam Chomsky. Skinner (1957) proposed that language learning occurs through operant
conditioning processes, consistent with the popular behaviorist view at that time. He suggested that language abilities develop
through the imitation of speakers around a child and the feedback (reinforcement or punishment) the child’s speech elicited.
Chomsky (1959) presented a strong counterargument to this proposal; a critical piece of evidence against the behaviorist
account of language development was the simple fact that children produce language that has never been produced around
them or been reinforced (e.g., original sentences never heard before, incorrect grammar that has never been modeled). Instead,
Chomsky suggested that children have the mental capacity to learn the rules of the language(s) spoken around them without
explicit feedback on the language they produce. In other words, language abilities result from cognitive processes inherent in
humans. From Chomsky’s argument, psychologists began to realize that the study of non-observable cognitive processes is an
important part of understanding behavior—that understanding the processes behind the overt behaviors would advance our
understanding of the mind and behavior in important ways. Still, behaviorism did influence the way we study cognitive
processes today. Its focus on the experimental examination of behavior shaped the way researchers approach the study of
mental processes. Experimentation is still the focus, but cognitive psychologists examine the behaviors resulting from the mental
processes being studied.
• Another influential event in the development of cognitive psychology research was the invention of the computer.
Herbert Simon recounts in his autobiography that he began a graduate class in 1956 by announcing, “Over the
Christmas holiday, Al Newell and I invented a thinking machine” (Simon, 1991, p. 206). Computers presented an
information-processing model as an analogous way of thinking about cognitive processes. In this new metaphor for
the mind, the brain could be thought of as a biolog- ical computer, capable of storing large amounts of information
and acting to alter that information as learning takes place. Cognitive processes were the “software” that processed
the information (with the brain as the “hardware”). The information-processing model helped psychologists think
about cogni- tion in a new way, which spurred research on how information is processed in a way that could be stored
in our minds and how that information is acted on as we encounter new information related to what is already stored.
This model also provided a universal language that allowed researchers to discuss the processes of the mind and their
connection to the brain.
• Another milestone in the development of cognitive psychology as a coherent field of study was a 1967 book by
Ulric Neisser that integrated such topics as memory, perception, attention, and language as a unified field. Neisser
coined the term cognitive psychology (hence the title of this text) and, due to this contribution, is widely viewed as
the father of the field. Throughout his career, Neisser conducted research in different areas of cognitive psychology
with a focus on cognition in everyday behaviors.
CURRENT APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF COGNITION

• A popular perspective in cognition is to consider information from the world as being represented in some form in our
minds. For example, we might store the concept of armadillo in various ways. We could represent armadillo as an exemplar
of the category of animals or in interconnections with related animals. We might also represent it as a concept with
characteristic features (e.g., mammal, hard shell, digs). The basic aspect of the representationalist approach is that
knowledge about the world is repre- sented in our minds such that cognitive processes can “operate” on the representations.
If we read about armadillos or see a documentary about them, we might change or add to this stored information as we learn
more about armadillos than we previously knew.
• In early representationalist models (Rumelhart & Norman, 1988), information was thought to be stored as symbols that
could be operated on in the way that mathematical variable symbols (e.g., 2 and II are both symbols used to represent the
concept of two) are operated on (we can manipu- late these symbols using operations such as addition or multiplication).
This approach allowed researchers to study the operations as processes of cognition. For example, models of perception
relied on feature detectors that stored information about features encountered in the world (e.g., lines, curves, colors). We
can identify objects when our feature system identifies particular features that we know to be a part of an object. If we
detect perpendicular edges on an object, then the fea- ture system can rule out objects with rounded edges and narrow
identification down to objects with sharper edges. In this way, the features we see are stored as feature symbols in our
minds. As knowl- edge of cognition has advanced, these symbol systems have become more complex in representing the
knowledge stored in our minds.
 • The representationalist approach arose from the computer and information-processing models of cognition.
Information is stored in computers in the form of 0’s and 1’s that form chains of “off” and “on” signals. This is similar
to the way that neurons either fire or do not fire at any given time. In this way, the computer model is analogous to how
the brain functions. Seeing this similarity, some cognitive and physiological psychologists have considered information
as being represented in the mind through the “on” and “off” firing patterns of groups of neurons. This allows
researchers to think of information as being stored in the mind and available for processing as we interpret, analyze, and
alter this information in our thinking.
• The representationalist perspective connects well with the biological perspective (see later in this section), as it
provides a model of cognition in sync with the physiological processes that occur in the brain. However, the primary
model for representationalism is the computer metaphor for the mind. The language of computers is typically evoked in
describing the representations found in the mind. For example, “concepts” are often described as storage nodes of
information in a hierarchical network (see Chapter 9 for further discussion of concepts). Thus, this approach has a
different origin and conceptual structure than the biological approach described shortly.
•
• Another approach to the study of cognition views our cognitive processes as providing a means of interacting
with the world around us. In this view, our visual sense doesn’t simply create representations of objects and
scenes from the world for us to interpret and process. Instead, it provides information about the world that
allows us to do things in that world, such as walking through a doorway or catching a ball. In other words,
our cognitive processes have evolved to allow us to interact with the world (e.g., objects, people, con-
versations) and should be studied according to the purpose they serve. As such, our motions and inter- actions
with objects and people in the world will influence our cognition. Researchers who adhere to the embodied
cognition perspective examine cognition as an interaction between humans (and other animals) and their
environment. Studies from this area have shown, for example, that memory of a text is better when people act
it out as compared with other learning strategies, like rereading the text (Scott et al., 2001); that people will
look at the space on an empty screen when recalling information previously presented at that location on the
screen (Richardson & Spivey, 2000); and that people with experience wearing the shoulder pads used in
American football pass through a small open space in a different way than those without experience playing
the sport (Higuchi et al., 2011). These results show that our memory, language, and perception processes
depend on our interactions with the world around us. More about this perspective is discussed in each of the
topical chapters where this approach has been applied
• We have already had some discussion of the role biology plays in the study of cognition as we have
considered the area of cognitive neuroscience and its connection to the representationalist approach.
However, some researchers have considered a biological perspective of cognition, a view beyond just the
specific brain activity associated with different cognitive processes. These researchers build theo- ries of
cognition using a different metaphor for the mind, one not based on a computer but rather on how the brain
works. In other words, they propose theories based not on the manipulation of symbols but rather on
networks of connections loosely analogous to networks of neurons.
• For example, in attempting to model how our memory system learns new information, researchers have
considered the way in which neurons are connected in networks in the brain and simulated such networks in
models of memory (McClelland, 1999). Models of this sort, known as connectionist models, have also been
developed to explain how we identify language through individual features of letters and spoken words. Thus,
our knowledge of the biological architecture of the brain and the neurological function- ing of the brain has
guided researchers in their attempts to better understand how different cognitive processes work.
• Concerned with the patterns of cognitive performance (intact and
impaired) shown by brain-damaged patients
• Informs us about normal human cognition

• Key assumptions:
• Functional modularity
• Anatomical modularity
• Uniformity of functional architecture across people
• Subtractivity
• A neural network consists of large number of units joined together in
a pattern of connections. Units in a net are usually segregated into
three classes: input units, which receive information to be processed,
output units where the results of the processing are found, and units
in between called hidden units. If a neural net were to model the
whole human nervous system, the input units would be analogous to
the sensory neurons, the output units to the motor neurons, and the
hidden units to all other neurons.
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• Each input unit has an activation value that represents some feature
external to the net. An input unit sends its activation value to each of
the hidden units to which it is connected. Each of these hidden units
calculates its own activation value depending on the activation values
it receives from the input units. This signal is then passed on to
output units or to another layer of hidden units. Those hidden units
compute their activation values in the same way, and send them
along to their neighbors. Eventually the signal at the input units
propagates all the way through the net to determine the activation
values at all the output units.
• The pattern of activation set up by a net is determined by the weights, or strength of
connections between the units. Weights may be either positive or negative. A negative
weight represents the inhibition of the receiving unit by the activity of a sending unit.
The activation value for each receiving unit is calculated according a simple activation
function. Activation functions vary in detail, but they all conform to the same basic plan.
The function sums together the contributions of all sending units, where the
contribution of a unit is defined as the weight of the connection between the sending
and receiving units times the sending unit’s activation value. This sum is usually
modified further, for example, by adjusting the activation sum to a value between 0 and
1 and/or by setting the activation to zero unless a threshold level for the sum is reached.
Connectionists presume that cognitive functioning can be explained by collections of
units that operate in this way. Since it is assumed that all the units calculate pretty much
the same simple activation function, human intellectual accomplishments must depend
primarily on the settings of the weights between the units.
• Connectionist models seem particularly well matched to what we know about neurology.
The brain is indeed a neural net, formed from massively many units (neurons) and their
connections (synapses). Furthermore, several properties of neural network models
suggest that connectionism may offer an especially faithful picture of the nature of
cognitive processing. Neural networks exhibit robust flexibility in the face of the
challenges posed by the real world. Noisy input or destruction of units causes graceful
degradation of function. The net’s response is still appropriate, though somewhat less
accurate. In contrast, noise and loss of circuitry in classical computers typically result in
catastrophic failure. Neural networks are also particularly well adapted for problems that
require the resolution of many conflicting constraints in parallel. There is ample evidence
from research in artificial intelligence that cognitive tasks such as object recognition,
planning, and even coordinated motion present problems of this kind. Although classical
systems are capable of multiple constraint satisfaction, connectionists argue that neural
network models provide much more natural mechanisms for dealing with such problems.
• Despite these intriguing features, there are some weaknesses in connectionist models
that bear mentioning. First, most neural network research abstracts away from many
interesting and possibly important features of the brain. For example, connectionists
usually do not attempt to explicitly model the variety of different kinds of brain
neurons, nor the effects of neurotransmitters and hormones. Furthermore, it is far
from clear that the brain contains the kind of reverse connections that would be
needed if the brain were to learn by a process like backpropagation, and the immense
number of repetitions needed for such training methods seems far from realistic.
Attention to these matters will probably be necessary if convincing connectionist
models of human cognitive processing are to be constructed. A more serious objection
must also be met. It is widely felt, especially among classicists, that neural networks
are not particularly good at the kind of rule based processing that is thought to
undergird language, reasoning, and higher forms of thought. (For a well known
critique of this kind see Pinker and Prince 1988.)
Psychophysics
What is Psychophysics?
• Psychophysics is the branch of psychology that deals with the
relationships between physical stimuli and mental phenomena.
Historical Background
• Psychophysics was founded by Gustav Fechner in the mid-19th
century. Fechner developed methods to quantify the relationship
between the intensity of stimuli and their perceived strength.
Key Concepts
• Absolute Threshold
• Difference Threshold (Just Noticeable Difference)
• Signal Detection Theory
• Weber's Law
Absolute Threshold
• The minimum stimulus intensity required for a stimulus to be
detected 50% of the time.
Difference Threshold
• The smallest difference in stimulus intensity that can be detected.
Also known as the Just Noticeable Difference (JND).
Method of Limits
• The experimenter can increase the stimulus intensity (or intensity
difference) until the observer detects the stimulus (or the change).
• For example, turn up the volume until the observer first detects the
sound. This is intuitive, but it is subject to bias — the estimated
threshold is likely to be different,
• for example, if we start high and work down vs. start low and work
up.
Method of Adjustment
• This is very much like the Method of Limits, except the experimenter
gives the observer the knob: “adjust the stimulus until it’s very
visible” or “adjust the color of the patch until it matches the test
patch.”
• The participant directly adjusts the intensity of the stimulus until it
reaches the threshold level (e.g., just noticeable or just undetectable).
This method is faster but can be less accurate due to its reliance on
the participant's control.
• Allowing a participant to turn a dial to adjust the brightness of a light
until they can just see it.
Method of Constant Stimuli
• This is the most reliable, but most time-consuming. You decide ahead of
time what levels you are going to measure, do each one a fixed number
of times, and record % correct (or the number of detections) for each
level. If you randomize the order, you can get rid of bias.
• This method involves presenting stimuli of varying intensities in a
random order. The participant indicates whether they can detect each
stimulus. The intensity levels are preselected and presented multiple
times to determine the threshold.
• Example: Presenting a series of light flashes of different brightness in
random order and asking the participant to indicate whether they saw
the flash.
Signal Detection Theory
• A theory that quantifies the ability to discern between information-
bearing patterns (signals) and random patterns (noise).
Weber's Law
• Weber's Law states that the smallest detectable difference in stimulus
intensity (the just noticeable difference, or JND) is a constant
proportion of the original stimulus intensity.
• In other words, the ability to detect a change in a stimulus is relative
to the intensity of the initial stimulus.
Applications
• Product Design: Understanding how consumers perceive changes in
product attributes (like weight, size, or color) can inform better
product design.
• Marketing: Helps marketers understand the noticeable difference
threshold for changes in product pricing, packaging, or features.
• User Experience (UX): In designing interfaces and digital products,
Weber's Law can be applied to optimize visual and auditory cues for
better user engagement and satisfaction.
Fechner's Law
• Fechner's Law states that the perceived intensity of a stimulus
increases logarithmically with the actual physical intensity of the
stimulus.
• This means that equal increments in perceived intensity correspond
to proportional increments in the physical intensity of the stimulus.
• Larger changes in physical intensity are needed to produce a
perceivable difference when the intensity is already high.
Applications of Fechner's Law
• Perception Research: Fechner’s Law is used to understand how
humans perceive differences in various sensory modalities, such as
brightness, loudness, weight, and more.
• Design and Ergonomics: Understanding how changes in physical
properties are perceived can help in designing products and
environments that are better suited to human perception.
• Consumer Behavior: Marketers and product designers use Fechner’s
Law to understand how changes in product attributes (such as price
or packaging size) are perceived by consumers.
Stevens' Power Law
• Stevens' Power Law is a psychophysical theory proposed by
psychologist Stanley Smith Stevens in the 1950s.
• It provides a more general and flexible model than Fechner's Law for
describing the relationship between the physical intensity of a
stimulus and its perceived intensity.
• Unlike Fechner's logarithmic approach, Stevens' Power Law suggests
that this relationship can be better represented by a power function
Applications of Stevens' Power
Law
• Product Design and User Experience (UX): Designers can use Stevens'
Power Law to predict how changes in physical attributes (such as
brightness, loudness, or weight) will be perceived, allowing them to create
products and interfaces that are more intuitive and satisfying to users.
• Audio and Visual Engineering: Engineers can apply the law to adjust audio
levels or visual brightness in devices to match human perception more
closely.
• Clinical Psychology and Medicine: Understanding the relationship
between stimulus intensity and perception can help in designing effective
treatments for sensory processing disorders and in managing pain
perception.
ROC curve
• An ROC curve plots the true positive rate (sensitivity) against the false
positive rate (1-specificity) across various threshold settings. Each
point on the ROC curve represents a different decision threshold,
showing the trade-off between the hit rate (true positive rate) and the
false alarm rate (false positive rate).
• True Positive Rate (TPR) or Sensitivity: This is the proportion of actual
positive cases that are correctly identified by the test. In
psychophysics, it corresponds to the proportion of trials in which a
signal was present and correctly detected (hit).
• False Positive Rate (FPR): This is the proportion of actual negative
cases that are incorrectly identified as positive. In psychophysics, it
represents the proportion of trials in which no signal was present but
the observer incorrectly reported detecting one (false alarm).
• Threshold: This refers to the criterion or cut-off point that an observer
uses to decide whether a signal is present or absent. Different
thresholds will affect the rates of hits and false alarms, thus changing
the position on the ROC curve.
Applications of Psychophysics
• Psychophysics has applications in various fields such as psychology,
neuroscience, and even marketing. It helps in understanding sensory
processes and developing better products and user experiences.