Intro to Cognitive Science - Unit 1 Flashcards
What is cognitive psychology?
study of human mental processes and their role in thinking, feeling, and behaving
What was Ebbinghaus’ pioneer experiment?
He compared the time it took to learn a list from scratch to the time it took to relearn/recall a list he had semi-forgotten, thus comparing explicit and implicit memory
explicit memory
as measured in recall
implicit memory
as measured in learning performance
two main schools of early psychological thought
structuralism and functionalism
structuralism
focused on the elements of consciousness such as sensations, feelings, and images
who pioneered structuralism?
Wundt and Titchener
what is the school of structuralism based on?
introspection
what are two problems with structuralism?
inconsistent introspective reports, and sometimes cognition happens without consciousness
how did functionalism arise?
as an alternative to structuralism
pioneers of functionalism
Angell, Thorndyke, etc.
what is functionalism based on?
function over structure of the mind: how the mind mediates between stimuli and reponse
behaviorism
tried to make psychology objective by studying behavior instead of cognition
pioneer of behaviorism
Watson, 1913
what is a well-known example of behaviorism?
Pavlov’s dogs: conditioning
Thorndyke’s law of effect
rewards increase the frequency of behavioral responses to certain stimuli
how did Skinner contribute to operant conditioning?
showed in experiments how rewards or punishments affected the frequency of responses to stimuli
how did cognitive studies come about?
with the arrival of and information provided by computer systems
who are some pioneers of cognitive studies?
Chomsky, Piaget, Miller, Bruner, Broadbent
who came up with the physical symbols hypothesis?
Simon, 1990
what is the physical symbols hypothesis?
a system is only capable of intelligent behavior if it can input, output, store, and modify symbols and carry out actions in relation to those symbols
information-processing approach to cognitive psychology
analogy between mental processes and computing
what provides the focus of human mental life, meaning or information?
meaning (Bruner, 1990)
how can psychologists study the evolutionary development of the mind?
by comparing different species, or by comparing developmental stages of a single species: earlier developing traits are generally accepted to be evolutionarily earlier