CHAPTER 1 WHAT IS COG PSYCH? Flashcards
key concepts that will be learned 1.1 The Study of Cognition 1.2 Precursors to Cognitive Psychology 1.3 The Cognitive Revolution 1.4 Cognitive Psychology in Relation to Other Areas
what is cognitve psychology?
is the scientific study of how the mind encodes, stores and uses information.
what objective measures does cog psych use?
both behavioral and neural
what does cog psych test or try to understand?
how the mind encodes, stores, and uses information about the environment
what are some topics that cog psych covers?
attention, memory, reasoning, and decision making, among other aspects of information processing
what are mental representations?
roughly defined the mind’s way of storing and processing information about the world.
what are computations?
The processing steps the brain performs on information about the environment.
When thinking of cognition at 3 different levels what are they?
computational, algorithmic, implementation
what does computational perception of cognition entail?
Tries to understand what the mind is trying to compute and why
what does the algorithmic level of analysis entail?
aims to understand the rules, mechanisms, and representations the mind uses.
what does the implementational level of analysis entail?
seeks to know what happens in the brain to enable cognition.
regarding ancient beginnings who was questioning ideas of human cognition
socrates & plato
what did socrates and plato believe about human cognition?
people possess innate knowledge, and probing questions enable access to this innate knowledge.
what is introspection?
A method whereby some early psychologists attempted to objectively observe their own mental experiences.
what is behaviorism?
A psychological movement characterized by its focus only on outwardly observable behavior.
Herman von helmholtz did what kind of work and suggested what?
He did work on nerve physiology. most importantly this person suggested the mind must actively engage in relatively automatic unconscious inference, in which the mind makes “best guesses” in order to turn sensory impulses into percepts of the external world.
what is an unconscious inference?
The perceptual process of making educated guesses based on visual clues, without being aware of this process.
Who was Donders and what significant impact did they make?
Hypothesized that the speed of higher mental processes could be similarly measured as the speed of nerve transmission. Discovered the subtraction method.
What is the subtraction method?
his subtraction method), one could isolate the time involved in a particular mental process.
What did Ebbinghaus believe?
established the forgetting curve. believed that higher mental functions such as memory could be understood via experimentation.
what is the forgetting curve and who made it?
the forgetting curve is the role of repetition in memory and the rate at which forgetting occurs, and it was made famous by ebbinghaus
What is the gesalt movement?
An early-twentieth-century movement promoting the idea that conscious experience as a whole cannot be sufficiently explained by examining individual components.
Behaviorists believed that…?
understanding the mind had to be achieved through purely objective measures.
What was objective and could be seen and measured? (behaviorism)
stimuli and responses
the kinds of conditioning in behaviorism are…?
classical and operant
what is classical conditioning
A form of learning in which observable changes in behavior result from learned associations between stimuli.
what is operant conditioning?
Learning in which observable changes in behavior result from associations between an organism’s actions and desired or undesired outcomes.
rewards= increase in behavior
punishment= decrease in behavior
when did the cognitive revolution start
50s and 60s and continued through the 70s
what lead to the cognitive revolution?
increasing numbers of researchers decided behaviorism could not explain psychological phenomena. and new tools and models were used for thinking abt cognition.
noam chomsky argued
behaviorist way of thinking of language was WRONG and children dont learn language through imitation and reinforcement.
edward tolman discovered
rats made mental maps of mazes therefore they built cognitive maps.
Claude shannon demonstrated
info can be thought of in terms of a source, a destination and noise in between
The inform theory was made by and is?
claude shannon and the information theory focuses on the processes by which information can be coded, stored, transmitted, and reconstructed.
alan turing// the turing test is..?
the belief that - If a human user can’t tell whether they’re interacting with a person or a machine, then we can say that the machine thinks and is intelligent
Cognitive science is…
A formal effort to synthesize insights across diverse disciplines attempting to understand the mind.
Cognitive neuroscience is…
The study of the neural mechanisms of cognition and behavior
Cognitive primacy hypothesis is..?
perceivers must know what they are looking at before they can make an affective judgment about it
the affective primacy hypothesis is..?
the hypothesis that an emotional response precedes cognitive interpretation.
somatic marker hypothesis is..?
The hypothesis that people learn to link their physiological responses to outcomes associated with their actions.
theory of constructed emotion…?
The theory that the experience of emotion is one we construct based on external cues, bodily cues, and our existing concepts and categories.
