Cognitive Psychology Flashcards
What decade did the Cognitive revolution occur in?
1970s.
What were the two main routes into Cognitive Psychology?
Computational approach - mind seen through metaphors of machines who process information.
Gestalt influence - the whole is different to the sum of the parts. Human thinking that goes beyond the information given.
(Prehistory of computational approach) Who developed a symbolic logic beneath words and numbers?
Leibnitz.
(Prehistory of computational approach) Who saw mathematics as one of several symbol systems?
Boole - Boolean Algebra.
What was gender imitation?
A machine pretended to be a human. An interrogator then had to guess who was the male and female in the other room (whilst the computer pretended to be one of the genders). The aim was to see if the computer could deceive the interrogator into choosing the wrong answer.
How did Newell & Simon (1959) contribute to Cognitive Psychology?
Created GPS - general problem solver.
This was applied to games like chess.
Used means-end analysis.
Relied on heuristics - imperfect satisfying solutions.
GPS shows the philosophy of computational functionalism.
Weakness: not an accurate model of how humans think.
IBM’s Deep Blue beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov (1996). What did this lead to in public interest?
The public became interested in machine opponents instead of humans.
How did Alan Turing contribute to Cognitive Psychology?
Created the Turing Test.
Wrote Computing Machinery and Intelligence - spoke of the burden of proof in the question of machine intelligence.
What did Skinner claim about the development of language? Who disagreed with him?
He claimed all language could be explained by operant conditioning.
Chomsky was against this. Chomsky believed all children were born with the innate capacity for grammar and the ability to learn any language. Believe there should be native language universals.
How did Tolman (1948) contribute to Cognitive Psychology (Gestalt influence)?
Cognitive maps in rats and humans.
Rats had mental maps about where the food was located in the maze.
How did Bruner & Postman contribute to Cognitive Psychology?
Studied perception of incongruity.
Perception of regular cards was slowed when incongruous cards were introduced.
Conclusion: Perceptual organisation is influenced by expectations. There is resistance when these are violated.
State the definition of cognition by Ulric Neisser.
Cognition is all of the processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used.
What did Bruner & Miller create in 1960?
The centre for cognitive studies at Harvard.
In the 1970s, historians began to reinterpret the work of earlier psychologists. Name an example.
Wilhelm Wundt’s work was re-interpreted.
Name some of the new topics in Cognitive Psychology in 1970.
Judgment and decision making.
Categorisation and concept.
Social cognition.
Priming and stereotyping.
