Foundations of cognitive psychology: from Plato to Pavlov Flashcards
What does cognition refer to in everyday use vs. in psychology
> Everyday use: an individual thought
> In psychology: all forms of mental processes
What is cognitive psychology, as a dominant branch of the 20th and 21st century?
What does it seek to identify?
Scientific study of mental processes
> Seeks to identify: internal representations and structures that underlie our conscious and unconscious cognitions
What are the two aims of cognitive psychology - what does it seek to provide?
- Provide theoretical descriptions or models of cognitive structures and processes
- Provide experimental and quantitative evidence regarding mental functioning
What are the four fields that make up cognitive science?
- Cognitive neuroscience
- Human experimental cognitive psychology
- Artificial intelligence and computer science
- Psycholinguistics
What are the origins of modern cognitive psychology?
Ancient Greek philosophy
- Plato
- Aristotle
What was the psyche associated with in Ancient Greek philosophy?
The soul -> mind
What are the 2 complementary schools of thought in Ancient Greek philosophy that still influence modern psychological theories?
> Rationalism (Plato)
> Empiricism (Aristotle)
Who founded rationalism, and what are its the underlying principles?
Plato: rationalism
- thinking itself: examining personal experience and mental processes -> intuition and deduction
- knowledge is innate -> nature view
- there is a core human nature that cannot be altered or manipulated
- > you’re either ‘good’ or ‘bad’
Who founded empiricism, and what are its underlying principles?
Aristotle: empiricism
- we are shaped by experience -> nature view
- humans can be controlled and manipulated to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’
Which interplay is involved in the modern scientific method?
Reasoning and abstract thinking
- generalisations from deductive processes
- induction from empirical methods
How is the nature vs. nurture debate now considered?
As sterile and fundamentally inaccurate as a dichotomy
What was Immanuel Kant’s idea of psychology?
Why?
Psychology is not an empirical science:
- there’s only introspection -> alters what it observes
- no general law
- reductionism
How did Immanuel Kant define the mind?
As a set of different abilities working together to produce individual experience
-> cognitive architecture
Which method did Immanuel Kant present in his work ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ (1781)?
Transcendental method:
- without observing the mind, we can infer the conditions that must be present in the mind to explain conscious experience
- > philosophical method
=> the mind and its functions are not amenable to direct study
What is the development of Psychology after Immanuel Kant’s work (1781)?
It continued to develop over early half of the 19th century in Europe and later on in the US
- all schools of psychology over that time have contributed in part to modern cognitive psychology
What was the work of Wilhelm Wundt on Psychology (1879)?
Father of Experimental Psychology
- first laboratory in 1879
> Introspection:
- thought it was the most direct way to study conscious mind (like Kant)
- based on perception and its percepts -> visual images
- warning + stimuli systematically varied to measure its effect on resultant internal cognitive event
Why was Wundt’s school of thought sometimes referred to as ‘voluntarism’?
Those doing the introspection were highly trained to manage and describe their experiences without interpretation
- understand how initial exposure lead to automatic passive associations
- leading to conscious thoughts
- and finally Apperception: mental images
-> resulting from an active voluntary process
How did Wundt approach the conscious experience?
Conscious experience as a whole
What is Wundt’s principle of structuralism?
In a typical experiment:
- stimuli word ‘apple’ presented to subject
- would evoke a set of properties defining its structure
- > preceding conscious awareness of the apple itself, before the mental image
-> Wundt concluded our thoughts have structure
Which apparatus did Wundt develop to measure the processes of the conscious experience?
Chromoscope:
- record reaction times from presentation of stimulus to introspective reponse
- subtractive procedure: time difference between 2 introspective products
- > estimate time reader for apperception to take place
=> mental chronometry
Why didn’t Wundt attempt to study the core aspects of cognition (e.g. learning, memory, language)?
They were less accessible to his experimental methods and to introspection
(not because he denied their existence or felt they were unimportant)
What was the relationship between Wilhelm Wundt and Edward B. Titchener?
Titchener studied with Wundt in Leipzig, before moving to Cornell University (US)
What was the work and approach of Edward B Titchener (1901)?
> Structuralism approach
- he wasn’t interested in holistic processes
- ‘Experimental Psychology’ (1901)
> Standardisation of Experimental Method of introspection
- to improve its accuracy and reproducibility
- focus on immediate and mental experience
- > science of sensation
How did Titchener’s approach differ from Wundt’s?
Both on experimental introspection:
- Wundt: whole conscious experience
- Titchener: studied the elemental parts of conscious experience, by breaking them down
How did Titchener approach the science of sensation?
Reductionist classification
> Sensation has 4 independent properties, each subclassified:
- intensity
- quality
- spatial extent
- duration
> Over 40 000 elemental properties
What characterises structuralism and Titchener’s psychology?
How are they limited?
> Feature analysis as a means of object identification
= the first step of cognitive and independent stages of analysis and decision making
-> fundamentally limited by its focus on sensation
> Titchener’s psychology:
- defined by what we can see and measure
- > neglected whole areas now considered part of cognitive science
What was the work of William James in the US (1891)?
> ‘The principles of Psychology’ (1891)
- no experimental processes
- his writings included consciousness, instinct, emotion
> First university course in Psychology in the US at Harvard
What was William James’s approach of functionalism?
Functional introspection:
- from Darwin’s theory, he explained how the mind adapts to met the needs of the organism
- mental processes (purpose of consciousness) rather than mental structures (constituents)
- > use of experience to understand how the constituent parts of the mind work together for the functioning of the organism
What is the place of functionalism today?
Remains a core part of modern psychology, focusing on cognitive processes and how they serve adaptive behaviour
- it emerged with other aspects of structuralist tradition to form an overarching framework: cognitive psychology
What was the work of Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885)?
Pioneer of Experimental Cognitive Psychology
> 1885 paper ‘Memory: a contribution to experimental psychology’
- control over conditions
- impact of extraneous factors interfering with out process of interest
> Statistical approaches
- estimate effects
- obtaining estimates of measurement error
- > fundamentally different from what came before
What is the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve?
Time course over which we forget information
> Some info. carries a complex set of associations, images, meanings, allowing us to recall the info.
(e. g. poetry)
- learning by repetition a standard set of nonsense syllables
> “saving score”: difference between the original and the late learning
> Average over many individual trials with different attention intervals = classic Ebbinghaus forgetting curve
-> most forgetting happens in the first minutes ;
forgetting slows down to very little forgetting of material after 4 days - even with intervals of a month
Which did Ebbinghaus’ statistical work offer?
Fundamental insights into memory processes, inaccessible to the introspection method
-> started experimental cognitive psychology of memory
When was the period of the (temporary) decline of cognitivism and the growth of behaviourism?
Why did that happen?
Late 19th - early 20th
- all psychology was cognitive
- dissatisfaction with introspection
What was the nature of the criticism against introspection (limitations of the method)?
Limitations raised by proponents of introspection, such as Wundt himself:
- Unreliable: inter- and intra-individual differences
- Unrepresentative: introspection by experts in the field
- Limited in use
- Limited in areas of application
e. g. can’t study unconscious processes - Wider issue: animal psychology ignored
What was the danger when the study of animal or comparative psychology started to emerge during late 19th and early 20th century?
That people would start to apply human constructs of the human mind to other animal species, without the ability to confirm their existence empirically.
Who responded to the preoccupations regarding the emerging animal and comparative psychology in the early 20th century?
How?
C. Lloyd Morgan (English psychologist)
‘Morgan’s Canon’: constraints on theories of animal behaviour:
> We need the simplest possible explanation to what can be observed without invoking higher - human -psychological processes
-> principle of Parsimony: between 2 alternative explanations, choose the simplest one
What was the implications of C. Lloyd Morgan’s Canon for human psychology?
If we don’t need human processes to explain behaviour in animals, why do we need to explain our own behaviour
-> Do we need cognition as explanatory factor?
Did C. Lloyd Morgan deny the existence of internal (cognitive) events in animals?
No, he was cautioning against invoking/inferring animal cognitive events as explanations for animal behaviour
- when simpler explanations existed, not requiring those internal events
Who is thought to have founded behaviourism?
With what event (1913)?
J. B. Watson (American psychologist)
- lecture given at Columbia University in 1913: “Psychology as the Behaviourist Views It”
= behaviourist manifesto
What were the ideas of J. B. Watson regarding introspection and mental states?
> Rejects introspection method, structuralism and functionalism
> Denies the need to evoke consciousness, perception, …
=> The study of mental states is fundamentally unscientific and needs to be abandoned
What is the most fundamental ‘unit’ for behaviourists?
Association: how animal/human makes links between
- stimuli-response
- response-outcome / adaptive behavioural goal: learning
What was the origin of the learning theory? What is it?
Birth of behaviourism -> learning theory:
- an area of psychology that continues to flourish, albeit in the context of a wider cognitive framework
What was the radical shift in approach advocated by Watson?
> Private events / cognitive faculties were pushed to the margins
Thought to be explained by simpler, observable public events
What is the concept of Watson’s behaviourism?
> Avoid psychological explanations that go beyond inputs and outputs
> Rejects the use of unobserved events in explanations
-> study of “private” events is unscientific and should remain private
How did later behaviourists differ from Watson?
Sought to apply the principles to explain complex behaviours (e.g. language, social behaviour) that would seem to require acceptance of an inner state
What is the behaviourist meaning of an input, an output,, and intervening variables?
> Input
- stimulus: experimental condition
- antecedent: natural event
> Intervening variables
- Watson’s private events (inner state)
- > link between input and output
> Output
- response
- behaviour
What is Pavlov’s idea of the physiological reflex?
Behaviours and reactions that aren’t learned, but can be explained by ‘built-in’ - innate - properties of the nervous system
- automatic response to stimuli, seen in all animals, preserved even with major damage to central nervous system
e. g. eye blink, salivation reflex
Which work lead Pavlov to be awarded a Nobel Prize in 1904?
Study of digestive reflex reactions in dogs
- he wanted to measure digestive fluids without getting food in the way of accurate measurement
- > systematically trained the dogs to make their reflex digestive secretions without the need for food at all
How did Pavlov train the dogs to make their reflex digestive secretions without the need for food at all?
By systematic and gradual pairing of natural stimulus (food) with neutral stimulus (bell ringing)
- this association got dogs to salivate only in response to the neutral stimulus (now conditioned)
- > “psychic secretion”
What is Pavlov’s method of classical conditioning?
Relies on temporal pairing of 2 stimuli so the natural properties of one (unconditioned stimulus) transfer to the other (neutral stimulus)
- > neutral stimulus becomes conditioned stimulus
- > induces a conditioned response
What did Pavlov’s classical conditioning paradigm become?
A crucial method to study the mechanisms of associative learning
What are the 3 phenomenons observable in the classical conditioning paradigm?
- Acquisition
- Extinction
- Spontaneous recovery
In a classical conditioning paradigm, what does the acquisition phenomenon reflect?
The amount of saliva secreted increases with the number of pairings, up to a physiological limit
-> the bell acquiring strength as a conditioned stimulus to produce a conditioned response
In a classical conditioning paradigm, what does the extinction phenomenon reflect?
Amount of saliva secreted decreases
- bell no longer serves as signal of imminent arrival of food
- > bell becomes again a neutral stimulus
=> the conditioned response doesn’t last forever
In a classical conditioning paradigm, what does the spontaneous recovery phenomenon reflect?
Reactivation of a dormant learned association:
- not all learning is gone, just no longer has useful function
- if dog is exposed to bell a few hours after extinction, animal may show reemergence of the conditioned salivation response
- > no new learning
What is the strength of a new conditioned response related to?
To how similar the new conditioned stimulus is to the original stimulus
- e.g. animal trained to a tuning fork at specific frequency will show a systematic reduction in saliva secretion for higher or lower frequencies
How does Morgan’s Canon intervene into classical conditioning?
The simple ability of a stimulus to produce a response -however complex - does not necessarily mean there’s a cognitive meditational process / conscious knowing
- a change in strength of the conditioned response to a similar conditioned stimulus indicates the animal has discriminated between the original and new stimulus
BUT does not necessarily imply it is conscious
=> don’t invoke cognitions if there are simpler explanations
How does Aplysia californica, the California sea slug, demonstrate that classical conditioning does not require cognitive explanations?
It has a very simple central nervous system, of only about 10,000 neurons (vs. 100 billion in human brain)
- yet, it still shows the ability to learn through classical conditioning
=> even the simplest of animals can be conditioned and learn new stimulus-stimulus pairings
What did Watson show using Pavlov’s principles with ‘Little Albert’?
It is possible to condition fear in a baby simply and quickly
- during infancy experience and associations made to stimuli could shape and evoke patterns of emotional response
- rat (neutral stimulus) paired with sound of hammer striking steel bar -> rat became a conditioned stimulus
- ‘Little Albert’ developed a conditioned fear response
What makes Watson’s study with ‘Little Albert’ unethical by today’s standards?
> The conditioned fear response extended from rat to other white furry objects (e.g. rabbit)
> Watson noted that contact with ‘Little Albert’ was lost at that point before they could undo the learned fear by a process of deconditioning
- he expressed concern that the learned fear would persist indefinitely
> ‘Little Albert’ hasn’t been found
What did Watson’s study with ‘Little Albert’ trigger?
Subsequent work in the development of positive therapeutic uses f conditioning principles
- a key step in the evolution of modern CBT
