Cognitive Psychology

• Cognitive psychology looks at how various functions like; perception, attention, memory, language and thinking all work together.
• Cognitive approach considers group behaviour. It mainly uses observations to look at human behaviour; case studies and lab experiments.
• Development of computers provided a useful analogy for understanding the brain.
• If the brain was a computer, then:

  • a storage system receives info via our senses
  • we process the information
  • we give an output
  • hardware = structural features of the brain
  • software = the experiments we write into the program or system
• Experimental cognitive psychology is the study of human mental functioning in a controlled lab setting, and use experimental tests to determine functioning.
• Cognitive science is a field concerned with mimicking human cognition in a computer program and modelling computer simulations of human cognition.
• Cognitive neuropsychology/case studies are studies of patients with brain damage - investigating the impact of the damage on capacity and functioning.
• What are the strengths of cognitive psychology?

  • mostly uses rigorous scientific methods
  • approach has many practical applications
  • area has worked with other areas of psychology to produce social learning theory, social cognition and AI.
• What are the weaknesses of cognitive psychology?

  • too simplistic
  • ignores the complexity of the human functioning
  • ignores biological influences
  • ignores emotions, conscious experience and free will
• Part of the mental processes are schemata.
• Schemata are mental structures that represent an aspect of the world such as an object or event.
• Schemata help us make sense of the world and hold things in our memory and provide shortcuts to identify things.
• Who created the Multi store model of memory and when?

  Atkinson and Shiffrin 1968
• What does the multi store model of memory do?

  explains how we remember, store an retrieve events
• The three stores in the multi-store model of memory are sensory register, short term memory and long term memory.
• The structural features of the MSM are its like computer hardware, it can't be altered the programmer.
• The control processes are conscious decisions about what to attend to from the sensory information in our environment.
• Reductionism is reducing complex phenomena, experiences, behaviour to its simplest form.
• Multi store model of memory

  
• The model has been criticised for being overly simplistic and underplays interconnections between the different memory systems by proposing the different stores.
• What was Sperling's experiment of sensory memory in 1960?

  participants saw a grid of digits for 50ms. they were asked to either write down all 12 items, or hear a tone immediately after and they'd have to recall that particular row.
• Sensory memory results suggest that participants should only remember 4 items from a row, however only 3 were remembered. it suggest sensory memory can't hold info for long, info decays rapidly in the sensory store, and supports existence of a sensory store.
• Encoding is the type of format of information being stored.
• Capacity is the amount/quantity that can be stored.
• Duration is the length of time information is held for.