Week 2 - Cognitive Psychology Flashcards
What is cognitive psychology?
NOT focused on the physical processes of the brain (Biological Psychology)
RATHER focuses on cognition = the mental action / processes that underlie human behaviour
Its the internal processes involved in making sense of the enviorment
AND deciding on approriate actions
What are the cognitive domains?
- Learning
- Working memory
- Prospective memory
- Problem solving
- Attention / Selective attention
- Reasoning
- Executive function
- Perceptual-motor
- Multisensory Perception
- Object Recognition
- Language
- Decision making
What are the classic cognitive models of how we think specific mental actions work?
Working Memory - Baddeley & Hitch, 1974
Face Processing Bruce and Young, 1986
What is Mental Chronometry?
***A classic method in cognitive psychology
- Measuring the time course of mental operations
- Dates back to F.C. Donders. 1968
Before cognitive (or pretty much any!) psychology
How to measure stimulus identification?
aka: decision time
Mental responses cannot be measure directly, therefore are inferred via reaction time
TASK A (SIMPLE REACTION TIME):
stimulus detection -> response organisation
TASK B:
stimulus detection + stimulus identification -> response organisation
time for TASK B - time for TASK A
What is the aim of cognitive psychology?
To determine how the brain manipulates information using:
* computer analogies
* drawing up testable models of functioning
What are mental processes?
They are internal
* Thus must be investigated using observables
* Something that can be measured. verified, and compared across participants and across studies
What is Structuralism
The first scientific psychology lab was established in 1879 by Wundt
Expanded by his student Titchener
To understand the mind by breaking conscious experiences down into elements and learning structure
primary research method = analytic introspection
What are the 2 types of information processing?
- Bottom up - Reflecting incoming data, understanding is reliant upon sensory information.
* e.g. stimulus -> brain - Top down - Reflecting on pre-existing information, understanding is reliant on higher-level knowledge and expectations
* e.g. brain -> perception / task
What study is an example of analytic introspection
HELMHOLTZ (1821 - 1894)
* Developed influential theories of object perception, colour vision, and hearing
* Visual processing experiment: showed things to people and asked what they see
Perception reflects unconscious inferences and assumptions about envirom
WHAT IS BEHAVIOURISM
- Aim is to predict and control behaviour
- Which can be understood without any referece to the mind
Stimulus —> Response - individual differences in behaviour are due to different experiences of learning
Example of REDUCTIONIST APPROACH which tries to explain complex phenomena in terms of simpler processes
What is the primary research method for BEHAVIOURISM?
- OBSERVATION (of behaviour)
- featured lots of work with animals
- Little Albert Experiment: Watson. 1919
WHAT IS THE COGNITIVE REVOLUTION?
AIM: To understand the mind by focusing on how it processes information
METHODS:
Acceptance of behaviourist view on the objective measurement of behaviour
* BUT… these observables are seen as only part of the story rather than an end in themselves
* The goal is to understand the underlying mental processes/actions
Who is Neisser?
- Father of ‘‘cognitive psychology’’
- Conducted the first comprehensive statement of research in the field
- Presented a clear alternative to behaviourism
- Emphasis on the information processing and constructive processing
