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.