1- What is Cognitive Psychology?

Question 1

What is cognitive psychology?

Answer 1

The scientific study of mental processes

Question 2

What are behaviours based on?

Answer 2

How we think

Question 3

What is cognitive psychology interested in?

Answer 3

Thoughts that are going on behind our behaviours

Question 4

Do we consciously think about everything we do?

Answer 4

No

Question 5

What are mental processes?

Answer 5

Building blocks that make up who we are

Question 6

What are mental processes related to?

Answer 6

Any aspects of human behaviour

Question 7

How is cognitive psych an experimental science?

Answer 7

There is very little observation

Question 8

4 things that mental processes allow us to do

Answer 8

1. Perceive our environment
2. Memorise information
3. Use language to communicate
4. Make decisions

Question 9

Are we always aware of our mental processes?

Answer 9

Sometimes but they are often automatic

Question 10

How are mental processes important in wider psychology?

Answer 10

Influence all other areas of psychology, and all parts of psychology contain a cognitive side

Question 11

Who was Wundt?

Answer 11

The first psychologist

Question 12

What did Wundt want?

Answer 12

To try and measure thought

Question 13

What did Wundt mean by wanting to look at the science of immediate experience?

Answer 13

Everything broken down right to the smallest cognitive processes

Question 14

What is apperception?

Answer 14

We apperceive the world

Question 15

Why do we apperceive?

Answer 15

We are inherently interpreting the world based on experience

Question 16

How do we gain insight into processing?

Answer 16

By accessing information via introspection

Question 17

How is apperception unbiased?

Answer 17

It is not affected by interpretation

Question 18

What was the key idea of Wundt’s ‘thought meter’?

Answer 18

Can pay attention to the pendulum or the bell positioning but not both- both stimuli sequentially register

Question 19

What did psychologists start to believe in the 1970s?

Answer 19

We should be looking at thoughts and cognitions rather than behaviour

Question 20

Why did cognitive psychologists attack introspection?

Answer 20

As we don’t have awareness of all psychological processes

Question 21

What did Nisbett and Wilson find?

Answer 21

People can be unaware of their response to a stimulus

Question 22

What did behaviourism believe?

Answer 22

We have no free will and we’re all just products

Question 23

Why did behaviourists critique the weakness of introspection?

Answer 23

Thought it was unscientific to be looking at people’s thoughts that aren’t observable- everyone’s different so you can’t really understand how someone is behaving

Question 24

What is behaviourism good at?

Answer 24

Explaining basic behaviours

Question 25

What doesn’t behaviourism explain well?

Answer 25

Complex cognition

Question 26

What is operant conditioning?

Answer 26

Where behaviour is modified (learned) as a result of its past consequences

Question 27

What is classical conditioning?

Answer 27

A type of unconscious or automatic learning that creates a conditioned response through associations

Question 28

What is Gestalt’s ‘functional fixedness’?

Answer 28

We perceive objects by their function

Question 29

How are humans similar to computers?

Answer 29

They both manipulate symbols

Question 30

What does Broadbent’s computer-mind analogy propose?

Answer 30

The mind is like a digital computer

Question 31

What does Miller’s magic number 7 suggest?

Answer 31

The capacity of STM is limited to 7 +/-2 items