Slides Week 8 Flashcards
Cognitive Psychology
- The branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind
Three concepts of the mind
- The mind controls and creates mental functions:
ie: perception, attention, memory emotions, languiage, deciding and thinking - The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to acheive our goals
- Mind’s operation must be inferred from what we can measure of behaviour or physiological responses
Cognition
The mental processes such as perception, attention and memory that are what the mind does
Early Studies of the Mind
- Donders (1868) was interested in how long it takes for a person to make a decision
- Found that processes with more mental processes tended to have longer reaction times
- Simple Reaction Time was the time it takes to make a decision
- Choice Reaction Times were 1/10th second longer than Simple Reaction Time
Analytic Introspection
- Method used my Wundt (1879) to study the mind
- Developed Structuralism
- Technique where researchers train their participants to examine their thought process or their experience in response to a provided stimuli.
- An experimental example could be to ask participants to stand outside in the rain for a short period of time and then describe it
William James (1890) - Principles of Psychology
- Considered topics such as cognition, thinking, consciousness, attention, memory, perception, imagination & reasoning
A History of studying the mind - Behaviourism
- Behaviourism central tenet was that psychology should only study observable behaviour
- It held that invisible mental processes were not valid topics for the study of psychology
How does cognitive psychology talk about the Mind?
- Sees Information Processing as a way to study the mind
- Makes analogy the the mind is like a digital computer
- Operation of the mind occurs in stages
- Input
- Input Processor
- Memory Unit
- Arithmetic Unit
- Output
Models play an essential role in Cognitive Psychology
- Models play an essential role by representing structures or processes
- Structural models - Represent structures in the brain and how they are connected
- Process Models - Illustrates how a process operates
Structure Models
- Represent structures in the brain and how they are connected

Process Model
Illutrates how a process operates

Attention
The ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations in our environments
Selective Attention
- The ability to focus on one message while ignoring all others
- Selective attention has been demonstrated using dichotic listening procedure (Cherry, 1953)
Distraction
One stimulus interfering with the processing of another
Divided Attention
Paying attention to more than one thing at a time
Attentional Capture
A rapid shifting of attention usually caused by a stimulus such as a loud noise, bright light or a sudden movement
Dichotic Listening
- Presenting different stimuli to the left and right ears
- Participant “shadows one message to ensure he is attending to that message
- Participants could not report the content of the message in the unattended ear
The Cocktail Party Effect
The ability to selectively attend to a single stimulus when input is crowded.
Sensory Memory
- Holds all incoming information for a fraction of a second and then transfers all information to the next stage
Early Selection Model -
Broadbents Filter Model
- Sensory Memory
- Filter
- Detector
- Short-Term Memory
Filter
- Identifies attended message basod on physical characteristics and only attended message is passed on to the next stage
Detector
Processes all information to determine higher level characteristics of the message
Short Term Memory
- Receives output from Detector
- Holds information for 10-15 seconds and may transfer it to long term memory
Evidence against Broadbents Filter Model
- Dear Aunt Jane experiment
- Gray & Wedderburn (1960)
- Participants incorporate information from both streams if it makes more sense


