Schools: - Structuralism: basic elements of the mind, introspection and psychophysics (sensory response to stimuli) - Functionalism: why the mind works, mental processes change and are hard to study, many methods - Behaviorism: focus only on what can be observed, animal research to gain control, use only stimulus-response task - Rationalism vs. empiricism - Classic views of cognition: world contains information for us to process, goal of info processing is to reduce uncertainty in the world, more uncertain = more processing, early behavioural evidence linked response time, measure of processing, to number of choices in a task, measure of uncertainty - Information processing theory: mind performs specific computations on incoming info to produce behaviour, mind performs these computations in a series of steps within systems, activating these steps (info process) requires energy, which takes time - Ecological validity (extent to which a finding can generalize to real world) and Cognitive ethology (benefit of lab but alone will not be ecologically valid because not real world): traditional lab approaches may not appreciate cognition in noisy environment, results to generalize to real-life, should consider cognition in complex environment, - Neisser's perceptual cycle is an example, also basis of understanding of schemas, how we form schemas and so forth, how this influences perception because of noisy environment we interact with = example of eco validity - Interactionism: mind and brain are separate but interact and influence each other (dualism) = thought can come from the pattern of brain, thought will also influence brain pattern - Epiphenomenalism: thoughts are the result of the brain, thought don't affect the brain, brain produces thoughts, but thoughts don't affect brain - Parallelism: mind and brain are two aspects of same reality, doesn't explain how they are connected, separate but don't interact (example of dualism) = separate, thoughts and brain don't affect one another - Isomorphism: mind and brain both follow same patterns or rules, but different substances, - Modularity of the mind: functional specialization view that states the mind has innate neural modules that perform specificized basic computation, suggests functional specialization = brain has different modules that process basic computations ex. processing lines or brightness, processed in separate regions, maybe there is no specialization as well, rationalist view because modules are innate - Animals models: establishes causal link between brain and behaviour but cannot study everything - Human psychophysiological tools: skin conductance is 1 tool so we can see effect on arousal on cognition - Neuropsychological cases: causal link, but cannot lesion people as we wish
- Neuroimaging: EEG = electrical activity and useful to measure timing of activity, PET/fMRI = active brain areas during task and useful to measure localized activity (PET involved radioactive tracer), Brain stimulation = affect nerve cell activity in brain, useful to determine causal link and for therapy, mechanisms are not clear (compare these) - Perception - Vision = dominant sense, McGurk effect demonstrates this because visual input overrides auditory input, prevalence of extramission belief suggest people don't know how the visual