Lecture 2 - History and Methodology

Cognitive psych

• Study of the human mind

• Study of the structures and the processes of the mind and that brain that take it in, transform, and use the information

Problem with studying cogpsych

• Mind is unobservable

• “Black Box” problem:

  • Can see stimulus and response but not the PROCESS

    • Can observe manifestations of the mind

      • Behavior, physiology, …

Solutions to the Black Box problem (3)

1. Introspectionism

2. Behaviorism

3. Cognitivism

1) Introspectionism

• Examining one’s own mind through thoughts and feelings - introspect one’s self

  • “Thinking about thinking” - think about / observe what you are doing / thinking about

• Wundt and his student Titchener,

  • Structuralists

  • Titchener - counting sensations

1) PROBLEMS with Introspectionism

• Difficult to verify others’ introspections

  • How can you independently verify (or replicate) Titchener’s sensations? YOU CAN’T!

• Private events, not public

  • Only accessible to the subjects

• End products, not process itself

  • We ourselves don’t have access to everything in are minds

  • Automatic processes, things we’re doing that we’re not aware of

2. Behaviorism

• Psych = “Science of behavior”

• Completely doesn’t consider mind observable at all - only looks at response/stimulus/what can be directly observed

  • Only looks at stimuli, responses, reinforcements/rewards, rats in mazes, etc

  • Ignore the mind (unobservable)

  • SR associations

  • Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner

Behaviorists (3)

• Pavlov

  • Salivation with dogs

• Watson

  • Argued that conscious doesn’t exist, conscious is automatic (extreme)

• Skinner

  • Skinner / Operant Conditioning Boxes

  • Modify animals’ behaviors due to awards and punishments, make generalizations about humans

2. PROBLEMS with Behaviorism

• Can’t account for human behavior

  • Language

    • Not likely that simple stimulus-response associations of rewarding past experiences could account for language

      • Speaking new sentences - if we haven’t heard of / said it before, no past reinforcement

      • Too Complex

• Limiting science to the observable is a bad idea

  • Some things in other fields we cannot see, but we know they exist, so we can’t just ignore

3. Cognitive Approach

• Consider the stimulus and response and use them to infer how the mind is working

• Study mental processes - memory, perception, decision making

  • Infer internal processes by observing how inputs lead to outputs

• Computational view of the mind - the mind is somehow like a computer program

Independent vs Dependent variable

Main effect

• Changing the IV has an effect on the DV

  • Ex: changing the delay (IV) affects the performance (DV)

• If no main effect (changing delay doesn’t matter) — 0 slope / horizontal line

  • Anything other than a flat line is a main effect

2 Main effects

• Time delay and Study time = IV

• Both affect DV

  • No interaction*

Interactions between lines

• There is still a main effect here of Study time (IV 1), but affect of the Study time DEPENDS on the Delay (IV 2)

• One IV DEPENDS on / affects the other IV

Mental Chronometry

• Donders

• Study of the time course of mental processes

Information processing Stages

1. Stimulus

2. Processing

3. More Processing

4. Response

• Each stage receives info from previous stage

• Transforms info

• Sends info to next stage

• Multiple can occur at once ; one starts at a time that doesn’t necessarily have to be the end at the previous stage - it could still be going!

Dunder’s stages for doing a task (Subtractive Method)

1. Detection task

2. Decision task

1. Detection task

• Red light green light, press button

• Stimulus, detection, response

• About 197 MS

2. Decision task

• Red light green light, left or right hand up

• Stimulus detected, decision - typically takes longer

• About 88 MS decision stage

Subtractive method: Problems

1. Problem of Pure insertion

   1. All stages remain the same when the new one is added

   2. PROBLEM : Adding the decision stage may influence another stage, like detection

2. Assumption at Additivity

   1. Durations of stages added together to yield reaction time

   2. PROBLEM : Stages may operate in parallel

3. Assumes you already know what the stages are

   1. YOU MAY NOT

Modern Cog Psych

• Confirming evidence is weak, so try to eliminate alternative explanations

  • Hypothesis about how the mind works —> prediction —> experiment, prediction confirmed, BUT….

    • Doesn’t PROVE hypothesis is right since there could be other hypotheses that confirm the prediction

      • Can only support hypothesis

    • Easier to disprove a hypothesis

Huppert and Piercy exp 1

• Amnesiacs vs Controls - want to see what memory impairments the amnesiacs had

  • Possible impairments: encoding, storage, retrieval

    • Encoding - learning, issue with “putting gas into the tank”

    • Storage - memory degrades quicker

    • Retrieval

  • STRAT for exp 2: See if improving encoding helps

Huppert and Piercy exp 2

• Allowed Controls and Amnesiacs to study for as long as they need until they get 80% correct, tested at different delays

  • Day 1 - same accuracy

  • Day 7 - same accurage

  • NOT A STORAGE DEFICIT!

    • If info was being degraded faster in the Amnesiacs, they would have lower performance

    • Possibly encoding or retrieval issue

• MAIN EFFECT?

  • YES, ME of delay since lines are straight, and also…

  • NO, ME of group = no ; Lines are on top of each other, groups didn’t perform differently

    • IV: Time Delay and Group

    • DV: Accuracy on test