Week 1: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology Flashcards
All forms of mental processes - conscious and unconscious, deliberate and automatic
Cognition
Branch of the subject devoted to the scientific study of mental and cognitive processes
Cognitive Psychology
Seeks to identify and understand the internal representations and structures that underlie our conscious and unconscious cognitions.
Cognitive Psychology
Based on building theoretical descriptions or models of cognitive structures and processes.
Cognitive Psychology
What is the Psyche?
- soul as distinct from the physical body
- soul encompassed a wide range of concepts, including
what we would call the mind
Two broad schools of thinking emerged that still influence and echo through modern psychological theory today and are seen as complementary, rather than opposing
Rationalism and Empiricism
We can explore the mind and other abstract ideas and constructs through a process of thinking itself, by examining personal experience and, through that, mental processes.
Rationalism
Greek philosopher who introduced Rationalism
Plato (c427 - 348 BCE)
A form of rational insight arising from the exploration of an idea.
Intuition
Use logical processes of reason to draw novel, general conclusions from existing knowledge and experience
Deduction
The fundamental concepts of the mind and all knowledge come from sensation and experience
Empiricism
Greek Philosopher, and student of Plato, who introduced Empiricism
Aristotle (c384 - 322 BCE)
A German, 19th century philosopher and one of the most influential figures in modern philosophy and arguably one of the founding influences on modern psychology.
Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804)
Process of examining our own thoughts and feelings.
Introspection
What are the flas of Introspection?
- Artificial separation
- Alter what it observes
- Reductionism
What is Reductionism?
It is the approach of breaking down complex mental processes into simpler, more basic components.
By examining these individual parts, psychologists aim to understand how they interact to create the overall cognitive experience.
What is the Cognitive Architecture according to Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, 1781)?
“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to understanding and ends with reason.”
What is Cognitive Architecture?
Perception, cognitive transformation and knowledge.
What is the Mind according to Immanuel Kant?
A set of separate abilities or functions, but which work together as a whole to produce our experience and onto the level of knowledge and understanding
What is the Transcendental Method (Immanuel Kant)?
Even if we cannot observe the mind, we can infer the conditions that must be present in the mind to explain our conscious experience
Who is the Father of Experimental Psychology?
Wilhelm Wundt (1832 - 1920)
He set up one of the first ever experimental psychology laboratories in Leipzig, Germany, in 1879
What is Experimental Introspection?
Introspection based on the sensations and the percepts, feelings, or thoughts that arose directly from them, the latter particularly in the form of visual images.
What are Automatic Passive Associations?
How people registered or attended to the presence of a stimulus without interpretation.
Ex. Hearing a loud noise and automatically flinching.
What is Apperception?
Formation of a mental image to the stimulus.
Ex. Seeing a red apple and consciously recognizing it as an apple.
What are Active Controlled Processes?
Conscious, voluntary efforts to focus attention and analyze information.
Ex. Deciding to focus on a specific sound in a noisy environment.
What is Conscious Thought?
The awareness of one’s own mental experiences.
Precise nature of the stimulus was registered.
What is Voluntarism (Wilhelm Wundt)?
The philosophical view that emphasizes the role of will and conscious control in mental processes.
Which psychologist was interested in looking at conscious experience as a whole, rather than understanding the individual nature of the initial sensation or the resultant image?
Wilhelm Wundt
This awareness iccurs when a subject is presented with an object and might immediately report an associated property.
We perceive individual features (crispness, color) before combining them into a complete image (an apple).
Preceding Conscious Awareness
What is Structuralism (Wilhelm Wundt)?
When the mind is presented with an object, it receives a set of properties that defined its structure before being
combined to form the thought or mental image.
What is Mental Chronometry?
Use of electromechanical devices to record reaction times from the presentation of the stimulus (attention) to the introspective response (apperception). Est. 1/10 sec
What was Wilhelm Wundt’s famous quote?
The distinguishing characteristics of mind are of a subjective sort; we know them only from the contents of consciousness
What was Edward B Titchener’s famous quote?
The world of psychology contains looks and tones and feelings; it is the world of dark and light, of noise and silence, of rough and smooth; its space is sometimes large and sometimes small,… its time is sometimes short and sometimes long, it has no invariables. It contains all the thoughts, emotions, memories, imaginations, volitions that you naturally ascribe to mind.
Which psychologist was interested in using experimental introspection to reveal and understand the elemental parts of conscious experience, by breaking them down, an approach that his teacher, Wundt, strongly and vocally disagreed with.
Edward B Titchener (1867 - 1927)
4 Independent Properties of Sensation
- Intensity (ex. bright)
- Quality (ex. pale in colour)
- Duration (ex. brief)
- Spatial Extent (ex. small)
What was highlighted in Experimental Psychology, a Manual of Laboratory Practice (1902)?
Standardisation of Experimental Method:
What is it (structure) > what is it for (function).
Cognition arose from sensations.
The process of breaking down the key sensory features as a means of object identification.
Feature Analysis
He brought together a disparate body of work in his seminal, two volume work, Principles of Psychology (1890).
Authored the first ever university course in psychology in the US at Harvard University.
William James (1842 - 1910)
Which psychologist was interested in mental processes, rather than mental structures?
William James (1842 - 1910)
Introspection that focused on the purpose of consciousness rather than constituent parts of consciousness.
Functional Introspection
What is Functionalism (William James)?
Functions of the mind and how it adapts to its environment.
Similar to Darwin’s theory of evolution, the mind has evolved to meet our needs.
A key pioneer of what we would now recognise as experimental cognitive psychology.
He believed that memory was amenable to systematic scientific study, without the need to rely on
the limitations imposed by the introspective method
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850 - 1909)
A classic description of the basic principles of experimental psychology and research methods.
Memory, a Contribution to Experimental Psychology (Ebbinghaus, 1885)
What was highlighted in ‘Memory, a Contribution to Experimental Psychology’ (Ebbinghaus, 1885)?
- precise control over conditions of the experiment
- inevitable impact of extraneous factors on the results
What were Ebbinghaus’s contributions?
- Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (1885)
- Statistical Approaches (measurement errors, criterion, savings score)
- Forgetting Curve
Psychology in the Late 19th to Early 20th Century
- All psychology was Cognitive Psychology
- Dissatisfaction with Introspection gave rise to Behaviourism
- Wider Issue: Animal Psychology ignored
What were the limitations of Introspection?
- Unreliable
- Unrepresentative
- Limited in Use
- Limited in areas to which if could be applied
“In no case is an animal activity to be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development.”
C Lloyd Morgan (1852 - 1936) / Morgan’s Canon
What was the Principle of Parsimony / Occam’s Razor?
When you have two alternative explanations for the same observation or fact, the simplest or one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
American Psychologist who founded Modern Behaviourism
John B Watson (1878 - 1958)
Authored the behaviourist manifesto, “Psychology as the Behaviourist Views It” (1913)
John B Watson (1878 - 1958)
Believed psychology should focus on observable behavior, not mental states or introspection.
John B Watson (1878 - 1958)
The most fundamental unit was that of association, how the animal or human establish links between two stimuli, or between a stimulus and a response, or between a response and an outcome or adaptive behavioural goal, inother words - learning.
Behaviorism
Focuses on the relationships between observable environmental events (stimuli) and the resulting observable behavior (responses) of organisms.
Behaviorism
Rejects subjective experience as a proper topic of study and resists explanations of observable acts in terms of inferred but unobservable mental processes.
Behaviorism
What was said about Inner States (B.F. Skinner, 1953)?
“The objection to inner states is not that they do not exist, but that they are not relevant in a functional analysis. We cannot account for the behavior of any system while staying wholly inside it; eventually we must turn to forces operating upon the organism from without. Unless there is a weak spot in our causal chain so that the second link is not lawfully determined by the first, or the third by the second, then the first and third links must be lawfully related. If we must always go back beyond the second link for prediction and control, we may avoid many tiresome and exhausting digressions by examining the third link as a function of the first.”
First Link or Input
- Controlled experiment: Stimulus
- Natural / less controlled / influence: Antecedent
Third Link or Output
- Controlled / Simple: Response
- Complex / Functional Analysis: Behavior
Second Link / Intervening Variables
- Not a term that behaviourists use, except dismissively
- Unobservable processes
- Private event (Watson)
We do not need to know in detail what they are or what functions they solve, just that they provide a link between the input and the output.
Russian Physiologist awarded with the Nobel Prize of Medicine in 1904.
He introduced the process of learning through stimulus association.
Ivan Pavlov (1849 - 1936)
Behaviors or reactions that did not seem to be learned, but could be explained by built-in or innate properties of the nervous system.
Physiological Reflex (Pavlov)
Classical Conditioning (Pavlov)
A systematic and gradual process of pairing the natural stimulus with a neutral stimulus that would create a conditioned response.
Key Concepts in Classical Conditioning
- Acquisition
- Extinction
- Spontaneous Recovery
The process of learning the association between the NS (neutral stimulus) and the US (unconditioned stimulus).
Acquisition
A phenomenon where the CS (conditioned stimulus) no longer serves as a signal, the CR (conditioned response) eventually stops.
Extinction
The gradual weakening and disappearance of the CR when the CS is presented repeatedly without the US.
Extinction
Re-activation of a dormant learned association, rather than new learning, suggesting that the learned association isn’t entirely forgotten.
Spontaneous Recovery
The tendency to respond to stimuli similar to the CS (conditioned stimulus).
Generalization
He won the Nobel Prize for Physiology in medicine in 2000 for his work on the physiological basis of memory, much of it using Aplysia.
Started out as a psychiatrist and studied psychoanalysis, making him want to understand how memory worked.
He was at Harvard University at the same time as Skinner and was undeniably influenced by his work.
His work forged links between psychology and brain science that we recognise today.
Eric Kandel
A natural reflexive response to naturally occurring stimuli in our environment, something that has developed through evolution as a critical survival tool.
As well as the emotional reaction, it has physiological components such as an increased heart rate and breathing, and behavioral components such as avoidance or escape.
Fear
Natural fear responses occur in the context of environmental stimuli typically perceived as safe and unthreatening to most people.
Phobia
A study conducted by JB Watson and colleague Rosalie Rayner and published in one of the earliest volumes of the new Journal of Experimental Psychology.
The study was intended as a demonstration of how basic principles of classical conditioning can explain the development of neurosis and specifically phobias.
Little Albert (1920)
A case study of a young boy written by Freud where concluded that the fear was actually related to the Oedipal complex, that the boy unconsciously wanted to have sex with his mother, and that he was afraid that his father, symbolized by the horse, would cut off his penis.
Little Hans (1909)
Infancy was the time when patterns of emotional reactions were shaped by experience and associations made to stimuli, which could evoke them.
Watson’s Theory on Infancy and Fear
Sigmund Freud VS JB Watson on Fear / Phobia
Freud: The first link, the actual experience or stimulus, was less important than the second link, the internal, unobservable, unconscious, or private event.
Watson: Phobias could develop by the process of conditioning.
