Cognitive Area Flashcards
What are the defining principles of the Cognitive area?
Our mid is like an information processor, a computer that inputs behaviour, our behaviour (output) is influenced by the way we process information (input)
- Cognitive psychologists investigate thinking by manipulating what people take into their minds and observing their behaviour.
What are the strengths of the Cognitive Area?
- scientific, based mainly on laboratory experiments/ standardised procedures means that conclusions are reliable(external)
- experiments are likely to be high in internal validity, as they will attempt to control all EV to establish cause and effect.
- many useful applications in real world, therapy or eyewitness testimony.
- computer models can be made to test what we cannot on humans.
What are the weaknesses of the Cognitive area?
- Only looks for causes of our behaviour in our thought processes and so it is reductionist as it ignores that behaviour could be come from our social environment or our biology.
- Lab experiments low in ecological validity because they are artificial. Cannot be confident about generalising.
- Ignores individual differences, it thinks we all work the same.
- cognition is a hypothetical construct.
What are the applications of the Cognitive area?
- Eyewitness testimony
- cognitive interview
- Depression
- Therapies to address faulty thinking
- Education
What is the background to moray?
-Cherry (The cocktail party) introduced the idea of “shadowing” a dichotic message and found that participants would remember very little of the other message.
-Broadbent’s (1958) Filter model suggested that information from incoming stimuli enters a sensory buffer where it is selected on the basis of its physical characteristics for further processing and is passed through a filter.
What is the aim to Moray’s study?
To test Cherry’s findings more rigorously by using a dichotic listening task to determine the amount of information recognised in a rejected message, the effect of hearing one’s own name in an unattended message, the effect of instructions to identify a specific target in a rejected message and other factors such as if salient information.
What is the sample to Moray’s study?
Male and female undergraduates and research workers. For experiment 1 the number was not stated but 12 took part in experiment 2 and two groups of 14 in experiment 3. Small sample of undergraduates which is unlikely to be representative of everyone and so cannot explain everyone’s auditory attention and so results lack population validity.
What is the research method and design in Moray’s study?
-A laboratory experiment
-Experiment 1 used a repeated measures design where the IVs were the dichotic listening test and the recognition test and the DV was the number of words correctly recognised in the rejected message
-Experiment 2 used an independent measures design where the IV was whether or not instructions were prefixed by the participant’s own name and the DV was the mean number of affective (name) instructions vs non affective (no name) instructions
-Experiment 3 used an independent measures design where the IVs were whether digits were inserted into both messages or only one and whether the participants had to answer questions about the shadowed message at the end of the passage or whether participants had to merely remember all the numbers they could. The DV for this experiment was the number of digits correctly reported
What is the procedure to Moray’s study?
-stereophonic tape recorder modified with two amplifiers to give two independent outputs one going to each of the earpieces of a pair of headphones
-Before each experiment the participants were given 4 passages of prose to shadow for practice. All the passages throughout the study were recorded by one male speaker.
What happened in experiment 1 of Moray’s study?
-list of simple words was repeatedly presented 35 times to one of the participant’s ears whilst they shadowed a message to the other ear and the word list was faded in after shadowing had begun
-The participant was then asked to report all they could remember of the content of the rejected message. 30 seconds after this had finished they were given a control recognition test containing similar material present in neither the list nor the passage.
What happened in Experiment 2 of Moray’s study?
-to investigate the limits of the efficiency of the attentional block to see if anything could break through it. Participants were shown 10 short passages of light fiction and told that their responses would be recorded and the object of the experiment was for them to score as few mistakes as possible
-Half of the cases with instructions were prefixed by the participants’ own name. The table below shows the order of presentation. The ‘no instructions’ passages were inserted at random.
What happened in experiment 3 of Moray’s study?
this experiment aimed to test this further to see if other types of information would do the same. Participants shadowed one of two simultaneous dichotic messages; in some messages digits were inserted towards the end of the message and sometimes present in both messages and sometimes only in one. The position of the numbers in the messages and in relation to each other randomly varied and there was a control condition were no numbers were inserted. One group of participants were told that they would be asked questions about the content of the shadowed message at the end of each message and the other group was specifically instructed to remember all the numbers they could
What ere the findings of experiment 1?
Words from early in the shadowed message were recognised which suggests that the 30 second delay was unlikely to have caused the rejected material to be lost. Overall the findings support Cherry’s findings as significantly more words were remembered from the shadowed message
-4.9 out of 7- to the rejected 1.9 out of 7
What were the findings of experiment 2 in Moray’s study?
Heard 20 of the 39 of affective instructions and 4 out of 36 of inaffective.
What were the findings of experiment 3 in Moray’s study?
No significant difference in the number of digits recalled in either condition.
