Status Updates From Cognition: The Thinking Animal

heurestiker i problemlösning

Sample illustration of what participants were supposed to image in Kosslyn’s (1975, 1976) experiments. In one case, they imaged a rabbit next to an elephant, and in another they imaged a rabbit next to a fly. Participants were slower to verify that a rabbit has a pink nose in the former than in the latter, presumably because they had to enlarge the image of the rabbit to see its nose.

Hierarkiska nätverk

Hierarkiska nätverk

kategorisering

cued recall

The final two characters are identical in the first line and the second line, but they are interpreted differently because of the surrounding context.

demonstrated that the gravity-based orientation of a diamond or square can be overridden by a purely visual frame of reference, in this case a rectangle. Participants were to report whether they saw a square or diamond (relative to gravity). On some
trials, there was no reference frame except gravity. On other trials, the square or diamond was surrounded by a rectangle that was either upright or tilted at 45 degrees.

Hermann von Helmholtz (1910/1962), one of the first giants of vision research, called this the likelihood principle. (varför en kvadrat, inte en kub)

Caudate and putamen Separate but related structures important in movement and some poorly understood cognitive functions.
Hippocampus Important in memory.
Cerebellum Important in motor control and probably in some higherlevel cognitive functions, but just what it does is not clear.

Thalamus A relay station for sensory and motor information. For all
senses except smell, the receptors first send information to the thalamus,
which passes it on to the cortex.
Amygdala Believed to be important in the processing of emotion (especially fear) and probably information about social functions.

mri

retrieval strategies

pavlov

Associationism

Assumption problem (omläsning)

A behaviorist would shrink from the term strategy because a strategy is not observable.

There was one big problem with Wundt’s introspectionism: It didn’t work. There was the problem of training people to introspect—a problem of the method they used—and there were other methodological problems. A more basic problem was that the introspectionists didn’t come up with any interesting results

The empiricists were also associationists. Associationism holds that knowledge originates from simple information from the senses and that this sensory information can be combined into more complex ideas. You know what an apple looks like because you have seen an apple before

Descartes discussed perception for the same reason as the Greeks—to understand where knowledge comes from. Other philosophers, notably George Berkeley, discussed perception as part of the empiricist versus nativist argument. Berkeley was an extreme empiricist.

Therefore, the first question to take up is Why make assumptions? As we’ll see, the answer is that it is difficult or impossible to avoid making assumptions. If that’s true, we should at least be clear about the assumptions cognitive psychologists make.