Chapter 13: Brain, Behavior, and Cognition since 1945 Flashcards
What is Cognitive Psychology?
Explaining the structure and operations of mental processes such as human intelligence, memory, perception, attention, consciousness, language, and thinking.
What were the Four research approaches influenced development and emergence of cognitive psychology?
Three research approaches outside Psychology:
1. Communications Research and Information Processing Approach
2. The Computer Modeling Approach
3. The Generative Linguistics Approach
One approach within Psychology:
4. Gestalt psychology application to higher mental processes
What is Communications Research and the Information Processing Approach?
WW1 research on signal processing and communications powerful impact on psychologists involved in war
What was Shannon’s Information Theory?
Described radio signal processing
Information was communicated by sending a signal through a sequence of stages or transformations
Came up with a precise mathematical definition for communication.
“Bits” of information - amount of information needed to answer a binary question
How did Communications Research and Information Processing Approach influence the way psychologists thought of human perception?
Human perception and memory conceptualized in a similar way
Cognition could be understood as a flow of information within the organism, continues to dominate cognitive psychology to this date.
Who was Donald Broadbent and what did he contribute to Communications Research and Information Processing Approach?
Proposed the first major theoretical effort
Provided the first cognitive theory to be presented in the form of a flowchart
Proposed a Filter model to present the flow of information
All-or-none model (criticized ex. subliminal messages)
What is the Computer Modeling Approach?
- The Computer Modeling Approach
Comparability of computer and human intelligence
Interaction between the computer modelling and information-processing approaches
Newell, Shaw, and Simon (1957) designed computer program capable of solving difficult logic problems like those of humans
Help established the field of artificial intelligence
Who was Miller and what did he contribute to the Computer Modelling Approach?
Plans and the Structure of Behavior
Theoretical language of computer modeling could be applied to information-processing psychology
Human information processing are sequences of computational processes operating on mental representations
Examples:
-Image (your knowledge base, all your ideas and thoughts)
-Plan (based on this knowledge ways of approaching a problem)
-TOTE (Test Operate, Test Exit)
What is the Generative Linguistics Approach?
- The Generative Linguistics Approach
Noam Chomsky - Universal grammar: human brain is biologically programmed to learn language
A child has innate mental capacity of generating sentences by using unconscious knowledge of language
Serious blow to behaviorism and impetus for cognitive revolution in psychology
All languages have similar characteristics and structure
What is Gestalt Psychology and how did this influence the way psychologists thought about Higher Mental Processes ?
- Gestalt psychology application to higher mental processes (holistic thinking, interpretation of info, use of mental process to put forth plans)
-A Study of Thinking, Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin (1956) People learn new concepts and categories through and strategies not just associations. We interact with the world. Modify ideas based on new info.
Matched well with the information-processing approach
Behaviorism challenged further
Who were Bruner and Miller and what did they contribute to Cognitive Psychology? What were their areas of research?
Worked at the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies Mind similar to computer, needs representations and processes to produce activities Research areas: Making a comeback -pattern recognition -attention -categorization -memory increasing -reasoning -decision making -problem solving -language
Who was Ulrich Neisser and how did he contribute to the Growth of Cognitive Psychology?
Father of cognitive psychology
Defined cognitive psychology, gave names to different subjects, defined the subject matter, systemized the feild
Mental processes are important and we need to study them
He brought to the mainstream
Journals appeared, research, institutionalization.
Felt that cognition involves all processes by which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used.
It is concerned with these, even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimuli such as an image or hallucination
How people perceive and recognize objects according to the Dual process model?
(a) describing the input object in terms of relatively primitive features
(b) matching this description to stored object descriptions in visual memory
What did Collins and Quillian contribute to cognitive psychology?
The New Psycholinguistics - a subfield within cognitive psychology emerged
Early work - semantic knowledge is organized in a hierarchical network
Evidence/Argument:
Participants asked simple questions about the meaning of a word, such as ‘Is a robin a bird,’ and ‘Is a robin an animal?’
Greater the categorical difference between the longer it took to answer.
What did John Anderson and Gordon Bower’s research on Memory and Language contribute to the Rise of Cognitive Science?
Human Associative Memory, intersection of memory and language
Model of memory for linguistic materials
Memory is represented by networks
