Chapter 1: What is Cognitive Psychology?

Question 1

Cognitive Psychology

Answer 1

The scientific study of how the mind encodes, stores, and uses information

Question 2

Cognitive psychology largely tries to understand the rules and systematic process by which the mind handles information (T or F)

Answer 2

True

Question 3

Mental representations

Answer 3

Encoded and stored information about the environment

Question 4

Computations

Answer 4

The processing steps performed on mental representations

Question 5

What were David Marr’s three levels of probing perception and cognition?

Answer 5

1. Computational
2. Algorithmic
3. Implementational

Question 6

Computational level of analysis

Answer 6

Seeks to understand what the mind is trying to compute and why

Question 7

Algorithmic level of analysis

Answer 7

Aims to understand the rules, mechanisms, and representations the mind uses

Question 8

Implementational level of analysis

Answer 8

Seeks to understand the “hardware” - the brain - that physically enables the processes of human cognition

Question 9

What was Plato and Socrates’ view of psychology?

Answer 9

Each of us comes into the world as a “blank slate” and learn everything from scratch, or is there some form of knowledge that we possess even as we draw our first breath

Question 10

What occurred in the 1950s and 1960s?

Answer 10

The Cognitive Revolution

Question 11

Introspection

Answer 11

Psychologists attempt to carefully observe their own mental experiences

Question 12

What was Ernst Weber’s contribution?

Answer 12

He tested how much stimuli needed to differ to give rise to a just-noticeable difference

Question 13

Weber’s Law

Answer 13

The first precise formula specifying the relationship between a physical aspect of the environment and the mind’s ability to perceive it

Question 14

Fechner’s Law

Answer 14

The intensity of subjective experience of a stimulus increases in proportion to the stimulus’s intensity

Question 15

Psychophysics

Answer 15

the study of the relationship between physical stimuli and mental experience

Question 16

What did Hermann von Helmholtz suggest?

Answer 16

The mind must actively engage in relatively automatic unconscious inference

Question 17

What is unconscious inference?

Answer 17

The mind makes “best guesses” in order to turn sensory impulses into percepts of the external world

Question 18

What was another major contribution of Helmholtz?

Answer 18

Discovered he could measure the speed of nerve impulses by stimulating nerves at varying distances from a muscle and observing the delay before the muscle contracted

Question 19

What did Franciscus Cornelius Donders hypothesize?

Answer 19

That the speed of the higher mental processes could be similarly measured; and that the time course of different mental processes could be isolated by measuring the the difference in reaction times

Question 20

Structuralism

Answer 20

The notion that conscious experience can be usefully understood through an examination of its basic building blocks

Question 21

Did Wundt believe in introspection?

Answer 21

Yes

Question 22

the notion What was Hermann Ebbinghaus’s contribution?

Answer 22

Pioneered memory research; found the rate at which forgetting occurs aka the forgetting curve

Question 23

Gestalt movement

Answer 23

Promoted the idea that even if we could observe such basic elements, such an approach could not provide insights into the nature of conscious experience

Question 24

What did William James decree?

Answer 24

That the appropriate focus of a scientific psychology should be on the functions of the mind; aka: functionalism

Question 25

Who was the founder of Behaviorism?

Answer 25

John Watson

Question 26

Classical conditioning

Answer 26

Associations between external stimuli

Question 27

Operant conditioning

Answer 27

associations between an organism’s actions and desired or undesired outcomes

Question 28

Reinforcers

Answer 28

Rewarding outcomes that increased the likelihood that an action would be repeated

Question 29

punishments

Answer 29

Aversive outcomes that decreased the likelihood that an action would be repeated

Question 30

Behavioral neuroscience

Answer 30

Uses animal models to understand neural mechanisms underpinning normal and abnormal psychological processs

Question 30

Behavioral neuroscience

Answer 30

Uses animal models to understand neural mechanisms underpinning normal and abnormal psychological processs

Question 31

Information theory

Answer 31

focuses on the processes by which information can be coded, stored, transmitted, and reconstructed

Question 32

Computational modeling

Answer 32

Refers to the use of computers and mathematical functions to constrain and predict aspects of human cognition, and it is a means to make theoretical models more precise and explicit than could be achieved through verbal descriptions alone

Question 33

Theory of constructed emotion

Answer 33

the experience of emotion itself does not stem from unique, isolated processes but is an experience that we construct based on external cues, bodily cues, and our existing concepts and categories