Week 1 - Introduction

Question 1

What is cognitive psychology

Answer 1

how the mind is organised to produce intelligent
thought and is realised in the brain

Question 2

Why do we study cognitive psychology?

Answer 2

• why certain thought malfunctions occur
• how people behave with other individuals
• how financial decisions are made

Question 3

two navigation systems

Answer 3

• response-based and place-based
• brain structures affecting response-based system are not affected in Williams Syndrome

Question 3

functionalism

Answer 3

• the mind if defined solely by its function and how it responds to various stimuli
• provided many ideas that formed the foundation of contemporary psych research
• weakness: little or no empirical support

Question 3

Williams Syndrome

Answer 3

• difficulty in processing visuospatial information
• not entirely impaired (can learn repeated routes better than age-matched healthy individuals)

Question 3

Where does knowledge come from?

Answer 3

Nativism: knowledge is innate (Plato, Descartes, Kant)
Empiricism: knowledge is acquired through experience (Aristotle, Bacon, Berkeley, Locke, Hume, Mill)

Question 3

Early psychology

Answer 3

structuralism
functionalism
behaviourism

Question 4

structuralism

Answer 4

• Analysis of the human mind into primitive componential elements - like water can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen the mind can be broken down into elements (sensation and thought)
• changed the nature of psychology from philosophical to scientific
• problems: subjective and unreliable

Question 5

Behaviourism

Answer 5

• only the directly observable should be studied
• focus on stimulus-response relations
• rigorous experimental approach
• introduced experimental methods to research
• mind viewed as a black box

Question 6

cognitive revolution

Answer 6

• research on human performance was conducted in WWII - revealed that behaviourism wasn’t useful for solving practical issues
• developed other scientific fields

Question 7

Information-processing approach

Answer 7

cognitive psychology is redefined as the science of human information processing
input –> Mind (process) –> Output

Question 8

cognitive science

Answer 8

the science of how the mind is organised to produce intelligent thought and how it is realised in the brain

Question 9

neuroscience

Answer 9

the study of the structure and function of the nervous system

Question 10

cognitive neuroscience

Answer 10

attempts to gain insights into cognitive processes by studying the brain and behaviour

Question 11

Decomposing mental processes

Answer 11

• formulate a theoretical model of how output is made from a given input (consist of multiple processing stages)
• measure the time taken for each processing stage
  analyse which variable affects which processing stage