Chapter 1 - Studying the Mind Flashcards
- The complexity of cognition
- Cognition involves:
- perception
- paying attention
- remembering
- distinguishing items from category
- visualizing
- understanding and production of language
- problem solving
- reasoning and decision making
-Cognition is not only
complex but it is also invisible
-a lot of times, we are not even aware of
inner workings of the mind
-indirect perception:
you cannot only rely on the stimuli itself (see diagrams in notes, rectangles may not be what they seem), our perception is not direct
-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
Thinking About the Mind:
-The mind:
– is involved in forming and recalling memories
– solves problems, considers possibilities, makes decisions
– helps us to survive and function normally
– is a symbol of creativity and intelligence
– creates representations of the world so we can act in it
Early Work in Cognitive Psychology
-Donders (1868)
measure how long it takes a person to decide
- Reaction time (RT) experiment
- measure interval between stimulus presentation and a person’s response to stimulus
- Simple RT task: participant pushes a button quickly after light appears
- Choice RT task: participant pushes one button if light is on right side, another if light is on left side
-On average the choice Donders’s reaction test takes someone about
100ms longer per reaction time
- very simple task but it is very important because it proves that we can measure decision making due to the differences in reaction time depending on the task
- we do have a method to measure, invisible mental processes
- only the number of correct answers is recorded
Ebbinghaus: Memory and Forgetting
- Ebbinghaus (1885/1913) read list of nonsense syllables aloud to determine number of repetitions necessary to repeat list without errors
- after taking a break, he released the list
- short break = fewer repetitions to relearn list
- learned many different lists at many different retention intervals
- CAK
- DAX
- LUH . . .
- List 1 (10 repetition) 19 minutes (4 repetition)
- List 2 (10 repetition) 30 days (8 repetition)
- Savings = (original time to learn list) – (Time to relearn list after delay)
Wundt: Structuralism and Sensations
- Wundt (1879) established first scientific psychology lab at University of Leipzig, Germany
- Developed approach called structuralism:
- overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience called sensations
- Used method of analytic introspection:
- participants trained to describe experiences and through processes in response to stimuli
William James’ Principles of Psychology
- James was an early American psychologist who taught the first psychology course at Harvard University
- Observations based on the functions of his own mind, not experiments
- Considered many topics in cognitions, including thinking, consciousness, attention, memory, perception, imagination and reasoning
Watson and Behaviorism
- john Watson noted two problems with analytic introspection method:
- extremely variable results per person
- results difficult to verify due to focus on invisible inner mental processes
- Proposed a new approach called behaviorism
- eliminate the mind as a topic of study
- instead, study directly observable behavior
- classical conditioning – pairing one stimulus with another, previously neutral stimulus, causes changes in the response to the neutral stimulus
-Watson’s “Little Albert” Experiment – Watson and Rayner (1920)
- 9-month-old Albert became frightened by a rat after a loud noise was paired with every presentation of a rat
- examined how paring one stimulus with another affected behavior
- demonstrated that behavior can be analyzed without any reference to the mind
Classical Conditioning:
- “Little Albert” experiment used classical conditions methods
- Pair neutral event with an event that naturally produces some outcome
- After parings, the “neutral” event now also produces the outcome
- Watson’ s experiment was inspired by Pavlov’s research with dogs
-“Little Albert” experiment
- behavior can be analyzed without any reference to the mind
- examined how pairing one stimulus with another affected behavior
Skinner: Conditioning and Behaviorism
- B.F. Skinner was interested in determining the relationship between stimuli and response
- Operant Conditioning:
- shape behavior by rewards or punishments
- rewarded behavior more likely to be repeated
- punished behavior was less likely to be repeated
- Behaviorism’s approach was dominant from the 1940s through to the 1960s
Not All Psychologists Abandoned the Mind
- Tolman (1938) trained rats to find food in a four-armed race
- When a rate was placed in a different arm, it went to the specific arm where it previously found food
- Tolman believed that the rat had created a cognitive map, a pre presentation of the maze in its mind
- the map helped the rat navigate to a specific arm despite starting the maze from a different spot
- rejected the behaviorists perspective for the rat’s actions
The Decline of Behaviorism
-a controversy over language acquisition
- Skinner (1957) – Verbal Behavior
- children imitate speech they hear
- correct speech is rewarded
- Chomsky (1959)
- argued that children do not only learn language though imitation and reinforcement
- children say things they have never heard before and therefore cannot be imitating
- children say things that are incorrect and have not been rewarded for
- language must be determined by inborn biological programs
Studying the Mind Again
-to understand complex cognitive behaviors
- measure observable behaviors
- make inferences about underlying cognitive ability
- consider what this behavior says about how the mound works
The Rebirth of the Study of the Mind
-the decade of the 1950s is generally recognized as the beginning of the cognitive revolution – a shift in psychology from the behaviourists focus on stimulus – response relationships to an approach whose main thrust was to understand the operation of the mind
Paradigms and Paradigm Shifts
-Kuhn defined a scientific Revolution as a shift from one paradigm to another, there a paradigm is a system of ideas that dominate science at a particular time (Dyson, 2012). A scientific revolution therefore involves a paradigm shift
The Cognitive Revolution: Information Processing
-shift form behaviorists stimulus – response relationships to an approach that attempt to explain behavior in terms of the mind
-Information-processing approach
- way to study the mind based on insights associated with the digital computer
- stages that operation of the mind occurs in stages
The Cognitive Revolution
- Early Computers (1950s) – processed information in stages
- how much information can the mind absorb?
- attend to just some income in information?
Attention and Flow Diagrams
- Cherry (1953) built in James’ idea of attention
- present message A in left ear and message B in right ear
- subjects could understand details of message A despite also hearing B
- Broadbent (1958) developed a flow diagram to show what occurs as a person directs attention to one stimulus
- unattended information does not pass-through filter
-Cherry (1953) – “Dichotic Listening”
- Present message A in left ear
- message B in right
- to ensure attention, shadow one message
- Participants were able to focus only on the message they were shadowing
- attended message would be overshadowing the unattended message
-Broadbent (1958) – Flow Diagram
- flow diagram representing what happens as a person directs attention to one stimulus
- unattended information does not pass through the filter
Artificial Intelligence and Information Theory
-Artificial Intelligence
- “making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving” (McCarthy et al., 1955)
- Newell and Simon created the logic theorist program that could created proofs of mathematical theorems in living logic principles
The Evolution of Cognitive Psychology
- Since the continue revolution in the 1950s and 1960s, the field of psychology continued to evolve in the decade that followed
- from perception to higher level of cognition
- more study of the physiology of mental processes
Memory: A higher Mental Process
- Arkinson and Shiffrin (1968) developed a 3-stage model of memory:
- sensory memory (less than 1 second)
- short term memory (a few seconds, limited capacity)
- long term memory (long duration, high capacity)
-Tulving (1972, 1985) divided long-term memory into 3 components
- Long term memory:
- Episodic – life events
- Semantic – facts
- Procedural – physical actions
-neuropsychology studies
behavior of people with brain damage
-electrophysiology studies
electrical responses of the nervous system including brain neurons
-Brain imaging
- positron emission tomography (PET)
- functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
- both technologies show which brain areas are active during specific episodes of cognition
