Midterm Study Guide


Introduction
Descartes
communications theory
cognitive psychology
cognitive neuroscience
artificial intelligence
cognitive science
bottom-up/top-down processing
information processing
stimulus-response
Marr's tri-level hypothesis
serial vs. parallel processing 
 

How has communications theory affected the development of cognitive psychology?
How important was it that the computer was a physical machine that did cognitive things?
How has the mind-as-computer analogy influenced the development of cognitive psychology? How has it limited cognitive psychology?
How does Sternberg's work on the relationship between memory set size and reaction time epitomize IP psychology?
What is the tri-level hypothesis? Which level do cognitive psychologists concentrate on the most? 
 

Pattern Recognition

McClelland & Rumelhart (Interactive Activation Model)
pattern recognition
template theories
feature theories
structural theory
geons
activation rule
detection paradigm
distinctive feature
excitatory/inhibitory connections
interstimulus interval
perceptual confusion
word superiority effect
phonemic restoration effect
associative agnosia/apperceptive agnosia 

100-step constraint
parallel distributed processing
graceful degradation
mutual constraint satisfaction
biological plausibility


What are some examples of the influence of context on the categorization of sensory information?
What does it mean for a process to be data driven? What evidence do we have that pattern recognition is not completely data driven?
What is the phonemic restoration effect?
What is the word superiority effect? What does it tell us about pattern recognition?
What does it mean for a process to be conceptually driven? What evidence do we have that some aspects of pattern recognition are conceptually driven?
Why is proofreading difficult? 

What sorts of pattern recognition models have difficulty accounting for context effects? Why?

How can neural network models be used to account for context effects?

What factors argue against the simple template hypothesis for pattern recognition?
What's the difference between serial and parallel processing?
Name one advantage that the feature hypothesis has over the template hypothesis.
Describe 3 ways a template model might fail to recognize something it was programmed to recognize.

What is a geon?
What is the structural theory of pattern recognition? What shortcomings of feature theory does structural theory address? Does structural theory have any advantages over template theory?
How does the IAC model use mutual constraint satisfaction to recognize words?
How can the IAC model account for the word superiority effect?
Elaborate on the claim that conventional symbolic computers are "brittle".
Elaborate on the claim that conventional symbolic computers are "inflexible".
Explain 3 ways in which connectionist networks resemble brains.

What advantage does being parallel afford connectionist models?
What does it mean to say that connectionist models have distributed representations?
What is the appeal of distributed representations for modeling cognitive processes?
 

What is a visual search task? What is the pop-out effect?
What is an illusory conjunction? When does feature integration theory predict it will occur?
What is the role of attention in Treisman's feature integration theory?

Imagery & Spatial Knowledge

What is a representation? 
What's the distinction between internal and external representations? 
Outline Pavio's dual coding theory. 
What is a logogen
What is an imagen
What evidence supports dual coding theory? 
Compare and contrast the properties of analogue and propositional representations. 
Describe the design and outcome of an experiment that suggests people use analogue representations in 'mental rotation' tasks. 
Describe the design and outcome of an experiment that suggests people use analogue representations in 'mental scanning' tasks. 
How did Pylyshyn argue that mental imagery was epiphenomenal? 
How does evidence from cognitive neuroscience bear on the debate about the status of mental imagery? 
What is change blindness? Why does change blindness occur?

What are two ways we acquire spatial knowledge?

What evidence is there that internal representation of direction (e.g. the angle of familiar street intersections) is somewhat distorted? What other kinds of ‘distortions’ of spatial knowledge have been noted by cognitive scientists?

What is hierarchical structuring? What evidence is there that people’s maps are hierarchically structured?

What evidence is there that there is a relationship between people’s self-reported sense of direction and their navigational abilities? What evidence is there that men and women utilize spatial information differently?

Learning

What is habituation?
What is sensitization?
Describe the sequence of events in classical conditioning.
What is the conditioned stimulus, the unconditioned stimulus, the conditioned response, and the unconditioned response?
What is stimulus generalization? Can this be modelled with a neural network?  If so how? If not, why not?
What is extinction?
What is spontaneous recovery?

How does discrimination training proceed?
Describe blocking.
What is overshadowing? What is latent inhibition?
Co-occurrence and contingency are both important in determining whether conditioning will occur. Which factor is more important? Describe at least one experimental finding that supports this claim.
Characterize the Rescorla-Wagner model of conditioning? Could this model be implemented in a neural network model?
Describe the sequence of events in operant conditioning.
What's trial-and-error learning (Thorndike's puzzle boxes)?
What is Thorndike's law of effect?

What's a Skinner box?

What's the difference between a primary reinforcer and a secondary reinforcer?
What's the difference between negative reinforcement and punishment?

What's the difference between a ratio and an interval reinforcement schedule?  
Does a fixed or variable interval reinforcement schedule result in learning that is more resistant to extinction?  
What is learned helplessness?  What does it suggest about operant learning?
What is equipotentiality and what evidence suggests that it doesn't hold?
What is universality and what evidence suggests it doesn't hold?

How did Tolman's research with rats argue against the idea that rats only learn associations and don't have any internal representations?