Jan 09 Intro

• Historical approaches to studying cognition include philosophical foundations from Ancient Greece, the early days of psychology as an experimental science, and behaviourism and then cognitive psychology.
• Ancient Greek philosophers considered the locus of the mind (sensations, memory) and basis of human personality.
• Many took an analytic approach to understanding the human mind by breaking it down into ‘parts’ to study.
• Aristotle and Plato were two key figures who studied human knowledge.
• Plato was the first early philosopher to consider the human mind.
• Plato stated that the world is a reflection of our reality and that observation does not always lead to certainty.
• Rationalism, the belief that knowledge is the result of observation and prior reasoning, was a philosophy of Ancient Greek philosophers.
• Aristotle combined philosophical and scientific approaches to thinking.
• Empiricism, the belief that all knowledge comes from experience, was also a philosophy of Ancient Greek philosophers.
• Behaviourism, which focused on what can be observed (input, output), emerged in the 1900s as a response to the struggle of psychology to be taken seriously.
• Cognitive psychology, which focuses on thought processes, emerged in the 1960s as a response to behaviourism.
• Philosophical foundations of cognitive psychology include the study of how the human mind works, the basis of human knowledge, and the study of mental processes.
• Early experimental psychology included:

  • Structuralism, which identified the basic building blocks of the complex thoughts or the conscious experience
  • Introspection, a method of self-report or observation about conscious experience.
• Structuralism emphasized systematic, controlled observation for understanding the structure of the mind.
• Introspection, a method of self-report or observation about conscious experience, was used in Structuralism.
• Classical Conditioning (Pavlov) is the learning by making associations between cue, a stimuli and the natural response.
• The information processing view of the mind and the brain is like a computer

  • information from the environment is processed by a series of processing systems
  • these processing systems change information in systematic ways
  • cognitive research aims to understand the processes and structures that underlie cognitive tasks such as attention, memory, etc.
• Information processing has limits, for example, the number of words remembered decreases as the distractor task increases in length, and you cannot rehearse information and in that time, information is not processed.
• The basic assumption of cognition research is information processing, where we select information to process to reduce uncertainty.
• Species obey the same laws of behaviour.
• Behaviourism overestimated the scope of their explanations, cannot account for complex human behavior, and the assumption that learning is the same for all individuals and across species is false.
• The cognitive revolution in the 1950s accepted that there are internal mental states, accepted the scientific method to study these states, and was driven by technology.
• The goal of cognitive research is to understand the computations made on information as a sequences of operations, represented in flowcharts, and must be mindful of ecological validity.
• Choice overload bias occurs when the greater the number of choices (or uncertainty of choice) taxes information processes, resulting in reduced satisfaction, lower confidence and more regret.
• Hick’s Law: The more information to process, the longer it takes to make a response to that information.
• Ecological validity is the extent to which the findings of a research study can be generalized to real-life naturalistic settings.
• Language is learned through conditioning, there is such a thing as latent learning, and children learn to apply language rules to new situations.
• Instrumental Learning (Thorndike) and Operant Conditioning (Skinner) involve behaviours that are contingent on a schedule of reinforcements, rewards and punishments.
• Decision fatigue occurs when making decisions uses cognitive processing, and decisions become harder to make and worse throughout the day, as we fatigue our system.
• The history behind cognition as a scientific study includes Greece, Structuralism/Functionalism, Behaviourism, and Cognition.
• Functionalism, which asks why the mind works, emerged in the 1800s and is not interested in breaking down mental states to basic elements.
• William James, a proponent of Functionalism, focused on the ‘usefulness of knowledge’ and contributed an emphasis on the adaptive functions of our mind.
• William James believed that consciousness is personal and cannot be broken down into parts as it is constantly changing.
• William James emphasized an eclectic methodological approach, needed to study the usefulness and variability of accessing knowledge in the real world.