Introduction Flashcards
What is cognitive psychology?
The study of how people perceive, learn, remember, and think.
Examples include how people perceive shapes and how we learn language
What is cognition?
The collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, learning, remembering, thinking, and understanding, and the act of using those processes.
Who is Willhelm Wundt?
The father of experimental psychology
Introspection
A method in which one looks carefully inward reporting on inner situations and experiences.
What were Wundt’s criteria for introspection?
- The observer must know when the experience begins and ends.
- The observer must maintain “strained attention”
- The phenomenon must bear repetition
- The phenomenon must be capable of variation.
What are some of the difficulties with introspection?
Observers were highly trained, but self-reports were not consistent across people.
The contents of reports were not observable and thus hard to study scientifically.
What is Illusory superiority?
a person overestimates their own qualities and abilities, in relation to the same qualities and abilities of other people (wikipedia)
What the response to Wundt’s introspection?
Behaviorism
What is behaviorism?
Focused on observing behavior instead of cognition. It excluded mental processes from the realm of scientific inquiry.
Operant conditioning
The
Reinforcement
A stimulus that strengthens or weakens a behavior
What are some challenges to behaviorism?
Species specific behavior- suggests innate differences and dispositions that were internal to the organism.
In principle arguments- Chomsky argued that terms such as stimulus, response, and reinforcement had insufficient precision to be applied outside the laboratory in a meaningful way.
What is the assumption about cognitive psychology?
Mental processes exist and need to be studied if psychology is to be useful
What are the assumptions about mental processes?
- They are lawful and systematic
- They generalize across people.
- They can be discovered and understood by examining behavior.
- Mental processes take time.
- Humans are active information seekers.
What is the subtractive method?
A method invented by Frans Cornelis Donders. It’s used to measure the duration of time it takes to select a response and to discrminate between two stimuli.
