Psych 207 - Module 1: History, Methods, Paradigms

Empiricism

• Supported by john Locke, David Hume, and Stuart Mill Believe that knowledge comes from individual's own experience

• Acquired from the observation and analysis of events that we experience

• Humans are born with a blank slate and knowledge is acquired through their interactions with their environment

Nativism

• Emphasizes roles of biological factors in determining one's cognitive abilities

• View comes from traditions of Descartes and Kant

• Attribute individual cognitive differences to innate abilities

• Argue that many cognitive abilities and the processes that underlie them are hardwired in the brain and thus difficult to modify with experience

Structuralism

• Wilhelm Wundt

• Primary goal was to discover elemental components of human mind

• Mode, quality, intensity, and duration = blocks of conscious experience

• Once identified, could be used to understand how these units combine to produce complex experiences

• Structuralists → laboratory

James Baldwin vs. William James

James Baldwin

• Primarily used introspection: presenting highly trained observers with various stimuli and asking them to describe their conscious experience (but this is limited by consciousness)

William James

• Polar opposite

• Primary goal to describe the functions of the mind, instead of structural units (functionalism)

• Functionalists → get out of lab and study organism in real life experiences

Behaviorism

• Only study what is observable

• Study of learning

• Relationship between inputs and outputs

• Unfashionable to talk about mental representations, consciousness or mental states

• Responsible for the development of rigorous research methods

Gestalt Psychology

• Phenomena had to be analyzed and studied in their entirety and could not be reduced to simple elements

• Argued that observers did not construct a perceptual experience or conscious cog experience based purely on simple elemental sensory aspects of experience. But the total structure is perceived as a whole

Caption: (From a structuralist perspective, perceptual experiences arise in a bottom up fashion)

Sir Francis Galton

• Intellectual abilities subject to same pressures of natural selection and thus inherited

• Invented cog ability tests

• Mental imagery as a cog ability

Work on genetic basis of psychology inspired a great research boom in this direction

Precursors to the Cognitive Revolution

• Human factors engineering presented new problems that needed solutions → machinery designed with human limits in consideration

• Developments in the field of linguistics (importance of how people acquire, understand and produce language -behaviorism does not explain language, For example, children say sentences they never heard before as well as incorrect sentences/ innate capacity to acquire language

• Developments in neuroscience, specifically the localization of function in the brain

• Development of computers and artificial intelligence systems - Compute metaphor of the mind

Developments in neuroscience - Donald Hebb / Donald Hubel and Torsten Weisel

• Donald Hebb --> visual perceptions and some otjher functions were constructed over time by building cell assemblies

• Donald Hubel and Torsten Weisel --> specific cells in visual cortex of cats were specialized to respond to specific kinds of stimuli --> early experience shaped brain development

Together these showed cognitive functions can be localized in specific parts of the brain

Paradigms

Paradigm refers to a body of knowledge that is structured according to what its proponents consider to be important, assumptions investigators make in studying a phenomena, and what kinds of experimental methods and measures are appropriate for investigation

Four major paradigms of Cognitive Psychology

Information Processing, Connectionist, Evolutionary, and Ecological: used by cognitive psychologists to frame their research

• Information Processing: Mind as computer → cognition thought of as information that flows through a system (step by step)

• Connectionism: cognitive machinery that underlies cognition is composed of interactions between processing units called neural networks (non-localist) (parallel)

  • Positively weighted connection between units → activation. Negative → inhibition

• Evolutionary Approach: mind and cog processes have evolved through evolutionary mechanisms

• Ecological Approach: culture and context shapes the cog processes under investigation (thus cog processes must be studied in their natural environments)