Lecture 1 - What Is Cogntive Pscyhology

Question 1

What is cognitive psychology?

Answer 1

What is the mind?
History of studying the mind
How can we study the mind?
Models of the mind

Question 2

The mind

Answer 2

Forms and recalls memories
Solves problems, considers possibilities, makes decisions
Responsible for survival and normal functioning
Symbol of creativity and intelligence
Creates representations of the world so we can act it - we never perceive the world as it actually is, we can only perceive the representation of it that our brain has created

Question 3

What is the mind?

Answer 3

The mind creates and controls mental functions such as the cognitive domains (this list isn’t exhaustive)
- perception
- attention
- memory
- emotions
- language
- deciding
- thinking
- reasoning
The mind operates high level (consciously controlled) and low level (automatic) cognitive functions
These are also often referred to as ‘top down’ vs ‘bottom up’ processing
The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals
~ some scientists go as far as saying hat the mind is a simulation or prediction machine or a ‘proxy’ of the real; world around us to effective;y operate in it

Examples of how the mind works in the real world:
- able to recall what they were doing the day of an accident - the mind is linked to memory
- solve maths equations - mind is a problem solver
- I haven’t made my mind up yet - the mind is used to make decisions and consider possibilities
- they are out of their mind - healthy mind associated with normal functioning, non-functioning mind associated with abnormal functioning
- A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Mind is valuable, something that should be used
- that person has a brilliant mind - used to describe people who are particularly intelligent or creative

It is important to note that cognition does not solely refer to thinking functions and that many of the processes involved (basic and complex) operate outside of conscious control
The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it and achieve our goals

Question 4

Problem with the study of the mind

Answer 4

We can’t observe the mind directly
- we can observe the brain directly, however not the mind, only the biological consequences of what the mind does (however the brain would need to be removed)
This is the case for all psychological neuroscience and neuropsychological research to this day
We can only observe behaviour and draw inferences about behaviour and underlying processes and mechanisms

Question 5

The first cognitive experiment

Answer 5

Before the 1800s the study of the mind was a question for philosophy
Franciscus Donders (Dutch physiologist) intents the subtraction method in his study on how long does it take to make a decision
How he conducted the experiment:
- he used reaction Times
- first measured simple reaction time -> press button as rapidly as possible when the light flashes
- then measured choice reaction time -> used two lights - when left light goes off, choose left button, when right light goes off, choose left button
- reasoned that the difference in reaction time would indicate how long it took to make the decision
- in this case, took around 100ms longer, therefore that is how long the decision took
Rationale behind subtraction method:
- if you measure 2 variations of the same mental function that only differ in 1 aspect, the observed difference between these 2 variables can be attributed to that one aspect, the observed difference between these two variations can be attributed to that 1 aspect in which they are different
- how long does it take to make a decision?
- T0 = T2-T1
-Td = (mean of T2) - (mean of T1)
Experimental importance because it showed the importance of studying the mind - mental responses cannot be directly measured but can be inferred from behaviour - also demonstrated the mathematical approach to studying the mind

Question 6

The first psychological lab

Answer 6

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)
- first psychological lab in 1879 at the University of Leipzig
- investigated nature of consciousness
- Assessment of mental activities
- introduced structuralism into the study of the mind
~ structuralism is an approach in psychology that attempts to explain the functions of the mind by adding up hypothesised elementary units

Question 7

Structuralism

Answer 7

Psychology as a science that investigates the nature of consciousness
- what are the elementary contents of the mind?
~ Wundt and his elects called these sensations
- what are the combinations that the elements undergo?
- what are the laws that regulate these combinations?
~ study of sensory experience through recording response times and introspection

Question 8

How did Wundt measure the mind?

Answer 8

Wundt was initially a physician and a well-known neurophysiologist before turning to sensory physiology and psychophysics (a new methodology to measure sensations)
Wundt was an empiricist:
- nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except intellect intel’s (knowledge is rooted in experience)
- there are observable and measurable effects that allow inferences about the mind
- trained experimental ppts in the method of introspection
- use of technical devices (tachistoscopes, chronoscopes, pendulums, electrical devices, timers and sensory mapping devices) to study consciousness
- goal was to create a periodic table of the mind
This method was limited to conscious thought
He used analytical introspection into analysing the mind, training ppts to describe their thought processes in a response to a stimulus
One example was when he asked ppts to describe their thoughts towards eating an apple using sensations in during redness, sweetness and crispness
Also played ppts 5 note chord on a piano to see if they were able to recognise the 5 individual notes §

Question 9

Wundt’s legacy

Answer 9

Made substantial contribution to the discipline of psychology by introducing the idea that behaviour and the mind can be studies scientifically under controlled experimental conditions
He also introduced structuralism - the idea that we can break down processes into their elements - to the study of mind

Question 10

Ebbinghaus’ approach to memory

Answer 10

Herman Ebbinghaus was a psychologist at the University of Berlin interested in memory and forgetting
Instead of introspection he used quantitative methods - counting correct and incorrect responses trying to remember his infamous nonsense syllables
- how long/many attempts does it take to learn a list of items?
- variation in memory internal before recall (e.g. hours, days, weeks)
- how quickly can you return a list after forgetting the items?

First measured how long it took to remember a list of syllables
Three waited for a time delay to see how long it took to relearn the list
He didn’t perform correctly after the first time delay because of the forgetting but after re-learning (which took less time than the first time), he was able to recall the list quicker and with more accuracy
He concluded hat this meant, because he re-learned the list quicker, some must have been saved in his memory
To determine how much was left after delay, he proposed savings:
- savings = (original time to learn list) - (time to relearn list after delay)
- the forgetting/savings curve shows memory drops rapidly for the first 2 day after initial learning ad levels off
Forgetting/retention curve is still a valid and accurate description of certain type of memory - memory for non-interpreted/meaningless information
Quantitative approach to studying the mind

Question 11

James introduced functionalism

Answer 11

Principles of Psychology (1890) was the first psychology textbook ever published
- contributed to popularising the discipline
James’ approach to studying the mind was based on observations and focused on functionality (not empiricist)
- what are the processes of conscious activities? - and paying attention
- what is he biological significance of the processes (adaptive values)?
- importance of mental operations not structures
He found that paying attention to one thing involved drawing attention from another thing - still rings true in the field today

Question 12

JB Watson introduced behaviourism

Answer 12

Watson criticised analytic introspection because
1. It produced extremely variable results from person to person
2. These results were difficult to verify
His solution was behaviourism

Question 13

Goals of behaviourism

Answer 13

“Psychology as the behaviourist sees it is a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science. It’s theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behaviour. It’s theoretical goal is the predication and control of behaviour. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, no is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness… what we need to do is start work upon psychology making behaviour, not consciousness, the objective point of our attack” - Watson, 1913
Reaction against all unobservable
Study of the mind -> study of behaviour
What does behaviour tell us about the mind -> what is the relation between stimuli in the environment and behaviour?
Can’t explain mental processes like language, perception, memory and is explicitly not interested in them
Stimulus -> response - don’t care about anything that goes on in between the stimulus and response

Question 14

Conditioning: behaviours controlled by stimuli

Answer 14

Classical conditioning:
Ivan Pavlov’s experiments with dogs (1927)
- unconditioned stimulus -> unconditioned response
- neutral stimulus -> neural/no conditioned response
- unconditioned stimulus + neutral stimulus -> unconditioned repose
- conditioners stimulus -> conditioned response

Operant conditioning:
Introduced by Burrhus Frederic (BF) Skinner in 1938 and became the dominant psychological appraoch until 1950s/1960s
Reward/positive and punishment/negative reinforcement as a mechanism for learning
- learned associations
- treatment for psychological disorders

Question 15

Ethical considerations

Answer 15

Behaviourism and the abandonment of a mental world in our test subjects led to problematic assumptions:
- emotions and displays of pain were only recognised as a reaction to environment meaning reduced to observable behaviour
- resulted in ethically questionable research practises and consequently a bad reputation for our discipline
~ Little Albert
~ animal research
~ Electroshocks as conditioning/treatment for mental disorders
- historical context - a substantial part of this research was motivated by the world wars

Question 16

The cognitive revolution

Answer 16

The (actually pretty slow) rediscovery of the study of the mind
Behaviours struggles to explain: Tolman discoveries cognitive maps (1948)
He placed rats in a maze and let them explore the different alleys
After this, the rat was placed at point A and the food at point B and the rat quickly turned right to get the food
Then, the rat was placed at point C and food at point B, and the still went to point B for the food but had to turn left, despite there being sets taken so the rat couldn’t smell the food
This developed the idea of the cognitive map which is a concept of the maze in the rat’s mind, which allowed it to still find the food
While this work attracted a lot of attention (and similar work emerged), scientists were still avoiding the term ‘cognitive’ due to the behaviours taboo of mental processes

Question 17

Skinner vs Chomsky

Answer 17

Skinner’s verbal behaviour:
Children learn language through operant conditioning
- imitate speech that they hear and repeat speech because it is rewarded
However, this was challenged by…
Noam Chomsky:
The ability for verbal behaviour is innate
- children say sentences that have never been uttered or rewarded by parents (“I hate you Mum)
- children go through incorrect grammar stages even though they are incorrect
Proving Skinner’s behaviourist approach wrong
He instead said that language development comes from an innate biological programme that holds across culture
This started to make people question that if language development could be innate, what other aspects of the mind were and therefore the shift from behaviourism back to cognitive started to occur

Question 18

The rebirth of a scientific discipline

Answer 18

This iconic debate between Skinner and Chomsky led to psychologists to reconsider the idea whether language and other complex behaviours, such as solving and reasoning, can be explained by operant conditioning
They began to realise that to understand complex cognitive behaviours, it is necessary not only to measure observable behaviour but also to consider what this behaviour tells us about how the mind works
Time line of events:
1948 - Tolman and cognitive maps
1953 - Cherry: attention experiment
1954 - first commercially available digital computer
1956- Dartmouth and MIT conferences
1957 - Skinner: Verbal Behaviour
1958 - Broadbent: flow diagram
1959 - Chomsky: “a review of B. F. Skinner’s verbal behaviour”
1967 - Neisser: first cognitive psychology book

Question 19

A new way of conceptualising cognition *****

Answer 19

Computers were invented
- computing
- breaking processes down into units and subprocesses
~ flow diagrams - process of information in stages - input processor, memory unit, arithmetic unit, which creates output in computer, so some psychologists proposed the information-processing approach for studying the human mind
- memory as a flexible storage system
- processing limitations
- working memory of CPU
This might seem trivial from today’s perspective but at the time this information processing approach was a completely new way of breaking down mental complexity (paradigm shift)

Question 20

Two key concepts of the cognitive revolution

Answer 20

Any mental activity is seen as an information processing problem
1. Mental representations
2. Transformations of mental representations
Example: ball
There were as many representations of a ball as there are brains
Yet, each of them has features that define “ballness”
These features can be from different domains
- motor
- visual
- tactile
- emotion
- olfactory
- etc
Each instance of representing the concept call is dependent on the situation

Question 21

Artificial intelligence

Answer 21

Originated in the idea that computers can mimic human behaviour or carry out intelligent behaviour
Computers were modelled after the logic processes that were thought to underline human cognition
Newell & Simon’s Logic Theorist (1955) was able to create proofs of mathematical theorems that involved principles of logic
Although primitive compared to modern artificial intelligence programmes, the Logic Theorist was considered a real “thinking machine” because it did more than simply process numbers - it used humanlike reasoning processes to solve problems

Question 22

The concept of processing limits

Answer 22

First evidence published that human working memory is limited to certain number of units (7 +/- 2), Miller, 1956
Inspired by computer science, they were balled bits
E.g. phonological loop/buffer
For further processing in memory, bits need to be recorded into larger to be more abstract units -> under tasking memory as an active behaviour rather than a passive storage

Question 23

Does the mind work like a computer?

Answer 23

No
It is a helpful metaphor to conceptualise processes
But the brain and a computer do operate on completely different basic principles
The apology works because
1. Brains and computers produce analogous observable behaviour (this is because we defined and designed computers that way, not the other way round)
2. It helps us understand and illustrate complex processes by breaking them down into smaller processes
Computers are not as powerful as brains and modern technical development tries to make them more like brains
Computers are just extremely fast

Question 24

Summary

Answer 24

1. Cognitive psychology is a branch of psychology concerned with the scientific memory of the mind
2. The mind creates and controls mental capacities such as perception, attention and memory and creates representations of the world that enables us to function
3. The work of Donders (simple vs choice reaction) and Ebbinghaus (the forgetting curve for nonsense syllables) are examples of experimental research on the mind
4. Because the operation of the mind cannot be observed directly, its operation must be inferred from what we can measure, such as behaviour or physiological responding. This is one of the basic principles of cognitive psychology
5. The first lab of scientific psychology, founded by Wundt in 1879, was concerned largely with studying the mind. Structuralism was the dominant theoretical approach of this lab and analytical introspection was one of the major methods used to collect data
6. William James, in the US, used observations of his own kind as the basis of his textbook, Principles of Psychology
7. In the first deceased of the 20th century, John Watson founded behaviourism, partly in reaction to structuralism and the method of analytical introspection. His producers were based on classical conditioning. Behaviourism’s central tendency was that psychology was properly studied by measuring observable behaviour, and that invisible mental processes were not valid topics for the study of psychology
8. Beginning in the 1930s and 40s, B.F. Skinner’s work on operant conditioning assured that behaviours would be the dominant force in psychology throughout the 1950s
9. In the 1950s, a number of events occurred that led to what has been called the cognitive revolution - a decline in the influence of behaviourism and a re-emergence of the study of the mind. These events included the following
   - Chomsky’s critique of Skinner’s “verbal behaviour” book
   - the introduction of the digital computer and the idea that the mind processes information union stages,like a computer
   - Cherry’s diachotic listening experiments and Broadbent’s introduction of flow diagrams to depict the process involved in attention
   - interdisciplinary approached to artificial intelligence and information theory
10. Models play an essential role in cognitive psychology by representing structures and processes. Structural models represent structures in the brain and how they are connected. Process models illustrate how a process or function operates. Resource models found on which type and how much mental effort certain processes and tasks use. Models make complicated systems easier to understand and often provide a starting point for research
11. Our increased understanding of our mind can be used to
    - design proper control panels and traffic situations
    - influence decision making and consumer behaviour
    - improve protocols relating to eyewitness interrogation
    - develop working memory and executive-control training programmes
    - stimulates good practise in education
12. Three things may help in learning the material in this text are
    - repeatedly return to what you have read and relate this to previous topics
    - test yourself
    - frequently ask why and try to explain what you have read