The Rise of Cognitive Psychology
Different disciplines • Flourished 1950s – 1960s
Essay questions
Reading
Recount factors/events that contributed to the rise of cognitive psychology
Discuss the central tenets of cognitive psychology
Explain what is meant by boxes-and-arrows diagrams
Describe how cognitive psychologists use computers to understand the mind
Contributing factors
Mathematical & technological advances eg Boolean logic
Development of the computer
Symposium on Information Theory
New approaches published (Neisser - Cognitive Psychology)
Development of computer Lashley
S-R associations not enough
Anticipatory speech errors showed evidence of planning
How could such errors be explained by S-R association chains?
Why don’t computers need a homunculus
Information feedback
Current state and end-state are compared and discrepancies are used to bring performance closer to the desired end-state
1956, turning point for behaviourism (under pressure), Chomsky, Miller, Newell
By mid 70's
psychologists were largely interested in cognitive psychology, not behaviorism
Features of Cognitive Psychology
Mental representations – information patterns that represent knowledge and is gained through observations and algorithms are used
Complex processes
Topdown processing
Experimental method
boxes and arrows diagram
eg Broadbent's filter model of attention
problem: complexity of info processing
Understanding why patients with schizophrenia do not perceive the hollow mask illusion using dynamic causal modelling - Dima et al. 2009
Lashley & the problem of serial order - Bruce 1994
Learning about cog P
seeing intro of behaviourism and cog. psych. as scientific revolutions helps us to understand why topics at the forefront of research at 1 moment no longer are a few years later
however this view distorts reality to some extent
maximises diffs between time periods and minimises the continuity that is present
ignores fact that behaviourism has never been an all domianting paradigm
ignores advances in applied psych eg client centred therapy & theories of intelligece
Escape of Gestalt psychologists from Germany to US in wake of WW2
Intro
disequilibrium - impairment of the bottom-up and top-down interaction may be a plausible explanation for the disintegrative and reality imapiring properties of psychotic disorders
patients suffering from schizophrenia do not experience the hollow mask illusion, consistent with weakened top-down influences
Aim: use measures of effective connectivity arising from dynamic causal modelling to explain differences in both he perception of hollow faces and associated neural responses.
top-down influences from the fronto-parietal network give rise to the hollow-mask illusion in controls, and that normal or strengthened bottom-up influences from visual areas in the absence of top-down input from the fronto-parietal network prevent the patients from experiencing the illusion.
schizophrenia - resulting from the abnormal integration of 2 or more processes and are expressed when 2+ regions interact
Method
13 patients 16 controls - matched for age, gender, education
fMRI design, 3 experimental conditions (3D normal, 3D inverted, 2D)
Results
Post-scan questionnaires revealed that none from the controls reported seeing a face as ‘hollow’, while all patients did
schizophrenic patients and healthy controls differ in terms of the modulation of neural connectivity during the presentation of illusory stimuli
op-down influences from the fronto-parietal network contribute to the perception of the hollow-mask illusion in controls.
he data of the patients with schizophrenia were, if anything, explained better by a model where the modulation was placed on the forward connection between V1 and LOC, consistent with a lack of modulatory top-down control in this group.
Discussion
The group-specific differences in these changes are entirely consistent with the dysconnection hypothesis of schizophrenia (Friston, 2005
This failure may be due to sub-optimal perceptual learning during neurodevelopment and beyond.
Stephan et al. (2006) propose that hallucinations may be related to impairments in synaptic plasticity during perceptual learning, while delusions may be related to impairments during stimulus-response learning
unable to establish a relationship between hallucination severity and responses to 3D-inverted faces in our ROIs, or with the modulation of connectivity with the LOC during the processing of 3D-inverted faces.
This negative result is not definitive, though, since we were only able to include 13 patients, who varied little in positive symptom scores as assessed by the PANSS, both of which make the likelihood of Type II error relatively high.
Future studies investigating the hollow-mask illusion in schizophrenia should employ larger samples and more sophisticated assessments of positive symptoms, perhaps including sub-groups of patients based on symptom type, in order to further investigate this important questio
Indeed, the reason for the enduring nature of the serial order chapter is not just that it identified problems that were not handled by existing theory (e.g., syntax) but that it proposed other explanations (e.g., generalized schemata of action)
The Hixon Symposium was but one of a broad unfolding of antecedents that led up to modem cognitive science
As for Lashley's address, the present consideration of published and unpublished documents, citation counts, and the topic areas in which the paper has been favorably received makes it plain that, for the most part, it was ahead of its time
Its role was not one of energizing and renewing these trends but of supporting and shaping them after they were under way
This is not to deny the relevance of Lashley's article to the cognitive renaissance but simply to suggest, as the citation data clearly do, that the serial order chapter became significant in that movement only when psychologists with a cognitive or linguistic bent discovered the paper in the 1960s and took it as additional grist for their mills.
The area of motor control may be excepted from this claim. In this instance, the concept of a motor program can be directly linked to Lashley's proposal that behavior sequences are mediated by action schemata