cognitive

• what does the cognitive approach involve?

  the way we store and extract information that helps guide our behaviour
• what is the main assumption of the cognitive approach?

  inference- mental processes can't be studied directly but can be studied as a result of inferring what goes on in the brain as a result of measuring behaviour, which can be used to develop theories
• what is a schema?

  cognitive framework that helps to organise and interpret information in the brain
• what are 2 advantages of schemata?

  • helps us interpret/make sense of large amounts of information quickly
  • helps us predict what will happen in our world based on experiences
• what are two disadvantages of schemata?

  • can cause biased recall- only allowing us to see what we expect
  • distort interpretations of sensory info
• what are theoretical models?

  • simplified representations based on current research evidence
  • eg MSM or WMM
  • usually pictorial, represented by boxes and arrows that imply cause and effect
  • can be edited/refined easily as the result of new research- they are incomplete and informal
• what are computer models?

  • the process of using computer analogies as a representation of human cognition
  • focuses on how sensory info is coded as it passes through the system
  • terms like "encoding" and "input" are used to describe cognitive processing- relation to computational terms
  • eg describing memory- LTM = hard disk, RAM = working memory, RAMs clear and reset when a task being carried out is finished
• how has studying the brain improved in terms of techniques used today?

  • through the emergence of cognitive neuroscience
  • non-invasive neuroimaging techniques
  • PET and fMRI allow scientists to understand how the brain supports different cognitive activities
  • these techniques give detailed info about the different brain structures used in information processing
  • gives a more precise/accurate way of identifying these things
• give an example of one piece of research which led to the discovery of the activity of a brain region when experiencing emotion

  Burnette et al- discovered when people feel guilty, medial prefrontal cortex activated, an area associated with social emotion
• evaluation of the cognitive approach?

  • 😊 scientific- rigorous to reach accurate conclusions- based on more than common sense and improvement from introspection, which is not consciously accessible, and can give misleading picture of mental processes
  • ☹️ doesn't explain motivation or emotion- fails to tell us WHY cognitive processes take place- motivation irrelevant to computers, over-dependence on analogies, psychodynamic ignores because of this
  • 😊 applications to reality- helps to understand how depression forms and effective cures (CBT, which after review of 75 studies by Cuijpers concluded it's superior to no treatment)
  • ☹️ limited explanatory power- encoding storage and retrieval borrowed from computing, but computers can be different eg- they don't make mistakes, error in assuming humans and computers are more similar than they actually are