History of Cognitive Psychology

Question 1

Definition of mind

Answer 1

A system that creates mental representations of the world and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning.

The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals.

Question 2

Simple reaction time

Answer 2

Reacting to the presence or absence of a single stimulus (as opposed to having to choose between a number of stimuli before making a response).

Question 3

Cognition

Answer 3

The mental processes involved in perception, attention, memory, language, problem solving, reasoning, and decision making.

Question 4

Reaction time

Answer 4

The time it takes to react to a stimulus. This is usually determined by measuring the time between presentation of a stimulus and the response to the stimulus. Examples of responses are pushing a button, saying a word, moving the eyes, and the appearance of a particular brain wave.

Question 5

Cognitive psychology

Answer 5

The branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mental processes involved in perception, attention, memory, language, problem solving, reasoning, and decision making. In short, cognitive psychology is concerned with the scientific study of the mind and mental processes.

Question 6

Choice reaction time

Answer 6

Time to respond to one of two or more stimuli. For example, in the Donders experiment, subjects had to make one response to one stimulus and a different response to another stimulus.

Question 7

Structuralism

Answer 7

An approach to psychology that explained perception as the adding up of small elementary units called sensations.

Question 8

Analytic introspection

Answer 8

A procedure used by early psychologists in which trained participants described their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli.

Question 9

Savings

Answer 9

Measure used by Ebbinghaus to determine the magnitude of memory left from initial learning. Higher savings indicate greater memory.

Question 10

Behaviorism

Answer 10

The approach to psychology, founded by John B. Watson, which states that observable behavior provides the only valid data for psychology. A consequence of this idea is that consciousness and unobservable mental processes are not considered worthy of study by psychologists.

Question 11

Operant conditioning

Answer 11

Type of conditioning championed by B. F. Skinner, which focuses on how behavior is strengthened by presentation of positive reinforcers, such as food or social approval, or withdrawal of negative reinforcers, such as a shock or social rejection.

Question 12

Savings curve

Answer 12

Plot of savings versus time after original learning.

Question 13

Classical conditioning

Answer 13

A procedure in which pairing a neutral stimulus with a stimulus that elicits a response causes the neutral stimulus to elicit that response.

Question 14

Cognitive map

Answer 14

Mental conception of a spatial layout.

Question 15

Scientific revolution

Answer 15

Occurs when there is a shift in thinking from one scientific paradigm to another.

Question 16

Cognitive revolution

Answer 16

A shift in psychology, beginning in the 1950s, from the behaviorist approach to an approach in which the main thrust was to explain behavior in terms of the mind. One of the outcomes of the cognitive revolution was the introduction of the information-processing approach to studying the mind.

Question 17

Paradigm

Answer 17

A system of ideas, which guide thinking in a particular field.

Question 18

Information-processing approach

Answer 18

The approach to psychology, developed beginning in the 1950s, in which the mind is described as processing information through a sequence of stages.

Question 19

Paradigm shift

Answer 19

A shift in thinking from one paradigm to another. The invention of the commercially available digital computer (1954) and the work of Noam Chomsky and Edward Chace Tolman contributed to the shift from behaviorism to cognitive psychology.

Question 20

Artificial intelligence

Answer 20

The ability of a computer to perform tasks usually associated with human intelligence.

McCarthy defined the artificial intelligence approach as “making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving” (McCarthy et al., 1955).

Question 21

Neuropsychology

Answer 21

The study of the behavioral effects of brain damage in humans.

Question 22

Electrophysiology

Answer 22

Techniques used to measure electrical responses of the nervous system.

Question 23

Brain imaging

Answer 23

Technique such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that results in images of the brain that represent brain activity. In cognitive psychology, activity is measured in response to specific cognitive tasks.

Question 24

Franciscus Donders

Answer 24

Dutch physiologist who in 1868 did one of the first experiments that today would be called a cognitive psychology experiment to measure reaction time (both simple and choice).

Because the choice reaction time took one-tenth of a second longer than simple reaction time, Donders concluded that the decision-making process took one-tenth of a second.

This experiment and Ebbinghaus’ both measured and quantified behavior to determine a property of the mind.

Question 25

Wilhelm Wundt

Answer 25

In 1879 founded the first laboratory of scientific psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany.

Wundt’s approach was called structuralism. Used analytical introspection to measure and understand the mind. Fell out of use in 1900s.

Question 26

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Answer 26

At the University of Berlin in 1885, first to use a quantitative method for measuring memory/ mental processes. He repeated lists of 13 nonsense syllables to himself one at a time at a constant rate. He used nonsense syllables so that his memory would not be influenced by the meaning of a particular word.

Measured time it took to learn the words and how long it took to relearn after forgetting. Used the term savings as the difference. The more time that elapsed when forgetting, the lower the savings. This was used to measure forgetting.

Forgetting occurs rapidly in the first 1 to 2 days after original learning, then levels out.

Question 27

William James

Answer 27

Taught Harvard’s first psychology course and made significant observations about the mind in his textbook, Principles of Psychology (1890).

James’s observations were based on observations about the operation of his own mind.

He stated that to focus your attention on a stimulus, you have to withdraw your attention from other stimuli.

Question 28

John B. Watson

Answer 28

Received his PhD in psychology in 1904 from the University of Chicago. Founded behaviorism and criticised analytical introspection for producing inconsistent results that could not be observed or verified (1913).

Behaviorism is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Ignores consciousness and subjective experience. Very popular from 1900s to 1960s.

Conducted Little Albert experiment where he conditioned a phobia of white rats in a 9-month-old boy.

Question 29

Ivan Pavlov

Answer 29

Russian physiologist who demonstrated principles of classical conditioning in the 1890s. His dog experiment inspired Watson’s theory of behaviorism.

In Pavlov’s famous experiment, he paired ringing a bell (NS) with presentation of food (US). Initially, presentation of the food caused the dog to salivate (UR), but after a number of pairings of bell and food, the bell alone (CS) caused salivation (CR).

Question 30

Burrhus Frederic Skinner (B. F. Skinner)

Answer 30

Received his PhD from Harvard in 1931. Introduced operant conditioning, which focused on how behavior is strengthened or discouraged with positive or negative rewards or punishments (1938). Dominated psychology from 1940s to 1960s.

Like Watson, Skinner was not interested in what was happening in the mind, but focused solely on determining how behavior was controlled by stimuli.

Question 31

Edward Chace Tolman

Answer 31

From 1918 to 1954 was at the University of California at Berkeley using behavior to infer mental processes.

In one of his experiments, Tolman (1948) placed a rat in a maze. The rat initially explores the maze. The rat learns to turn right to obtain food at B when it starts at A. When placed at C, the rat turns left to reach the food at B. In this experiment, precautions are taken to prevent the rat from knowing where the food is based on cues such as smell.

This experiment demonstrated that the rat developed a mental map when exploring and despite being rewarded for turning right initially, knew where to go to find food in a new position.

Tolman’s use of the word cognitive, and the idea that something other than stimulus–response connections might be occurring in the rat’s mind, placed Tolman outside of mainstream behaviorism.

Question 32

Reemergence of the Mind in Psychology

Answer 32

The publication, in 1957, of a book by B. F. Skinner titled Verbal Behavior. In his book, Skinner argued that children learn language through operant conditioning.

But in 1959, Noam Chomsky, a linguist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a review in which he pointed out that children say many sentences that have never been rewarded by parents. And that during the normal course of language development, they go through a stage in which they use incorrect grammar, even though this incorrect grammar may never have been reinforced.

Question 33

Noam Chomsky

Answer 33

Chomsky saw language development as being determined not by imitation or reinforcement, but by an inborn biological program that holds across cultures.

Demonstrated that to understand complex cognitive behaviors, it is necessary not only to measure observable behavior but also to consider what this behavior tells us about how the mind works.

Question 34

Thomas Kuhn

Answer 34

The philosopher who published the (1962) book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Defined a scientific revolution as a shift from one paradigm to another, where a paradigm is a system of ideas that dominate science at a particular time (Dyson, 2012). A scientific revolution, therefore, involves a paradigm shift.

Question 35

Colin Cherry

Answer 35

British psychologist (1953) presented participants with two auditory messages, one to the left ear and one to the right ear, and told them to focus their attention on one of the messages (the attended message) and to ignore the other one (the unattended message).

The result of this experiment was that when people focused on the attended message, they could hear the sounds of the unattended message but were unaware of the contents of that message.

Question 36

Donald Broadbent

Answer 36

British psychologist (1958) proposed the first flow diagram of the mind.

Applied to Cherry’s attention experiment, “input” would be the sounds of both the attended and unattended messages; the “filter” lets through the attended message and filters out the unattended message; and the “detector” records the information that gets through the filter.

Question 37

John McCarthy

Answer 37

A young professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College wondered if it could be possible to program computers to mimic the operation of the human mind. McCarthy decided to organize a conference in the summer of 1956 to provide a forum for researchers to discuss ways that computers could be programmed to carry out intelligent behavior. The title of the conference, Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, was the first use of the term artificial intelligence.

Question 38

Herb Simon and Alan Newell

Answer 38

From the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Created a computer program that could create proofs for problems in logic—something that up until then had only been achieved by humans. It was called Logic Theorist.

What they demonstrated was revolutionary because, although primitive compared to modern artificial intelligence programs, was a real “thinking machine” because it did more than simply process numbers—it used humanlike reasoning processes to solve problems.

Question 39

George Miller

Answer 39

A Harvard psychologist who presented a version of a paper “The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two,” which had just been published (Miller, 1956) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Symposium on Information Theory conference.

In that paper, Miller presented the idea that there are limits to a human’s ability to process information—that the capacity of the human mind is limited to about seven items.

Question 40

Ulrich Neisser

Answer 40

Published a textbook with the title Cognitive Psychology (Neisser, 1967).

Emphasized the information-processing approach to studying the mind.

Two gaps in knowledge were the physiology of mental processes and the understanding of higher mental processes such as thinking, problem solving, and long-term remembering.

Question 41

Endel Tulving

Answer 41

IIn 1972 divided Long-term memory into three components.

Episodic: life events

Semantic: facts

Procedural: physical actions

Question 42

Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin

Answer 42

Their model of memory published in 1968 was a big step toward the study of higher mental processes. This model, shown in demonstrates the flow of information in the memory system as progressing through three stages.

Sensory memory holds incoming information for a fraction of a second and then passes most of this information to short-term memory, which has limited capacity and holds information for seconds. The process of rehearsal occurs when we repeat something to keep from forgetting it. Some information in short-term memory can be transferred to long-term memory, a high-capacity system that can hold information for long periods of time. Some of the information in long-term memory can be returned to short-term memory (to be remembered).

Question 43

positron emission tomography (PET)

Answer 43

Introduced in 1976, made it possible to see which areas of the human brain are activated during cognitive activity. A disadvantage of this technique was that it was expensive and involved injecting radioactive tracers into a person’s bloodstream.

Question 44

functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

Answer 44

Introduced in 1990, it doesn’t involve radioactive tracers and is capable of higher resolution.

Question 45

Stephen Palmer

Answer 45

In 1975 completed an experiment to illustrate how our knowledge about the environment can influence our perception and is central to our cognitive processing.

Palmer first presented a context scene such as the kitchen scene on the left and then briefly flashed one of the target pictures on the right. When Palmer asked observers to identify the object in the target picture, they correctly identified an object like the loaf of bread (which is appropriate to the kitchen scene) 80 percent of the time, but correctly identified the mailbox or the drum (two objects that don’t fit into the scene) only 40 percent of the time.

Question 46

Notable developments in cognitive psychology in the decades following Neisser’s book

Answer 46

(1) development of more-sophisticated models; (2) research focusing on the physiological basis of cognition; (3) concern with cognition in the real world, and (4) the role of knowledge in cognition.