Cognitive Psychology - Lecture 1

Question 1

What are the elements of cognitive psychology?

Answer 1

“Mind reading”

• Perception
• Learning emotion
• Memory
• Language
• Decision making

Question 2

What is a Stroop task?

Answer 2

The Stroop Task is one of the best known psychological experiments named after John Ridley Stroop. The Stroop phenomenon demonstrates that it is difficult to name the ink colour of a colour word if there is a mismatch between ink colour and word.

Question 3

What is cognitive psychology?

Answer 3

The branch of psychology that explores the operation of mental processes, attending, thinking, language and memory, mainly through inferences from behaviour

Question 4

History of the rationalist Plato

Answer 4

• Believes people born with certain skills hardwire to brain

- Acquire knowledge through thinking and logical analysis

Question 5

History of the empiricist Aristotle

Answer 5

• People are not born with skills
• Skill/knowledge can be obtained through experience and observation
• Acquire knowledge through empirical evidence

Question 6

History of the rationalist Rene Descartes

Answer 6

• Dualism, mind and body are separate but closely linked

- some part of the brain served as a connector between the soul and the body (pineal gland)

Question 7

History of the empiricist John Locke

Answer 7

• at birth, the mind is a blank slate or tabula rasa

- humans learn through experience derived from sense perception

Question 8

William Wundt

Answer 8

• establish the first experimental psychology lab

- what are the elementary contents/ structures of the human mind

Question 9

William James

Answer 9

• the first educator of a psychology course in the US
• focus on the function of the mental process rather than the structures
• assumptions, the behaviour is the result of stimulus-response

Question 10

What are the four main approaches in understanding human cognition by observing behaviour in cognitive tasks

Answer 10

• Experimental cognitive psychology, evidence from behaviour
• Cognitive neuropsychology, evidence from brain-damaged patients
• Cognitive neuroscience, evidence from brain activity and/or behaviour
• Computational cognitive science, developing computational models

Question 11

What is a type of internal cognitive processing

Answer 11

bottom-up processing vs top-down processing

serial-processing vs parallel processing