cognitive approach

Question 1

What is cognitive neuroscience?

Answer 1

Aims to specifically identify and examine the neurological structures and chemical processes in the brain that are linked to mental processes

Question 2

What are the assumptions of the cognitive approach?

Answer 2

• the mental processes should be explored
• stimulus and response needs an explanation
• these mental processes cannot be directly observed
• the mind works like a computer

Question 3

What is an inference?

Answer 3

Making an educated guess based off of evidence

Question 4

What are role schemas?

Answer 4

How you expect people to behave based on their roles in society

Question 5

What are the weaknesses of schemas?

Answer 5

• Can distort information
• Can be very difficult to change

Question 6

What are theoretical models?

Answer 6

simplified representatives of a particular mental process, they identify the steps involved in the process

Question 7

What are schemas?

Answer 7

Mental short cuts, we use them to quickly understand and navigate the world, they can also help us predict the future

Question 8

Strengths of the cognitive approach?

Answer 8

• soft determinism
• experiments can be replicated
• unlike the behaviourist approach it says we have free will and that thought effects our actions

Question 9

Weaknesses of the cognitive approach?

Answer 9

• lacks ecological validity
• inferences
• machine reductionism - reducing our brain to a machine

Question 10

Strengths of cognitive neuroscience?

Answer 10

• the study has established a credible scientific basis
• Tulving’s PET study can help explain the complexity of internal mental processes

Question 11

Weaknesses of cognitive neuroscience?

Answer 11

• expensive
• It doesn’t actually give us more information about the mental processes

Question 12

What is soft determinism?

Answer 12

A position that all events, including human behaviour, have causes but that free will and responsibility are also a factor