Lecture 1: History

Question 1

What is cognitive psychology?

Answer 1

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.

Question 2

What do we have to observe to infer thought? Why?

Answer 2

We have to observe behaviour to infer thought because much of cognition is unconscious and more complex than it seems.

Question 3

What does epistemology study?

Answer 3

What do we know and how do we gain knowledge?

Question 4

What is rationalism?

Answer 4

• a priori truths

- gain knowledge through reasoning and deduction

Question 5

What is empiricism?

Answer 5

• a posteriori truths

- gain knowledge through observation and induction

Question 6

What is the difference between a priori and a posteriori knowledge?

Answer 6

a priori - self-evident truth, independent of experience

a posteriori - truth gained through experience or from empirical evidence

Question 7

What is the difference between induction and deduction?

Answer 7

induction - works from the specific to the general, bottom-up

deduction - works from general to specific, top-down approach

Question 8

Who is Wilhelm Wundt?

Answer 8

• the “first” psychologist

- investigated the elements of immediate experience via analytic introspection

Question 9

What is analytic introspection?

Answer 9

• trained to look carefully inward and report inner sensation and experience

Question 10

What ideas did Wilhelm Wundt first develop psychological theories about?

Answer 10

• Experimentation
• Perception
• Attention
• Memory
• Language

Question 11

What is structuralism?

Answer 11

• 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

Question 12

Who is William James?

Answer 12

• Father of American psychology

- wrote “The Principles of Psychology”

Question 13

What is functionalism?

Answer 13

• studied the purpose of thought rather than its elements

- concerned with prediction and control through direct observation

Question 14

What were the influences of psychoanalysis?

Answer 14

• put forth idea of unconscious mind

- highlighted the importance of biology and society

Question 15

Who is Edward Lee Thorndike?

Answer 15

• set the stage for behaviourism in America

- named the “law of effect”

Question 16

What is the law of effect?

Answer 16

• When an association is followed by a “satisfying state of affairs,” the connection is strengthened

Question 17

What is behaviourism?

Answer 17

• scientific study of observable behaviour
• considered brain processes as unimportant (“mystery box”)
• animals can substitute study of human behaviour

Question 18

What was E. C. Tolman’s experiment and what did it prove about learning?

Answer 18

• 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.

Question 19

Who is Noam Chomsky?

Answer 19

• linguist

- did not believe language could simply result from stimulus and response

Question 20

What is the “poverty of stimulus” argument?

Answer 20

• 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

Question 21

Why was WWII a turning point for psychology?

Answer 21

• research needed for practical applications in the field

> attention, problem solving, and decision making were primary areas of interest
computers were developed

Question 22

Why was the advent of computers an important development for psychology?

Answer 22

• computers that can perform tasks that resemble human performance allowed the mental operations to be observable

Question 23

What is a Turing Machine?

Answer 23

• hypothetical device proposed by Alan Turing
• basically a computer program
• goal was to carry out what the human mind could do

Question 24

What is Logic Theorist?

Answer 24

• the first “thinking machine”

- worked through proofs using programmed laws

Question 25

What are some common themes in cognitive psychology?

Answer 25

1. Mental representations
2. Bottom-up vs. Top-down processing
3. Content vs. Process
4. Serial vs. Parallel processing
5. Unconscious vs. Conscious
6. Attention
7. Embodiment
8. The mind is in the brain
9. Metacognition

Question 26

What is ecological validity?

Answer 26

• generalizability to the real-world situations in which people think and act

Question 27

What is reductionism?

Answer 27

• attempting to understand complex events by breaking them down into their components

Question 28

What is cognition?

Answer 28

• collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, remembering, thinking, and understanding, as well as the act of using those processes

Question 29

What is verbal learning?

Answer 29

• the branch of experimental psychology that dealt with humans as they learned verbal material, composed of letters

Question 30

What is the concept of channel capacity?

Answer 30

• any channel (physical device that transmits messages or information) has a limited capacity
• humans are limited-capacity channels
  → lead to investigations about human limits