Chp 1 - Intro to Cognition Flashcards
Cognition
Collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, remembering, thinking and understanding, and the act of using those processes
Cognitive psychology
The scientific study of
mental processes
Empiricism (Aristotle)
A philosophical
position that holds that
observation and observation driven
data is the basis for all
scientific inquiry
Who were the key figures for structuralism?
→ Key figures: Wilhelm Wundt & Edward Titchener
Structuralism
examining the fundamental structures of the mind is the key to understanding the mind
→ Introspection
Introspection (structuralism)
research participants are asked to carefully look inward and report on their inner sensations and experiences.
Functionalism
Psychology’s aim should be to discern the functions of the mind
Who were the key figures for functionalism?
→ Key figure: William James
Who were the key figures for behaviourism?
→ Key figures: John Watson, B. F. Skinner
Behaviorism
contends that observable behavior is the
only appropriate material for study, and that human
behavior is largely the result of learned associations
between stimuli and responses
Who was responsible for the idea of purposive behaviourism?
Edward Tolman
The Cognitive Revolution: Influences
→ Failure of behaviorism to account for complex
behaviors
→ Psychologist involvement in WWII
→ Technological advances (i.e., communications
engineering & computer science)
Ecological Validity
When a research resembles the characteristics of situations and task demands of the real world so the results will generalize well to the real world (high EV)
Reductionism
Scientific approach that a complex event or behavior is broken down into constituents, and the individual constituents are then studied individually
Mental operations (4)
- Rehearsal
- Organization
- Storage
- Retrieval
Paired associate learning task
- pairing of two items (usually words)—a stimulus and a response.
- E.g. words such as calendar (stimulus) and shoe (response) may be paired, and when the learner is prompted with the stimulus, he responds with the appropriate word (shoe).
Response Time (RT)
- Informative, can be used to study the “speed of mental processes”
- “What accounts for the increase in RT?”
Replication
- Finding is only scientifically useful and meaningful if can be replicated
- Issue of replication: increasing reliance on measures of effect size
What graph to measure accuracy?
Serial position graph
Modal model of memory: The standard model of memory consists of 3 primary components
- The sensory registers
- Short-term store
- Long-term store
2 main processes in standard model of memory
- Control processes
- Encoding
Standard model of memory (Control processes)
the part of the standard model of memory responsible for the active manipulation of information in STM
Standard model of memory (encoding)
the act of taking in information and converting it to a usable mental form
i.e., encode auditory info into sensory memory, if the info is transferred to STM then it said to have been encoded to STM
Embodiment
The idea that cognition is grounded in our actions and interactions with the world.
- What aspects of how people report memories to another person (like an experimenter) make signal detection theory’s classification of responses useful?
- How does this approach help us get at whether something is actually remembered or not, as opposed to a guess?
The cocktail-party effect
refers to the ability to focus one’s attention a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli (i.e., noise)
Operation Span Task Procedure
Each display contained a mathematical operation and an unrelated word, (e.g., IS (6+4)/2 5 ? DOG).
The subject’s task for each display was to say the equation aloud, answer “yes” or “no” as to whether the equation was true, and then say each word.
ended, the task was to write all of the words on a response sheet.
Selective Listening Procedure
Each subject’s first name was inserted into the irrelevant message.
Subjects were instructed to listen to the message presented to the right ear and to repeat (shadow) each word as soon as it was presented, making as few errors as possible and to ignore the distractions coming to the left ear.
what does the operation span task test for?
divided attention
What does the dichotic listening task test for?
selective attention
Computer Analogy
Channel capacity
- One wire can carry only a limited capacity, and loses info if capacity is exceeded
- Humans have a limit on how many things you can do/think at a time
Computer Analogy
- Human info process might be similar to flow of input to output, steps and operations
