cognition includes:
Perception, language, attention, thinking, memory, reasoning
behaviourism vs cog psych
Behaviourism (1910)
Scientific study of observable behaviour
Rejected use of introspection (examining mental processes)
Cog Psych (1960)
Change / shift in interests
Mental processes used in thinking
4 process to human cognition
- Cognitive psychology
Use behavioural evidence to understand cognition - Cognitive neuropsychology
Studying brain damaged patients
What happens to cognition in event of diseases - Cognitive neuroscience
Evidence from behaviour + brain imaging
4.Computational cognitive science
Developing computer models
algorithm
computational procedure providing specific steps to solution
what is cog psych?
Scientific study of human mental (or internal) processes
Involved in making sense of the environment + taking action
Occurs rapidly
Below level of conscious awareness
assumptions of cog psych
- Mental processes exist
- Mental processes can be studied scientifically
- Humans are active participants in the act of cognition
the cognitive scientific approach
Systematically study people performing tasks
How can we measure mental processes?
includes response time + accuracy
response time
a measure of time between a stimulus + a person’s response
accuracy
measuring proportion of correctness
strengths of cog scientific approach
Foundation for understanding human mental processes
Continues to inform theorising in contemporary research across disciplines
Source of most theories used by other approaches
weaknesses of cog scientific approach
Task impurity problem: most tasks involve multiple cognitive processes (e.g Stroop task = visual, language, recognition)
Ecological validity: behaviour in lab settings differs from everyday life
Lab based measures only provide indirect evidence
Paradigm specificity: findings on one task don’t always generalise to other similar tasks
metatheory
A set of assumptions + guiding principles to generate research questions
- Helps scientists to decide what experiments need to be done + how they should be undertaken
information processing
Mental processes understood as a sequence of independent processing stages
bottom up info processing
processing directly affected by the stimulus approach
E.g spider → attention + perception → thought + decision → fear
Serial processing: current process is completed before the next one starts
weaknesses of bottom up info processing
Too simplistic: contemporary approaches moved away from strict info processing approach
Cannot account for other types of processing
top down info processing
processing influenced by the individuals expectations + knowledge
Parallel processing: more than one cognitive process occurs simultaneously
7 themes of cognition
Bottom up vs top down
Attention
Representation
Implicit vs explicit memory
Metacognition
Embodiment
The brain
attention
An important but poorly understood mental process
Limited in quantity
Essential to most processing
Only partially under our control
representation
A hypothetical entity
Stands for a perception, thought or memory
Manipulated during cognitive operations, such as retrieval from memory or problem solving
implicit vs explicit
Implicit (unconscious)
Remember things without awareness
Explicit (conscious)
Memories of personal info + facts
metacognition
An awareness of our own cognitive system + how it works
Thinking about thinking
Used to plan, monitor + assess our understanding & performance
embodiment
Embodied cognition
The way we think + represent info is a reflection of how we interact with the world
the brain
Brain-cognition relationships + questions the focus of contemporary cognitive psychologists
Brain = 2% of body mass, 20% of energy expenditure
Focus on how + where memories are stored in the brain
