Chapter 1 Flashcards
define cognitive psychology
the study of mental processes
3 important ways to define cognitive psychology
- determine the characteristics and properties of the mind
- how the mind operates
- the study of mental operations that support peoples acquisition and use of knowledge
define the mind
- system that creates mental representations of the world and controls mental functions
- e.g. perception, attention, memory, etc
Neissers definition of the “mind”
refers to all the processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used
transformation definition and what it does
- discuss external stimuli such as sounds and sites
- stimuli in our environment are transformed into neural signals that travel to our brain, forming a mental representation
reduction
stimuli is reduced to its components such as colour, features and location
recovery
retrieval processes
mental operations
how information is used for decision making, creativity and problem solving
donders study (1868)
- illustrates that mental responses cannot be measured directly, but must be inferred from behaviour
- reaction time experiment (RT tasks vs. choice RT tasks)
structuralism (Wundt)
- an approach to psychology that explained perception as the adding up of small elementary units called sensations
- was not found to be a fruitful approach
analytic introspection (Wundt)
a procedure used by early psychologists in which trained participants described their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli
ebbinghaus’ study
- measured the rate of forgetting using 13 nonsense syllables (CVS’s: consonant, vowel, consonant)
- learned the list of syllables and then relearned the list after various intervals of time to determine the amount of “savings” in relearning
- most forgetting occurred after the 1st hour
the nature of attention (william james)
observation that paying attention to one thing involves withdrawing from other things still rings true today and has been the topic of many modern studies of attention
tolmans study
- rat in a maze with the goal of directing itself to food despite being placed at different starting locations
- used a cognitive map (mental conception of a spatial layout)
- placed emphasis on the mind, not behavior
Noam Chomsky
- saw language development as being determined not by imitation or reinforcement, but by an inborn biological program that holds across culture
- the idea that language is a product of the way the mind is constructed, rather than a result of reinforcement, led psychologists to reconsider the idea that language can be explained by operant conditioning
behaviourism
states that observable behavior provides the only valid data for psychology
consequence of behaviourism
consciousness and unobservable mental processes are not considered worthy of study by psychologists.
classical conditioning
pairing a neutral stimulus with a stimulus that elicits a response, causes the neutral stimulus to elicit that response
operant conditioning
a type of conditioning which focuses on how behavior is strengthened by presentation of positive reinforcers, such as food or social approval, or withdrawal of negative reinforcers, such as a shock or social rejection.
cognitive revolution
- a shift from the behaviourist approach to an approach focussed on explaining behaviour in terms of the mind
- introduction of information-processing
paradigm
a system of ideas, which guide thinking in a particular field
information-processing approach
an approach that traces sequences of mental operations involved in cognition
colin cherry
- presented participants with an attended message in one ear and an unattended in the other
- when focused on the attended message, they could hear the sounds of the unattended message but were unaware of the contents of that message
donald broadbent
- proposed the first flow diagram of the mind
- represented what he believed happens in a persons mind when directing attention to one stimulus through a sequence of stages
- input and filter
John McCarthy on AI
defined the artificial intelligence approach as “making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving”
Simon and Newel on AI
- created the logic theorist program
- the program was able to create proofs of mathematical theorems that involve principles of logic
the model of memory (atkinson and shiffrin)
- pictures the flow of information in the memory system as progressing through three stages
- three stages:
1. sensory memory
2. short-term memory
3. long-term memory
sensory memory (stage 1)
holds incoming information for a fraction of a second and then passes most of this information to short-term memory
short-term memory (stage 2)
has limited capacity and holds information for seconds
long-term memory (stage 3)
high-capacity system that can hold information for long periods of time
3 components of long-term memory
- episodic memory
- semantic memory
- procedural memory
episodic memory
- events, experiences, personal details
- can be referred to as a mental diary or timeline
semantic memory
- facts, general knowledge
- mental encyclopedia of information
procedural memory
- how to perform certain actions, skills and tasks
- e.g. muscle memory
physiology of cognition and its 3 stages
- the “behind the scenes” activity in the nervous system that creates the mind
- 3 stages:
1. neuropsychology
2. electrophysiology
3. brain imaging
neuropsychology
the study of the behavior of people with brain damage, had been providing insights into the functioning of different parts of the brain
electrophysiology
measuring electrical responses of the nervous system, made it possible to listen to the activity of single neurons
brain imaging
- PET scans made it possible to see which areas of the human brain are activated during cognitive activity
- later replaced by fMRI
stephen palmer
-Illustrated how our knowledge about the environment can influence our perception
