Chapter 1: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology

• Cognition involves perception, attention, memory, representation of knowledge, language, problem-solving, reasoning, and decision-making.
• All of these mental processes include "hidden" processes of which we may not be aware.
• The goal of Cognitive Science is to find ways to study and understand the inner workings of the mind.
• Cognitive Science is an interdisciplinary study of the mind that includes Psychology, Computer science, Cognitive anthropology, Linguistics, Neuroscience, and Philosophy.
• Donders (1868) is considered the first cognitive psychologist, known for his work in mental chronometry, which involves measuring how long a cognitive process takes.
• Helmholtz (~1860s) is also considered a first cognitive psychologist, known for his work in unconscious inference, which involves some of our perceptions being the result of unconscious assumptions we make about the environment.
• Tolman trained rats to find food in a four-armed maze, and there are two competing interpretations: behaviorism predicts that the rats learned to “turn right to find food”, while Tolman believed that the rats had created a cognitive map of the maze and were navigating to a specific arm.
• Classical conditioning involves pairing a neutral event with an event that naturally produces some outcome, and after many pairings, the “neutral” event now also produces the outcome.
• When the rats were placed in a different arm of the maze, they navigated to the specific arm where they previously found food, supporting Tolman’s interpretation and not supporting behaviorism interpretation.
• The “Little Albert” experiment is an example of behaviorism, where the behavior of a 9-month-old became frightened by a rat after a loud noise was paired with every presentation of the rat.
• Watson proposed a new approach called behaviorism, which involves studying directly observable behavior instead of the mind.
• Watson published “The Psychological Care of Infant and Child” advising parents not to touch their children too often and to keep an emotional distance so as not to spoil them.
• Watson examined how pairing one stimulus with another affected behavior.
• Pavlov’s famous experiment paired ringing a bell with the presentation of food, and initially, only the presentation of the food caused the dog to salivate, but after a number of pairings of bell and food, the bell alone caused salivation.
• Skinner was interested in determining the relationship between stimuli and response, and operant conditioning involves shaping behavior by rewards or punishments.
• Skinner argued children learn language through operant conditioning, while Chomsky argued children do not only learn language through imitation and reinforcement.
• Watson's four children: John, Mary, James, and William, all had behavioral issues.
• Behavior can be analyzed without any reference to the mind.
• Ebbinghaus (1885) is considered a first cognitive psychologist, known for his work in learning, which involved reading a list of nonsense syllables aloud many times to determine the number of repetitions necessary to repeat the list without errors.
• Wundt (1897) is considered the first psychology laboratory, located at the University of Leipzig, Germany.
• Wundt's approach in cognitive psychology was Structuralism, which determines experience by combining elements of experience called sensations.
• Wundt's method in cognitive psychology was Analytic introspection, where participants are trained to describe experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli.
• The rise of Behaviorism in cognitive psychology was influenced by John B. Watson
• Memory for recent events is fragile and if processing is disrupted, recent memories can fail to be consolidated.
• Memory consolidation is a process where new information can interfere with memory consolidation.
• Broadbent (1958) created a flow diagram representing what happens as a person directs attention to one stimulus, with unattended information not passing through the filter.
• The Cognitive Revolution shifted from behaviorist’s stimulus-response relationships to an approach that attempts to explain behavior in terms of the mind.
• In this experiment, precautions are taken to prevent the rat from knowing where the food is based on cues such as smell.
• Muller and Pilzecker (1900) had participants learn two lists of words, with one group learning the second list immediately after the first list and the other group experiencing a six-minute delay between learning the lists.
• Gais et al. (2007) studied the effect of sleep on memory consolidation, with one group learning a list of words shortly before going to sleep and the other group learning the words many hours before going to sleep.
• Early computers processed information in stages.
• Cherry (1953) conducted a study on dichotic listening where participants were able to focus only on the message they were shadowing.
• The information-processing approach is a way to study the mind created from insights associated with the digital computer.
• Measuring how long a cognitive process takes.

  Mental chronometry
• Measures interval between stimulus presentation and person's response to stimulus.

  Reaction time experiment
• Participant pushes a button quickly after a light appears.

  Simple RT Task
• Participant pushes one button if light is on right side, another if light is on left side.

  Choice RT Task
• Choice RT - Simple RT =

  time to make a decision
• Mental responses cannot be measured directly but can be inferred from the participant's behavior. True or False?

  True
• It shows savings as a function of retention interval.

  Forgetting curve