M1 COG PSY

• This module will last for two weeks
• San Mateo Municipal College is the location
• Cognitive psychology


  The scientific investigation of human cognition, that is, all our mental abilities – perceiving, learning, remembering, thinking, reasoning, and understanding
• The Cognitive Revolution began

  Mid-1950s
• Cognitive psychology became predominant in the 1960s
• Since 1970, more than sixty universities in North America and Europe have established cognitive psychology programs
• Assumptions of cognitive psychology

  • Human cognition can at least in principle be fully revealed by the scientific method, that is, individual components of mental processes can be identified and understood
  • Internal mental processes can be described in terms of rules or algorithms in information processing models

  
• Approaches in cognitive psychology

  • Experimental cognitive psychology
  • Computational cognitive psychology
  • Neural cognitive psychology
• Sub-domains of cognitive psychology

  • Perception
  • Attention
  • Learning
  • Memory
  • Concept formation
  • Reasoning
  • Judgment and decision-making
  • Problem solving
• Perception


  How we construct subjective interpretations of proximal information from the environment
• Attention


  Solves the problem of information overload in cognitive processing systems by selecting some information for further processing, or by managing resources applied to several sources of information simultaneously
• Learning


  The study of which new information is acquired and the conditions under which it is acquired
• Memory


  The study of the capacity and fragility of human memory, focusing on how memories are acquired, stored, and retrieved
• Concept formation


  The ability to organize the perception and classification of experiences by the construction of functionally relevant categories
• Judgment and decision-making


  The study of how humans make judgments and decisions, including the failures of rational models due to differential assessment of risks and rewards, distorted assessment of probabilities, and limitations in human information processing
• Reasoning


  The process by which logical arguments are evaluated or constructed, including deductive and inductive reasoning
• Problem solving


  The study of how humans pursue goal-directed behavior to move from an initial state to a goal state in a problem space
• Inductive reasoning


  Develops a hypothesis consistent with a set of observations or reasons by analogy
• Heuristic judgments, fallacies, and the representativeness of evidence, and other framing phenomena

  Affect reasoning
• Computational models developed for

  • Inference making and analogy
  • Logical reasoning
  • Bayesian reasoning
• Problem solving


  The study of how humans pursue goal directed behavior
• Solving a problem


  • Finding operations to move from the initial state to a goal state in a problem space using either algorithmic or heuristic solutions
  • Problem representation is critical in finding solutions
• Expertise in knowledge rich domains (i.e., chess)

  Depends on complex pattern recognition
• Brain areas engaged in problem solving tasks

  • Perception
  • Memory
  • Attention
  • Executive function
• Linguistic approaches


  Focus on the formal structures of languages and language use
• What cognitive psychology has focused on

  • Language acquisition
  • Language comprehension
  • Language production
  • Psychology of reading
• What psycholinguistics has studied


  • Encoding and lexical access of words
  • Sentence level processes of parsing and representation
  • General representations of concepts, gist, inference, and semantic assumptions
• Computational models developed for language processing

  • Lexical systems
  • Parsing systems
  • Semantic representation systems
  • Reading aloud
• The neuroscience of language has a long history in the analysis of lesions and has also been extensively studied with cognitive imaging
• Successful applications of cognitive psychology research

  • Development of computer interfaces that collaborate with users
  • Development of a flexible information infrastructure based on knowledge representation and reasoning methods
  • Development of smart tools in the financial industry
  • Development of mobile, intelligent robots
  • Development of bionic components of the perceptual and cognitive neural system
• Empirical data and theories

  Both are important - data can only be fully understood in the context of an explanatory theory, and theories are empty without empirical data
• Theories give meaning to data and assist in both explanation and prediction
• Cognition is generally adaptive

  But not in all specific instances - the same processes that lead to accurate perception, memory, and reasoning can also lead to systematic errors
• Cognitive processes interact with each other and with non-cognitive processes
• Cognition needs to be studied through a variety of scientific methods
• Basic and applied research in cognitive psychology often lead to each other
• Key themes in cognitive psychology

  • Nature vs nurture
  • Rationalism vs empiricism
  • Structures vs processes
  • Domain generality vs domain specificity
  • Validity of causal inferences vs ecological validity
  • Applied vs basic research
  • Biological vs behavioral methods
• Learning activities include answering questions, online quizzes, and assignments
• Learning resources include a textbook by Sternberg