The Cognitive Approach Flashcards
What is the cognitive approach?
- Approach is focused on how our mental processes affect behaviour
- Unlike behaviourists cognitive psychologists believe that it is possible to study internal mental processes in an objective way & that insight into mental processes may be inferred from behaviour
What are internal mental processes?
- ‘Private’ operations of the mind such as perception & attention that mediate between stimulus & response
What is inference?
- Reaching a logical conclusion on the basis of evidence & reasoning
What does the cognitive approach recongise?
- Recongises that mental processes cannot be studied directly but must be studied indirectly by inferring what goes on as a result of measuring behaviour
What is schema in the cognitive approach?
- ‘Packages’ of ideas & information developed through experience
- Act as a mental frame work for the interpretation of incoming information recieved by cognitive system
- Enables us to process lots of info quickly & is useful as a sort of mental shortcut that prevents us from being overwhelmed by environemental stimuli
What was Bransford and Johnsons procedure conducted on schema?
- Labatory experiment w an independent measures design
- IV was picture w text or no picture w text
- DV how much information the ppts could recall
- Ppts read a paragraph of text; a little later they were asked to recall the information they had read in as much detail as possible
What were the findings of Bransford and Johnsons study?
- Ppts with the picture alongside the text recalled more information than ppts w just the text
What can we conclude from Bransford & Johnsons study?
- The picture helped ppts access their schema to understand the text which lead to greater recall
- Therefore accessing schema can help code new information into memory & lead to better learning
What was the study investigating how different images affect our view of new images/information?
- Bulgesky & Alampay
- Labotory experiment with an independant measures design
- IV- Pictures of animals or faces
- DV- What ppts percieved the ‘rat man’ image to be
- Ppts studied a set of images for short period of time.
- After this they were presented with the ‘rat-man’ picture – ambiguous picture that looks like a rat or a man.
- Ppts wrote down first image they saw
What is cognitive neuroscience?
- The scientific study of biological structures that underpin cognitive processes
Give one strength of the Cognitive Approach.
- Highly scientific- uses objective scientific measures
- Highly controlled
- Also involved use of lab studies to produce reliable objective data
- Asw the emergence of cognitive neuroscience has enabled the two fields of biology & cognitive psychology to come together to enhance scientific basis of study
This means that study of the mind has a credible scientific basis
How are biological strucutres in cognitive neuroscience investigated?
- Only in the last 30 years, with advances in brain imaging techniques fMRI and PET scans & experimental methods
What is studied in cognitive neuroscience?
- Neural processes- underlying memory, attention, perception and awareness
- Social cognition, the brain regions involved when we interact with others
& How impairments in these regions may characterise different psychological conditions
Give another strength on the Cognitive Approach.
- OS is that it has practical application
- Cognitive approach is proabaly the dominant approach in psychology today & has been apllied to wide range of practical & theoretical contexts
- For example; cognitive psychology has made important contribution in the field of AI & the development of ‘thinking machines’
- Cognitive principles have also been applied to the treatment of depression.
- & Improvment & reliability of Eye witness testimony
This supports the value of the cognitive approach
Give one disadvantage to the Cognitive Approach.
- Cognitive Approach is based on machine reductionism
- There are similarities between the human mind & the operations of a ‘thinking machine’ such as a computer
- However this computer analogy has been criticised
- Such machine reductionism ignores the influence of human emotion & motivation on cognitive system & how this may affect our ability to process information
This suggests that machine reductionism may weaken the validity of the cognitive approach
