CHAPTER 1: Cognitive Psychology Flashcards
What is cognitive psychology?
The attempt to answer how do we think and how we study it.
- What, why, and how we think. What influences thought- memory, perceptions, emotions, and so on.
HOW WE ACQUIRE KNOWLEDGE
Memory
Recalling information from the past
Process of storing information or recovering it
Place where knowledge is stored
Cognition
The collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, remembering, thinking, and understanding
Acquisition
Process of memory
acquiring
Retention
Process of memory
keeping
Retrieval
Process of memory
coming back or obtaining
Ecological Validity
Research must resemble the situations and task demands that are characteristics of the real world rather than rely on artificial laboratory settings and tasks so that results will generalize to the real world.
Reductionism
The scientific approach in which a complex event or behavior is broken down into it’s constituents, the individual constituents are then studied individually.
Aristotle
First historical figure to advocate empirically based, natural science approach.
TABULA RASE = THE MIND IS A BLANK SLATE
Wilhelm Wundt
Believed that the study of psychology was of “unconscious processes and immediate experience”
INTROSPECTION
Introspection
a method in which one looks carefully inward, reporting on inner sensations and experiences.
Edward Titchener
insisted on rigorous training for his introspectors who had to avoid the “stimulus error” of describing the physical stimulus rather than the mental experience of it
Hermann Von Ebbinghaus
aim was to study memory in a “pure” form
- constructed a list of nonsense syllables.
William James
believed in functionalism over structuralism
HOW DOES THE MIND WORK?
HOW DOES IT ADAPT TO NEW CIRCUMSTANCES?
Functionalism
which the functions of consciousness, rather than it’s structure were of interest.
Noam Chomsky
the conditioning of new behavior by means of reinforcement, provided a useful and scientific account of human language
VERBAL LEARNING
HELPED REJECT BEHAVIORISM
When did cognitive psychology begin?
1960
MIT Conference
Gardner
Channel capacity
Any physical device that transmits messages or information has a limited capacity
AKA BANDWIDTH
Spoon Theory
When the spoons were gone, it meant there was barely energy to do anything else. This idea of quantifying energy as spoons,
Computer Analogy
Flow of information
Sensory and Perceptual
Part of the Intuitive Cognitive Analyses
- focus eyes on print (visual perception, sensory memory)
- Encode and recognize printed material (pattern recognition, reading)
Memory and Retrieval
Part of the Intuitive Cognitive Analyses
- look up and identify words (Memory retrieval)
- Retrieve word meanings (semantic retrieval)
Comprehension
Part of the Intuitive Cognitive Analyses
- combine word meaning to yield sentence meaning (semantic retrieval, comprehension)
- evaluate sentence meaning, consider alternative meanings (comprehension)
judgement and decision
Part of the Intuitive Cognitive Analyses
- retrieve answer to question (semantic retrieval)
- determine reasonableness of question ( comprehension, conversation)
Modal model of memory
Describes information flow through memory
ENVIRONMENTAL FLOW - SENSORY REGISTERS - SHORT TERM - LONG TERM
Standard Theory
three components are sensory, short term and long term memory.
Word frequency effect
words we hear the most are more easier to recall
Implicit memory
Theme of Cognition
does not require the conscious or explicit recollection of past events or information, and the individual is unaware that remembering has occurred.
Explicit memory
Theme of Cognition
type of long-term memory that’s concerned with recollection of facts and events. requires you to consciously recall information.
Metacognition
Theme of Cognition
Awareness of own thoughts
Embodiment
Theme of Cognition
that we use our own bodily experience and processes to understand our own emotional experience, and the experiences of others
Future Orientation
Theme of Cognition
we are always thinking; using past to make future decisions
