Chapter 1: What is Cognitive Psychology? Flashcards
Cognitive Psychology
The scientific study of how the mind encodes, stores, and uses information
Cognitive psychology largely tries to understand the rules and systematic process by which the mind handles information (T or F)
True
Mental representations
Encoded and stored information about the environment
Computations
The processing steps performed on mental representations
What were David Marr’s three levels of probing perception and cognition?
- Computational
- Algorithmic
- Implementational
Computational level of analysis
Seeks to understand what the mind is trying to compute and why
Algorithmic level of analysis
Aims to understand the rules, mechanisms, and representations the mind uses
Implementational level of analysis
Seeks to understand the “hardware” - the brain - that physically enables the processes of human cognition
What was Plato and Socrates’ view of psychology?
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
What occurred in the 1950s and 1960s?
The Cognitive Revolution
Introspection
Psychologists attempt to carefully observe their own mental experiences
What was Ernst Weber’s contribution?
He tested how much stimuli needed to differ to give rise to a just-noticeable difference
Weber’s Law
The first precise formula specifying the relationship between a physical aspect of the environment and the mind’s ability to perceive it
Fechner’s Law
The intensity of subjective experience of a stimulus increases in proportion to the stimulus’s intensity
Psychophysics
the study of the relationship between physical stimuli and mental experience
What did Hermann von Helmholtz suggest?
The mind must actively engage in relatively automatic unconscious inference
What is unconscious inference?
The mind makes “best guesses” in order to turn sensory impulses into percepts of the external world
What was another major contribution of Helmholtz?
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
What did Franciscus Cornelius Donders hypothesize?
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
Structuralism
The notion that conscious experience can be usefully understood through an examination of its basic building blocks
Did Wundt believe in introspection?
Yes
the notion What was Hermann Ebbinghaus’s contribution?
Pioneered memory research; found the rate at which forgetting occurs aka the forgetting curve
Gestalt movement
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
What did William James decree?
That the appropriate focus of a scientific psychology should be on the functions of the mind; aka: functionalism
Who was the founder of Behaviorism?
John Watson
Classical conditioning
Associations between external stimuli
Operant conditioning
associations between an organism’s actions and desired or undesired outcomes
Reinforcers
Rewarding outcomes that increased the likelihood that an action would be repeated
punishments
Aversive outcomes that decreased the likelihood that an action would be repeated
Behavioral neuroscience
Uses animal models to understand neural mechanisms underpinning normal and abnormal psychological processs
Behavioral neuroscience
Uses animal models to understand neural mechanisms underpinning normal and abnormal psychological processs
Information theory
focuses on the processes by which information can be coded, stored, transmitted, and reconstructed
Computational modeling
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
Theory of constructed emotion
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
