Chapter 1 - Introduction to Cognitive Psychology

Question 1

What is cognitive psychology?

Answer 1

The branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind.

Question 2

What is cognition?

Answer 2

The mental processes, such as perception, attention, and memory.

Question 3

What is the mind?

Answer 3

1. The mind creates and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning.
2. The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals.
   * The question of how the mind achieves what is does is what cognitive psychology is about.

Question 4

Who are the early pioneers in cognitive psychology?

Answer 4

1. Donders (1868) - simple reaction time vs. choice reaction time
2. Wundth (1879) - analytic introspection
3. Ebbinghaus (1885) - savings method to measure forgetting
4. James (1890) - no experiments; reported observations of his own experience

Question 5

Abandoning the study of mind.

Answer 5

Watson (1890s)
Skinner

Dominated psychology from 1940s through the 1960s.

Question 6

Reemergence of the mind in psychology.

Answer 6

Edward Chance Tolman. (1918-1954)

Experiments with rats: cognitive map.

Noam Chomsky. (1959).

Language is a product of the way the mind is constructed, rather than a result of reinforcement.

Question 7

The rebirth of the study of the mind.

Answer 7

1950s - Cognitive Revolution

First digital computers: late 1940s
Computer available for general public: 1954 IBM

Characteristics of computers: they process information in stages.

Inspired from this, some psychologists proposed the information-processing approach to the mind.

Question 8

Information processing approach

Answer 8

An approach that traces sequences of mental operations involved in cognition.

Question 9

Colin Cherry’s experiment (1953)

Answer 9

Dichotic listening experiment.
the attended message-the unattended message

Result: when people focused on the attended message, they could hear the sounds of the unattended message but were unaware of the contents of that message.

This result led Donald Broadbent (1958) to first flow diagram of the mind.

Question 10

The first flow diagram of the mind.

Answer 10

Donald Broadbent (1958)

Input -> Filter -> Detector -> to memory