1:1 Foundations of cognitive psychology: from Plato to Pavlov Flashcards
What is the definition of cognition in everyday use and in psychology?
Everyday cognition: an individual thought.
Psychology cognition: all forms of mental processes – conscious and unconscious, deliberate and automatic.
Psychology domains of cognition include: ○ perception and memory, ○ the understanding of language, ○ how we identify the objects in our world, ○ how we form and use concepts, ○ interpret events, ○ ascribe meaning, ○ make judgments and decisions, ○ solve problems, ○ plan, and so on-- ○ essentially, everything that allows us to function within the world.
What branch of study is cognitive psychology devoted to?
The scientific study of mental and cognitive processes.
What does cognitive psychology seek to identify and understand?
The internal representations and structures that underlie our conscious and unconscious cognitions.
Cognitive psychology is based on building theoretical descriptions or models of cognitive structures and processes.
Because we cannot observe them directly, the structures and processes can be considered:
Hypothetical constructs.
Their existence in nature is inferred from a combination of testable theory and experimental study: this is cognitive psychology.
When was cognitive psychology arguably the dominant school of psychology?
Later 20th century and 21st century.
True or false: When we talk about cognitive psychology, we are mainly referring to experimental cognitive psychology.
True.
What areas of study have made cognitive psychologists focus on emerging area of science?
Attention, memory, decision making, etc.
The study of brain mechanisms and functional cognitive neuroscience, computers and artificial intelligence, and psycholinguistics.
These different areas, once largely separate, have grown closer and closer– building on each other’s theories, methods, and findings to form evermore integrated models of the mind and how it works.
What is the integration of many cognitive areas of study called?
When did it start?
The cognitive revolution.
Middle of the 20th century, but continues today.
Which two ancient philosophers are thoughts to have shaped modern cognitive psychology?
Plato and Aristotle.
Where does the word “psychology” derive from?
The Greek word “psyche,” which refers to the soul as distinct from the physical body.
In the thinking at that time, the soul encompassed a wide range of concepts, including what we would call the mind.
What two broad schools of thinking emerged 2000+ years ago?
Rationalism and empiricism.
They still influence and echo through modern psychological theory today and are seen as complementary, rather than opposing.
Which school of philosophy was proposed by Plato and what views did it hold?
The rationalist schools.
They broadly held that we can explore the mind and other abstract ideas and constructs through a process of thinking itself, by examining personal experience and, through that, mental processes.
Rationalism --> Thinking itself --> Knowledge is innate --> Nature --> Core human nature
What were two key mental processes examined by rationalists?
INTUITION: considered a form of rational insight arising from exploration of an idea.
DEDUCTION: where we use logical processes of reason to draw novel, general conclusions from existing knowledge and experience.
What processes does rationalists think are innate or acquired through development, without the need to be learned?
Rationalist thinking often presumes that much knowledge, including mathematical concepts such as quantity and logic, is innate.
This is a version of the NATURE view in the nature versus nurture dichotomy.
What broad generalization did rationalists hold about human nature?
We all have an invariable core, our individual human nature, that cannot be altered or manipulated.
It is this that makes each of us unique, whether good or bad.
Who was a founder of empiricism?
Aristotle.
What was the empiricists approach?
They believed that the fundamental concepts of the mind and all knowledge comes from sensation and experience, rather than sitting there, waiting to emerge.
Empiricists had a profound preference for simpler explanations.
Human beings can be controlled and manipulated exceptionally easily.
Also, we are shaped by what happens to us, the NURTURE viewpoint.
Empiricism –>
Shaped by experience –>
Nurture –>
Humans can be controlled and manipulated
In nature vs nurture, which view did empiricists hold and which did rationalists hold?
Rationalists: nature
Empiricists: nurture
What did later empiricists often have a skeptical distrust of?
The unobservable. They preferred evidence of our senses and what emerged from them.
What kind of explanations did empiricists prefer?
Simpler explanations, ones that were sufficient to account for what could be experienced and observed.
Such simplicity was contrasted with explanations based on the internal and the unobservable.
How did the rationalists approach explanations of the internal and unobservable?
They tended to be complex, arising from intuition and reason.
True or false: An implication of the empiricist view was that human beings can be controlled and manipulated exceptionally easily.
True.
They believed that we are nothing other than what we experience and so can be influenced to do whatever we’re taught, again, for good or bad.
True or false: Today, rationalist and empiricist principles remain contradictory or conflicting.
False.
They can be applied to different methods of inquiry and subject areas.
The modern scientific method involves the interplay between reasoning and abstract theorizing, from which generalizations arise by deductive processes, and induction, where we use empirical methods, such as observation and experiments, to test the validity of those theories and so refine them.
During the European Age of Enlightenment and the start of the Scientific Revolution, who was one of the most influential figures in modern philosophy and arguably one of the founding influences on modern psychology?
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to understanding and ends with reason.”
What issue did Kant address in regards to psychology?
Whether psychology, the study of the mind, could ever be an empirical science in the same way as the physical sciences, such as chemistry and physics, which he felt were governed by the immutable laws of mathematics, or whether it must remain within the realm of philosophy or natural science.
What was Kant’s conclusion about psychology?
That it was not and could not be an empirical science, that the mind and its functions were not amenable to direct study.
What were three main arguments of Kant to show that psychology could not be an empirical science?
- INTROSPECTION ALONE: We can only rationally study our own thoughts and internal processes and not those of others.
- NO GENERAL LAW: One person’s introspection may be very different from another’s and, therefore, a poor method to reveal any underlying laws governing the mind.
- REDUCTIONISM: Introspection artificially forces us to separate things that may not be separable, that such so-called reductionism may lead to false conclusions when it comes to studying the mind.
- INTROSPECTION ALTERS what we are attempting to observe and understand.
Kant concluded that the scientific study of the mind was doomed.
Why do we consider Kant an important figure in the history of cognitive psychology?
He defined the mind as a set of separate abilities or functions, but which work together as a whole to produce our experience and onto the level of knowledge and understanding.
He described what we would now call a cognitive architecture, linking elements of perception, cognitive transformation, and knowledge.
What was Kant’s transcendental method?
Although rejecting the possibility of direct study and measurement, he proposed that, even if we cannot observe the mind, we can infer the conditions that must be present in the mind to explain our conscious experience.
He viewed this as a philosophical rather than a scientific method.
However, in suggesting that there are ways to infer what we cannot directly measure, he established the basic tenet of modern cognitive psychology.
Who is credited as the father of experimental psychology?
Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920).
“The distinguishing characteristics of mind are of a subjective sort; we know them only from the contents of consciousness.”
Wundt set up one of the first ever:
Experimental psychology laboratories in Leipzig, Germany, in 1879.
True or false: Like Kant, Wundt believed that introspection was the most direct way to study the conscious mind, the only sort that he felt important.
True.
But he sought to make it an empirical tool fit for purpose, with his techniques of experimental introspection.
