Cognitive Psych Final

• Cognitive Psychology


  All aspects of gathering & using information
• Donders' theory was the first theory in Cognitive Psychology
• Donders' theory


  • Decision-making impacts many different areas of our lives
  • Developed a system to determine how the mind makes a simple choice vs. a complex choice
• Biological Localization of function

  • Specific areas of the brain have different specific functions
  • Many are served by the cerebral cortex
• Perception


  Conscious experience that results from stimulation of the senses
• Theoretical perspectives on perception

  • Helmholtz's unconscious inference
  • Gestalt laws of organization
  • Bayesian inference
• Perception


  • Bottom-up processing uses sensory data about the environment
  • Top-down processing uses past experience in perception
• Gestalt


  The idea that principles of organization are built in
• Biological approach to perception

  • Brain ablation - removing parts of the brain in animals to determine the effect on perception and how the brain perceives the world
• Attention


  The ability to focus on specific features, objects, or locations or on certain thoughts or activities
• Broadbent's filter model of attention


  • A filter lets attended stimuli through and blocks some or all of the unattended stimuli
• Processing capacity


  The amount of information people can handle sets a limit on their ability to process incoming information
• Divided attention


  The ability to pay attention to and carry out two or more tasks simultaneously