Chapter 1-introduction To Cognitive Psych Flashcards
Cognition Involves
- perception
- paying attention
- remembering
- distinguishing items in a category
- visualizing
- understanding and production of language
- problem solving
- reasoning and decision making
What is cognitive psychology
Scientific study if the mind concerned with attention, perception and attention
Donders
- 1868
- measured how long it takes a person to make a decision
- reaction time (RT) experiment
Reaction Time (RT) experiment
- Donders
- measures interval between stimulus presentation and persons response time
- involves simple RT task and choice RT task
- stimulus->mental process->behavioural response
Time to make a decision?
=choice RT-simple RT
-choice RT is 1/10 sec longer than simple RT
Ebbinghaus
-1885
-read a list of nonsense syllabus aloud to
determine the number of repetitions necessary to repeat a list without errors
-after taking a break (retention interval) he relearned the list
“Savings” in ebbinghaus experiment
Savings=(Original time to learn list)-(Time to relearn list after delay)
Savings curve
Shows savings as a function of retention interval (time between initial learning and testing)
Forgetting occurs rapidly over the first two days and then occurs more slowly after that
Wundt
- Structuralism
- 1879
- established first psych lab
- overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience called sensations
- analytic introspection
Analytic introspection
-participants trained to describe experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli
William James
- 1890
- taught first psych course
- observations based on the function of his own mind, not experiments
John Watson (& Rainer)
- behaviourism: Which eliminates the study of the mind and studies only directly observable behaviour
- “little Albert” (1920)
- examined how pairing one stimulus with another affected behaviour (classical conditioning)
Watson’s two problems with analytic introspection
- Extremely variable results per person
2. Results are difficult to verify due to focus on invisible inner mental processes
Classical Conditioning
- pair neutral stimulus with an event that naturally produces some outcome
- after many pairings the “neutral” event now also produces the outcome
- Pavlov and Watson
Skinner
-1938
interested in determining relationship between
stimuli and response
-operant conditioning
Operant conditioning
-behaviour can be shaped by rewards or punishments
When was behaviourism approach dominant
1940s-1960s
Tolman
- 1938
- rat/maze experiment
- rats created a cognitive map of the maze in their minds
- rejected behaviourist perspective
What started the decline in behaviourism
-a controversy proposed by Chomsky over language acquisition (Skinner 1957 argued children learn language through operant conditioning: imitation and repetition through reward)
Chomsky
- 1959
- argued that children don’t only learn language through repetition and reinforcement
- children say things they have never heard and cannot be imitating
- children say things that are incorrect and have not been rewarded for
Therefore language must be determined by inborn biological program
How to understand complex cognitive behaviour
- measure observable behaviour
- make inference about underlying cognitive activity
- consider what this behaviour says about how the mind works
Cognitive Revolution
- 1950s and 1960s
- shift from behaviourist focus on stimulus-response associations to an approach that tries to explain behaviour in terms of the mind
- Information processing approach
Kuhn
- 1962
- defined a scientific revolution as a shift from one paradigm to another
A scientific revolution involves a
Paradigm shift
