Introduction to cognitive Flashcards
Dr. Smith believes that overt, observable behaviour is the only valid way that we can study people. Dr. Smith is a _____________
Behaviourist
Representations are …
The form information is stored in the mind
Is the P300 ERP a measure or concept ?
measure
Is amnesia a measure or concept?
concept
Is blink rate a measure or concept?
measure
Is frequency of laughter a measure or concept?
measure
Is overconfidence a measure or concept?
concept
Is percent accuracy a measure or concept?
measure
Is working memory a measure or concept?
concept
Is attention a measure or concept ?
concept
Are hesitations a measure or concept?
measure
Is top down processing a measure or concept ?
concept
Are confidence judgements a measure or concept ?
measure
Is reaction time a measure or concept ?
measure
Is recognition memory a measure or concept ?
concept
Is happiness a measure or concept ?
concept
What is a core principle of cognitive psychology ?
Information processing
Dr. Jones believes that studying in the morning enhances memory. She uses Ebbinghaus’s word recall task with two groups of students and find that those that study in the morning don’t recall more words. Is this theory correct?
The theory may be correct, the data contradicts it
- It’s a plausible theory, the data contradicts it, but it doesn’t mean the theory is wrong.
- Can’t say paradigm is perfectly aligned to her theory, or that the theory is definitely correct/wrong
What is a paradigm?
A commonly used experimental design
What are the challenges of studying cognition?
- Key concept= using objective measures (e.g. speed, accuracy) to make inferences about representations
- therefore cognition is a challenge to study because you cannot directly measure the thing that you are making theories about
Are all schemas representations?
All schemas are representations, but not all representations are schema
What is cognitive psychology?
The scientific study of mental processes, from perception, attention, memory, language, judgement and decision making, reasoning etc..
to creativity, learning, consciousness, animal
What is cognition?
- cognition is a function
- thought is invisible and intangible
- therefore we can only gather data that we can objectively verify and make inferences about i
What are the philosophical foundations of cognitive psychology?
- Behavioursim
and
-Information processing
What is behaviourism?
Two twin ideas:
1) an idea that there is no mind = shouldn’t talk about mental states and try and make theories about what people say they think- should look at the observable
2) a method: build psychology by measuring only the observable (skinner)
What is information processing ?
Thinking about the mind as an information processor
- Take input info in - transform it = way to understand the mind
What is the difference between data and theory?
- Data= evidence
- Theory = claims about what the data means
What are representations ?
What is the centrality of representations? (why are they important to cognitive psychology)
- The form that the information is stored in
(Therefore understanding representations = how they are created, stored, transformed, how produce output
Memory, perception etc. can be thought of what you do with representations e.g. memory storing representations)
What do representations allow you to do?
Allow you to impose structure on variable information, as you can’t store raw perceptions because they have no meaning
What did Newell do ? How did he affect the methological approach of cognitive psychology ?
Newells recommendations for progress in psychology:
- said psych work at the time was a good idea but will never go anywhere/help us understand the mind
- claimed we need to build theories
- its about the theories and processing that account for multiple phenomena
-
What were Newells suggestions?
- Formal models to be precise specification between input and output
- Models of cognition, not of tasks. Should be modelling complex tasks
- General models= model that is the same theory that you can apply to multiple tasks
How does cognitive psychology work?
experiments- paradigms & models - theories
