Chapter 1: Introduction To Cognitive Psychology Flashcards
Cognition
Mental process involved in perception, attention, memory, language, problem solving, reasoning, and decision making
- mind+brain+behavior
Cognitive Psychology
- The branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind
- Cognition refers to the mental processes, such as perception, attention, and memory, that are what the mind creates
Mind
System that creates mental representations of world and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning
Donders
Reaction time: how quickly it takes to respond to a stimulus
Simple Reaction Test vs. Choice Reaction Test: shows how long it takes to make decision
Simple Reaction Test
Presence of absence of single stimulus
Choice Reaction Test
Participant pushed one button if light is on right side, another if light is on left side
Wundt
Structuralism and Sensations
- established first scientific psychology lab at University of Leipzig, Germany
Structuralism
Approach to psychology that explained perception as adding up small elementary units called sensations
Analytic Introspection
Procedure used by early psychologists in which trained participants described their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli
Ebbinghaus
Forgetting Curve
- determined how long it took to learn a list for first time
- relearned after while and saw how long it took to relearn
- non-words trigrams (cons-vowel-cons)
- Ebbinghaus was the only participant
- Serial anticipation: predict non-word that comes next
- repeat without error and then take break and then relearn
- how long would it take to learn afterwards - savings: time to learn originally- time to relearn
Savings Curve
Plot of savings us time after original learning
- magnitude of memory left from initial learning
- increased saving= increased memory
William James
Principle of Psychology
- observations about operation of his own mind
- functionalism
- descriptions of wide range of experiences
Watson
Behaviorism
- behavior can be analyzed without any reference to the mind
Noted 2 problems with analytic introspection method
Little Albert classical conditioning
Behaviorism
Observable behavior provides only valid data for psychology
2 problems with analytic introspection method
- Produced extremely variable results from person to person
2. Results were difficult to verify because they were interpreted in terms of invisible inner mental processes
