Lecture 1: History Flashcards
What is cognitive psychology?
Cognitive psychology is concerned with how people think and learn, remember (and forget), speak, read, write, pay attention, solve problems, make decisions, etc.
Scientific study of the mind.
What do we have to observe to infer thought? Why?
We have to observe behaviour to infer thought because much of cognition is unconscious and more complex than it seems.
What does epistemology study?
What do we know and how do we gain knowledge?
What is rationalism?
- a priori truths
- gain knowledge through reasoning and deduction
What is empiricism?
- a posteriori truths
- gain knowledge through observation and induction
What is the difference between a priori and a posteriori knowledge?
a priori - self-evident truth, independent of experience
a posteriori - truth gained through experience or from empirical evidence
What is the difference between induction and deduction?
induction - works from the specific to the general, bottom-up
deduction - works from general to specific, top-down approach
Who is Wilhelm Wundt?
- the “first” psychologist
- investigated the elements of immediate experience via analytic introspection
What is analytic introspection?
- trained to look carefully inward and report inner sensation and experience
What ideas did Wilhelm Wundt first develop psychological theories about?
- Experimentation
- Perception
- Attention
- Memory
- Language
What is structuralism?
- psychological discipline brought by Titchener to America
- study of the structure of the conscious mind, the sensations, images, and feelings that were the elements of the mind’s structure
Who is William James?
- Father of American psychology
- wrote “The Principles of Psychology”
What is functionalism?
- studied the purpose of thought rather than its elements
- concerned with prediction and control through direct observation
What were the influences of psychoanalysis?
- put forth idea of unconscious mind
- highlighted the importance of biology and society
Who is Edward Lee Thorndike?
- set the stage for behaviourism in America
- named the “law of effect”
What is the law of effect?
- When an association is followed by a “satisfying state of affairs,” the connection is strengthened
What is behaviourism?
- scientific study of observable behaviour
- considered brain processes as unimportant (“mystery box”)
- animals can substitute study of human behaviour
What was E. C. Tolman’s experiment and what did it prove about learning?
- E. C. Tolman believed learning was purposeful and latent i.e. required neither reward nor punishment
PART A: Let a rat explore a maze.
PART B: Put a rat in one end of the maze and reward present in one of the chambers.
PART C: Put rat in opposite side of maze, but it still managed to find the chamber.
RESULT: Rat learned maze layout without prompting.
Who is Noam Chomsky?
- linguist
- did not believe language could simply result from stimulus and response
What is the “poverty of stimulus” argument?
- Noam Chomsky argued that behaviourism could not explain how language is simply learned
> children don’t have enough exposure to language to know the incredible amount of words/phrases they know
children say things that they’ve never heard before and frequently make mistakes that adults don’t make
Why was WWII a turning point for psychology?
- research needed for practical applications in the field
> attention, problem solving, and decision making were primary areas of interest
computers were developed
Why was the advent of computers an important development for psychology?
- computers that can perform tasks that resemble human performance allowed the mental operations to be observable
What is a Turing Machine?
- hypothetical device proposed by Alan Turing
- basically a computer program
- goal was to carry out what the human mind could do
What is Logic Theorist?
- the first “thinking machine”
- worked through proofs using programmed laws
What are some common themes in cognitive psychology?
- Mental representations
- Bottom-up vs. Top-down processing
- Content vs. Process
- Serial vs. Parallel processing
- Unconscious vs. Conscious
- Attention
- Embodiment
- The mind is in the brain
- Metacognition
What is ecological validity?
- generalizability to the real-world situations in which people think and act
What is reductionism?
- attempting to understand complex events by breaking them down into their components
What is cognition?
- collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, remembering, thinking, and understanding, as well as the act of using those processes
What is verbal learning?
- the branch of experimental psychology that dealt with humans as they learned verbal material, composed of letters
What is the concept of channel capacity?
- any channel (physical device that transmits messages or information) has a limited capacity
- humans are limited-capacity channels
→ lead to investigations about human limits
