Chapter 1: Cognitive Psychologist's Approach to Research

What is Cognitive Psychology?

A science of mental processes

What are the two assumptions that cognitive psychologists make?

Assumptions about what aspects of the mind are important enough to explain. Beliefs about mental processes are often based on personal experience of them.

What are cognitive psychologists interested in?

Discovering and describing commonalities in mental processes across people.

Philosophical Underpinnings: Ancient Greece

Established 3 ways of asking how knowledge is acquired. Philosophers weren't always right, but their contributions were how they thought of 3 assumptions.

Greek Philosophers 3 ways of asking how knowledge is acquired

1. Perception: How do we gain access to knowledge about the world around us immediately? 2. Memory: How do we retain knowledge about the world for later use? 3. Nature and Nurture: What is the origin of knowledge?

3 assumptions of all sciences

1. The world is predictable and works in systematic ways. 2. Humans are physical objects and parts of the physical world. 3. Explanations of phenomena should consist of other physical events.

Philosophical Underpinnings: Islamic Golden Age

Western Europe turned away from the philosophy of the mind, Islamic Golden age caused it to flourish. Translated Greek texts and applied it to Islamic theology. Influenced the Renaissance in Western Europe.

Philosophical Underpinnings: The Renaissance

13th-17th century Europe marked by the rise in humanism, a subsequent flowering of literature and arts, and the beginning of Modern Science.

Critical Features of the Renaissance

Returned the greek assumption that the world can be understood and predicted and that understanding the world is a worthwhile pursuit.

What was the Scientific Revolution?

Emphasis on observation, resurrection of ancient assumptions, breakthroughs in physical sciences, delayed application to the human mind.

Why did psychology not start until 200 years after the Scientific Revolution (the Renaissance)?

You needed to predict things, and people were hesitant to accept that the mind could be predictable. They held a nondeterministic view.

Deterministic View

It is possible to fully predict human behavior.

Nondeterministic View

Humans have free will, never fully able to predict their behavior.

Descartes View

There were ideas that come from experiences and innate ideas that everyone is born with.

Nativist Perspective

Fundamental knowledge is innate and everyone is born with it.

Empiricist Perspective

Fundamental knowledge comes from life experiences.

Perception

If knowledge comes from experience of the world, then that experience is rooted in our senses. Became part of nativists vs. empiricists debate.

Memory

Associationism holds that knowledge originates when sensory information combines with more complex ideas.

The Beginnings of Modern Psychology: Structuralism

Wilhelm Wundt is credited for finding modern psychology in 1879. He developed the idea of structuralism with the goal of describing the structures that compose thought.

The Beginnings of Modern Psychology: Functionalism

Functionalism was created by William James. He believed that mental processes must have a purpose. Him and his ideas weren't popular.

The Beginnings of Modern Psychology: Introspectionism

Inspired by Fechner, developed by Wundt. A school of psychology that aimed to describe the contents of the consciousness through experiments where participants were asked to observe and describe their own internal mental processes. James also used introspectionism.

Wilhelm Wundt's Impact

Wundt trained many students and was a large reason why psychology became a full-fledged science by 1913.

Why did Introspectionism not work?

Trainer bias and lack of objectivity, unverifiability, and overall lack of scientific progress between 1879 and 1913. There were no useful results and people were frustrated. Watson came around to fix this.

Historical Impact of Introspectionism

Because Introspectionism could produce reproducible results or objective data, John Watson published a manifesto in 1913 calling for a rejection of the method... He introduced behaviorism.

Behaviorism

Created by John Watson after he published "Psychology as the Behaviorist views it" in 1913. He stated he sought to replace introspectionism approach. His main idea was consciousness is impossible to study so we should focus on behavior.

4 Basic Principles of Behaviorism

1. Psychologists should focus only on that which is observable. 2. Psychologists should explain behavior, not thought or consciousness. 3. Theories should be as simple as possible. 4. The overarching goal of psychology is to break down behavior into irreducible constructs.

Behaviorism's Successes

It was so straightforward because behavior was very observable. Focused on the reflex, which made the framework promising.

Reflex

Irreducible unit of Behavior

Conditioned Reflexes

Reflexes that are learned through experience.

Classical Conditioning

The training procedure and the result learning that creates conditioned reflexes. Begins with an unconditioned stimulus (i.e. food) which elicits an unconditioned response (i.e. salivation).

Conditioned Stimulus

Evokes little or no response, if a dog gets used to the sound of a bell, it won't keep turning its head when it hears it.

Conditioned Response

Elicited when you pair a conditioned stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus. The conditioned response is often similar to the unconditioned response (i.e. salivating).

Pavlov's Fame

Pavlov had good experimental set up which allowed him to ask other questions. This allowed behaviorists to start thinking about a general theory of behavior with the conditioned reflex at its center. The conditioned reflex can't account for all behavior though because of Operant Conditioning.

Operant Conditioning

Form of learning in which a person actively makes a voluntary response (the operant), and the probability of making that response in the future changes depending on the environmental consequences (rewards or punishments) that follow.

Law of Effect

Introduced by Thorndike. If you do something good, and get a reward, you will do it again. But if you do something bad, and there is consequences, you are less likely to do it again.

Why did Behaviorism crumble despite its many successes?

People doubted behaviorism can do what it promised, and it became obvious that eliminating any discussion of mental processes from psychology was hurting more than helping. Behaviorism was replaced by Cognitive Psychology.

Why did Ethologists not like Behaviorism?

Behaviorists did not emphasize the possibility of important genetic contributions to behavior.

Ethology

The study of animals in their natural habitat.

Fixed-Action Pattern

Finding of Ethology. Complex behaviors in which an animal engages despite very limited opportunities for practice or reward. Usually taken as evidence for innate or inborn learning.

Critical Period

Finding of Ethology. A window of time during which an organism is primed to learn some particular information. If the information isn't learned in the critical period, later it may be unable to acquire.

Critical Period Experiment

Ducks and imprinting. Any large object they see during critical period they will follow as if its it mother. They followed an experimenter when it was the first object they saw.

Language and Behaviorism

Chomsky thought that Skinner underestimated complexity of language and found that language is generative. People were shaken by Chomsky's argument and it pushed them further away from Behaviorism.

Language Generativity

Language is generative, people have the ability to create novel sentences.

The Computer Metaphor

Became available in the 1950s. A computer uses representations and processes that do things to the representations.

Representation

A symbol for an entity in the real world. Translates a real-world object/event into the "language" of the mind.

Process

Manipulates the representations in some way.

Information Processing Model

Model developed from the computer metaphor.

3 assumptions of the Information Processing Model

1. Humans are processors of information, just like computers. The processing of info supports human thought and behavior.

2. Representations and processes that operate on these representations underlie information processing.

3. Information processing typically occurs within largely isolated modules which are organized in stages of processing, thus one module receives info from another, performs an operation on the info, and passes the info to another module.

Short Term Memory

Contains representations and uses processes that manipulate representations. i.e. If you wanted to remember someones food order, a process would continually refresh this representation. An abstract construct.

Abstract Construct

A theoretical set of processes (i.e. refresh) and representations (i.e. food order) that are useful in explaining some data.

Hippocampus

Important for transferring information from short term memory to long term memory