The Cognitive Area Flashcards
What core studies are in the cognitive area?
- Moray
- Loftus and Palmer
- Simons and Chabris
- Grant
What are the strengths of the cognitive area?
Practical application
Favours scientific method
What are the weaknesses of the cognitive area?
Lacks ecological validity
Cognitive processes cannot be directly studied so use self report
What are some applications of the cognitive area?
The police to avoid leading questions
Do crime reconstructions in the same place as the crime occured (or get witness to mentally reinstate the context)
Do revision sessions for students in the exam hall
In an emergency, use someone’s NAME (e.g smoke alarms)
Ban mobile phones for people who are driving
What are some defining principles of the cognitive area?
Our behaviour is driven by internal mental processes (such as attention, memory, perception and language) so we need to study these processes to understand behaviour
The mind processes information like a computer with inputs from the senses, storage and processing of information and then retrieval
What are some concepts of the cognitive area?
Context-dependant memory
Reconstructive memory
Schema theory
Inattentional blindness
The cocktail party effect
How does Moray relate to the cognitive area?
Investigated auditory attention and showed we are unable to process information we are not attending to unless its meaningful to us
Participants failed to notice information in the rejected message, unless their name was used
How does Loftus and Palmer relate to the cognitive area?
Investigated an internal mental process (memory) and showed that this can be distorted by information gained after the event
Participants gave higher speed estimated and were more likely to report seeing broken glass in the video clip after hearing the verb ‘smashed’ compared to ‘hit’
How does Simons and Chabris relate to the cognitive area?
Provides evidence of inattentional blindness (we can miss unexpected events if we are not attending to them, even if they are in the middle of our field of vision).
Participants often failed to notice the woman in the gorilla costume or carrying an open umbrella as they were focused on another task.
This is even more likely to be missed if the task that are attending to is more difficult
How does Grant et al relate to the cognitive area?
Investigated memory and showed this is influenced by the environment in which the information is learned and recalled (context)
Participants remembered more details from the article when the noise conditions matched (E.g. silent study and silent test) compared to when they did not match
