Cognitive Research

Question 1

What is Cognitive Psychology?

Answer 1

• Scientific study of human mental (or internal) processes
• Mental processes used in perceiving, comprehension, remembering and thinking

Question 2

What are the four approaches to human cognition?

Answer 2

• Cognitive Psychology - Use behavioural evidence to understand cognition
• Cognitive Neuropsychology - Studying brain damaged patients
• Cognitive Neuroscience - Using evidence from behaviour and brain imaging
• Computational cognitive science - Developing computational models - Algorithm = computational procedure providing specific steps to problem solution

Question 3

What are the 3 basic assumptions

Answer 3

• Mental processes exist
• Mental process can be studied scientifically
• Humans are active participants in the act of cognition

Question 4

What is the Cognitive Science Approach?

Answer 4

Systematically study people performing tasks

Experiments on healthy people under controlled, laboratory conditions

e.g. Response time (RT), Accuracy

Question 5

Strengths of CSA?

Answer 5

The foundation for understanding human mental processes

Continues to inform theorising in contemporary research across disciplines (e.g. social, clinical, and developmental)

The source of most theories and tasks used by other approaches

Question 6

Weaknesses of CSA?

Answer 6

Task impurity problem – Most tasks involve multiple cognitive processes (e.g., Stroop task – RED)

Ecological validity – People’s behaviour in the lab may differ from everyday life

Lab-based measures – RTs and/or accuracy – Provide indirect evidence

Paradigm specificity – Findings on one task do not always generalise to other similar tasks

Question 7

What are the Seven Themes of Cognition?

Answer 7

• Bottom-up (or data-driven) vs. top-down (or conceptually driven) processing
• Attention
• Representation
• Implicit vs explicit memory
• Metacognition
• Embodiment
• The brain

Question 8

State the 3 stages of memory? (3)

Answer 8

Encoding – Storage - Retrieval

Question 9

Define the 3 stages of memory? (3)

Answer 9

Encoding - Process of placing new information in memory – Change into a form that can be stored

Storage - Known as a memory trace – Information stored in some way for later use

Retrieval - Recovering stored information from memory

Question 10

What does recall mean?

Answer 10

Retrieve information from memory in response to a cue or question

Question 11

What does recognition mean?

Answer 11

Refers to ability to identify if encountered something before (i.e. familiarity)

Question 12

Features of STM? (5)

Answer 12

Limited capacity
Hold items for short duration
Physical/sensory codes
Trace decay/interference
Prefrontal cortex

Question 13

Features of LTM? (5)

Answer 13

Unlimited capacity
Indefinite duration/permanent
Meaning/semantic codes
Cue dependent forgetting
Hippocampus

Question 14

What is Recency effect?

Answer 14

New items displace old items
Last item = no new information

Question 15

What is Primacy effect?

Answer 15

Earlier items in list get full attention
Slower presentation rate = longer time for attention, so more items remembered

Question 16

Strengths of the Multi-store models

Answer 16

Widely accepted that there are three distinct memory systems
Evidence to support separate short- and long-term memory

Question 17

Weaknesses of the Multi-store models

Answer 17

Oversimplified, as stores do not operate in a single, uniform way
Cannot explain implicit learning
Information only transferred to long-term memory via rehearsal

Question 18

Features of the WMM? (4)

Answer 18

Central Executive
Phonological store
Visuo-spatial Sketchpad
Episodic buffer

Question 19

What are the 2 components of the Phonological store?

Answer 19

Phonological store = speech perception
Articulatory loop = speech production (or rehearsal)

Question 20

Features of the Central Executive (2)

Answer 20

Resembles attentional system
Most important and versatile component

Question 21

Features of the Visuo-spatial Sketchpad (3)

Answer 21

Storage and manipulation of visual patterns and spatial movement
Remembering what something is (visual)
Remembering where something is (spatial)

Question 22

What are the 2 components of the Visuo-spatial Sketchpad?

Answer 22

Visual cache = stores information about visual form/colour
Inner scribe = processes spatial and movement information

Question 23

Features of the Episodic buffer (3)

Answer 23

Holds integrated information (or chunks) about episodes/events in multidimensional code
Combines visual, auditory, spatial, etc. information
A buffer between other slave systems

Question 24

What is Phonological similarity effect?

Answer 24

Poor recall for similar sounding items than dissimilar ones
Supports notion that there is a separate phonological store and articulatory loop…the role of articulatory suppression prevents rehearsal
Modality dissociation
Auditory list = similarity effect still present
Visual list = similarity effect abolished!