Intro

• Major cognitive processes


  • Memory
  • Perceptual and pattern recognition
  • Language/communication
  • Decision making
  • Attention
• When performing an experiment, you have to be careful to have enough control to get good data, but it can't be too stripped down so that it cannot apply to real world situations
• Psychologist's main goal is to examine complex cognitive processes and discover key mechanisms underlying those processes
• Major influences of the study of cognition

  • Empiricism (Humans are born as blank slate, knowledge is acquired)
  • Nativism (Biological factors determine one's cognitive abilities)
• Five major schools of thought

  Structuralism

  Funtionalism

  Behaviourism

  Gestalt

  Individual
• William Wundt


  Wanted to find periodic table of psychology
• James Baldwin


  Used introspection in his studies twithwith children. Focused more on elemental components of the mindwith
• William James


  Goal to explain function of the mind- the how and why
• Francis Galton


  Inspired by Darwin, wondered if intellectual abilities would work the same under pressure of natural selection, looked at family trees to determine roots of cognitive ability, studied individual differences and human cognitive abilities, most well-known for study of mental imagery as a cognitive ability
• James Baldwin used introspection as main experimental method, with highly trained observers presented with different stimuli and asked to describe their conscious experiences, but this had serious limitations because many aspects of cognition occur without us being aware of it
• Cognitive revolution


  • Human factors engineering
  • Dissatisfaction of behaviorist accounts of language
  • Computer metaphor of the mind
  • Neuropsychological work looking at localization of function
• Person-Machine System


  Man-operated machines should be designed to interact with the operator limitations, psychologists begin to see humans as sharing similarities with inanimate objects, humans end up being described as limited-capacity info processors
• Noam Chomsky


  Began to see importance of studying how people acquire, understand, and produce knowledge, showed behaviorism cannot fully explain language (e.g. children may say sentences they've never heard before so it can't just be learned by imitation and conditioning), thought humans have innate capacity to acquire language and its not just conditioning
• Donald Hebb


  Some functions are constructed over time by building cell assemblies
• Donald Hubel and Torsten Weisel

  Demonstrated early experience shapes brain development, demonstrated specific cells in visual cortex were specified to respond to specific stimuli, together showed that cognitive functions can be localized to specific parts of the brain
• Computer metaphor of the mind


  Compares people's mind to an operating computer (like computers needing to be fed data, people need to acquire info through their senses; both computers and people have structures that process and store info)
• Paradigm


  A body of knowledge that is structured according to what its proponents consider to be important, specifies what kind of experimental methods should be used
• Four major approaches to modern study of cognitive phenomena

  • Information processing (stage like, serial processing, information flow through our system)
  • Connectionist (network of connections among simple processing units, simultaneous processing, compared to neural network, no central information storage space)
  • Evolutionary approach (cognitive processes are shaped by evolutionary pressures over multiple generations)
  • Ecological approach (all cognitive abilities shaped by culture, context, and situation)
• Structuralism: Want to discover the principles that explain conscious experience and simplest essential units (believe lab and high control is best)
• Functionalism: Focus on how we function rather than structure, want to understand mental processes underlying behavior (believe naturalistic observation is best)
• Behaviorism: Behavior is learned from environment, focus on observable behaviors (believe lab with animals is best)
• Gestalt: psychological: psychological phenomena cannot be reduced to simple units, must be studied as a whole
• Individualism: Individuals differ in their cognitive abilities