chapter 1 Flashcards
What is cognition?
collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, remembering, solving problems, and thinking and understanding
What is cognitive psychology?
science of mental processes
what is cognitive psychology concerned with?
not only what we are thinking, but why and how we are thinking
What is psychology?
How the mind and its processes work
What are mental processes?
the things going on inside your head that you can’t see that react to the world around you
What are the principle research areas of cognitive psychology? (12)
thinking and concept formation
human and AI
cognitive neuroscience
sensation and preparation
Pattern recognition
attention
consciousness
memory
representation of knowledge
imagery
language
cognitive development
What can cognitive psychology teach us?
-influence other areas of psych
-dev psych: how cog abilities change
-neuro: how cog processes occur in brain
-I/O: problem solving applied to workplace
-clinical: disordered thinking (OCD, PTSD)
What are some careers in cognitive psychology?
universities, private sector, government and private research centers, treatment centers, consulting (law, etc)
What is psychophysics?
studies the relationship between the physical characteristics of stimuli, such as their intensity, and out subjective experience of them
What is the difference between psychophysicists and psychologists?
Physicists focus on initial stages of information processing
psychologists focus on all stages of information processing
Who is the father of psychology?
Wilhelm Wundt
What is structuralism?
trying to figure out the basic structure of the mind
What did the first psychology study look at?
what are the most basic processes that the mind can engage in (atoms of the mind)
What did Edward Titchener do>
popularized structuralism in the US
What are the basic elements of consciousness?
sensations, feelings, images
What is introspection?
Self-observation, relate experience and transform it into words
What is the con of introspection?
even if people say they are experiencing something there is no way to make sure that they are actually feeling that
What is functionalism?
concentrate on the how, and the functions of the mind instead of the structure
What did William James do ?
emphasis on mental processing rather than mental structure
What did behaviorists believe?
we should be studying behavior
What did behaviorism say?
can’t study mental processes we can’t see (study of behavior)
What is methodological behaviorism
processes occurring inside the organism are not accessible
What did BF Skinner say?
we shouldn’t doubt the existence of mental processes, but it is something that we do not know how to study right now
What is radical behaviorism?
private events could be studies and eventually the descriptions of private events become necessary
What is BF skinner known for?
Skinner box and operant conditioning
What did Skinner study?
children, rats, and cockroaches
What did skinner emphasize?
studying observable responses and their relation relation to observable stimuli
Form a relationship between a stimulus and response
What did Ebbinghaus do when he didn’t have enough participants for his study?
He used himself instead
What did Ebbinghaus investigate?
how much information we can keep in our memory
What was Ebbinghaus’s experiment?
Long list of words and tried to memorize them by systematically repeating them
Kept track of how long the lists are, and how many times he has to repeat the list to memorize it
How did Ebbinghaus memorize things?
developed little tricks to help him remember but then realized that they were not giving him an actual measure of how much memory can hold
What was a trick that Ebbinghaus used in order to memorize the words?
Nonsense syllables which are just like combinations of three letters making sure that they don’t make any sense you know so something like BIQI know that doesn’t mean anything right so now he memorizes lists of nonsense syllables
What did Ebbinghaus find out from his experiments?
the size of the lists makes a difference and the more repetitions you have to make
What would happen when Ebbinghaus went back to rememorizes words?
The second time through he needed to repeat the words less times before he remembered them
What did Ebbinghaus try to determine ?
The forgetting curve
info retained and time
When does most forgetting occur?
20 minutes after you learn it
very little forgetting as time progresses outside of the initial rapid forgetting
What was Bartlett trying to figure out?
what people do when they don’t remember something
What is reconstruction?
(Bartlett) filling in the blanks and how we reconstruct these memories when we have pieces missing
What was Schemata ?
(Bartlett) structures that we use to organize knowledge, representation of the outside world using schemes
What does Gestalt mean?
Whole, configuration, form
What did Gestalt psychologists believe?
we have a tendency to integrate pieces of information into meaningful wholes
What was the failure of behaviorism?
Learning without responding, learning without reinforcement, problems for the S-R accounts
What is a cognitive maps?
animal should learn their environment through mapping
What was communications engineering?
communication systems can serve as a model for how humans process information
What was computer science?
computers can be seen as handling information the same way humans do
What was the cognitive revolution?
Failure of behaviorism
Symposium on information theory
AI
RAND conference
Information theory and the computer metaphor
Linguistics– Noam Chomsky
New technologies
What were key notes from the video?
We cannot study the mental world directly, must understand mental to understand behavior
What was the information processing model? (computer metaphor)
information is processed through a series of stages, each of which performs unique operations
What does each stage in the computer metaphor do?
receives information from preceding stages and passes the transformed input along to the other stages for further processing
What is connectionism?
Uses the brain as a basis for modeling cognitive processes
Complex cognitive functions can be understood in term of the network of links among the units
What are the models of connectionism?
Parallel distributed processing
