Introduction

Question 1

what is cognitive psychology?

Answer 1

• how sensory stimulation is acted upon by mental processes
• how do these lead to changes in behaviour?
• “Acted upon” = reduced, stored, transformed, generalized, retrieved, etc.
• Fundamental to every activity in daily life.
• Cognition is the building blocks of psychology
• memory, language, learning, attention, decision making

Question 2

what is introspection?

Answer 2

• looking in on one’s thoughts
• intuitively this seems a plausible method
• has major problems
  - reliability, generalisation, falsification, lacks the rigour of a scientific method

Question 3

what is behaviourism?

Answer 3

• John Watson
• psychology must be objective, observable, free from bias and scientific

Question 4

what are the principles of behaviourism?

Answer 4

• methodological
  - psychological theories should be based on observable empirical data
• theoretical
  - behaviour is best understood in terms of stimulus-response associations

Question 5

what are the successes of behaviourism?

Answer 5

• new methods and practices developed
• an understanding developed of how animals learn certain new behaviours e.g., conditioning
• psychological theories became testable and falsifiable
• huge implications for the clinic

Question 6

what are the limitations of behaviourism?

Answer 6

• was restrictive in terms of what could be explained
• with just stimulus-response or response-outcome links some mental processes are very hard to explain

Question 7

what is the cognitive revolution?

Answer 7

• it didn’t happen overnight and behaviourism didn’t just disappear
• theorists did have new freedoms to think about mental processes
• new empirical data
  - Miller 1956
  - STM cap, 7±2
• cognitivism
  - human behaviour is best explained by understanding how people think
• the unobservable is not necessarily unexplainable
• the future of psychology? computing

Question 8

what is information?

Answer 8

• developments in technology helped scientists think about psychology in a new way
• the brain performs functions on its input much like calculator
• information can be encoded in a variety of formats

Question 9

what is the cognitive revolution?

Answer 9

• psychologists has a new framework for describing and examining sophisticated mental processes
• building a machine that can mimic a mental process provides a theory of how that process occurs in the brain
• these theories can be simulated, new predictions can be tested and the theory can be falsified

Question 10

what are the different levels of theoretical account

Answer 10

• descriptive
  - the more surprised an animal is the more it will learn
• formal notation
  - ΔV = αβ(λ-ΣV)
• computational implementation
  - coding and graphs

Question 11

what were the changes from behaviourism?

Answer 11

• behaviourism wasn’t a dark time for psychology
• behaviourism was the birth of modern experimental psychology
• many research areas progressed rapidly after breaking free
• new conceptual tools facilitated researchers to develop more sophisticated higher-level theories of cognitive processes