define cognitive psychology
the study of mental processes
3 important ways to define cognitive psychology
- determine the characteristics and properties of the mind
- how the mind operates
- the study of mental operations that support peoples acquisition and use of knowledge
define the mind
- system that creates mental representations of the world and controls mental functions
- e.g. perception, attention, memory, etc
Neissers definition of the “mind”
refers to all the processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used
transformation definition and what it does
- discuss external stimuli such as sounds and sites
- stimuli in our environment are transformed into neural signals that travel to our brain, forming a mental representation
reduction
stimuli is reduced to its components such as colour, features and location
recovery
retrieval processes
mental operations
how information is used for decision making, creativity and problem solving
donders study (1868)
- illustrates that mental responses cannot be measured directly, but must be inferred from behaviour
- reaction time experiment (RT tasks vs. choice RT tasks)
structuralism (Wundt)
- an approach to psychology that explained perception as the adding up of small elementary units called sensations
- was not found to be a fruitful approach
analytic introspection (Wundt)
a procedure used by early psychologists in which trained participants described their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli
ebbinghaus’ study
- measured the rate of forgetting using 13 nonsense syllables (CVS’s: consonant, vowel, consonant)
- learned the list of syllables and then relearned the list after various intervals of time to determine the amount of “savings” in relearning
- most forgetting occurred after the 1st hour
the nature of attention (william james)
observation that paying attention to one thing involves withdrawing from other things still rings true today and has been the topic of many modern studies of attention
tolmans study
- rat in a maze with the goal of directing itself to food despite being placed at different starting locations
- used a cognitive map (mental conception of a spatial layout)
- placed emphasis on the mind, not behavior
Noam Chomsky
- saw language development as being determined not by imitation or reinforcement, but by an inborn biological program that holds across culture
- the idea that language is a product of the way the mind is constructed, rather than a result of reinforcement, led psychologists to reconsider the idea that language can be explained by operant conditioning
behaviourism
states that observable behavior provides the only valid data for psychology
consequence of behaviourism
consciousness and unobservable mental processes are not considered worthy of study by psychologists.
classical conditioning
pairing a neutral stimulus with a stimulus that elicits a response, causes the neutral stimulus to elicit that response
operant conditioning
a type of conditioning which focuses on how behavior is strengthened by presentation of positive reinforcers, such as food or social approval, or withdrawal of negative reinforcers, such as a shock or social rejection.
cognitive revolution
- a shift from the behaviourist approach to an approach focussed on explaining behaviour in terms of the mind
- introduction of information-processing
paradigm
a system of ideas, which guide thinking in a particular field
information-processing approach
an approach that traces sequences of mental operations involved in cognition
colin cherry
- presented participants with an attended message in one ear and an unattended in the other
- when focused on the attended message, they could hear the sounds of the unattended message but were unaware of the contents of that message
donald broadbent
- proposed the first flow diagram of the mind
- represented what he believed happens in a persons mind when directing attention to one stimulus through a sequence of stages
- input and filter
