PSY 3217 - Ch 1: Intro to Cognitive Psych

Franciscus Donder

1868 — measured how long it takes a person to make a decision (RT)

Reaction time (RT) experiment

measures intervals between stimulus presentation and person’s response to stimulus

SIMPLE - participant pushes button quickly after light appears

CHOICE - pushes on button if light is on right or if on left

CHOICE RT - SIMPLE RT = time to make a decision

RT formula for a decision

Wilhelm Wundt (1879)

established first scientific psychology lab

analytic introspection

participants trained to describe experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885-1913)

Read list of nonsense syllables aloud to determine number of repetitions necessary to repeat list without errors

Savings

OG to learn list - time to relearn list after delay

William James

Father of American Psychology

Functionalism

Taught the first psych course @ Harvard

Considered topics in cognition

John Watson

Primary work was classical conditioning

B.F. Skinner

Operant conditioning — shape behavior by rewards or punishments

Tolman (1938)

Trained rats to find food in a maze

Believed the rat had created a cognitive map, a representation of the maze in its mind

Information theory

Developed by Claude Shannon. Equated “environmental energy” to “information”

Ulric Neisser

German American psych

Father of Cognitive psychology

Book Cog Psych (‘67) unified research on perception, memory, attention, and reasoning

Began the Cog revolution

Human procsessing is

computational (brain)

Humans use a

symbol manipulating system (mind)