Week 9 - Cognitive Perspective

Question 1

explain the assumptions of the cognitive perspective

Answer 1

From text:

(1) How people deal with the info that surrounds them. You integrate and organise bits of info the world provides.
(2) Life involves an elaborate web of decisions, some conscious, some not.

From web:

(1) Human cognition can at least in principle be fully revealed by the scientific method, that is, individual components of mental processes can be identified and understood.
(2) Internal mental processes can be described in terms of rules or algorithms in information processing models

Cognitive perspective -
considers how people attend to process, organise, encode, store and retrieve information.

Connectionist models of memory -
View it in terms of patterns in overall networks. Applies nicely to social perception and decision making.

Theorists believe there is 2 distinct kinds of thought processes

1: quick, intuitive and connectionist
2: slower, rational and linear.

Question 2

describe personal construct theory and the role of George Kelly

Answer 2

Personal Construct Theory -
Foreshadowed Cognitive perspective (1950’s)
People generate a set of personal constructs and impose them on reality.
People don’t experience the world directly but know it through the lens of their constructs.

George Kelly -
In the 1950’s Kelly foreshadowed cognitive perspective theory long before it’s 1970’s popularity.
Viewed people as implicit scientists: all info is processed for usefulness and order.
Kelly’s views represent essentially the same thing as cognitive perspective but he was largely ignored in the cog persp. acknowledgements.

Question 3

explain schemas and their effects

Answer 3

Schemas -
mental organisations of info that develops over experience, which are used to identify new events. They are roughly ‘categories’
ie: memories used to enhance familiarity for recognition.

Self-schema -
a representation of themselves

Effects of schemas -
recognition, can also cause depression with negative self-schemas (cognitive therapy helps here)

Question 4

explain different types of schemas: social, self, entity and incremental

Answer 4

Self-schema -
Representation of the ‘self’.
Can be negative and lead to depression

Social schemas -
people, gender roles, environments, social situations, types of social relations, emotions and music.

Entity schemas -
A schema/mindset that suggests something you have more/less of (but that can change)
Becomes about ‘proving’ themselves.

Incremental schemas -
A schema/mindset that suggests you can increase something through experience.
Becomes about ‘extending’ ability

Question 5

define attribution, activation and memory, priming, and connectionism

Answer 5

Attribution -
inferring cause to an event.
People do this spontaneously without consciousness.
Relies on social schemas.

Activation of memory -
When a node gets activated consciously, other nodes become activated unconsciously.
Called partial activation.
Priming
Orange > Colour > Fruit > Taste > Orange group

Connectionism -
etext - Neuronal processes are a metaphor for cognitive processes.
Pathways can be excitatory (reaction) or inhibitory (stops reaction).
The system simultaneously satisfies multiple constraints that the units place on each other.
Experience is being constructed from bits of input.

Net - a movement in cognitive science that hopes to explain intellectual abilities using artificial neural networks (also known as “neural networks” or “neural nets”). These weights model the effects of the synapses that link one neuron to another.

Question 6

describe dual process models and cognitive person variables

Answer 6

Dual process models -
connectionist models join symbol-processing models.

Cognitive person variables - 
Competencies
Encoding strategies and personal constructs
Expectancies
Behaviour outcome expectancy
Self-regulatory systems

Mischel suggests that an individual’s behaviour is fundamentally dependent on situational cues; this counters the trait theories’ perspective that behaviour is dependent upon traits and should be consistent across diverse situations.
The conflict of ideas between Mischel’s model and earlier trait theories was “trait vs. state”, whether traits or situations are more influential in predicting behaviour.
Mischel found “if-then” situation-behaviour relations that form personality signatures
He did the Stanford marshmallow experiment on delayed gratification.

Question 7

identify issues in assessment in the cognitive perspective

Answer 7

Assessment - 
Mapping people if (situation) >> then (behavioural response) signatures.
Done via:
think aloud procedures (self-reported)
thought sampling (self reported)
Monitoring (case study)
Experience sampling

Self-reports can have bias and case studies are hard to generalise to the wider population.

Question 8

identify problems from the cognitive perspective and therapy

Answer 8

Problems -
Reflect deficits in cognitive or memory functions (attending, extracting or organising info)
Limit on attentional capacity (anxiety impacts possibility of learning)
Deploying attention - over attention expecting a certain thing (eg: this person is aggressive = seeing things/actions to confirm this)
Schemas lead people to these things.

Criticisms -
Disorganised, not yet mature, has many ‘loose ends’.
Tries to graft cognitive psychology to personality psychology when it shouldn’t be.
Doesn’t account for the unconscious
It’s not possible to fully understand inter-personal functioning without understanding the complexities of the mind and it’s workings.

Therapy -
Cognitive Therapy (Or Cog Behavioural Therapy=CBT): procedures for changing faulty schemas.
Patients led to test thoughts/fears as data/hypotheses to be tested
Thought > Feeling > Behaviour