COGPSYCH

• Cognition


  Coming to know
• Cognitive Psychology


  The study of how people perceive, learn, remember, and think
• Important persons representing a philosophical approach

  • Plato
  • Rene Descartes
  • Aristotle
  • John Locke
• Rationalism


  Seeks to understand the general nature of many aspects of the world through inspection
• Empiricism


  Seeks a scientific study of life-sustaining functions in living matter through empirical methods
• Rationalist


  Knowledge is through reasoned contemplation
• Empiricist


  Knowledge is through experience & observation
• Structuralism


  • Goal is to understand the structure of the mind & its perceptions; Method is introspection
• Functionalism


  • Goal is to study the processes of the mind; functions/uses of the mind; adaptive purpose of mental processes; Method is combination of introspection, observation, experiment
• Associationism


  Understanding how elements of the mind can be associated with another
• Behaviorism


  • Goal is to study observable behavior; any hypothesis about internal thoughts & ways of thinking are nothing but speculation; Method is animal experiments, conditioning experiments
• Gestalt Psychology


  • Goal is to understand psychological phenomena as organized, structured wholes; The whole differs from the sum of its parts; Method is experiment, observation
• Edward C. Tolman


  One of the most prominent learning theorists; behaviorist that incorporated non behavioral elements; forefather of modern psychology; thought that understanding behavior required considering the purpose and the plan for a behavior
• Cognitive Revolution


  1950s; response to behaviorism; belief that much of human behavior can be understood regarding how people think; rejects the notion that psychologists should avoid studying mental processes because they are unobservable; adopts behaviorism, the precise quantitative analysis to study how people learn & think; emphasizes internal mental processes
• Karl Spencer Lashley


  • Challenged the behaviorist view that the human brain is a passive organ merely responding to environmental contingencies outside the individual; brain to be an active, dynamic organizer of behavior; wanted to understand how the macro-organization of the brain made possible complex, planned activities
• Donald Hebb


  • Father of neuropsychology; merged psychology & neuroscience; proposed the concept of cell assemblies as the basis for learning in the brain
• Avram Noam Chomsky


  • American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, & political activist; father of modern linguistics; stressed both the biological basis & the creative potential of language; defied behaviorist notions that we can learn language by reinforcement; pointed out the infinite number of sentences we can produce with ease
• Alan Turing and the development of the 1st computers


  • Analogy between computers & minds; Hardware (brain), Software (mind); Thinking can be described in terms of algorithmic manipulation of information; gave rise to the information processing paradigm in psychology (cognitive psychology)
• Donald Broadbent


  • Proposed that information output from the perceptual system encountered a filter, which passed only information to which people were attending; Broadbent's model of attention and memory - used as an explanation for selective attention & eventually served as an important forerunner for latter models developed for memory
• George A. Miller


  • 1956 - published paper "The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information"
• Noam Chomsky


  • Stressed both the biological basis & the creative potential of language
  • Defied behaviorist notions that we can learn language by reinforcement
  • Pointed out the infinite number of sentences we can produce with ease
• Thinking


  Can be described in terms of algorithmic manipulation of information
• Donald Broadbent


  • Proposed that information output from the perceptual system encountered a filter, which passed only information to which people were attending
  • Broadbent's model of attention and memory - used as an explanation for selective attention & eventually served as an important forerunner for latter models developed for memory
• Ulric Neisser


  • His book Cognitive Psychology (1967) was especially critical in bringing cognitivism to prominence by informing people of the newly developing field
• Cognitive Science


  • A cross-disciplinary field that uses ideas & methods from cognitive psychology, psychobiology, artificial science, philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology
  • Cognitive scientists use these ideas & methods to focus on the study of how humans acquire & use knowledge
• Study of Thinking


  • Investigated how people learn new concepts & categories; emphasized strategies of learning rather than just associative relations
  • Likened mind to a computer; emphasized representations & processes needed to give rise to activities (pattern recognition, attention, categorization, memory, reasoning, decision making, problem solving, and language)
• Hindbrain


  Transmit information from the spinal cord to the brain, regulating life support functions, and help maintain balance
• Midbrain


  Relay centers to transfer information between different brain regions
• Forebrain


  Contains thalamus, hypothalamus, hippocampus, amygdala, & cerebral cortex; most directly implicated in cognition (memory, language, planning, & reasoning)
• Paul Broca


  • Medical finding of injury to the Broca's area (posterior, inferior left frontal lobe) resulted in a particular aphasia (unable to produce words/speak fluently)
• Aphasia


  • Brain disorder; trouble speaking/understanding others
  • Problems in expressing & understanding language
  • Caused by stroke/accident
• Agnosia


  • Rare disorder; unable to recognize & identify things using one or more of their senses
  • Usually normal
  • Neurodevelopmental/genetic/trauma response
  • E.g. face blindness, dyslexia, dyscalculia
• Carl Wernicke


  • Could speak but made no sense; Wernicke's area contributes to language component (superior, posterior of temporal lobe)
• Left hemisphere


  Dominant for language; analytical; good at processing information serially—information with events occurring one after another
• Right hemisphere


  Larger parietal & temporal areas that leads to better integration of visual & auditory information & better spatial processing; synthetic; putting individual elements together to make up a whole
• Corpus callosum


  Connects the two hemispheres and other regions which sends information
• Roger Sperry


  • Each hemisphere behaves in many respects like a separate brain; made an experiment which severed the corpus callosum of a cat; information to one side of the brain isn't recognizable to the other
• Cognition


  Coming to know
• Cognitive Psychology


  The study of how people perceive, learn, remember, and think
• Important persons representing a philosophical approach

  • Plato
  • Rene Descartes
  • Aristotle
  • John Locke