Intro to Cognitive Psychology Flashcards
What is the mind?
A system that creates mental representations of the world and controls mental functions.
By creating mental representations of the world…
We can act within it to achieve our goals.
Define ‘cognitive psychology’
The study of mental processes, which includes determining the characteristics and properties of the mind and how it works.
Describe the impact of behaviourism on the study of the mind.
Focuses on observable behaviour as a means to studying the human mind. Halted research on the operations of the mind and focused only on stimulus-response connections.
Tolman was placed outside of mainstream behaviourism because…
He used behaviour to infer mental processes.
Cognitive revolution
Paradigm shift in the 1950s from behaviourism to understanding the operation of the mind.
What events led to the cognitive revolution?
- Chomsky’s critique of Skinner’s book
- Invention of the computer and the idea that the mind also processes information in stages
- Cherry’s attention experiments and Broadbent’s “Early Selection Theory” flow diagrams
- Interdisciplinary conferences
What is the role of models in cognitive psychology?
They explain and simulate mental processes
Contrast early and late selection theory
Early selection theory: selection occurs at early stages of processing, therefore, unattended stimuli are not fully processed
Late selection theory: attention operates only after stimuli have been fully processed
Early/late selection theory states pre-attentive, automatic, parallel processing of:
Early - physical information
Late - physical and semantic information
Early/late selection theory states unlimited capacity for processing of:
Early - physical information
Late - physical and semantic information
Early/late selection theory states attention required for processing of:
Early - meaning, awareness, encoding, making a response
Late - awareness, encoding, making a response
Franciscus Donders
Did one of the first cognitive psychology experiments. He studied reaction time vs choice reaction time.
Conclusion: choice reaction time takes longer, therefore it takes longer to make a decision
Wilhelm Wundt
Founded the first scientific psychology lab. His approach was structuralism and method of introspection
Ebbinghaus
Savings method to measure forgetting, quantitative method
Conclusion: forgetting happens rapidily, in the first 1-2 days
