Core Cognitive Flashcards
Cognition is defined broadly so as to include all processes within the capacity of the human mind, including (5):
sensation, perception, learning, remembering and decision making
Wundt’s school of psychology made at least two major contributions to cognitive psychology:
- They showed that mental activity can be broken down into more basic operations.
- They developed objective methods for assessing mental activity (decision making timing).
Introspection
The process of internal perception, looking within oneself to assess one’s mental activity
The functionalist perspective
Certain practices or approaches are better suited than others to accomplishing certain tasks, and that we should change our thoughts and behaviour as we discover those that are increasingly better adapted to our environment.
The behaviourist perspective
Questions concerning the mind are speculative and not amenable to scientific inquiry and psychology should focus on observable behaviour
Chomsky identified limitations to behaviourism such as:
Its failure to provide insights into perception, memory and attention. Additionally, it fails to explain how humans can understand and produce and indefinite number of unique sentences
What idea did the cognitive revolution (1950s-1960s) introduce?
The human-computer analogy
C.Rev. explanation of mental processes:
- information processing and the storage, manipulation and transformation of information.
- Information processing occurs at distinct levels of analyses.
Levels of analysis
The various degrees of abstraction we can use to describe an entity
The functional level of analysis:
What a computer programme does, receiving input in symbols, storing information and performing operations – mental activity
The physical level of analysis:
Computer in terms of chips and circuits – neural structures
Marr (1982) – Complex systems (computers, human brain etc.) should be understood on 3 different levels:
o Computational – what it does.
o Algorithmic – how it does what it does.
o Implementational – what section is responsible for a function.
Mental Representations
A physical space that conveys information, specifying an object, event or category or its characteristics
Two distinct facets of representation:
- Format – the means by which information is conveyed.
- Content – The meaning conveyed by a representation.
Descriptive representations
abstract and based on syntactic rules
Depictive representations
occur in a spatial medium and based on perception
Mental processing
a transformation of information that obeys well-defined principles to produce outputs given inputs
What is a processing system?
A set of processes that work together to accomplish a type of task.
What is an algorithm?
An algorithm is a step-by-step procedure through which a certain input will generate a certain output
What is a theory?
A less concrete version of a model - a set of abstract principles that account for a range of phenomena.
What are computer simulation models used for?
Intended to mimic the underlying representations and processes that produce specific types of human performance
Drawbacks of process models:
- Internal workings/processes are not specified in detail.
- Assume serial processing rather than parallel processing where processes occur in conjunction.
What are behavioural methods?
The measurement of directly observable actions to try to draw inferences about internal representation and processing from observable responses
Common observational techniques Include (3):
- Accuracy
- Response Time
- Self reports
