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