Define cognitive psychology
The scientific study of how the mind encodes, stores, and uses information
Ie. how is knowledge acquired, retained and used?
Cognitive psychology is a _ science
A new science
Give some examples related to cognitive psychology covered in class
- studying for a test is reading info, storing info, applying it back from memory to recite or apply to novel problems
- driving is mundane but involves a lot of processing
- lots of things happening, remembering rules from 16 years old and apply info to different environments/cars
- How experts make their decisions (ex. Physician) who studied things in the past, apply this to solve problems. Do their job well hit sometimes make mistakes which is also a part of cognitive psycholo
When did cognitive psychology arise?
1950 to 60s
Cognitive psychology arose partly from previous research traditions. What were they?
Introspection and behaviourism
Who pioneered introspectionism and what did they focus on?
Wilhelm Wundt (and Edward Titchener, his student)
Focus on studying one’s own conscious thoughts and experiences
What are the 2 features of introspectionism?
Who can observe thoughts?
What about unconscious thoughts?
Who can observe thoughts? (Introspectionism)
- only you, you are your own observer (not always the best, describe things differently depending on life experiences
- not everyone can be an introspectionist, has to be trained
- people are presented with the same experiences and would be asked to describe it
- this was made a formal method, scientific approach to studying the mind
What’s another word for introspectionism?
Structuralism
Can we observe unconscious thoughts?
- don’t really have access to that
- part of the mental processes we don’t have access to if we only use introspection
When was behaviorism dominant in psychology? Who was the biggest advocate?
First half of the 20th century, John Watson
What was one of Jon Watson’s most popular beliefs?
- believed behaviour mattered most, not what is happening in the mind
- thought we learne EVERYTHING through some form of rewards and punishment through stimulus
- “give me any child and i can raise them to become a doctor, lawyer, etc.
What kind of behaviors did behaviorism focus on?
Observable
What is the salt shaker example within the topic of behaviorism?
Stimulus response pairs can’t explain all behavior
- there’s a ton of ways to ask for the salt but the response will be the same despite only training a couple ways
What’s the main limitation for introspection?
Methods for studying mental events are not scientific
What’s the main limitation of behaviorism?
To fully understand behavior, we can’t ignore mental events (aka. can’t just focus on observable behaviors)
What heavily influenced future study of psychology after the cognitive revolution?
The transcendental method: reason backward from observations to determine the cause (Immanuel Kant)
- don’t just stop at behavior and explain it through external stimulus, considers internal such as thoughts
(Ex. Observe behavior like driving aggressively and make inferences on to what is happening in the mind)
Name 5 people who contributed to the cognitive revolution
Noam Chomsky
Edward Tolman
Claude Shannon
George Miller
Donald Broadbent
Describe Noam Chomsky’s contributions to the cognitive revolution + year
1959
- criticized Skinner’s description that children’s language development occurs via conditioning
- was a pioneer in language development
- children understand rules of language and learn at a speed that cannot be explained by conditioning
Describe Edward Tolman’s contributions to the cognitive revolution + year
Demonstrated that reinforcement is not required for learning
(1930)
-(rat experiment - left rats to walk around either with food in a non-specific place or no food at all on the 10th today the rats can really quickly navigate the maze if a reward were to somehow appear) COGNITIVE MAP!
Describe Claude Shannon’s contributions to the cognitive revolution
Demonstrated that the nature and processing of information itself could be studied and analyzed without consideration of the actual content of a message (1948)
- can convey any info through zeros and ones as long as the center and interpreter both have the same rules/algorithms they can extract info through
= INFORMATION THEORY
Describe George Miller’s contributions to the cognitive revolution+ year
(1956) Identified the amount of information people could store (7 plus minus 2)
- ex. if there are more than seven marbles, the estimates get really variable but before it’s easy to guess
Describe Donald Broadbent’s contributions to the cognitive revolution and year
Built a filter model of attention (1958)
- the idea that information is filtered by different processes based on type of information
- use computer language to understand human processing?
Psychology often modelled advances in what subject?
Physics
- seen as a gold standard of science, questioned when quantum was introduced
- psychologist thought maybe they should leave some room for uncertainty
