COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY Flashcards
is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals.
mind
Study of mental processes, which includes determining the characteristics and properties of the mind and how it operates
COGNITIVE
PSYCHOLOGY
Not possible for the mind
to study itself
• The properties of the mind
cannot be measured
1800s ideas about the
mind
A Dutch physiologist who
performed one of the first
cognitive psychology
experiments in (1868)
FRANCISCUS DONDERS
When was the term Cognitive
Psychology coined
1967
How long it takes for a
person to make a decision
which was determined by
measuring reaction time
Donders’ Pioneering
Experiment
participants push a button
as rapidly as possible
when a light goes on
simple
reaction time
– left button
when the left light goes on,
right button when the right light
goes on
choice
reaction time
the time between the presentation of the
stimulus and the behavioral response
Reaction Time
founded the first laboratory of scientific psychology at the The University of Leipzig in Germany
Wundt’s Psychology
our overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience called sensations.
Structuralism:
basic
elements of experience
called
sensations
trained participants described
their experiences and
thought processes in
response to stimuli
Analytic Introspection:
German psychologist, University of Berlin • he used another approach to measure the properties of the mind – nature of memory and forgetting (how info learned is lost over time)
Ebbinghaus
Used himself as a participant and repeated lists of 13 nonsense syllables (to not be influenced by the meaning of a word) to himself one at a time at a constant rate
Ebbinghaus’s Memory
Experiment
original time to
learn the list – time to relearn
the list after the delay
• Savings
shows that memory drops rapidly for the first 2 days after the initial learning and then levels off
Savings Curve:
American psychologist • Taught Harvard’s first psychology course and made significant observations about the mind in his textbook Principles of Psychology (1890)
William James
Dissatisfaction with Analytic Introspection • Produced extremely variable results from person to person • Results were difficult to verify because they were interpreted in terms of invisible inner mental processes
Watson
Watson and Rosalie Rayner
subjected a 9-month old boy
to a loud noise every time a
rat came close to the child
Little Albert experiment
Goal was to replace the mind
as a topic of study in
psychology with the study of
directly observable behavior
Watson Founds
Behaviorism
how pairing
one stimulus causes
changes in the response to
the neutral stimulus
classical
conditioning
OC focused on how behavior is strengthened by the presentation of positive reinforcers • Focused solely on determining how behavior was controlled by stimuli (SR relationship)
Skinner’s Operant
Conditioning
Called himself a behaviorist because his focus was on measuring behavior • One of the early cognitive psychologists – used behavior to infer mental processes
Edward Chace Tolman
conception within the rat’s mind of the
maze’s layout
• “cognitive” violated the behaviorist’s idea that internal
processes were not acceptable topics to study
Cognitive map
Transpired about a decade
after Tolman introduced the
idea of cognitive maps
Resurgence of the mind
children learn language
through operant conditioning
• Skinner’s Verbal Behavior:
children imitate speech they
hear and repeat correct
speech because it is
rewarded
Skinner’s Verbal Behavior:
a linguist from Massachusetts Institute of Technology | wrote a scathing review of Skinner’s book pointing out that children say many sentences that have never been rewarded by parents
Noam Chomsky
Chomsky’s idea that language is a product of the way the mind is constructed led psychologists to realize that it is necessary to measure observable behavior and at the same time consider what this behavior tells us about how the mind works.
Resurgence of the mind
A shift in psychology from the behaviorist’s focus on stimulusresponse relationships to an approach that emphasized the understanding of the operation of the mind
Cognitive Revolution1950s
a
shift from one paradigm to
another
Scientific Revolution
a system of ideas
that dominate science at a
particular time
• Paradigm
Introduction of a new technology that suggested a new way of describing the operation of the mind – digital computer – as one of the events that led to a new way of studying psychology
• Paradigmand Paradigm
Shifts
traces sequences of mental operations involved in cognition (info > input processor > stored in a memory unit > processed by an arithmetic unit > output
• Information-processing
approach
presented participants with two auditory messages, one to the left ear and one to the right ear, and told them to focus their attention on one of the messages and ignore the other
Flow Diagrams for the Mind
• British psychologist Colin
Cherry (1953):
sounds of both the
attended and unattended
messages
Input:
lets through the attended
message and filters out the
unattended message
Filter:
records the
information that gets through
the filter
Detector
The shift from Skinner’s Behaviorism to the cognitive approach occurred over a period of time. • Take into account the conference that spanned 10 weeks on artificial intelligence – Herb Simon & Alan Newell
The Cognitive “Revolution”
Took a While
published a textbook with the title Cognitive Psychology which coined the term cognitive psychology and emphasized the informationprocessing approach to study the mind
Ulrich Neisser
not knowing much about higher mental processes – thinking, problem-solving, long-term remembering
1
st gap
almost complete
absence of physiology
2
nd gap
holds incoming information for a
fraction of a second then
passes most of this information
to short-term memory
Sensory memory:
has
limited capacity and holds
information for seconds
vShort-term Memory:
a highcapacity system that can hold
information for long periods of
time
Long-term Memory: