Semester 1 Lecture 1 - The History of Cognitive Psychology

Question 1

What is introspection?

Answer 1

The belief that we can understand our own cognitions by monitoring and observing them ourselves

Question 2

How can we observe cognition through introspection? (3 ways)

Answer 2

Via anecdotes of our daily tasks (then analysing stimuli, process and output behaviour from this)
Vocalising our stream of consciousness (then relating our vocalised thoughts to input/process/output systems)
We can use structured systems to observe our cognitions

Question 3

What are three limitations of using introspection to observe cognition?

Answer 3

• Different people have different cognitions, so introspection may produce different findings for different people, making these results less nomothetic and falsifiable
• Introspection is prone to cognitive biases such as egocentrism
• Some mental processes are not observable via introspection as they are too automatic.

Question 4

What psychological idea could you relate to the simplicity of behaviourism’s stimulus/association/behaviour model?

Answer 4

Parsimony/Occam’s Razor

Question 5

What are two cognitive ideas that debunked behaviourism as our primary learning method?

Answer 5

Navigation and language

Navigation- we don’t just do this for reward

Question 6

How does language help debunk behaviourism as our primary learning resource?

(Three points said by Chomsky)

Answer 6

• Behaviourism suggests that we learn language via stimulus-behaviour response, but we can form sentences that we haven’t heard before, so the behaviour, the formation of the sentence, doesn’t seem to have a direct stimulus.
• children are able to learn language without explicit reinforcement of every word
• Languages vary. if we just learnt words positive reinforcement, all language would be the same

Question 7

What did Chomsky suggest about language?

Answer 7

that language learning cognitions are innate.

Question 8

What idea did the cognitive revolution introduce?

Answer 8

mental processes do exist and they can be studied, therefore introducing the computer model and the idea of informational processes in the mind

Question 9

What is decomposition?

Answer 9

The idea that cognition is composed of multiple processes rather than the simple, mono process one, as is suggested in behaviourism

Question 10

What are representations?

Answer 10

Cognitions that act on and transform information rather than having it directly create a response as the raw stimulus

Question 11

What is embodied cognition?

Answer 11

The idea that our body shapes how we sense and act on the world and we should therefore contextualise cognitions with environmental factors.