1- What is Cognitive Psychology? Flashcards
What is cognitive psychology?
The scientific study of mental processes
What are behaviours based on?
How we think
What is cognitive psychology interested in?
Thoughts that are going on behind our behaviours
Do we consciously think about everything we do?
No
What are mental processes?
Building blocks that make up who we are
What are mental processes related to?
Any aspects of human behaviour
How is cognitive psych an experimental science?
There is very little observation
4 things that mental processes allow us to do
- Perceive our environment
- Memorise information
- Use language to communicate
- Make decisions
Are we always aware of our mental processes?
Sometimes but they are often automatic
How are mental processes important in wider psychology?
Influence all other areas of psychology, and all parts of psychology contain a cognitive side
Who was Wundt?
The first psychologist
What did Wundt want?
To try and measure thought
What did Wundt mean by wanting to look at the science of immediate experience?
Everything broken down right to the smallest cognitive processes
What is apperception?
We apperceive the world
Why do we apperceive?
We are inherently interpreting the world based on experience
How do we gain insight into processing?
By accessing information via introspection
How is apperception unbiased?
It is not affected by interpretation
What was the key idea of Wundt’s ‘thought meter’?
Can pay attention to the pendulum or the bell positioning but not both- both stimuli sequentially register
What did psychologists start to believe in the 1970s?
We should be looking at thoughts and cognitions rather than behaviour
Why did cognitive psychologists attack introspection?
As we don’t have awareness of all psychological processes
What did Nisbett and Wilson find?
People can be unaware of their response to a stimulus
What did behaviourism believe?
We have no free will and we’re all just products
Why did behaviourists critique the weakness of introspection?
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
What is behaviourism good at?
Explaining basic behaviours
What doesn’t behaviourism explain well?
Complex cognition
What is operant conditioning?
Where behaviour is modified (learned) as a result of its past consequences
What is classical conditioning?
A type of unconscious or automatic learning that creates a conditioned response through associations
What is Gestalt’s ‘functional fixedness’?
We perceive objects by their function
How are humans similar to computers?
They both manipulate symbols
What does Broadbent’s computer-mind analogy propose?
The mind is like a digital computer
What does Miller’s magic number 7 suggest?
The capacity of STM is limited to 7 +/-2 items
