no reason for my mind to be still

EL

1100

2500

2501

PSYC 2501 sec 02
Cognitive Psychology, Fall 2009
UConn Storrs Campus, MONT 143
TUE THU 3:30-4:45
Eric Lundquist

Click here to SUBMIT QUIZ QUESTIONS for QUIZ 2
(DON'T EMAIL THEM TO ME DIRECTLY, USE THIS FORM!)
Do this between Thursday 11/19/09 and Sunday 11/22/09 at the latest so I have time to choose 20 of your questions and make a quiz out of them for you in a timely manner. But you can still submit a question until the quiz is posted, if you "forgot" until now. I'll give out bubble sheets in class; when the quiz is ready I'll post it right here on this web page as soon as I can, hopefully by NEXT Saturday or Sunday (after Thanksgiving). Then you'll do it at home -- using notes, text, and taking as much time as you like, but NOT talking to each other about it! -- and return your bubble sheet to me personally or to my mailbox or office, by Thursday 12/3/09. (If this date changes, it will be announced right here.) Hope this helps with your studying for the final, and the open-book nature of the quiz should help your grade overall.

As described in class, YOU make up this quiz. JUST FOR SUBMITTING A (DECENT) QUESTION, you will receive ONE POINT on this quiz. Plus if yours gets used, presumably you'll know the answer to it. And of course if I don't receive 20 decent questions covering this material, I can easily make up the balance myself -- but my questions are soooo hard...

You should submit one multiple choice question on material roughly since the midterm -- starting with the Atkinson and Shiffrin "modal model" at the beginning of Ch. 5 and continuing through Thursday's class material on long-term memory (consult the outline of arguments for and against the modal model and its elements as a reminder of many of the points covered) -- with one clearly correct answer (preferably marked as such) and three plausible but incorrect alternatives. Use the form I've provided at the above link so as to save me as much typing and formatting as possible!

BE SURE TO INCLUDE YOUR NAME SO I CAN CREDIT YOU FOR CONTRIBUTING A QUESTION! Otherwise I can't tell who it came from.

EXAM 1 RESULTS
and may I once again urge you to take your well-deserved vacation time AFTER class, because missing class could hurt you later!
EXAM 1 REVIEW INFO
EXAM 1 IS THURSDAY 10/29/09, MONT 143, 3:30 PM
REVIEW SESSION WEDNESDAY 10/28/09, MONT 143, 6:00 PM
check back here for review information to be posted

QUIZ 1 RESULTS
QUIZ 1 REVIEW INFO

When I made a shadow on my window shade They called the police and testified But they're like the people chained up in the cave In the allegory of the people in the cave by the Greek guy -- from "No One Knows My Plan" by They Might Be Giants (play the song)

READING:

1. REQUIRED: Goldstein, E. Bruce (2008). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience (2nd ed.). Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth. (ISBN-13: 9780495095576)
2. REQUIRED: On-Line Readings and Reserve Readings (to be announced)
3. OPTIONAL: Some classic papers in the Psychology of Learning - Here's a collection of links to papers I'll refer to in class - and a few of them may appear among the required readings for the class. Also see Classics In The History Of Psychology, if you're looking for extra stuff to read.

Stellarium is a free program that will simulate a planetarium on your computer so that you will always know what stars you're looking at and when something interesting will be appearing. It's quite addictive.

Norman Borlaug died on Saturday September 12, 2009. Read the link for an appreciation, a short interview, and even the clip where they mentioned him on The West Wing in 2000, way back in its awesome days. And of course his Wikipedia entry is quite thorough and interesting and addresses some controversy as well. A billion lives saved by one man? Maybe...

Two short excerpts about James Gibson's Ecological Psychology: these are written by people who DON'T actually agree with Gibson and his ecological view, but who are describing him and his work fairly objectively. (While they're sort of skeptical, personally I'm not!) It's difficult to sum up the approach in brief; the linked passages are decent outsider views, but they're still incomplete and fail to appreciate some subtleties and philosophical implications. Ecological psychology is an approach to problems of perception and other aspects of psychology that is very different from conventional mainstream approaches. Instead of looking at the mind as a kind of computer involved in the processing of information (which is what mainstream psychology assumes), it is concerned with how animals and people can directly detect information in the environment which will be sufficient to guide their actions. The phrase "directly detect" is why the approach is often referred to as "direct perception"; it implies that the information doesn't need to be processed at all, which is controversial to say the least, and which certainly flies in the face of many centuries of epistemology. (At the end of the excerpt is an example of what a conventional "INdirect perception" approach looks like, for comparison.) The term "ecological" refers to a view of the animal and its environment as an integrated and co-evolving whole, as opposed to the conventional approach which seems to view the animal as an arbitrary observer placed into an arbitrary context. The ecological approach was developed by James Gibson over the whole course of his career, and today the University of Connecticut is the world leader in promoting and pursuing this approach. In particular the Psychology Department's Center For The Ecological Study Of Perception And Action (CESPA) is dedicated to advancing research and theory in ecological psychology.

Spiders and turkeys and bears: some pictures from backyards (mine, my brother's). You're free to exclaim "oh my!" after reading the album title. Just something to look at if you're bored.

Some Introductory notes: three important dates in the history of psychology; four defintions of psychology; a timeline and four terms that are central to epistemology (For the full version of the epistemology distinctions, see the Outline of Epstemology linked below.) Brief overview of psychology's history: A few pages from Bruce Goldstein's Cognitive Psychology textbook that provide a sketch of the history of psychology from its beginnings up through the Cognitive Revolution of the 1950's and 1960's, for those who would like a text reference to go along with the class discussion. For our purposes this excerpt really begins on p. 9, "The First Psychology Laboratories." The "imageless thought debate" is not mentioned explicitly but problems with introspection are summarized under "Watson Founds Behaviorism." (And not that it matters for this course, but in a History Of Psychology course it would be important to recognize that Wundt's own view of psychology was not Structuralism but something a bit more subtle called Voluntarism.)

Two commentaries on the continuing vitality of behaviorism despite rumors of its demise:

• Roddy Roediger's March 2004 commentary from the APS Observer, 17(3) re-examines the simplistic story about behaviorism's fate after the rise of cognitive psychology, shedding some important light. One nice point he makes is that Chomsky contributed a rationalist intellectual foundation to refuting Skinner's behaviorism, but mainly was arguing at cross-purposes with Skinner and maybe shouldn't be thought of as have fomented a revolution.

• Alferink, Larry (2005). Behaviorism Died Today, Again! The General Psychologist, 40(1) (Spring 2005), 7-9. This is a brief mention of some of the many ways, both scientific and practical, in which behaviorism is still thriving today, which should counter the cliché that it's a thing of the past.

Here are a couple of ways to get things really wrong, in viewing the relationship between science and religion:

• Cognitive Psychologist Stephen Pinker argues in a commentary piece in Newsweek magazine that modern neuroscience has disproved the existence of the soul; responses from readers point out that no such scientific disproof is possible. Not stated explcitly is the fact that science is not the kind of inquiry that could ever be used to anwswer questions about the existence of souls or of God, and that deciding such questions is a matter of personal commitment that might then steer the type of inquiry you choose to pursue. See Lewontin's quote on materialism in science for a voice of reason.

• From a book on the "debate" over Intelligent Design: Intelligent Design is a euphemism for Biblical Creationism that atttempts to portray itself as science by supposing the "evidence" of the complexity of life leaves no possibility for its explanation in material terms, and that instead there must be a "designer" behind all of the complexity. That may sound like a plausible claim to some, but it's not a scientific one, since science only allows certain kinds of evidence and procedures to be used; science certainly doesn't throw up its hands and give up, and say "this is beyond us, so it all must have just been made by someone." If it all WAS made by someone, SCIENCE WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO DISCOVER THAT FACT, and will keep banging its head against the evidence FOREVER, in a noble failed attempt to stick to its principles. But the issue is far from settled, and probably never will be. In this excerpt, Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe (under "Conclusion") explicitly claims that science is not a game with arbitrary rules, when in fact that's exactly what it is -- well, not arbitrary rules, but rules nonetheless, which exclude the kind of conclusion Behe wants to force. Break those rules, and it's no longer science that you're doing. Then there are a few pages by noted philosopher of religion Alvin Plantinga, who tries to undermine those rules of science (what he calls science's "methodological naturalism" or commitment to non-supernatural explanation), so you can get a taste of the style of argument; notice the footnote that I think shows the bankruptcy of his point of view: #31, which essentially says the thing for scientists to do is to try to solve problems for a while, then give up and say "God did it." Again, even if it's true that "God did it," that's NOT SCIENCE!

• A reflection on changing the meaning of words like "science," or in this passage, the word "art." It's from the play Travesties by Tom Stoppard (author of things you've probably heard of like Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead and Shakespeare In Love and one spectacular thing you should check out, Arcadia, a mere hundred page play that could change how you look at the world). I should note that in this excerpt the character Carr's point of view is hardly the final word on the matter, though it is the reason I've posted this link.

Crimson by Josip Novakovich is a moving and disturbing short story that features this intriguing passage: "Milan thought how strange it was that he should be held responsible for the past, three years ago, when he was conscripted and enslaved--when he wasn't even himself. 'We all have multiple personalities,' he said. 'One of us is the past, and another the future, and there's no present me. We are vacant right now--spaces through which the past and the future disagree.'"

Outline of epistemology for psychology: This web page highlights some differences between empiricist and rationalist approaches to psychology, and calls them Platonic and Aristotelian in character -- but be warned: they are not exactly what Plato or Aristotle would have claimed, they're just descriptions of the spirit of the two families of claims! Plato and Aristotle: discussed in brief, from another textbook; this excerpt pretty well reproduces the gist of the lecture on these two figures. Illustration of top-down processing: in reading the words "THE CAT" as printed in the link, bottom-up or purely stimulus-driven processing is not sufficient to decide whether the ambiguous letter is an A or an H in each word, since it could be either; instead the reader makes use of higher-level knowledge (of vocabulary and word spellings) which is normally the end product of the reading process, to resolve the ambiguous stimulus in each context through what is known as top-down or knowledge-driven processing (i.e., the knowledge that there is a word C-A-T in English, but no word C-H-T).

Some excerpts from Plato's Dialogues: They're very readable even in this classic translation from the 19th century. "Meno" features the slave boy demonstrating that he knows the Pythagorean Theorem (this version with illustrations may be easier to follow). Book VII of The Republic contains the famous Allegory Of The Cave.

David Hume on causation, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) -- in case you want to see where questions about causality all began. (See also the famous conclusion.)

Outline of Logical Positivism: This is a very brief sketch of the philosophy of science known as Logical Positivism, which was very influential in the development of psychology in the first half of the 20th century. It's mainly of interest for the concluding segment, an excerpt from the first English-language manifesto of logical positivism, in which Hume's influence is explicitly acknowledged.

Chomsky, Noam (1959). A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Language, 35(1), 26-58. The famous critique of the behaviorist approach is fairly difficult, but rewarding if you're interested.

• MacCorquodale, Kenneth (1970). On Chomsky's Review Of Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Journal Of The Experimental Analysis Of Behavior, 13(1), 83-99. This lesser known but fairly effective rebuttal of Chomsky's arguments shows how he missed the point of Skinner's book and chose instead to attack behaviorism in general; of course by 1970 this essay was a bit late to counter the perception that Chomsky had successfully demolished behaviorism, which of course he had not done.

Language Development: here are a couple of brief passages scanned from Erika Hoff's text that describe the Chomskyan view of language acquisition, for those who want something more than their notes to refer to. It also makes some of the same points about behaviorism and cognitivism as I made in class, and emphasizes that behaviorism fails as a theory of language. THIS IS PURELY OPTIONAL and introduces no new material that you would be responsible for. Note that Piaget is mentioned in a way that makes his theory sound more like a "quantitative accumulation" process than a "qualitative change" process, but in class we emphasized the qualitative change aspect. Also note that connectionism / parallel distributed processing / neural network models are mentioned in passing as embodying both nativist and empiricist elements. We described them as a type of information processing model (or "computer"), and therefore rationalist. At the same time, they are inspired by arch-empiricist David Hume's view of simple ideas "thinking for themselves" through the application of a small set of rules, rather than the complicated sets of instructions in a familiar computer "program" that might be more in line with Descartes's thinking.

Excerpt from an interview with philosopher Daniel Dennett (from Jonathan Miller's collection titled States Of Mind) on the strategy of investigating the workings of the brain by probing the information processing capacities of the mind, rather than approaching it directly through neuroscience. Note that this difference in investigational strategies is also referred to as top-down vs. bottom-up in a different context.

Two excerpts from Stephen Pinker's book How The Mind Works in which the Computational Theory of Mind is nicely described. Note that at one point, Pinker claims this theory is different from "the despised computer metaphor," which he suggests is the idea that the brain is exactly like a digital computer. But no one actually thinks that, and when people "despise" the computer metaphor, it actually is Pinker's own view that they mean. Pinker just wants to make it seem that no one could possibly have any reasonable objection to what he's saying. This is typical of Pinker, and part of the reason many people (including me) can't stand him; another believer in the Computational Theory of Mind, the famous philosopher Jerry Fodor, found enough to disagree with in this book that he wrote his own book as a response, titled The Mind Doesn't Work That Way. These pages are an interesting read nonetheless.

Two versions of Roger Shepard's monster illusion: with a ruler to show the same heights, and with a movable monster to show the overlap; other illusions are available from these sources as well. Unconscious inferences seem to be based on premises about convergence of lines and relative retinal image size, and their implications for object size.

The Ames Room Illusion, and its explanation.

Inverted faces are more difficult to identify, though it can still be done at some cost. (Look at this and this for comparison. Or view a different face if you prefer (give it a few seconds to load).

Color changing card trick demonstrating the role of attention in perception.

How Our Eyes and Minds Betray Us on the Road, from Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt; pp. 75-89 are most relevant to the topic of attention; the rest of the chapter is just there in case you're interested. Read it as an example of the real-life implications of the theories covered in the textbook -- and then remember it in real life too!

Stroop Effect: time yourself reading the words out loud, and then again saying the names of the colors they're printed in instead.

Excerpt from Alan Baddeley's 1990 textbook Human Memory which can serve as a resource for various experiments discussed in class that are not in the Goldstein text. See also the excerpt from Mark Ashcraft's 1994 textbook Human Memory And Cognition (2nd Ed.) as an alternative treatment of similar material. These are meant only as a supplement or backup for class notes, if needed.

Summary of arguments about the "modal model": this list provides an outline of the arguments and evidence concerning the first explicit model of memory as covered in lecture, along with citations and page references when possible.

Weston Ashmore Bousfield was the first to investigate the clustering of responses in free recall, which suggested that the stimuli were organized by the mind when they were learned. Does his name sound familiar?