Cognitive Approach

• What is included in the Cognitive Approach?

  • Internal mental processes
  • Role of schemas
  • Theoretical and computer models
  • Emergence of cognitive neuroscience
• What does Cognitive mean?

  Mental Processes.
• When was the Cognitive Approach developed?

  Developed in the 1960s in the response to the behaviourists' failure to consider mental processes.
• Why does this approach disagree with behaviourism?

  • They believe that internal, mental processes can and should be studied scientifically.
  • This is different to behaviourists because they believe stimulus bonds drive our behaviours.
• Assumptions of Approach:

  • Internal mental processes influence our behaviours.
  • Investigated areas of psychology that were ignored or neglected by the behaviourists. E.g. Memory, perception and thinking.
  • These processes are private and cannot be observed directly.
  • This means cognitive psychologists study them indirectly by making inferences from their behaviour about what is going on in their mind.
• What are Internal mental processes?

  Operations that occur during thinking.
• What is Perception?

  How we turn information we see into usable form.
• What is Attention?

  How we choose what to think about.
• What is Problem Solving?

  Constructing new solutions.
• What is Memory?

  Retaining Information.
• What is Inference?

  The process where cognitive psychologists draw conclusions about the way mental processes operate on the basis of observed behaviour.
• However:

  Psychologists cannot see these mental processes therefore they make inferences about these concepts based on the observable behaviours they can see.
• What was Peterson and Peterson's Experiment?

  Peterson and Peterson have inferred that the capacity of short term memory is approximately 7 items. This is because people tend to be able recall 7 items from their Short Term Memory.
• What is a Schema?

  A mental framework of information that we use to organise past experiences and interpret and respond to new situations.
• What does a schema enable us to do?

  Enable us to process information more quickly as they enable us to take shortcuts.
• Examples of Schemas:

  Doors- we have a schema for what a door is and how to use it.

  Subcategories of a door(sliding, revolving etc.)

  Getting the Bus-Waiting at the bus stop, getting on the bus, paying for ticket, sitting down, getting off at your stop.
• What was the use of the Theoretical Model?

  Proposed to attempt to explain and infer information about mental processes.
• What does the Information Processing Model(IPM) describe the mind as?

  A Computer.
• What is the computer analogy?

  When cognitive psychologists compare the mind to a computer.
• What do computer models suggest?

  It suggests that the information is inputted into the brain and the brain has to code it in order to make some sense of it and it is sorted inside.
• What was the Computational Model?

  The computational model similarly compares the brain with a computer, but it focuses more on how we reach the behavioural outputs.

  The process uses mathematical or logical algorithms that can be executed on a computer.
• What is the Connectionist Model?

  Takes a neural line of thought; it looks at the mind as a complex network of neutrons, which activate in regular patterns to make associations between neurones.
• What is Cognitive Neuroscience?

  A new field that tries to bridge the gap between the biological approach and the cognitive approach.

  The scientific study of biological structures that underpin cognitive processes.
• What are fMRI scans?

  Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: fMRI measures brain activity by defecting changes associated with blood flow.

  When an area of the brain is in use, blood flow to that region increases which shows up on the scan.
• What are EEGs and ERPs?

  Electroencephalograms are Brain Scans.

  ERPs are Brain Scans as well.
• What is a Post Mortem?

  An examination which is done after death to show injury in the brain.
• What are the 4 main scan techniques?

  1. fMRIs
  2. EEGs
  3. ERPs
  4. Post Mortem
• What have the scans helped us understand?

  They have helped us understand that the hippocampus is associated with semantic memory, temporal lobe with semantic memory and cerebellum and motor cortex with procedural memory.
• Two strengths of the Cognitive Approach:

  Uses highly controlled methods to allow psychologists to INFER the cognitive processes at work.

  Cognitive Approach has led to real life applications.

  
  

  COUNTERPOINT: However, this can be criticised as this evidence is correlational which means causation cannot be established.
• Two weaknesses of the Cognitive Approach:

  1. It is Machine Reductionist- Simply human experiment.
  2. Difficult to study a person's cognitions.