Exam 1 Flashcards
Cognitive Psychology
The study of the mind: memory, perception, attention, etc.
Socrates
Very interested in the nature of knowledge and belief. He created the Socratic method.
Aristotle
Developed the first known model of how memory works. He compared memory it wax seals: how impressions mold your mind. Younger people have “hotter wax” and it’s easier to have them remember.
Franciscus Donders
Ophthalmologist and physiologist. First to measure reaction time by flashing lights and having participants press a button when they saw the light.
Simple Reaction Time
Flash ->(processing)-> button press
Perceive the light -> physical response
Choice Reaction Time
Flash -> (processing) -> button press but 100 ms difference from Simple Reaction Time bc of choice between two buttons.
Perceive light -> identify location of it -> physical response
Cognitive Research
Lets us measure cognitive processes, which requires inference and requires a model of the processes.
Cognitive Models
Stimulus detection -> stimulus identification -> response organization
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Focused on learning and forgetting by studying meaningless syllables bc they were independent from a meaning bc that would lead to contextual clues. He did research on himself. He also looked at retention and improvement. He was the first person to discover forgetting curve by learning words and testing himself to see how much he forgot.
Savings
Being able to learn something a second time made it easier than learning it for the first time.
Spacing Effect
Spread out your learning, which allows you to remember more.
Wilhelm Wundt
Founded the first psychology lab, which was in Germany. Created structuralism.
Structuralism
Tried to break down the mind down into small pieces to see what it was made up like the table of elements. Wundt did this through introspection.
Introspection
What goes on in your mind when you see something. Introspection is unverifiable, unreliable bc people are different and even the same person could be different, and most mental processes are unconscious.
Behaviorism
All about the study of behavior and things that happen on the outside, which took the spotlight from the mind.
Stimulus -> response instead of stimulus -> mental processing -> response bc behaviorism only studies observable behavior. It was the dominant focus for a while. Can’t explain rats not going back to the same location on a maze.
Classical Conditioning
Pavlov’s experiment with dog, bell, and food, which led to salivation. Also, with Little Albert and his fear of small white animals.
Operant Conditioning
B.F. Skinner said, “All we need to know in order to describe behavior: reward good behavior and not bad behavior.” This is how animals are trained.
Cognitive Maps
Mapping out places in your mind.
Instinctive Drift
Going back to their instinct behavior.
Noah Chomsky
Famous linguist who argued that people understand the structure of language. A sentence can be grammatically correct but make no sense.
The Cognitive Revolution and End of Behaviorism
Made it okay to talk about how the mind works again like failure of conditioning animals, human language, developments in brain research, subjective experience, new models arose, bc behaviorism couldn’t explain this.
Behavioral Approach
Overt, deliberate responses like response time, accuracy, recall, etc.
Physiological Approach
Bodily responses and often outside conscious control. Measuring your brain’s activity and eye tracking.
Consolidation
Stabilization of a memory trace after its initial acquisition.