1st study guide PSY311 Flashcards
Def: cognitive psych
- Branch in psychology that focuses on the mind as it relates to our behaviors.
- the study of mental processes, which includes determining the characteristics and properties of the mind and how it operates.
How does the textbook define what the Mind is?
The mind is involved in memory
The mind is a problem-solver.
The mind is used to make decision or consider possibilities
A healthy mind is associated with normal functioning, a nonfunctioning mind with abnormal functioning.
The mind is valuable, something that should be used.
Used to describe ppl who are particularly intelligent or creative.
Def: mind
A system that creates representatives of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals.
Cognition w/ clinical psych
psychological disorders impeach how info is processed & organized into prototypes within our brains
Cognition w/ developmental psych
development on cognition will affect how you think in adulthood
Cognition w/ neuroscience
looks at the human brain brain = cognition. Physiological processes that give rise to cognition
Cognition w/ social psych
individuals’ cognition in social settings. Cognition/mental processes = behavior
__________ behaviors -> increased _________
Adaptive, survival
Precursors -> 1800’s Germany -> Behaviors ____ Hiatus -> Cognitive __________ -> Contemporary Psychology
1, Revolution
In 1500 BCE, Ebers Papyrus mentions _________ & ___________ in Egypt
dementia, depression
In 450 BCE Protagors proposed that all judgments ________ on the perceiver rather than ________ reality in Greece.
depend, physical
In 400 BCE, Plato writes human psyche as a define ______ or _______
soul, mind
What was Donders known for?
uses a chronometer (or a Hipp cronoscope)
Objectively measures reaction time up to 500Hz, then to 1,000Hz
Shocks participant’s feet individually and then asks them to report which foot was shocked.
IV - know which foot will be shocked or not
DV: reaction time
Finding: knowing which food increased RT by 66ms.
Choice RT-Simple RT= time to make a decision
Not a direct observation of mental processes
But an inference abt what’s happening.
The choice reaction time task added decisions by requiring participants to 1st decide whether the left or right light was illuminated and then which button to push.
Why was Donders’ experiment important info for us?
It combines a behavioral study with a simple computational model of cognitive processes
Mental chronometry is still used even today (a lot)
Unfortunately, this method can be conflated with other simultaneous processes.
It was the 1st cognitive psychology experiment and bc it illustrates something extremely significant abt studying the mind; mind responses cannot be measured directly, but have to be inferred from behavior.
He didn’t directly measure their mind, he just measured how long they took from the reaction times
What was Wundt known for?
established the 1st psychological lab at University of Leipzig, Germany.
Developed perspective known as Structuralism.
Along with chronometry, it uses introspection.
Def: structuralism
Overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience.
Def: analytic introspection
a technique in which train participants describe their experiences and thought processes in response to a stimulus or to stimuli.
Requires extensive training due to the participants’ goal to describe their experience in terms of elementary mental elements.
What are some downsides to analytic introspection?
Not objective and not reliable.
What was Ebbinghaus known for?
He was focused on memory and forgetting. Specifically, how quickly info that is learned is lost over time.
He used himself as a participant for his experiments.
Learning Phase
List of trigrams
CEP, TUL, FOM, WAZ
Considered learned when the list is recalled twice without error.
Relearning Phase
After some time, same learning procedure
Savings Score: Time of learning - Time of relearning = Savings score
Savings scores are specifically sensitive
Measures learning and forgetting
Reduction in savings provides a measure of forgetting, with smaller savings means more forgetting
Def: savings curve
shows that memory drops rapidly for the first 2 days after the initial learning & then levels off.
This is important bc it demonstrated that memory could be quantified and that functions like the savings curve can be used to describe properties of the mind.
What was James known for?
Viewed functionalism as a means of identifying psychological constructs
Rather than individual units, looked at:
Cause and effect
Prediction and control
His observations were based not on the results of experiments but instead on the observations abt the operation of his very own mind.
He focused on the nature of attention.
Cognitive topics he considered included: thinking, consciousness, attention, memory, perception, imagination, & reasoning.
What was Watson the Asshole known for?
Eliminates the mind as a topic
Why not just study behavior? Since our behavior is caused by our thoughts.
Instead, he focused on directly observable behavior
But the drawbacks of his method was:
It produced extremely variable results from person to person.
These results were difficult to verify bc they were interpreted in terms of invisible inner mental processes.
Benefits: evidence-based research
Contributes to theories of learning/associations
Ignores “intervening” variables
Stimuli -> ?? -> behavior
Explain the Watson & Rayner experiment
Study of classical conditioning
Demonstrates that behavior can be analyzed without mentioning the mind
Stimuli -> behavior/conditional response
“Little Albert”
Watson and Rayner subjected Albert (9mon boy) to a loud noise every time a rat came close to the kid.
After a few pairings of the noise with the rat. Albert reacted to the rat by crawling away as quickly as possible.
Pair neutral stimulus with a natural event that produces a response.
White rat (NS) paired with a loud noise (UCS)
White rat + loud noise = scared which turns into: white rat = scared
NS becomes conditioned to produce a response
What was Buswell known for?
He was interested in linking our eye movements to cognitions
Constructed an eye-tracking machine with machinists at the University in Chicago
Notes that participants have very similar looking patterns
Physical characteristics draw attention
Inferring that yes, movement is a result of a cognition
What was Tolman known for?
hypothesized that animals make cognitive maps to find food
He was one of the early cognitive psychologists even if due to the fact that he used behavior to infer mental processes.
Trains rats to find food in a 4-armed maze
After learning, rats significantly improve in speed of finding food
Found the cognitive map
Def: cognitive map
a conception within the rat’s mind of the maze’s layout. Even tho the rat had prev. Being rewarded for turning right, its mental map indicated that when starting from the new location it needed to turn left instead in order to reach the food.
Skinner argued that kids learn language thru _______ and __________.
imitation, reinforcement
Chomsky argues that kids don’t only learn language thru imitation and reinforcement, that they have an _______ ______________ that holds across cultures.
inborn biological program
Def: cognitive revolution
a shift in psych from the behaviorist’s focus on stimulus-response relationship to an approach whose main focus is to understand the operation of the mind.
Def: scientific revolution
a shift from one paradigm to another.
Defined by Kuhn.
Def: a paradigm
a system of ideas that dominates science at a specific time.
Def: episodic memory
memory for events in your life (what did you do last summer?)
Def: semantic memory
part of your memory that stores facts and trivia about several different topics.
Def: procedural memory
memory for physical actions like how to ride a bike or play the violin.
Who produced the theory of AI?
McCarthy
Def: Neuropsychology
the study of the behavior of ppl with brain damage, provides insights into the functioning of different parts of the brain.
Def: electrophysiology
measures electrical responses of the nervous system, which makes it possible to listen to the activity of single nerves.
What’s a con with a PET scan?
A downside of this is that it was expensive and involved injecting radioactive tracers into someone’s bloodstream.
Def: sensation
occurs at the beginning of a sensory system.
Our way of receiving the info from the stimulus