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

clinical psychology - why certain thought malfunctions occur
social psychology - how people behave with other individuals
business and economics - 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 is 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

neuroscience

Answer 8

the study of the structure and function of the nervous system

Question 9

cognitive neuroscience

Answer 9

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

Question 10

Decomposing mental processes

Answer 10

• 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