The Cognitive Approach Flashcards
Summary
Human behaviour is caused by our internal thinking processes
First assumption?
Behaviour is controlled by our thought processes.
What is the cognitive approach based on?
Some aspects of the behaviourist approach but with some added focus on the intermediary process between stimulus and response.
Second assumption?
Our behaviour can be explained as a series of responses to external stimuli, much like a computer
What idea does the second assumption discuss?
Schema-driven processing
What are schemas?
Ways of organising knowledge and experience of the world into generic templates
What are schemas used for?
Making sense of objects, situations and people we encounter
How are schemas used?
We search through our existing memory store to find if something matches an existing schema, and act accordingly.
Third assumption?
Human behaviour can be explained as a set of scientific processes, in an objective and measurable way.
Why is the cognitive approach sometimes considered to be too scientific?
It depends largely on controlled experiments to observe human behaviour, which may lack ecological validity
What does the approach fail to consider?
Important aspects of nature and nurture.
How is the approach ‘mechanistic’?
It portrays human behaviour as that of a machine
What has the approach’s focus on the important processes between stimulus and response helped to do?
Explain the practicalities of human behaviour, better than behaviourism
What has the approach led cognitive psychologissts to look at?
Ways of improving people’s memories using contextual cues.
What has the approach influenced?
Many areas of psychology, it is easily combined with other approaches e.g.CBT
CBT
Treatment used to treat issues e.g. depression and OCD
What can the approach also be applied to?
Developmental psychology
What can the approach help us to explain?
The social world and the people around us e.g. why we form steryotypes
In what way is the scientific nature of the approach beneficial?
Thinking processes theories can be tested to demonstrate if true of not
When did Baddely and Hitch study the WMM?
1974
What did Baddely and Hitch aim to study?
The purpose of the WMM
What technique did Baddely and Hitch use to conduct their experiment?
A dual task technique
How did Baddely and Hitch conduct their experiment?
By asking Ps to do a reasoning task whilst simultaneously reciting a list of 6 digits or continuously saying ‘the’
What was the control group of the Baddely and Hitch study?
People doing the reasoning task alone
What were the results of the Baddely and Hitch study?
The speed of answering is slower when having to do another task than when answering alone
What was the conclusion of the Baddely and Hitch study?
The STM must have more than 1 component + must be involved in processes other than simple storage e.g. reasoning
