What Is Cognition And How Can We Study It? Flashcards
What type of pyschologist was BF Skinner and what did he believe?
He was a behaviourist. He believed that we have an input and output. Published a book called ‘verbal behaviour’ which suggested that language learning could be learnt by typical reinforcement learning principles (positive reinforcement)
What is the behaviourist model?
Stimulus -> black box -> response
What is the cognitive model?
Input -> mediation process -> output
What are the factors that emerged around the same time and led to cognition?
- Noam Chomsky: language learning
- Edward Tolman: internal representations
- Jerome Bruner: value changes perceptions
What did Noam Chomsky do?
Published an influential critique of Skinner’s book and demonstrated that behaviourist ideas could not explain how children learn language:
- observed that language is inherently generative (people can produce unique utterences they haven’t encountered before)
- language emerges even when there’s a poverty of stimulus
What did Edward Tolman do?
Challeneged the idea that nothing happens between stimulus and response. He found that rats will learn the layout of a maze even when not reinforces to do so:
- shows that the behaviour doesn’t disappear if not rewarded
- shows that there’s an internal representation of the environment for the rat
What did Edward Tolman do?
Challeneged the idea that nothing happens between stimulus and response. He found that rats will learn the layout of a maze even when not reinforces to do so:
- shows that the behaviour doesn’t disappear if not rewarded
- shows that there’s an internal representation of the environment for the rat
What did Jerome Bruner do?
Asked ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ children to estimate the size of the coins and found that poorer children over estimated coin size:
- he argued that coins meant more to poorer children and this ‘need’ inflated their perception of physical size of the coins
- shows that there’s an internal representation
What is the ‘Turing test’?
Suggested that a computer could be considered intelligent if the person ‘conversing’ with it could not tell whether they were communicating with a person or another humanq
What’s Searle’s Chinese Room argument?
A non-chinese person is sat in a bare room with an instruction manual and a selection of chinese characters. There is someone who could speak chinese sat outside the room communicating with the person in the room using messages in chinese characters. Searle compared the person in the room making up the chinese messages to a computer code. It raises the question at what point can you say that a machine is really understanding and thinking?
What are the main approaches to studying cognition and what are they?
- cognitive psychology: using behavioural evidence (e.g. response time) to study cognition
- cognitive neuropsychology: studying patients with brain damage or neurological disease to understand how these affect cognition
- cognitive neuroscience: using converging evidence from brain and behaviour to understand cognition
- computational cognitive science - developing computational models to understand human cognition
What is bottom up processing?
Driven by the environment. Input that produces an output. ‘Bottom’ is the senses and ‘up’ is the higher processes in the brain.
What is top down processing?
Processing driven by expectation and knowledge. You use your knowledge and expectation about the world to correctly interpret a stimulus/input
What are the strengths of cognitive pyschology?
- first scientific and systematic aporoach to studying cognition and provided the bedrock for other approaches to build upon
- diverse and flexible - has influenced every other area of pyschology
Limitations of cognitive pyschology?
- ecological validity: might people’s behaviour differ in the lab to everyday life (can be mitigated by well designed experiments)
- Behavioural evidence only offers indirect evidence about the internal mental processes so researchers must infer what these tap into
- theories/ models can often be too general and not make clear predicitions
- findings can be paradigm specific
- no unifiying models to explain cognitive pyschology
