What is cognitive psychology?
The science of how the mind is organised to produce intelligent human thought.
Why do we study cognitive psychology?
- why not (curiosity-driven discipline)
- real-world purposes such as understanding:
–> why thought malfunctions occur (clinical psychology)
–> how people behave with other individuals (social psychology)
–> how financial decisions are made (business and economics) - Practical applications - eye witness
- Understanding Brain Disorders i.e research on navigation systems and Williams Syndrom
What is William Syndrome?
Patients with this syndrome have difficulty with spatial awareness (find it hard to identify where they are, their surroundings, etc)
Although this means they should hypothetically have difficulty navigating, they dont.
Cognitive psychology can explain this
How does Cognitive Psychology explain Williams Syndrome?
In the brain, there are two distinct navigation systems:
response based
response-based - where you take the same path over and over again
Place-based - where you actually think about the environmental framework.
When one of these systems is down, the other can work better, and that’s what’s going on in Williams syndrome. The people’s place-based system is down; therefore, their response-based system functions so well
History of Cognitive Psychology
- Root in early Philosophy. Philosophy asked, ‘Where does knowledge come from?’ There are two schools of thought here:
Navism - knowledge is innate
Empercicism - knowledge is acquired through experience
From this, people tried to establish psychology as its own dicipline. Three types of people did this:
structuralist
Functionalist
Behaviourist
What are the different ways of studying the human mind
– Structuralism: by analysing the mind into components
– Functionalism: by understanding what the mind does
in response to stimuli (environments)
– Behaviourism: by studying input-output association
What is Structuralism?
It is a way of analysing the human mind into its primitive components (example - the mind can be broken down into sensations, thoughts etc).
Use introspection to understand the different components of the mind
Changed nature of psychology from philosophical to scientific
- Wunt and Titcher
What are the issues in structuralism?
Unreliable and subjective (because it uses introspection)
What is functionalism?
- Functionalism was concerned with how the mind responds to various external stimuli
- understand the function of the human mind
- still used introspection but less intense
-WIlliam James
What are the issues of Functionalism?
little to no empirical support
What is Behaviourism?
- Believed that only the directly observable should be studied
- strict about stimulus - response relations
- Experimental approach
- mind as the black box
- SKinner and Watson
what is the weakness of Behviourism
treated mind as a black box -
What is the cognitive revolution?
During World War II, research on human performance was intensively conducted
– What makes a better soldier?
– This revealed a shortcoming of behaviourism—it was
not always useful for solving practical issues
–> to answer these questions, behaviourism wasn’t useful as they failed to look inside the human mind. Therefore other developments were made in other disciplines such as Information theory and Linguistics
- revolution occurred and resulted in what we know today as cognitive psychology
Information-Processing Approach
Cognitive psychology = re-defining psychology
as the science of human information processing
What is cognitive psychology / cognitive science
- the science of how the mind is organised to produce intelligent thought and how it is relised in the brain.
What is Neuroscience
- the study of the function and structure of the nervous system
How do we actually understand mental processes (how do we see what’s happening inside the black box?)
- Formulate a theoretical model of how output (behaviour etc) is made from a given input (stimuli - ie. light sound etc)
– Models usually consist of multiple processing stages - You create an experiment and in that you measure the time taken for each processing stage
- Analyse which variable affects which processing stage
What is cognitive neuroscience
- Attempts to gain insights into cognitive processes by
studying the brain and behaviour
what does a theoretical model allow you to do?
A theoretical model allows you to make predictions
For example:
– The time it takes to find a target should linearly increase as the number of letters increases
