The Cognitive Perspective Flashcards
Cognitive perspective
The Cognitive Approach asks how we organise & use
information to make sense of the world?
❖ Interested in how people represent the world (physical objects, situations & people)
❖ Focuses on categories people develop & hierarchical
organisation of categories
❖ Categories defined by pattern of characteristics & in cognitive approach called schemas
Cognitive psychology
❖ Contemporary cognitive psychology is an outgrowth from social
learning & phenomenological psychology emphasising:
• how people structure & represent subjective experience of life
• view that people inherently create goals & are motivated to move toward
achieving them
• based on empirical research
❖ Social cognitive learning theories challenged behaviourism over assumption of direct (causal) relationship between behaviour & environment
❖ Cognitive psychologists maintain that a person’s cognitions directly influence how they behave and feel
Cognitive perspective & personality
Assumptions:
1. It is critical to understand how people deal with
information that surrounds them.
2. Flow of life consists of an elaborate web of decisions.
3. Personality is reflected in the decision-making that goes in your mind.
4. Schemas play a major role in the decision-making
processes.
Schemas and their development
❖ Include information about specific cases called
exemplars & information about what a generic sense of category is:
• perceptual images
• abstract knowledge
• feeling qualities
• time sequence information
❖ While no one attribute may be crucial or sufficient to define membership some members of category best exemplify it - prototypes.
Effects of schemas
❖ Facilitate coding of new information
❖ Fill-in information lacking from events
❖ Influence what information is remembered
❖ Can be self-perpetuating
• schemas guide what is remembered
• what you remember confirms schema
• schema continues to guide what is remembered
Schemas and memory
❖ Schemas are organisations for memories &
❖ Memories are organised in two main modes:
1. Semantic memory – organisation by meaning
2. Episodic memory – memory for events.
❖ Scripts are prototypes of event categories
❖ More recent theories have recognised that schemas
have cognitive & affective components
Activating memories
❖ Memories are organised as unique neural networks
❖ Information from activated memory networks is represented in consciousness
❖ A stimulus activates a network
❖ Previous exposure makes it easier for information to move into consciousness
• priming—activation of a neural network in a task prior to a task of interest (experimental uses)
❖Schematic information varies in the ease of activation depending on frequency of use
Socially relevant schemas
Social Cognition—cognitive processes focusing on socially meaningful stimuli People form cognitive categories for: • Types of people • Gender roles • Environments • Social situations • Social relations Social cognitions differ in content and complexity from person to person, depending on experience
Social cognitive theory
❖ Views people as active agents with potential to influence own destinies & achieve within limits of their biological endowment & emphasises:
• situation-specificity
• reciprocal determinism
• person’s behaviour both influences & influenced by personal factors & social environment
• e.g. Child who dislikes school, teachers restrictive on child.
❖ Promotes systematic study of human behaviour
Julian Rotter
❖ Primarily concerned with how
people make decisions
❖ Expectancy value theory assumes mental representations such as expectancies have a
causal effect on behaviour.
Rotter’s expectancy value theory 1
Describes individual’s tendency to do
something as a function of:
1. Their expectancies
2. Reinforcement value (incentive value) of
desired outcome (goal)
3. The particular situation
Goals allow us to plan for our future –minimum goal level is lowest incentive value that is still sufficient to motivate an individual’s behaviour.
Rotter’s expectancy value theory 2: Part 1
- Locus of control expectancies
❖ Assumption: Rotter maintained people differ in degree to which
they see cause-and-effect links between behaviors & outcomes that follow (reinforcers).
❖ A person’s “locus“ is conceptualised as either
• internal - the person believes they can control their life or
• external - meaning they believe that their decisions & life controlled by environmental factors which they cannot influence. - Efficacy expectancies
Albert Bandura
Efficacy expectancies – perceived ability to carry out desired action (also known as self efficacy)
❖ Assumption: Not enough to know what needs to be done, one must be confident in ability to do it
❖ Those with internal locus-of-control can hold negative or positive efficacy expectancies
❖ Efficacy expectancies may be less relevant to those with external locus-of-control, except to degree they use efficacy of others as a proxy (representation).
>. Bandura maintained self-efficacy judgements influence thought & thereby create competencies, hence should be main target for therapeutic interventions.
Self-efficacy
SELF-EFFICACY beliefs influence motivational processes:
❖ Selection: High efficacy belief individuals select more challenging goals
❖ Effort, Persistence, Performance: High efficacy belief individuals show greater effort & persistence & perform better
❖ Emotion: High efficacy belief individuals approach tasks with less anxiety or depression
❖ Coping: High efficacy belief individuals cope better with stress & disappointments
The role of reinforcement
❖ Self-regulation occurs through self reinforcement of
one’s own standards
❖ Internal standards represent goals for us to achieve
& bases for expecting reinforcement from others &
from ourselves
❖ The process of self-reinforcement is important in
maintaining behaviour over extended periods of
time in absence of external reinforcers
