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ch.1 (p.1-12) (pg2) (exam 1)

Terms in this set (36)

what is cognitive psychology?
-scientific approach to memory and thought
what are one of the centreal features of modern cognitive psych?
-its allegiance to objective, empirical methods of investigation
what was the cognitive revolution?
-questions that were of pent-up interest unleashed the cognitive revolution of the late 1950s and early 1960s
what is cognitive science?
-interdisciplinary approach to the scientific study of thought, language, and the brain (scientific study of the mind)
-contributions of disciplines such as linguistics, computer science, anthropology, and the neurosciences.
cognitive psychology is the ____________________ in psychology
-the core and "most prominent school of thought"
cognitive psychology is a __________ fielf
-multidisciplinary
explain how cognitive psychology is multidisciplinary
-this fusion and cross-pollination of ideas stems from the conviction that researchers in linguistics, artificial intelligence, the neurosciences, economics, and even anthropology can contribute important ideas to psych and vise versa.
-eduction
-even fields like medicine, lawn and business use findings from cog psych
what things all factor into cognitive processes?
-memory, perception, emotions, beliefs, reasoning, imagination, and how we acquire knowledge
Consider this question: "how many hands did Aristotle have?".
what 2 important lessons did you encounter?

what other thing to note from this example?
-1st, mental processes such as reading can occur w/ little conscious awareness, especially if they are highly practiced
-2nd, even though these processes can operate very quickly, they are complex.

-there are differnt cognitive processes that are operating at the same time or similar times
-these processes also are providing input and influencing one another
-cognition is complex and interactive thing
consider the question: "what is 723 divided by 6?"
what things do you note?
-mental processes happened more or less automaticaly (identifying digits, knowledge of arithmetic, etc)
-cognitive psych also interested in mental processing of arethematic problems and knowledge you acquire in school, not just the kind of reasoning you used in aristotle Q
consider the 3rd Q: "does a robin have wings?"
what do you note?
-you dont know why you know but "you just know".
-there were steps you took, and each step is a mental act (reading, find meaning in memory, check relevant facts, nad make decision)
-this Q takes slightly longer b4 people answer, and small time differences cna give us a wealth of information
-the difference in Q3 is that most of the mental processes do not require much conscious activity; the Q seems to be processed automatically
-bc such automatic processes are so pervasive, we are particularly interested in understanding them
what is cognition?
-the collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, remembering, thinking, and understanding, as well as the act of using those processes

-cognition is largely what might be everyday, ordinary mental processes
what may some people be concerned about?

what concern does this reflect about cognitive research?
-the reliance on seemingly sterile experimental techniques and methods, techniques that ask simple questions, may yield overly simple-minded views about cognition

-that it lacks ecological validity - generalizability to the real-world situations in which ppl think and act
what is a primary reason that cognitive psychologists do not try to do studies that have an immediate and direct implication for real-world activities?

what would this make us?

so what is it reasonable to do?

what would this allow?
-the fact that cognition is complex, even when using artificially simple tasks.

-overwhelmed, if tasks were comlex or if we tried to study a full range of behavior in all of its detail

-to take the approach reductionism - attempting to understand complex events by breaking them down into their components

-once the basic prosesses and components are understood... the greater goal is for scientists to eventyally put the pieves back together and deal with the larger events as wholes
is the bulk of scientific work on memory and cognition recent or old?
-recent
summary of aristotle?

summary of wildhelm wundt?

summary of edward titchener?
(not imp probs**)
-1st dude, studying "thinking"
-advocated for empirically based, natural science approach
-position known as empiricism
-objective explanation of how learning and memory take place
-"blank slate" or tabula rasa

-1st lab, inspired James
-wrote books
-studied sensation, perception, and attention
-used method of Selbst-Beobachtung ("self-observation"), aka introspection

-american psych
-attempted to study the structure of the conscious mind: the sensations, images, and feelings that, for him, were the very elements of the minds structure
-he called this structuralism - early school of thought
who was ebbinghaus?

what was ebbinghaus's goal?

what did he use to study?

what was his measure of learning?

what was his savings score idea based on?

what was he able to study?

what did his work gain?
-achievements in memory and forgetting; decided that a study of the mind by objective measures was possible

-to study memory in a "pure" form

-nonsense syllables. he'd ;earn it to mastery, then set list aside. later he would relearn the same list, noting how many fewer trials it took him.

-the "savings score", the number of trials that had been saved in memory btw the first and second sessions.

-the idea that if info is stored in memory, even in a form that is not strongly consciously available, it can still ease the relearning of that material

-retention and forgettig memories as a function of time, degree of learning or overlearning, and even the effect of nonsense vs meaningful material (forgetting curves).

-wide acclaim as a model of scientific inquiry into memory
-one of stronest influences on cognitive psych
summary of william james?
-functionalism - the functions of consciousness, rather than its structure, were of interest
-suggested memory consists of 2 parts
-led to behaviorism
summary of bheaviorism?
-there were changes in behaviorism that smoothed the transition to cognitive psych
-didnt want to study the "un-observables" like thought, mind, consciousness, etc
-psych was redefined as the scientific study of observable behavior, the program of behaviorism
-Skinner emerged and argued that mental events were real, but had no place in psych, unobservable, unnecessary to a scientific explanation of behavior
when did cog emerge?
-the cogntive revolution in the mid to late 1950s (break from behaviorism); rapid reform in experimental psych
what was the role of psychs in WWII?

why?

what was the problem with these psychs?
-psychs involed w WWII, psychs accostumed to animal learning in the lab were put to work on practical problems of the war... trying to understand problems of perception, judgement, thinking, and decision making

-bc soldiers difficulties w sophisticated technical devices: e.g. skilled pilots who crashed their aircraft

-the behavior of animals in mazes and skinner boxes shed little light on the performance of airplane pilots and sonar operators. the kind of learning w nonsense syllabes contributed little to psychs trying to teach ppl how to operate complex machines. most problems arose after the tasks had already been learned, when normally skillful performance broke down. the focus was on performance rather than learning; and this left academic psychologists poorly prepared
what did they do to deal with these practical problems?

what concepts became of attention?

how did psychologists rub sholders with other ppl?

thus..
-to deal with these practical problems, waetime psychs were forced to think about human behavior very differently.

-attention and vigilance; decision making;

-rubbed shoulders from ppl in diff fields (e.g. communications engineering) who they gained new outlooks and perspectived on human behavior

-they returned to their labs after the way to broaden their own research interests and those of psych as well
what was verbal learning?

who inspired this tradition?

why is this imp?

what else did the verbal learning tradition lead to?

nonetheless, verbal learning gave conitive psych...
-branch of experimental psych that dealt with himans as they learned verbal material composed of letters, nonsense syllabes, or words

-ebbinghaus; agreed with behaviorist on things like being objective

-the more moderate view in verbal learnong circles made it easy for ppl to accept cognitive psych in the 1950s and 1960s; there were many indications than an adequate psych of learnning and memory needed more than just observable behavior.

-the derivation and refinement of lab tasks for learning and memory. like measured the outcomes of mental processes in valid and useful ways

-an objective, reliable way to study mental processes, and a set of inferred processes such as storage and retrieval to investigate. the infuence of verbal learning on cog psych was almost entirely positive.
what else challenged behaviorism (linguistics)?
-Noam Chomsky, rejected a purely behaviorist explanation of the most human of all behaviors: language
describe skinners view on languag
-he thought about language from the radical behaviorism standpoint, the conditioning of new behavior by means of reinforcement accounted for language. human language followed the same laws and mechanisms of a learned behavior
what did chomsky say about skinners idea?
-the insights of reinforcement thworists can only be applied to complex human behavior only in the most gross and superficial way; he thought that skinner brought along the vocab of scientific expanation but left the substance behind.
what did chomsky believe in his view of language?

how did it become clear that the new direction for psych would take hold?
-emphasized its novelty; language WAS an important behavior for psychs to understand. an approach that offered no help in understanding was useless.
-chomskys argument summarized the dissatisfactions w behaviorism that had become so apparent. the irrelevance of behaviorism in the study of language (and other human behavior) was now obvious

-chomky in combination with other developments (the wartime fling, the expansion of the catelog of such processes by verbal learning, and the disarray within behaviorism itself)
what would be the date they would pick for the beginning of cog psych?
-1960
again... summarize what chomsky argued
-made forceful argument against a purely behaviroist position
-argued that the truely interesting part of language was exactly what skinner had omitted: mental processes and cogntiion
-in chomsky's view, it was exactly there, in the organism, that the key to undrstanding language would be found
-researchers in other fields making the same claim. they were in the person, in memory and mental processes.
what development happened in this period?
-invention of the modern computer
how did computers compare to human mind?
-they take in info, do something with it internally, and then produce some observable product.. the product gives clues to what went on internally. the operations done by computer were not unknown bc they were internal and unobservable. they were under the control of the computer program, the instructions given to the machne to tell it what to do
what was the breakthrough?
-the realization that human mental activity might be understood by analogy to this machine was a breakthough
what was this proof for?

what was Newel and Simon's idea that was especially important?
-the computer was an existence proof for the idea that unobservable processes could be undertood.

-the idea of symbols and their internal manipulation. a computer is a symbol-manipulating machine. the human mind might also be a symbol-manipulating machine.
what did Newell and Simon present?
-an explicit analogy between information processing in the computer and that in humans
similar to this was a book that suggested human problem solving could be understood as a kind of ______________________________________. the mentalistic plans, goals, and strategies in the book were not just ______________________. instead, they were ideas that in principle could be ________________________________________-
-planning in which mental strategies or plans guide behavior toward its goal.
-unobservable, hypothetical ideas.
-specified in a program running on a lawful, physical device: the computer
what was channel capacity?

what did psychologists notice?
-(aka bandwidth) they found this concept from communications engineering useful. telephoens and things could only carry so many messages at a time, and it loses info if capacity is exceeded.

-humans are limited-capacity channels too. there is a limit on what we can do or think at one time. this insight lent a fresh perspective to human experimental psych
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