PSYC230 Chapter 1: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology

• Cognitive Psychology: The branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind
• Cognition involves


  • Perception
  • Paying attention
  • Remembering
  • Distinguishing items in a category
  • Visualizing
  • Understanding and production of language
  • Problem solving
  • Reasoning and decision making
• Cognition involves "hidden" processes of which we may not be aware
• Idea is that "the mind cannot study itself"


  Early 1800s
• Donders measures Reaction Time (RT) of decision making


  1868
• Wundt establishes first scientific psychology lab


  1879
• Ebbinghaus measures the time course of Forgetting


  1885
• William James publishes the first psychology textbook


  1890
• Watson -> Analytic Observation is too subjective/variable (Rise of Behaviorism)


  Early 1900s
• Neisser Publishes first Cognitive Psychology textbook in 1967


  Mid 1900s
• Rise of Behaviorism leads to Cognitive Revolution


  Mid 1900s
• Reaction time (RT) experiment

  • Simple RT task: participant pushes a button quickly after a light appears
  • Choice RT task: participant pushes one button if light is on right side, another if light is on left side
• Choice RT - Simple RT = time to make a decision
• Choice RT = 1/10th second longer than Simple RT
• Structuralism


  Overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience called sensations
• Analytic introspection


  Participants trained to describe experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli
• Savings


  (Original time to learn list) - (Time to relearn list after delay)
• James was an early American psychologist who taught the first psychology course at Harvard University
• James's observations based on the functions of his own mind, not experiments
• Watson noted two problems with analytic introspection method: extremely variable results per person, results difficult to verify due to focus on invisible inner mental processes
• Behaviorism


  Eliminate the mind as a topic of study, instead study directly observable behavior
• Classical Conditioning


  Pairing one stimulus with another affects behavior, can be analyzed without any reference to the mind
• Operant Conditioning


  Shape behavior by rewards or punishments, rewarded behavior more likely to be repeated, punished behavior less likely to be repeated
• Cognitive Map


  A conception within the rat's mind of the maze's layout
• Skinner (1957) argued children learn language through operant conditioning


  Chomsky (1959) argued children do not only learn language through imitation and reinforcement
• Shift from behaviorist's stimulus–response relationships to an approach that attempts to explain behavior in terms of the mind
• Information-processing approach


  Way to study the mind based on insights associated with the digital computer, states that operation of the mind occurs in stages
• Cherry (1953) built on James's idea of attention


  Present message A in left ear and message B in right ear, subjects could understand details of message A despite also hearing message B
• Broadbent (1958) developed flow diagram


  Shows what occurs as a person directs attention to one stimulus, unattended information does not pass through the filter
• Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) three-stage model of memory


  Sensory memory (less than 1 second), short-term memory (a few seconds, limited capacity), long-term memory (long duration, high capacity)
• Tulving (1972) divided long-term memory


  Episodic, Semantic, and Procedural Memory