Chapter 1 - Cognitive Paychology Flashcards
The mental processes of acquiring and retaining information for later retrieval; the mental storage system that enables these processes
Memory
The collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, remembering, thinking, and understanding, and the act of using those processes
Cognition
Memory refers to three kinds of mental activities:
Acquisition, retention, and retrieval
The hotly debated principle that research must resemble the situations and task demands that are characteristic of the real world rather than rely on artificial laboratory settings and tasks so that results will generalize of the real world; that is, will have ____________
Ecological validity
The scientific approach in which a complex event or behavior is broken down into its constituents; the individual constituents are then studied individually
Reductionism
The philosophical position, originally from Aristotle, that advances observation and observation-derived data as the basis for all science
Empiricism
Latin term meaning “blank slate.” Refers to a standard assumption of behaviorists that learning and experience write a record on the blank slate; in other words, the assumption that learning, as opposed to innate factors, is the most important factor in determining behavior
Tabula rasa
Believed that the study of psychology was “of conscious processes and immediate experience” —what today we consider areas of sensation, perception, and attention
Wilhelm Wundt
“Self observation,” a method in which one looks carefully inward, reporting on inner sensations and experiences is
Introspection
Attempted to study the structure of the conscious mind: the sensations, images, and feelings that, for him, were the very elements of the mind’s structure. He called this structuralism
Edward Titchener
Studied retention and forgetting of memories as a function of time, degree of learning or overlearning, and even the effect of nonsense versus meaningful material
Hermann Von Ebbinghaus
His approach was functionalism, in which the functions of consciousness, rather than its structure, were of interest
William James
The movement or school of psychology in which the organism’s observable behavior was the primary topic of interest; and the learning of new stimulus-response associations, whether by classical conditioning or by reinforcement principles
Behaviorism
- concern it’s the learning of new behaviors
- animal studies
Interpretation based closely on observable stimuli
Behaviorist tradition
Immigrated to the United States has in the 1930s, always maintained an interest in human perception, thought, and problem solving
Gestalt psychology
The branch of human experimental psychology, largely replaced by cognitive psychology in the late 1950s and early 1960s, investigating the learning and retention of language-based, influenced directly by Enbinghaus’ methods and itnerests
Verbal learning
An early analogy for the limited capacity of the human information-processing system
Channel capacity
Human information processing may be similar to the sequence of steps and operations in a computer program, similar to the flow of information from input to output when a computer processes information
Computer analogy
- The time it takes to do some task
2. The accuracy of that performance
Two of the most prominent behavioral measures
The elapsed time, usually measured in milliseconds, between some stimulus event and the subject’s response to that event; a particularly common measure of performance in cognitive psychology
Response time (RT)
How correct a person is in the responses given; often quantified in terms of both number correct and number incorrect. Separately, or paired with response time, it can give an indication of cognitive functioning
Accuracy
The standard model of memory derived by Atkinson and Shiffrin, which is made of three primary components: the short-term store, and the long-term store
Modal model of memory
The standard theory model includes three components:
- Sensory memory
- Short-term memory
- Long-term memory
The initial mental storage system for sensory stimuli. These are presumably as many modalities or sensory memory as there are kinds of stimulation that we can sense
Sensory memory
The component of the human memory system that holds information for up to 20 s; the memory component where current and recently attended information is held; sometimes loosely equates with attention and consciousness
Short-term memory
The portion of the memory system responsible for holding information for more than a period of seconds or minutes; virtually permanent storage of information
Long-term memory
Part of the standard or modal model of memory responsible for the active manipulation of information in short-term memory
Control process
To input or take into memory, to convert to a usable mental form, to store into memory
Encoding
A stage model designed to explain the several mental steps involved in performance of some task, usually implying that the stages occur sequentially and that thy operate independently of one another
Process model
A simple yes/no task in which subjects are time as they decide whether the letter string being presented is a word/ sometimes called simply the word/nonword task
Lexical decision task
Finding that frequent words in the language are processed more rapidly than infrequent words
Word frequency effect
An assumption in most process models that the separate stages of processing occur in a fixed sequence, with no overlap of the stages
Sequential stages of processing
Mental processing in which only one process or operation occurs at a time
Serial processing
The assumption in the strict information processing approach that the stages of processing are independent of one another in their functioning, and that they do not overlap in time. In other words, a stage begins its operations only when a precious stage has finished, and those operations are not changed by previous or subsequent stages
Independent or nonoverlapping stages
Any mental processing in which two or more processes or operations occur simultaneously
Parallel processing
Mental activation of a concept by some means, or the spread of that activation from one concept to another; also, the activation of some target information by action of a previously presented prime; sometimes loosely synonymous with the notion of accessing information in memory
Priming
“Top-down,” mental processing is said to be conceptually driven when it is guided and assisted by the knowledge already stored in memory
Conceptually driven processing
In studies of problem solving, a word-for-word transcription of what the subject said aloud during the problem-solving attempt
Verbal protocol
Seven themes of cognition
- Death-driven versus conceptually driven processing
- Representation
- Implicit versus explicit memory
- Metacognition
- Brain
- Embodiment
- Future orientation
General term referring to the way information is stored in memory. Term always carries the connotation that we are interested in the format or organization of the information as it is stored
Representation
Mental processing outside of awareness
Unconscious processes
Awareness and monitoring of one’s own cognitive state or condition, knowledge about one’s own cognitive processes and memory system
Metacognition
The way we think about and process information reflects the facts that we need to interact with the world using our bodies
Embodiment
Scientific study of human mental processes. Includes perceiving, remembering, using language, reasoning, and solving problems
Cognitive psychology
Intuitive analysis of examples
“How many hands did Aristotle have?”
“Does a robin have wings?”
Indicates that many mental processes occur automatically
Modern history of cognitive psychology began in 1879 with Wundt and the beginnings of experimental psychology as a science
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The behaviorist movement rejected the use of introspection and substituted the study with observable behavior
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Modern cognitive psychology, which dates from approximately 1960, rejected much of the behaviorist position but accepted its methodological rigor. Many diverse viewpoints, assumptions, and methods converged to help form cognitive psychology. This was at least a rapid, evolutionary change in interests, if not a true scientific revolution
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Cognitive psychology began as a separate field around 1960 with the decline of behaviorism; the developments in linguistic and verbal learning; and important papers by researchers on attention, visual processing, and memory
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The advent of the modern digital computer played a key role in the development of cognitive psychology and served as the basic metaphor for how the mind processes knowledge. From this, models of the mind as a means of processing information were developed
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Although channel capacity was an early, useful analogy in studying information processing, a more influential analogy was later drawn between humans and computers: that human mental processing might be analogous to the sequence of steps and operations in a computer program. Computers still provide an important tool for theorizing about cognitive processes
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Measuring information processes, the mental processes of cognition, has relied heavily on time and accuracy measures. Differences in response time (RT) can yield interpretations about the speed or difficulty of mental processes, leading to inferences about cognitive processes and events. Accuracy of performance, whether it measures correct recall of a list or accurate paraphrasing of text, also offers evidence about underlying mental processes. The findings of individual studies can be interesting and informative. However, in order for a finding to be truly valuable, it is best if it has been replicated to show that it is stable and robust. Good science is rooted in being able to accurately predict outcomes
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The modal model of memory suggests that mental processing can be understood as a sequence of independent processing stages, such as the sensory, short-term, and long-term memory stages
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Process models are appropriate for fairly simple, rapid tasks that are measured by response times, such as the lexical decision task
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There is substantial evidence to suggest that cognition involves parallel processing and is influenced by context; for example, research on skilled typing shows a high degree of parallel processing. Also, slower, more complex mental processes, such as those in the study of decision making and problem solving, may be studied using verbal protocols
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Cognitive psychology is better understood as residing within the context of a broader cognitive science. This approach describes cognition as the coordinated, often parallel operation of mental processes within a multicomponent system. The approach is deliberately multidisciplinary, accepting evidence from all the sciences interested in cognition
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A number of themes running throughout the study of cognition cut across many of the subdomains. These include data-driven versus conceptually driven processes, representation, implicit versus explicit memory, metacognition, the brain, embodiment, and a future orientation to cognition
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- mental processes exist (vs. the behaviorist perspective),
- mental processes can be scientifically studied (vs. subjective methods such as introspection),
- humans are active information processors (vs. passive recipients of knowledge and experience).
three major assumptions that guide cognitive psychology
