Cognitive Psychology - Chapter 1

Cognitive psychology

the study of how people perceive, learn, remember, and think about information

Heuristics

mental shortcuts we use to process information (ex. Apple spends so much on ads for consumer’s better recall…examples…familiar names/objects)

Dialectic

a developmental process whereby ideas evolve over time through a back-and-forth exchange of ideas (discussion…)

Dialectic process

1. A thesis is proposed

2. An antithesis emerges

3. A synthesis integrates the viewpoints.

Thesis

a statement of belief

Antithesis

a statement that counters a thesis

Synthesis

integrates the most credible features of each of two (or more) views

• philosophy

• physiology

(earliest roots of psychology) Two approaches to understanding the human mind

philosophy

seeks to understand the general nature of many aspects of the world through introspection, th examination of inner ideas and experience

physiology

seeks a scientific study of life-sustaining functions in living matter, primarily through empirical or observation-based methods

introspection

• the examination of inner ideas and experiences

• the conscious observation of one’s own thinking processes

empiricist

Aristotle was a ________.

Rationalist

believes that the route to knowlege is through thinking and logical analysis… does not need any experiments to develop new knowledge….appeal to reason as a source of knowledge or justification

Empiricist

believes that we acquir knowledge via empirical evidence.. that is, we obtain evidence through experience and observation… design experiments and conduct studies

René Descartes

• a French rationalist who viewed the introspective, reflective method as being superior to empirical methods for finding truth

• the famous “cogito, ego sum” (I think, there I am) stems from him

• he maintained the only proof his existence is that he was thinking and doubting

John Locke

• had more enthusiasm for empirical obervation

• he believed that humans are born without knowledge and therefore must seek knowledge through empirical observation

• his term for this view was tabula rasa

• for him, the study of learning was the key to understanding the human mind

tabula rasa (“blank slate”)

Locke’s term for this view: humans are born without knowledge and therefore must seek knowledge through empirical observation

Immanuel Kant

• In the eighteenth century, he synthesized the views of Descartes and Locke, arguing that both rationalism and empiricism have their place

• both must work together in the quest for truth

• most 21st cntury psychologists accept Kant’s synthesis

structuralism and functionalism

An early dialectic in the history of psychology is that between _________ and ___________.

Structuralism

• first major school of thought in psychology

Structuralism

• seeks to understand the structure of the minds and its perceptions by analyzing those peceptions into their constituent components (affection, attention, memory, and sensation)

Wilhelm Wundt

• founder of structuralism in psychology

• German psychologist whoe ideas contributed to the development of structuralism

• rationalism

• empiricism

• synthesis

methods to gain knowledge

• structuralism

• functionalism

• pragmatism

• synthesis

• behaviorism

• gestalt psychology

• synthesis

approaches to studying the mind

structuralism

studies the conten/structure of the mind

functionalism

studiees the processes of how the mind works

pragmatism

studies research that can be applied to the real world

associationism

studies how learning takes place by associating things with each other

behaviorism

relations between observable behavior and environmental events/timuli

Gestalt psychology

psychological phenomena studied as organized wholes

cognitivism

understand behavior through the ways people think

functionalism

it was developed as an alternative to structuralism

Functionalism

seeks to understand what people do and how they do it

Pragmatism

believes that knowledge is validated by usefulness

Associationism

examines how elements of the mind such as events or ideas, can become associated with one another in the mind to result in a form of learning…..

Associations may result from

• contiguity

• similarity

contiguity

associating things that tend to occur together at about the same time

similarity

associating things with similar features or properties

Herman Ebbinghaus

the first experimenter to apply associationist principle systematically

Edward Lee Thorndike

held that the role of “satisfaction” is the key to forming association

Law of effect

• principle termed by Thorndike

• a stimulus will tend to produce a certain response over time if the organism is rewarded for that response

Behaviorism

focuses only on the relation between observable behavior and environmental events or stimuli

John Watson

the father of radical behaviorism

Gestalt Psychology

• states that we understand psychological phenomenon when we view them as orgnized, structured wholes

• “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”

Cognitivism

the belief that most human behavior explains how people think

Turing test

judges whether a computer program’s output was indistinguishable from the output of humans

Artificial intelligence

defined as human attempts to construct systems that show intelligence and, particularly, the intelligent processing of information

Theory

an organized body of general explanatory principles regarding a phenomenon

Hypotheses

tentative proposals regarding expected empirical consequences of the theory, such as the outcomes of research

Statistical significance

indicates the likelihood that a given set of results would be obtained if only chance factors were in operation

Independent variables

aspects of an investigation that are individually manipulated, or carefully regulated, by the experimenter

Dependent variables

are outcome responses, the values of which depend on how one or more of independent variables influence or affect the participants in the experiment

Control variables

irrelevant variables that are held constant

Confounding variables

a type of irrelevant variable ethat has ben left uncontrolled in a study

Subtraction Method

involves estimating the time a cognitive process takes by subtracting the amoint of time information processing takes with the process from the time it takes without the process

correlation

It is the description of a relationship

correlation coefficient

describes the strength of the relationship

positive relationship

it indicates that as one variable increases, another variable also increases

negative relationship

indicates that as the measure of one variable increases, the measure of another decreases

no correlation

indicates that there is no pattern or relationship in the change of two variables

ecological validity

the degree to which particular findings in one environmental context may be considered relevant outside of the context

Cognitive science

a cross-disciplinary field that uses idas and methods from cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, AI, philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology

“cocktail party effect”

This is a phenomenon wherein we have the ability to focus on one out of many voices.

availability heuristic

• a cognitive bias and mental shortcut where people judge the probability of events based on how easily examples or instances of that event come to mind. Because vivid, dramatic, or recently learned information is more readily available in memory, it's often overestimated, leading to inaccurate assessments of likelihood and risk. 

• when we think about an issue and certain eexmples immediately come to mind/why a brand or company invests on advertisements