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COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
INTRODUCTION TO COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
INTRODUCTION
 Metacognition – a cognitive task that involves thinking about one’s own
thought processes
 Cognition – (also referred to as mental activity) describes acquisition,
storage, transformation, and use of knowledge
 Cognitive psychology – sometimes interpreted as a synonym for the
word “Cognition”, but it also refers to a particular theoretical approach
in psychology
 Cognitive approach – a theoretical orientation that
emphasizes people’s thought processes and their knowledge
 Cognition occupies a major portion of human psychology that almost
everything that an individual have done in the past hour required some
sort or form of cognition
 The cognitive approach has widespread influence on other areas of
psychology such as clinical psychology, educational psychology, and
social psychology.
 Cognitive neuropsychology – examines specific
neurological problems such as an extreme difficulty in
recognizing faces of others, when other cognitive skills
remain to be normal.
 The study of cognition helps an individual understand and describe how
the mind works which also includes hints on how to improve one’s
performance.
BRIEF HISTORY OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
 The cognitive approach traces its origins to the classical Greek
philosophers and to developments that began in the 19th century.
 The contemporary version of cognitive psychology emerged within the
last 60 years
ORIGINS OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
 Philosophers and other theorists speculated about human thought
processes for more than 23 centuries
 Aristotle – a Greek philosopher who examined topics sch as
perception, memory, and mental imagery
 Emphasized the importance of empirical evidence or
scientific evidence obtained by careful observation and
experimentation
 Can reasonably called as the first cognitive psychologist
 Wilhelm Wundt – was believed by many scholars of the history of
psychology to be the founder of psychology
 Proposed that psychology should study mental processes
 Introspection – carefully trained observers would
systematically analyze their own sensations and report them
as objectively as possible under standardized conditions
Early Memory researchers
 Hermann Ebbinghaus – the first person to scientifically study
human memory
 Examined a variety of factors that might influence
performance, such as the amount of time between two
presentations of a list of items
 Mary Whiton Calkins – reported a memory phenomenon called
the recency effect
 Recency effect – recall of information is especially accurate
for the final items in a series of stimuli.
 First female to be the president of APA.
William James
 Preferred to theorize about our everyday psychological experiences
 Best known for his textbook Principles of Psychology which
provided clear detailed descriptions about people’s everyday
experiences. It also emphasized that the human mind is active and
inquiring
Behaviorism
 The most prominent theoretical perspective in the US during the
first half of the 20th century
 Psychology must focus on objective, observable reactions to
stimuli in the environment rather than introspection
 Behaviorists contributed significantly to contemporary research
methods
 Operational definition – a precise definition that specifies exactly
how a concept is to be measured
 Their learning principles have been extensively used in
psychotherapy, business, organizations, and education
Gestalt approach
 Gestalt psychology – emphasizes that we humans have basic
tendencies to actively organize what we see.
 The whole is greater than the sum of its parts
 Gestalt – refers to the overall quality that transcends the individual
elements
 Gestalt psychologists valued the unity of psychological
phenomena. Gestalt psychologists constructed a number of laws
that explain why certain components of a pattern seem to belong
together
 They also emphasized the importance of insight in problem solving
Frederic Bartlett
 His book Remembering: An experimental and social study is
considered one of the most influential books in the history of
cognitive psychology
 He used meaningful materials, such as lengthy stories instead of a
carefully controlled research that Ebbinghaus formulated.
 He proposed that human memory is an active, constructive process
in which we interpret and transform the information we encounter
EMERGENCE OF MODERN COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
 Cognitive psychologists generally agree that the birth of cognitive
psychology can be listed as 1956.
 By the 1960s, the methodology, approach, and attitudes had
changed substantially
 Cognitive revolution – refers to the growth of the support for the
cognitive approach
Factors contributing to the rise of cognitive psychology
 Psychologists became increasingly disappointed with the
behaviorist outlook that dominated the US in the previous decades
 The behaviorist approach tells nothing about numerous
psychologically interesting processes such as the thoughts and
strategies that people use when they try to solve a problem
 Research and theory in three content areas also increased the
emerging popularity of cognitive research
 Research in human memory began to blossom at the end of the
1950s, further increasing the disenchantment with behaviorism.
Psychologists examined the organization of memory, and they
proposed memory models
 Another influential force came from research on children’s thought
processes.
 According to Jean Piaget, children actively explore their
world in order to understand important concepts
 Growth of cognitive approach was encouraged by research in
linguistics, memory, and developmental psychology.
Information processing approach
 Information-processing approach – argued that our mental
processes are similar to the operations of a computer; information
progresses through our cognitive system in a series of stages, one
step at a time
 Atkinson-Shiffrin model – proposed that memory involves a
sequence of separate steps wherein information is transferred from
one storage into another in each step
 Sensory memory – is a storage system that records information
from each of the senses with reasonable accuracy. In here, memory
is stored for 2 seconds or less and most of it is forgotten
 Short-term memory – also known as working memory, holds
only the small amount of information that a person is actively
using. These memories can be lost in about 30 seconds unless
repeated.
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COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
 Long-term memory – has an enormous capacity because it
contains memories that are decades old, in addition to memories of
events that occurred several minutes ago. Atkinson and Shiffrin
proposed that information in here is relatively permanent.
CURRENT STATUS OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
 Even if psychologists do not endorse a specific model of cognitive
processes, cognitive psychology has had an enormous influence on
the discipline of psychology
  Recent articles in the journal of the Association for
Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, have focused on using
cognitive behavioral therapy for a variety of clients.
 Ecological validity – studies are high in ecological validity if the
conditions in which the research is conducted are similar to the
natural setting where the results will be applied
 Most cognitive psychologists prior to the 1980s did indeed conduct
research in artificial laboratory environments, often using tasks that
differed from daily cognitive activities, leading to low ecological
validity
 However, current researchers study real-life issues
 Most cognitive psychologists acknowledge that the discipline must
advance by conducting both ecologically valid and laboratory-
based research
COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE TECHNIQUES
 Cognitive neuroscience – combines the research techniques of
cognitive psychology with various methods for assessing the structure
and function of the brain
 Psychologists now use neuroscience techniques to explore the kind of
cognitive processes that we use in our interactions with other people.
This discipline is called social cognitive neuroscience
 Because the brain is so complex, we need to be very cautious when we
read summaries of cognitive neuroscience research in the popular media
BRAIN LESIONS
 Brain lesions – refers to the destruction of an area in the brain,
most often by strokes, tumors, blows to the head, and accidents.
 The study of brain lesions has definitely helped us understand the
organization of the brain. However, results are often difficult to
interpret
POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY
 PET Scan – researchers measure blood flow in the brain by
injecting the participant with a low dose of radioactive chemical
just before this person works on a cognitive task. The chemical
travels through the bloodstream to the parts of the brain that are
activated during the task
FUNCTIONAL MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING
 FMRI – is based on the principle that oxygen-rich blood is an
index of brain activity.
 The research participant reclines with his or her head surrounded
by a large doughnut-shaped magnet. This magnetic field produces
changes in the oxygen atoms
 It was developed during the 1990s based on the magnetic
resonance imaging which is used in medical settings.
 It is less invasive with no injections and no radioactive material
involved
 It can also measure brain activity that occurs fairly quickly
EVENT-RELATED POTENTIAL TECHNIQUE
 Event-related potential technique (ERP) – records the very brief
fluctuations in the brain’s electrical activity in response to a
stimulus such as an auditory tone
 Electrodes are placed on a person’s scalp with each electrode
recording the electrical activity generated by a group of neurons
located directly underneath the skull.
 It can identify the brief period in a specific region of the brain, but
not of individual neurons.
 It provides a reasonable precise picture about changes in the
brain’s electrical potential while people perform a cognitive task.
ADDITIONAL AREAS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO COGNITIVE
PSYCHOLOGY
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
 Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch of computer science which
seeks to explore human cognitive processes by creating computer
models that show “intelligent behavior”, and also accomplish the
same tasks that humans do
 Research in artificial intelligence have tried to explain how humans
recognize a face, create a mental image, and write a poem, as well
as hundreds of additional cognitive accomplishments
Computer metaphor
 According to the computer metaphor, our cognitive processes work
like a computer, that is, a complex, multipurpose machine that
processes information quickly and accurately
 The human and computer may operate according to similar general
principles
 Both can compare symbols and can make choices according
to the results of comparison
 Both have a limited capacity
 Thagard (2005) suggests that a computer model resembles a recipe
in cooking. A recipe has two parts.
 Ingredients which are somewhat like the structure
 The cooking instructions for working with the ingredients,
which are somewhat like the process
 With the right computer program and sufficient mathematical
detail, researchers hope to imitate the flexibility and the efficiency
of human cognitive processes
 Every metaphor has its limitations, and the computer cannot
precisely duplicate human cognitive processes
Pure artificial intelligence
 Pure AI – is an approach that designs a program to accomplish a
cognitive task as efficiently as possible, even if the computer’s
processes are completely different from the processes used by
humans
 Researchers have designed pure AI systems that can play chess,
speak English, or diagnose an illness.
Computer simulation
 Computer simulation or computer modeling – attempts to take
human limitations into account. Its goal is to program a computer
to perform a specific cognitive task in the same way that humans
actually perform this task
 Computer simulation research has been most active in such areas
as memory, language processing, problem solving, and logical
reasoning
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COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
Connectionist approach
 This approach argues that cognitive processes can be understood in
terms of networks that link together neuron-like units; in addition,
many operations can proceed simultaneously rather than a step at a
time.
 Human cognition is often parallel, not strictly linear
 Other names for this approach include Parallel distributed
processing approach (PDP) and Neural-network approach.
 This approach is useful in explaining why we can perform some
cognitive tasks quickly and accurately
 Cerebral cortex – the outer layer of the brain that is essential for
cognitive processes.
 The discovered connections among neurons in the brain suggests
that an item stored in the brain seems to be distributed throughout a
section of the brain instead of it being localized in a specific pin-
point sized location of the cortex.
 Some researchers were discovering the limitations of the classical-
artificial intelligence approach. This approach viewed processing
as a series of separate operations
 Serial processing – the system must complete one step
before it can proceed to the next step in the flowchart.
- this one step at a time approach may capture the series
of operations a person conducts while thinking about
every step in a process.
 Parallel processing – numerous signals are being handled at
the same time. On many cognitive tasks processing seems to
be both parallel and distributed, explaining the origin of one
label for this theory, the parallel distributed processing
approach
COGNITIVE SCIENCE
 Cognitive science – is an interdisciplinary field that tries to answer
questions about the mind
 Cognitive science includes:
 Cognitive psychology
 Neuroscience
 And artificial intelligence
 Philosophy
 Linguistics
 Anthropology
 Sociology
 Economics
 According to cognitive scientists, thinking requires us to
manipulate our internal representations of the external world.
Cognitive scientists focus on these internal representations
 Cognitive scientists value interdisciplinary studies, and they try to
build bridges among the academic areas.
VISUAL AND AUDITORY RECOGNITION
OVERVIEW OF VISUAL OBJECT RECOGNITION
 Perception – uses. Previous knowledge to gather and interpret the
stimuli registered by the senses
 Perception combines aspects of both the outside world and one’s inner
world
 The analysis of the physical properties of input occurring early after it
makes contact with one’s sensory receptors constitutes the “bottom-up”
part of perception
 After early sensory processing, additional higher level
processing of the input occurs
 Internal representation of stimulus is formed and matched to
information stored in the long term memory
 An object is recognized once bottom-up information has been
processed enough for this matching process to occur
 Object recognition/Pattern recognition – a process where we identify
a complex arrangement of sensory stimuli, and perceiving that the
pattern is separate from its background
THE VISUAL SYSTEM
 Distal stimulus – refers to the actual object that is in the environment
 Proximal stimulus – refers to the information gathered on the sensory
receptors
 Retina – a part of the human eye which covers the back portion of the
eye
 It contains millions of neurons that register and transmit
visual information from the outside world
 Sensory memory – a large-capacity storage system that records
information from each of the senses with reasonable accuracy
 Iconic memory/Visual memory – preserves an image of a
visual stimulus for a brief period after the stimulus has
disappeared
 Primary visual cortex – a portion of the brain located in the
occipital lobe; this portion of the cerebral cortex is concerned
with basic processing of visual stimuli
 Information from the retina up can travel to the primary visual cortex in
about 50-80 milliseconds
ORGANIZATION IN VISUAL PERCEPTION
 Our visual system is designed to impose organization on the richly
complicated visual world
 Gestalt psychology - a view that believes that humans have basic
tendencies to organize what they see
 the whole is more than a sum of its parts
 Figure – has a distinct shape with clearly defined edges
 Ground – refers to the region or portion in an image that is
left over and forms the background
 Ambiguous figure-ground relationship – the figure and ground
reverse from time to time
 Even in situations such as this, our perceptual system
imposes organization on a stimulus, so that one portion
stands out and the remainder recedes into the background
 Illusory contours – we see edges even though they are not
physically present in the stimulus
THEORIES OF VISUAL OBJECT RECOGNITION
 According to one early theory, our visual system compares a
stimulus with a set of templates
 Templates – refers to specific patterns that an individual have
stored in memory. It then notes which template matches the
stimulus
 Perception requires a more flexible system than matching a pattern
against a specific, stored template
 Human perception is somewhat flexible, and we may use different
approaches for different object recognition tasks
Feature-analysis theory
 Feature analysis theories – propose a relatively flexible approach
in which a visual stimulus is composed of a small number of
characteristic or components
 Distinctive feature – refers to each individual characteristic
 Feature-analysis theories are consistent with psychological
research
 People require a relatively long time to decide whether one
letter is different from a second letter when these two letters
share a large number of critical features
 These theories are also compatible with evidence from
neuroscience
 The visual system contains feature detectors that are present
when we are born. These detectors help us recognize certain
features of letters and simple patterns
 The feature-analysis theories were constructed to explain the
relatively simple recognition of letters. In contrast, the shapes that
occur in nature are much more complex
Recognition-by-components theory
 Recognition by components theory – a specific view of an object
can be represented as an arrangement of simple 3D shapes called
Geons
 Emphasizes the way in which Geons are combined
 Geon – arrangement of simple 3D shapes that can be combined to
form meaningful objects
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COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
 An arrangement of three geons gives people enough
information to classify an object
 This theory by Irving Biederman is essentially a feature-analysis
theory that explains how we recognize three-dimensional objects
 Findings in Biederman’s studies show that
 young children may initially represent each object as an
undifferentiated complete object.
 In older children, adults can represent an object as a
collection of geons
 Viewer-centered approach – proposes that we store a small
number of views of 3D objects rather than just one view
 If we see an object from an unusual angle, and this object
does not match any object shape we have stored in memory,
we will mentally rotate the image of that object until it
matches one of the views that are stored in memory
TOP-DOWN PROCESSING AND VISUAL OBJECT RECOGNITION
Bottom-up versus top-down processing
 Bottom-up processing – the stimulus characteristics are important
when we recognize an object. The physical stimuli from the
environment are registered on the sensory receptors. Information is
then passed on to higher more sophisticated levels in the perceptual
system
 The combination of simple, bottom-level features helps you
recognize more complex, whole objects
 Top-down processing – emphasizes how a person’s concepts,
expectations, and memory can influence object recognition. The
higher level processes all help in identifying objects
 One’s expectations at the higher level of visual processing
will work their way down and guide our early processing of
the visual stimulus
Top-down processing and reading
 Researchers have demonstrated that top-down processing can
influence our ability to recognize a variety of objects.
 Psychologists who study reading have realized for decades that a
theory of recognition must include factors other than the
information in the stimulus
 Word superiority effect – we can identify a single letter more
accurately and more rapidly when it appears in a meaningful word
than when it appears alone in a meaningless or string of unrelated
letters
 The context of a sentence facilitates the recognition of a word in a
sentence
 Both the features of the stimulus and the nature of the context
influence word recognition
 Bottom-up and top-down processing operate in a coordinated
fashion
 Context is important because word recognition also operates partly
in a top-down fashion
 Precious letters in a word help us identify the remaining letters of
the word quickly
 Other words in a sentence help a person identify individual words
more quickly
Smart mistakes in object recognition
 When we occasionally do make a mistake, that error can be traced
to a “smart mistake” such as overusing the strategy of top-down
processing
 Change blindness – occurs when we fail to detect a change in an
object or a scene
 When perceiving an entire scene, our top-down processing
encourages us to assume that the basic meaning of the scene
will remain stable.
 This assumption is rational, and the mistaken perception
makes sense
 People quickly identified changes when the change is
important
 People are surprisingly blind to fairly obvious changes in the
objects they are perceiving
 In general, when we look at a scene with numerous objects,
we typically do not store a detailed representation of every
item in that scene
 Inattentional blindness – when we are paying attention to some
events in a scene, we may fail to notice when an unexpected but
completely visible object suddenly appears
 People often fail to notice a new object if they are paying
close attention to something else
 People are likely to experience inattentional blindness when
the primary task is cognitively demanding
 Ecological validity – a study is high in ecological validity if the
conditions in which the research is conducted are similar to the
natural setting where the results will be applied
 We function very well in our normal visual environment.
 If we are walking along a busy street, a variety of perceptual
representations will rapidly change from one glance to the
next
 The visual system is fairly accurate in creating the “gist” or
general interpretation of a scene.
 We focus only the information that appears to be important,
such as the proximity of an approaching bus as you cross the
street, and you ignore the unimportant details
SPECIALISED VISUAL RECOGNITON PROCESSES
 The processing of certain types of visual stimuli appears to be in
part supported by neural and cognitive processes that are somewhat
specialized
 Special recognition processes have been proposed for the
recognition of:
 Faces
 Particular locations and spatial layouts
 Visual words
 These types of stimuli are frequent and highly important for
navigating and interpreting the visual environment.
 Thus, it is reasonable that certain portions of neural tissue
become highly specialized over the course of development to
support the processing of them
 We recognize most objects by identifying the individualized
features that combine together to create these objects.
 However, researchers emphasized that most people perceive
faces in a different fashion from other stimuli
 Research participants were significantly more accurate in
recognizing a facial feature when it appeared within the
context of a whole face, rather than in isolation
 Holistic recognition – recognizing objects (the face in particular)
in terms of their overall shape and structure.
 We perceive a face in terms of its gestalt or overall quality
that transcends its individual elements
Neuroscience research on face recognition
 Prosopagnosia – a condition wherein an individual cannot
recognize human faces, though they perceive other objects
relatively normally
 Individuals with prosopagnosia can easily recognize common
objects
 People with prosopagnosia often report that the various parts
of a person’s face seem independent of one another, instead
of forming a unified, complete face
 The presence of this disorder is often taken as additional
evidence that special mechanisms underlie facial processing
 Temporal cortex – the location in the brain that is most
responsible for facial recognition.
 FMRI technique – a technique for obtaining images of human
brain activity.
 FMRI studies demonstrated that the fusiform face area is
more activated when an individual is expose to images of
faces
 People are much more accurate in identifying upright faces
compared to upside-down faces
 Face-inversion effect – people are much more accurate in
identifying upright faces compared to upside-down faces
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 When car experts and bird experts were expose to either cars or
birds, the fusiform area was activated.
 The fusiform area may not be designed to process only
information about faces
Applied research on face recognition
 Applied research on face recognition focuses on real-life situations
that assess our ability to recognize people’s faces
 When students carried a credit card that showed their own photo,
the cashiers correctly accepted the card 93% of the time. However,
when students carried a card that showed a photo of another
person, they correctly rejected the photo only 36% of the time
 In general, people guessed quite accurately in studies that explored
whether people can accurately match two images of a person’s face
 Schizophrenia – one of the most serious psychological disorders.
It typically do not show intense emotions, and they may have
hallucinations
 Individuals with schizophrenia tend to perform poorly on
many cognitive tasks
 Researchers have also reported that people with
schizophrenia seem to have difficulty in perceiving faces and
facial expressions
 It was hypothesized that the poor performance in judging
faces might be due to more general problems on cognitive
tasks, rather than a specific difficulty with faces
SPEECH PERCEPTION
 Speech perception – during speech perception, the auditory system
must record the sound vibrations generated by someone talking. The
system must translate the vibrations into a sequence of sounds that we
perceive as speech
 In order to perceive a word, we must distinguish the sound pattern of one
word from the tens of thousands of irrelevant words that are stored in
our memory
 We must separate the voice of the speaker from the irrelevant
background noises
 Speech perception is indeed extremely complex
CHARACTERISTICS OF SPEECH PERCEPTION
 Phoneme – refers to the basic unit of spoken language.
 The English language uses between 40 and 45 phonemes, a number
that includes both vowels and consonants
Word boundaries
 The actual acoustical stimulus of spoken language shows no clear-
cut pauses to mark the boundaries between words.
 An actual physical event marks a word boundary less than 40% of
the time
 Research shows that our speech recognition system initially
considers several different hypotheses about how to divide a phrase
into words
 The system immediately and effortlessly uses our knowledge
about language in order to place boundaries in appropriate
locations
Variability in phoneme pronunciation
 Inter-speaker variability – refers to the observation that different
speakers of the same language produce the same sound differently
 May be affected by factors such as the speaker’s gender, age,
and regional dialect
 A second source of variability is that speakers often fail to
reproduce phonemes in a precise fashion
 Coarticulation – the third source of variability. When we
pronounce a particular phoneme, the mouth remains in
somewhat the same shape it was when pronouncing the
previous phoneme. Resulting to a slight variety of the
phoneme pronunciation from time to time
Context and speech perception
 People are active listeners
 Instead of passively receiving speech sounds, we can use the
context as a cue to help us figure out a sound or a word
 Top-down factors also influence speech perception, because we
use our vast knowledge about language to help us perceive
ambiguous words
 Phonemic restoration – filling in a missing phoneme, using
contextual meaning as a cue
 People are able to reconstruct missing words based on the
context cue at end of sentences
 It is a well-documented phenomenon and it has been
demonstrated in numerous studies
 The top-down processing approach argues that we use our
knowledge about language to facilitate recognition, whether we are
looking at objects or listening to speech
 We actively use our knowledge about language to create
expectations about what we might hear
Visual cues as an aid to speech perception
 Information from the speaker’s lips and face helps us resolve
ambiguities from the speech signal.
 We integrate visual cues during speech perception
 McGurk effect – refers to the influence of visual information on
speech perception, when individuals must integrate both visual and
auditory information
 Superior temporal sulcus – the location within the cerebral cortex
that gives rise to the McGurk effect.
 Located in the right side of the horizontal groove along the
center of the temporal lobe of the cortex
 It is responsible for other tasks where sight and sound must
be integrated
THEORIES OF SPEECH PERCEPTION
 Special mechanism approach – humans are born with a
specialized device that allows us to decode speech stimuli. We
process sounds more quickly and accurately than other auditory
stimuli, such as instrumental music
 Phonetic module – a special-purpose neural mechanisms
that specifically processes all aspects of speech perception.
This module presumable enable listeners to perceive
ambiguous phonemes accurately
 This approach suggests that the brain is organized in an
unusual way. The module that handles speech perception
would not rely on general cognitive functions
 Categorical perception – we perceive sounds in clear-cut
categories rather than partway in between categories
 General mechanism approaches – we can explain perception
without proposing any special phonetic module.
 humans use the same neural mechanisms to process both
speech sounds and non-speech sounds
 Speech therefore is a learned ability
 Humans exhibit categorical perception for complex non-
speech sounds. Other research supporting the general
mechanisms viewpoints uses event-related potentials (ERPs)
 Other evidence against the phonetic module is that people’s
judgement about phonemes are influenced by visual cues
 Our ability to perceive speech sounds is impressive.
However, this ability can probably explain by our general
perceptual abilities combined with other cognitive abilities,
rather than any special, inborn human speech
We seldom give much thought to our attention. Instead, attention just
“happens”, and similar to visual processing, it seems as natural to us as
breathing. Attention is involved in just about any cognitive tasks that we
perform on a daily basis.
OVERVIEW OF ATTENTION
 Attention – can be defined as a concentration of mental activity that
allows us to take in a limited portion of the vast stream of information
available from both our sensory world and our memory
 Unattended items lose out and are not processed in detail.
 Attention allows us to direct our mental effort towards thoughts and
environmental stimuli that are most important to us given our current
goals
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 It allows us to filter out information that is not useful or important given
our current goal state
 Attention tasks rely on both bottom-up and top-down processing
 Bottom-up processing – we sometimes concentrate our
mental activity because an interesting stimulus in the
environment has capture our attention
 Top-down processing – we sometimes concentrate our
mental activity because we want to pay attention to some
specific stimulus
 It refers to multiple coordinated systems and processes that together
provide us with the ability to strategically allocate our attention
DIVIDED ATTENTION
 Divided attention task – we try to pay attention to two or more
simultaneous messages, responding appropriately to each message
 When attempting to equally divide our attention between two or
more messages, both our speed and accuracy suffer especially
when the tasks are challenging
 Multitask – trying to accomplish two or more tasks at the same
time.
 When people multitask they strain the limits of attention as
well as the limits of their working memory and long-term
memory
 People may believe that they can multitask, but the research
does not support this illusion
 A general guideline is that we will typically perform faster and
more accurately if we work on one task at a time
 Studies who that people make significantly more driving errors
when they are having a conversation on a handheld cellphone,
compared to driving without conversation
 Participants who used cellphones showed a form of
inattentional blindness
 Task switching is closely related to multitasking in that if you are
deeply engrossed in writing a research paper and your roommate
keeps interrupting, you are more likely to work more slowly and
make more errors during the transitions
SELECTIVE ATTENTION
 Selective attention task – requires people to pay attention to
certain kinds of information while ignoring other ongoing
information
 Our cognitive apparatus is impressively well-designed. Features
such as selective attention may actually be beneficial
Dichotic listening
 Dichotic listening – one message is presented to the left ear, and a
different message is presented to the right ear
 Participants of research involving dichotic listening are asked
to shadow or repeat after the message being said by the
speaker
 People can process sonly one message at a time.
 People are more likely to process the unattended message when:
1. Both messages are presented slowly
2. The main task is not challenging
3. The meaning of the unattended message is immediately
relevant
 Cocktail party effect – paying close to a certain stimulus because
it contains information that is relevant to an individual, such as
their name or a name of another person that matters to the
individual
 Working memory – refers to the brief, immediate memory for
material that we are currently processing
 Students who had a high working memory capacity noticed
their names in the cocktail party phenomenon only 20 % of
the time
 Students with a low working memory capacity noticed their
name 65% of the time
 People with a relatively low capacity have difficulty blocking
out the irrelevant information such as their name. They easily
get distracted from the task they are supposed to be
completing
 When people’s attention is divided, they can sometimes notice
characteristics of unattended messages, such as the speaker’s
gender and whether their own name is being mentioned.
Stroop effect
 Stroop effect – people take a long time to name the ink color when
that color is used in printing an incongruent word.
 In contrast, they can quickly name that same ink color when
it appears as a solid patch of color
 People take longer to pay attention to a color when they are
distracted by another feature of the stimulus
 Adults have had much more practice in reading words than in
naming colors. The more automatic process interferes with the less
automatic process
 Emotional Stroop task – people are instructed to name the ink
color of words that could have strong emotional significance to
them.
 These individuals often require more time to name the color
of the stimuli, presumably because they have trouble ignoring
their emotional reactions to the words themselves
 Phobic disorder – an excessive fear of a specific object.
These individuals are significantly slower on anxiety-
arousing words than on control words in the research
 Attention bias – describes a situation in which people pay
extra attention to some stimuli or some features
 The Stroop task has also been used in research on eating disorders.
 Slow responses to body-shape words predicted women’s
attitudes about eating
 When women took much longer to read words related to
shape, they were especially likely to have high scores on the
Eating Attitudes test
 Cognitive-behavioral approach – psychological problems arise
from inappropriate thinking and inappropriate learning
 PTSD – posttraumatic stress disorder; it is an anxiety disorder
characterized by repeated re-experiencing of an extremely
traumatic event
 For combat veterans with PTSD, the amount of time
necessary for color naming was higher for combat-related
words than for words on the other two lists
 Magnetoencephalography – records magnetic field fluctuation
produced by neural activity during the processing of stimuli
 Combat veterans with PTSD exhibited reduced activity
around the right ventral prefrontal cortex when processing
combat-related words, relative to those without PTSD
 PTSD-affected individuals appear to access associated
emotions at least partially as a result of either a trigger-
induced attentional impairment or a trigger-induced
weakening of emotional regulation ability
Visual search
 Visual search – the observer must find a target in a visual display
that has numerous distractors
 Trained experts must visually inspect a complicated image in order
to detect a very specific set of visual features that could be
indicative of danger
 Variables that influence visual searches:
 People are much more accurate in identifying a target if it
appears frequently
 Isolated-feature/Combined feature effect – if the target differed
from the irrelevant items in the display with respect to a simple
feature such as color, observers could quickly detect the target.
 People can typically locate an isolated feature more quickly
than a combined feature
 Feature-present/feature-absent effect – cognitive processes
handle positive information better than negative information.
 People can typically locate a feature that is present more
quickly than a feature that is absent
 People performed rapid searches for a feature that was
present.
 When people are searching for a feature that is present, the
target item in the display usually capture their attention
automatically
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COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
 When people search for a feature that is absent, they typically
examine every item, one item at a time. They must use a kind
of attention that emphasizes both bottom-up and top-down
processing
EYE MOVEMENTS IN READING
 Our eye movements provide important information about the way our
minds operate when we perform a number of everyday cognitive tasks
 Researchers have also discovered that our eyes move when we are
speaking
 One particularly compelling use of eye-movement data has been to
examine which objects people look at in a visual scene as they hear
spoken language
OVERVIEW OF EYE MOVEMENTS IN READING
 Saccadic eye movement – a series of little jumps that our eyes
make when reading.
 Its purpose is to bring the center of the retina into position of
the words being read
 Fovea – a very small region in the center of the retina that
has better acuity than other retinal regions
 Fixation – a brief pause made by the visual system in order to
acquire information that is useful for comprehending the written
text
 The duration of fixation in English ranges from 200 to 250
milliseconds
 Perc
eptu
al
span
– brain that are active during the cognitive task
refers to the number of letters and spaces that we perceive during a
fixation.
 Parafoveal view - refers to the fact that readers can access
information about upcoming words even though they are currently
fixated on a word to the left of those words
 This can cause shorter fixation durations on a nearby word
when information about the properties of the text is available
parafoveally
 Saccadic eye movements show several predictable patterns
 when the eye jumps forward in a saccadic movement, it
usually moves toward the center of a word rather than to a
blank space between words of between sentences
 The eye also jumps past short words, words that appear
frequently in a language, and words that are highly
predictable in a sentence
 Properties of the written language system can influence the general
pattern of eye movements discussed above.
SELECTIVE ATTENTION IN READING
 Reading is one of the most complex behaviors that humans can
perform.
 Reading involves the coordination of visual. Linguistic,
oculomotor, and attentional systems
 A large amount of research demonstrates that when people are
highly certain of the identity of an upcoming word, there is a much
higher probability that they will skip it, relative to a context in
which the word is not predictable
 Good readers make larger jumps when reading and are also less
likely to make regressions
 Regressions – moving eyes backward to earlier material in
the sentence when they realize that hey to not have
understood the passage they are reading
 A wide variety of factors have an important influence on the
pattern and speed of our saccadic eyer movements
NEUROSCIENCE OF ATTENTION
 Research use a variety of sophisticated techniques in order to identify a
network of areas throughout the brain that accomplish various attention
tasks
 Several regions of the brain are responsible for attention. Several
systems in the cortex process different aspects of attention
ORIENTING ATTENTION NETWORK
 Orienting attention network – generally responsible for the kind
of attention required for visual search in which we must shift our
attention around to various spatial locations
 Brain lesion – refers to specific brain damage caused by strokes,
accidents, or other traumas
 Damage to the parietal region of the right hemisphere of the
brain results to having trouble noticing visual stimulus that
appears on the left side of their visual field.
 People with damage in the left parietal region have trouble
noticing a visual stimulus on the right side
 Unilateral spatial neglect – the term when a person ignores a part
of his or her visual field
 PET Scan – positron emission tomography scan; measures blood
flow in the brain by injecting the participant with a radioactive
chemical just before he or she performs a cognitive task
 The chemical travels through the blood to the parts of the
 A specialized camera makes an image of the accumulated
chemical
 The parietal cortex shows increased blood flow when people
perform visual searches and when they pay attention to spatial
locations
 The orienting network develops during the first year of life by
about 4 months of age
EXECUTIVE ATTENTION NETWORKS
 Executive attention network – is responsible for the kind of
attention we use when a task focuses on conflict
 The executive attention network inhibits our automatic
responses to stimuli
 It is primarily involved during top-down control of attention
 This network begins to develop about age 3
 There is also some evidence that adults can enhance their executive
attention network by learning meditation, adopted from traditional
Chinese techniques
 Orienting attention network: PET scans and other neuroscience
techniques have identified one brain region that is typically active when
we are searching for objects
 Executive attention network: Neuroscience research also demonstrates
that a different brain region is typically active when we must inhibit an
automatic response and produce a less-obvious response
THEORIES OF ATTENTION
EARLY THEORIES OF ATTENTION
 First approaches to attention emphasized that people are extremely
limited in the amount of information they can process at any given
time
 Bottleneck theories – propose a similar narrow passageway in
human processing. The bottleneck limits the quantity of
information to which we can pay attention.
 When one message is currently flowing through a bottleneck,
the other messages must be left behind
 Researchers rejected the bottleneck theories because those theories
underestimate the flexibility of human attention
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COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
 Information is lost throughout many phases of attention rather than  We need to emphasize this topic of consciousness about thought
at just one phase of the attention process as the bottleneck theories processes, because it shows that cognitive psychologists should not rely
suggest on people’s introspections

FEATURE-INTEGRATION THEORY THOUGHT SUPPRESSION

 Anne Treisman – developed an elaborate theory of attention and
perceptual processing
 Feature integration theory – distributed attention and focused
attention form a continuum, rather than two distinctive categories
 Distributed attention – allows one to register features
automatically
 Parallel processing is used across the filed
 Features are registered simultaneously
 This kind of processing is so effortless that one is not even
aware that he/she is using it
 Focused attention – requires slower serial processing.
 It identifies which features belong together
 A more demanding kind of processing is necessary when
objects are more complex
Research on the theory
 Research on distributed attention: If you process isolated
features in distributed attention, then you should be able to rapidly
locate a target among its neighboring irrelevant items. That target
should seem to pop out of the display automatically, no matter how
many items are in display
 Research on focused attention: People need more time to find the
target when there are a large number of distractors in a focused
attention task
 Illusory conjunction – refers to an inappropriate combination of
features, perhaps combining one object’s shape with a nearby
object’s color
 The human visual system actually processes an object’s features
independently. The visual system has a binding problem because
it does not represent the important features of an object as a unified
whole
 Focused attention allows the binding process to operate
 When we cannot use focused attention, we sometimes form
illusory conjunctions that are consistent with our expectations
 Thought suppression – refers to the attempt of eliminating the
thoughts, ideas, and images that are unrelated to an undesirable
stimulus
 Ironic effects of mental control – describe how our efforts can
backfire when we attempt to control the contents of our
consciousness
 Initial suppression of specific thoughts can produce a
rebound effect
BLINDSIGHT
 Blindsight – a condition in which an individual with a damaged
visual cortex claims not to see an object; however, he or she can
accurately report some characteristics of that object
 People with blindsight can report visual attributes such as color,
shape and motion
 Most of the information that is registered on the retina travels to
the visual cortex. However, a small portion of this information
travels to other locations in the cerebral cortex that are located
outside the visual cortex
 A person with blindsight can therefore identify some
characteristics of the visual stimulus based on information
registered in other cortical locations
 It is possible that an individual will not be conscious of the
visual experience. However, he or she may indeed perceive
the stimulus
 Our consciousness is not a perfect mirror of our cognitive
processes.

Current status of the theory

 Basic elements of the feature-integration theory were proposed
more than 25 years ago. Researches have already conducted
dozens of additional studies and the original, straightforward
theory has been modified
 With extensive research, theorists frequently conclude that reality
is much more complex. Rather than two clear-cut categories, we
find that distributed attention can occasionally resemble focused
attention

CONSCIOUSNESS
 Consciousness – refers to the awareness that people have about the
outside world and about their perceptions, images, thoughts, memories,
and feelings
 It is closely related to attention, but the processes are
definitely not identical
 In general it can be associated with the kind of controlled,
focused attention that is not automatic
 Cognitive psychologists have been especially interested in three
interrelated issues concerned with consciousness
1. Our inability to bring certain thoughts into consciousness
2. Our inability to let certain thoughts escape from consciousness
3. Blindsight
 Mindless reading – the eyes may move forward, but you do not process
the meaning of the material
 Mind wandering – occurs when your thoughts shift from the external
environment in favor of internal processing
 We often have little direct access to our thought processes.
 We may be fully conscious of the products of our thought processes, but
we usually not conscious of the processes that created these products
 Psychologists currently believe that our verbal reports are somewhat
accurate reflections of our cognitive processes