introduction to cognitive research

Question 1

assumptions of cognitive psychology

Answer 1

• mental processes exist
• mental processes can be studied scientifically
• humans are active participants in act of cognition

Question 2

what is cognitive psychology

Answer 2

• Scientific study of human mental (or internal) processes
• Involved in making sense
  of the environment and
  taking action
• Occur rapidly
• Below level of conscious
  awareness

Question 3

behaviorist vs cognitive psych

Answer 3

• behaviourist interested in observable behavior. rejected use of introspections
• cognitive is a change/shift in interests, mental processes used in perceiving ,comprehension ,remembering and thinking.

Question 4

four approaches to human cognition

Answer 4

• cognitive psychology (use behavioral evidence to understand cognition)
• cognitive neuropsychology (study of brain-damaged patients)
• cognitive neuroscience ( using evidence from behavior and brain imaging)
• computational cognitive science (developing computational models, algorithm = computational procedures providing specific steps to problem solution)

Question 5

the cognitive scientific approach

Answer 5

• Systematically study people performing tasks
  – Experiments on healthy people under controlled, laboratory conditions
• How can we measure mental processes?
  – Response time (RT) , a measure of time between stimulus and persons response
  – Accuracy, measuring proportion correct

Question 6

strengths of cognitive scientific approach

Answer 6

• foundation of understanding human mental processes
• countinues to inform theorising in contemporary research across disciplines
• source of most theories and tasks used by other approaches

Question 7

weaknesses of cognitive scientific approach

Answer 7

• task impurity problem (most tasks involve multiple cog processes
• ecological validity
• lab based mesures (provide indirect evidence)
• paradigm specificity (findings on one task do not always generalise to other similar tasks

Question 8

information processing

Answer 8

• mental processes can be understood as a sequence of independent processing stages
• Bottom-up (data-driven)
  – Processing directly affected
• Serial processing current process is
  completed before the
  next one starts by the stimulus input

Question 9

weaknesses of info processing

Answer 9

• Too simplistic!
• More contemporary approaches
  have moved away from strict
  information processing approach
• Cannot account for other types of
  processing
  (e.g. top-down (processing influenced by individuals expectations)/parallel)

Question 10

parallel processing

Answer 10

• more than one cognitive process occurs simultaneously

Question 11

seven key themes

Answer 11

• bottom up (data driven) vs top-down (conceptually-driven) processing
• attention
• representation
• implicit vs explicit memory
• meta cognition
• embodiment
• the brain

Question 12

attention

Answer 12

• poorly understood
• limited in quantity and only partially under our control, essential

Question 13

representation

Answer 13

• a hypothetical entity
• stands for particular perception,thought or memory
• manipulated during cognitive operations such as retrieval from memory, thinking or problem solving

Question 14

implicit vs explicit

Answer 14

• implict is unconscious memories, remember without awareness
• explicit is conscious memories, episodic or semantic

Question 15

metacognition

Answer 15

• awareness if own cognitive system and how it works
• processes we use to plain, monitor and assess understanding and performance

Question 16

embodiment

Answer 16

• Embodied cognition
• The way we think and represent
  information is a reflection of how
  we interact with the world

Question 17

the brain

Answer 17

• focus on how and where memories are stored in the brain
• brain cognition relationships and questions focus on contemporary cognitive psychologists