Origins of Cognitive Psychology Flashcards
What is cognition?
Describes the acquisition, storage, transformation and use of knowledge
Acquisition
How we perceive and learn from our experiences
Storage
How we represent and maintain knowledge gained from experience
Transformation
How we flexibly retrieve and use knowledge to guide actions
What is cognitive psychology?
The scientific study of how people (and occasionally animals) achieve cognition
Individual differences
Cognitive psychology is NOT the study of
individual differences - we make an assumption that everyone is the same and like to focus on what makes us all the same (general principles)
What do cognitive DO use individual differences for?
Sometimes extreme differences are used to test theories about how cognition works in the healthy brain
History of psychology as a science
Early philosophers asked questions about the origins of human thought and knowledge; in the early 1800s, the principles of scientific inquiry were applied to these questions
Principles of scientific inquiry
- Explanatory & falsifiable theories
- Experiments
- Public observations - replicable
Structuralism/introspectionalism
Founded by Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) in Germany and trained students to introspect on and analyze the
elements of their thought .
What was structuralism inspired by?
Inspired by the periodic table in chemistry, wanted to
identify the elements of thought.
Problem 1 with structuralism
Not all cognitive processes are conscious - you don’t know how information is stored, that’s not consciously accessible, but it’s still important (e.g. depth perception; took a long time to figure out how it works)
Problem 2 with structuralism
Observations are not public - data must be objective and it’s difficult to make conclusions about a phenomenon if two people report different sensations (e.g. is someone lying? do they truly have different experiences?)
Donders’ contribution to psychology
First cognitive psychology experiment
Wundt’s contribution to psychology
Established the first lab of scientific psychology
Ebbinghaus’s contribution to psychology
Quantitative measurements of mental processes
Donders
Developed an approach to study mental chronometry (the timing of cognitive processes) - the reaction time task
Choice RT task
Participants push different buttons depending on which side the light is on
Simple RT task
Participants pushed a button as soon as they perceive a light
Decision time
Choice RT - Simple RT (Takes the “pushing the button” part out of the decision time)
Ebbinghaus
Developed an approach to study forgetting and
memory
Savings in relearning task
- Read nonsense syllables aloud and recorded how
many repetitions were required to learn them - Repeated process with the same syllables after a
delay (19 min - 31 days)
How did Ebbinghaus calculate savings?
((initial repetitions - relearning repetitions)/initial repetitions) x 100
What did Donders and Ebbinghaus have in common?
Both measured behaviour to study the mind
Benefits of classic conditioning
Allowed for the scientific study of how behaviour is modified by the environment — no need to evoke mental states
Classical conditioning
- Developed by Pavlov
- Paired an unconditioned stimulus (e.g. food)
with a neutral/conditioned stimulus (e.g. bell) - The once neutral stimulus reliably acquired the
same response as the unconditioned stimulus
Behaviourism
Proposes that psychology should not study
mental states because they can not be directly observed - took the radical stance that mental states, as we view them, don’t exist
What was behaviourism a reaction to?
Reaction to introspective approaches used by the structuralist school
4 principles of behaviourism
- focus on observable events
- explain behaviour not consciousness (so nothing subjective like emotions)
- theories should be simple
- break behaviour down into simple units
Results of Ebbinghaus’s experiment
- You don’t forget information at a steady rate
- Forgetting occurs rapidly in the first 1 to 2 days after original learning, then levels off
Results of Donders’ experiment
Choice reaction time takes 1/10 seconds longer, so decision making takes 1/10th a second
Results of Wundt’s analytic introspection
No reliable results
Watson’s little Albert experiment
- Watson believed that the basic principles of learning which had been studied in animals also applied to humans
- He tested this theory by conditioning an baby (little
Albert) to fear white rats
BF Skinner
- Studied how animals and people act to obtain rewards and avoid punishments (instrumental/operant
conditioning) - Manipulated the rewards and punishments and measured behaviour - no need for mental states in theories
Critiques of behaviorism
- Not all knowledge is evident in behaviour
- Not all behaviours can be explained by basic learning principles
“Not all knowledge is evident in behaviour”
Tolman demonstrated that rats could learn routes in mazes that were not previously reinforced - they just don’t demonstrate the learning until they need to!
“Not all behaviours can be explained by basic learning principles”
- BF Skinner tried to account for language acquisition with basic learning - e.g. a child says “can I have a cookie” and gets reinforced
- Noam Chomsky wrote a influential critique of this work in 1959. Argued that children say unreinforced things all the time: “I hate you, mommy”; “the boy hitted the ball”
Cognitive revolution
- The transition between behaviorism to cognitive
psychology in America (1950-1970) - Questions shifted from control of behaviour to
theories of how information is processed by the
mind - Unobservable cognitive processes are inferred
from behaviour
How does the cognitive approach differ from structuralism?
Behaviour is publicly observable so the results of
cognitive psychology experiments can be publicly
replicated, unlike Structuralism
Savings curve
Plot of savings versus time after original learning.
James’s contribution to psychology
First psychology textbook; some of his observations are still valid today
What did James do?
No experiments; reported observations of his own experience
James’s results
Descriptions of a wide range of experiences
Why did Watson reject analytic introspection?
- it produced extremely variable results from person to person, and
- these results were difficult to verify because they were interpreted in terms of invisible inner mental processes.
Artificial intelligence
The ability of a computer to perform tasks usually associated with human intelligence.
Logic theorist program
First artificial intelligence program; was able to use humanlike reasoning to solve problems
Neisser
Wrote the first Cognitive Psychology textbook
“Cognitive Psychology” (Neisser)
Mainly covered vision and hearing (i.e. how they processed such information related to vision and hearing and how it was related to memory), but didn’t contain much information on higher mental processes (which there was limited knowledge about) and the physiology of mental processes
Neuropsychology
The study of the behavioral effects of brain damage in humans.
Electrophysiology
Techniques used to measure electrical responses of the nervous system.
Events that led to cognitive revolution
- Noam Chomsky’s critique of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour
- The introduction of the digital computer and the idea that the mind processes information in stages, like a computer
- Cherry’s attention experiments and Broadbent’s introduction of flow diagrams to depict the processes involved in attention
- Interdisciplinary conferences at Dartmouth and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Developments in cognitive psychology post-Neisser
- Development of more sophisticated models
- Research on physiological basis of cognition
- Concern with cognition in the real world
- Role of knowledge in cognition
