Lecture 1 Flashcards
What is cognitive psychology
the study of intelligent behaviour. wants to know how people think and learn, remember (and forget), speak, read, write, pay attention, solve problems, make decisions.
Wilhelm Wundt and Structuralism
first person to call himself a psychologist. Trained as a medical doctor- became interested in studying thought and the mind. investigated the elements of immediate experience via analytic introspection. - describing component parts, e.g. water bottle- how does the shadow change when moved…
Developed some of the first ideas about:
1. Experimentation
2. Attention- first person to describe the difference between sustained and focused attention. (pay attention broadly or focus in)
3. Memory- first person to say the capacity of memory is around 7
4. Language- first person to invent tree diagrams to describe language
Titchener brought Wundt’s ideas to America
William James and Functionalism
thought of himself as a philosopher, trained as a medical doctor, did not consider himself to be a psychologist
Father of American psychology- attended wundts lectures, took his ideas back to Harvard and continue it but he did not like the approach of analytic introspection. He wanted to know what the mind does. He did thought experiments- what would happen if, a more philosophical approach. Many of his thought experiments have been demonstrated true later on though scientific experiments
Functionalist were interested in studying the purpose of thought rather than it’s elements
4 key principles of the scientific method
- Empiricism- observe the thing you are studying- never observe the mind, observe the output of the mind but not the mind directly
- Determinism- everything has a cause, everything happens for a reason- in theory what the mind does has a cause
- Testability- have to be able to test our theories and falsify, observe and test. If you cannot observe how do you test?
- Parsimony- Make the simplest conclusion. draw a conclusion from the observation.
analytic introspection
purpose of thought
Behaviourism
Behaviorism offered a way to study publicly observable functions of the mind
1. Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) described what would become the groundwork for behaviourism: classical (Pavlovian)
conditioning-
when dogs had meat powder on their tongues the salivated- Unconditioned stimulus and unconditioned response. Paired the meat powder with a bell (neutral stimulus)- Unconditioned stimulus and neutral stimulus paired- eventually the neutral stimulus causes salivation (conditioned response)– demonstrates that you can control behaviour
2. John Watson (1878-1958) was concerned with behaviour as a series of stimuli and responses- understand psychology in a predictable controlled way- use animals to stand in for humans. Mystery box is the mind, we cannot understand it but we do not need to, we just need to know what goes in and predict what will come out/ what the behaviour will be. Brain processes are unimportant (“mystery box”)
Animals can be a good substitute to study human behaviour
3. B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) developed operant conditioning- operant- animal or human has to do something, some behaviour happens and it is either rewarded or punished and based on that the behaviour will or will not happen again. behaviour techniques are useful for behaviour modification
Latent learning
E.C.Tolman (1886-1959) believed behaviour is not just a result of cause and effect:
radio arm maze- hallways with rooms at the end. A rat was put in chamber A and it was let to wander around with no punishment or rewards, according to behaviourism at the time the rat would learn nothing and wander around aimlessly. Then he put in food and would get re warded when they get to a specific room/ place. They get to e.g. chamber B and press a lever that will release food. The rat learnt this- reward for success, 3rd stage- rat is put into chamber C after it learnt about the food, according to behaviourism the rat will walk to centre and turns right going to the wrong place. But all the rats turned left and got to the correct chamber to get food. This shows that the rats were not learning to turn right they were learning the food is in chamber B and how to get there. they were learning the spatial arrangement of the space. They learnt this in the first phase where they clearly learnt how the maze looks like. Thus when they got to the third stage they knew how to get to chamber B. Learnt from wandering around, not a behaviour but a cognitive map (mental representation of what the place looked like
Cognitivism and Computers
WW2 changing point for psychology- gov funding diverted to war- less money for research. Shift to study cognition because that was being funded as it studied what govs wanted to know.
Attention, problem solving and decision making were of
primary interest
Computers were being developed that could perform tasks to replace human performance ➔ unobservable computations were knowable
Attention, problem solving and decision making were of primary interest
Computers were being developed that could perform tasks to replace human performance ➔ unobservable computations were knowable. idea laid the grown work for current computer
Newell and Simon were among the first to design a “non
war” computer program
Logic Theorist (1956) was the first ‘thinking machine’
Neisser’s 1967 book, Cognitive Psychology, relied heavily
on ideas from computer science
Themes in Cognitive Psychology
- Representationalism- describes how the unobservable mind can act on the real world
- Computation- assumes the mind is an information processor
- The biological perspective- believes information is represented as patterns of activity between interconnected neurons in a way similar to the brain
- Embodied cognition- is the study of cognition as we interact with the world
Representations
comes from the idea that we cannot observe the mind- most have the impression that what we think is not physical and is unique, but it comes from the physical brain- our thought is about a real thing, so what we have in our mind it is not a real thing in the world but is a representation of it e.g. see a water bottle, have a representation about it but it is not actually in our brain. Thought is all about mental representation that stand for a real thing- separation between world and mental events.
Computations
computers and minds do information processing, humans and computers essentially are doing the same things. For humans the goal is to figure out the process of manipulation. Computers are a type of a symbol system (using symbols to stand for something else). Computers and humans use symbol systems, representational and computational, all symbols are about something. They can be manipulated according to rules. mind is a symbol system
Representations and Computations
mental symbol form to stand for stuff in the world and thought is the manipulation. We can go backwards to see what were the rules to manipulate those representations.
There are rules we use. Symbol system, some kind of rule to manipulate. Observe the output and work backwards to figure out the rules.
Biological Perspective
Patient case studies have taught us about the functions of the brain but also of cognitive systems
Technology allows previously unobservable processing to become observable
The biological perspective has a basis in computation
Connectionism is an alternate theory of computing that is based on the idea that information is carried in connected neuron-like units
Information isn’t represented by symbols, it is a pattern of activation spread across units
Embodiment
opposite of representation- all symbol systems face a grounding problem- what is an apple?- a fruit- What is a fruit?- a seed from flower- what is a flower?- a plant- what is a plant?- use a symbol to explain another but you never get access to the real world. To know what an apple is you need to see it, have the experiences. The grounding problem is for symbol systems. Embodied cognition believes information is given by perceptual, motor and emotional activity by the body in the real world (and maybe eliminating the need for representations)
Experiments and Quasi-experiments
grounding problem
research methods
- Case studies- studying an individual or small group of individuals in detail e.g. for brain damage
- Correlational studies- observe how variable tend to go together, done when you cannot control your variable of interest. Cannot infer causation
- Experiments-
- Computer simulations- important bcs of the computer metaphor, theory of human processing- program into a computer and watch the output, is it the same?
