Week 9 Cognition Flashcards
What are the session objectives for studying cognitive psychology?
Understand the development of cognitive psychology in the 20th century.
Recognize its challenge to behaviorism.
Identify key researchers (Piaget, Bartlett, Chomsky, Miller, Broadbent).
Evaluate the role and influence of cognitive psychology.
How did Ulric Neisser (1967) define cognition?
All processes by which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.”
Q3: What are Piaget’s stages of cognitive development?
Sensorimotor (0–2): Explore through senses and movement.
Preoperational (2–7): Use symbols; no logical reasoning.
Concrete Operational (7–11): Logical reasoning and rules.
Formal Operational (11–adult): Abstract and hypothetical thinking.
What did Frederick Bartlett propose about memory?
Memory is actively constructed using past experiences.
Introduced schemata: frameworks of past experiences.
Famous study: The War of the Ghosts (1932).
What was the key finding of Bartlett’s “War of the Ghosts” study?
Participants altered the story to fit their cultural schemata and reduced recall over time.
How did Noam Chomsky challenge behaviorism’s explanation of language?
Language develops too quickly for conditioning alone.
Humans create/understand novel sentences.
Proposed the Language Acquisition Device and concepts of deep structure and surface structure.
What is George Miller’s “Magic Number”
The capacity of short-term memory is 7 ± 2 items, which can be expanded through chunking.
Q8: What did Donald Broadbent study with dichotic listening tasks
Limits of attention and the Selective Filter Model.
Demonstrated the cocktail party effect: focusing on one conversation amidst distractions.
Q9: How did behaviorism fail to explain human behavior?
Could not account for complex sequences (e.g., language or playing instruments).
Struggled with errors like spoonerisms (e.g., “I saw you fight a liar”).
What metaphor did computer science provide for cognitive psychology?
The brain functions like a computer: Input → Process → Output.
Q11: What did the Atkinson & Shiffrin model compare memory to?
Short-term memory: RAM (temporary).
Long-term memory: Hard drive (storage).
Q12: What are some limitations of cognitive psychology?
Oversimplifies humans as “machines.”
Models don’t always align with neurological evidence.
Critics like Skinner dismissed constructs like STM as “fiction.”
How did cognitive psychology gain prominence over behaviorism?
Exposed behaviorism’s explanatory limits.
Supported by advances in computer science and interdisciplinary research.
What areas of psychology were shaped by cognitive psychology?
Cognitive development, memory, attention, language.
Applications in education, AI, and clinical psychology.
