Introduction Flashcards
What is Williams Syndrome?
Patients that have difficulty processing visuospatial information but generally learn repeated routes better than age-matched individuals.
Why is Williams Syndrome an interesting phenomenon to study in cognitive psychology?
Through Cognitive methods, we are able to understand the mechanisms behind this syndrome, where the method could lead to a substantial finding in unknown disorders of the like.
In early philosophy, what are the two schools of thought that understand where knowledge comes from?
Nativism: Knowledge is innate
We are born with the knowledge we possess already, through development we can experience learning that is already there.
Plato, Socrates, Kant
Empiricism: Knowledge is acquired through experience
The child is born with a blank mind, overtime knowledge is acquired.
Aristotle, Bacon, Berkley, Locke, Hume
In early psychology what are the different ways of studying the human mind?
Structuralism: Analyse the mind into components.
Functionalism: What the mind does in response to stimuli.
Behaviourism: By studying input-output associations.
What are the main ideas of structuralism, its impact and its weakness?
Just like water can be broken down into its sub-components so can the mind. This was achieved through introspection, the free association of thought. Free association was broken down into sub-categories of thoughts and feelings.
Changed the nature of psychological research from philosophical to scientific.
Issues: subjective and unreliable
What are the main ideas behind behaviouralism, its impact and weaknesses?
Only the directly observable should be studied. Strict about stimulus-response relations and had a rigorous experimental approach.
Impact: Made psychology a subject of experimentation by involving methods and data-driven experiments.
Issues: It studied the mind as a black box, neglecting emotion, memory and attention etc. It could not solve practical problems.
What is the information-processing approach in cognitive psychology?
It aims to explain how information is encoded into memory. It is based on the idea that humans don’t merely respond to stimuli from the environment. Instead, humans process the information they receive.
When decomposing mental processes, what are the three sub-processes that exist?
Formulate a theoretical model of how the output is made form a given input.
Measure the time taken for each processing stage
Analyse which variable affects which processing stage
What is cognitive psychology, neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience?
Cognitive psychology
The science of how the mind is organised to produce intelligent thought and how it is realised in the brain
Neuroscience
The study of the structure and function of the nervous system
Cognitive neuroscience
Attempts to gain insight into cognitive processes by studying the brain and behaviour.
