Chap 1 Flashcards
what does cognition involve ?
Perception
Paying attention
Remembering
Distinguishing items into a category
Visualizing
Understanding and production of language
Problem solving
Reasoning and decision making
cognitive phycology is ?
The scientific study of the mind
The mental processes, such as perception, attention, and memory, that are what the mind creates
Donders (1868)
measured how long it takes a person to make a decision
found that mental responses cannot be measured directly but can be inferred from the participant’s behavior
Wundt(1879)
Developed approach called structuralism: overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience called sensations
Used method of analytic introspection: participants trained to describe experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli
Ebbinghaus (1885/1913)
Ebbinghaus (1885/1913) read list of nonsense syllables aloud to determine number of repetitions necessary to repeat list without errors
The decrease in savings (remembering) with increasing delays indicates that forgetting occurs rapidly over the first 2 days and then occurs more slowly after that. (Based on data from Ebbinghaus, 1885/1913.)
William James Principles of Psychology
- Observations based on the functions of his own mind, not experiments
- Considered many topics in cognition, including thinking, consciousness, attention,memory, perception, imagination, and reasoning.
Watson
Proposed a new approach called behaviorism
- Eliminate the mind as a topic of study
- Instead, study directly observable behavior
- little Albert experiment
noted two problems with analytic introspection method:
Extremely variable results per person
-Results difficult to verify due to focus on invisible inner mental processes
Pavlov Classical Conditioning
Dog and food experiment paired bell with food to dog
Skinner Behaviorism
interested in determining the relationship between stimuli and response
- Operant conditioning
- Shape behavior by rewards or punishments
Tolman (1938)
trained rats to find food in a four-armed maze
- When a rat was placed in a different arm of the maze, it went to the specific arm where it previously found food
- Tolman believed the rat had created a cognitive map, a representation of the maze in its mind
Chomsky (1959)
Argued that children do not only learn language through imitation and reinforcement
- Children say things they have never heard and cannot be imitating
- Children say things that are incorrect and have not been rewarded for
- Language must be determined by inborn biological program
Cherry (1953)
built on James’s idea of attention
- Present message A in left ear and message B in right ear
- Subjects could understand details of message A despite also hearing message B
Unattended information does not pass through the filter
Artificial Intelligence
- “making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving.” (McCarthy et al., 1955)
- Newell and Simon created the logic theorist program that could create proofs of mathematical theorems involving logic principles
Arkinson and Shiffrin (1968)
Three stage model of memory
- sensory memory (less than 1 second)
- short term memory (a few seconds, limited capacity)
- long-term memory (long duration, high capacity)
- Information we remember is brought from long-term memory into short-term memory
- Tulving (1972, 1985) divided long-term memory into three components
Longe term memory
- Episodic- Life events
- Semantic- Facts
- Procedural- Physical actions
Different ways to measure
- Neuropsychology studies behavior of people with brain damage
- Electrophysiology studies electrical responses of the nervous system including brain neurons
- Brain imaging
- positron emission tomography (PET)
- functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
- both technologies show which brain areas are active during specific episodes of cognition
