Cognitive Psychology - Introduction and History of Cognitive Psychology

Vocabulary flashcards covering the key terms, historical developments, philosophical roots, and foundational concepts presented in Lecture 1 of PSY1004 Cognitive Psychology.

Mind

A system that creates and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, planning, and reasoning, creating representations of the world so individuals can act to achieve goals.

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Processing

Top-down processing refers to high-level, consciously controlled cognitive functions, whereas bottom-up processing refers to low-level, automatic cognitive functions.

Rationalism

A philosophical view (e.g., held by Plato and Descartes) asserting that reason is the chief source and test of knowledge, and that a class of fundamental truths exists that the intellect can grasp directly.

Empiricism

A philosophical view (e.g., held by Aristotle, Locke, and Wundt) assuming that all knowledge and understanding originate in sensory experience, in contrast to rationalism.

Subtraction Method

An experimental technique invented by Franciscus Donders in 1868 stating that if two variations of a mental function differ by only one aspect, the observed difference in reaction time between them can be attributed to that specific aspect.

Structuralism

An approach in psychology introduced to the study of the mind by Wilhelm Wundt that attempts to explain the functions of consciousness by combining elementary sensory units called sensations.

Introspection

A research method used in early experimental psychology where trained participants describe their conscious sensory experiences and mental activities under controlled experimental conditions.

Forgetting Curve

A quantitative model established by Hermann Ebbinghaus describing memory retention over time for non-integrated or meaningless information, illustrating rapid initial forgetting followed by a leveling off.

Functionalism

An approach to studying the mind introduced by William James in Principles of Psychology (1890) that focuses on the functional operations, adaptive values, and biological significance of conscious activities.

Behaviorism

An objective, experimental branch of natural science introduced by John B. Watson in 1913 aiming to predict and control observable behavior while rejecting introspection and unobservable mental states.

Classical Conditioning

A learning procedure demonstrated by Ivan Pavlov (1927) where a neutral stimulus comes to evoke a conditioned response after being repeatedly paired with an unconditioned stimulus.

Operant Conditioning

A learning framework introduced by B.F. Skinner in 1938 in which behavior is strengthened or weakened through positive reinforcement (rewards) or negative reinforcement (punishments).

Cognitive Map

An internal mental representation of spatial layouts discovered by Edward Tolman in 1948 through rat maze experiments, demonstrating cognitive learning independent of direct behaviorist reinforcement.

Verbal Behavior Debate

A historical debate in which B.F. Skinner proposed language is learned via operant conditioning, while Noam Chomsky argued language capacity is innate because children say novel sentences and show unreinforced grammatical errors.

Cognitive Revolution

A paradigm shift in psychology during the mid-20th century away from behaviorism toward studying how observable behavior reveals the underlying internal mechanisms of the mind.

Information Processing Approach

A conceptual framework inspired by digital computing that analyzes cognition by breaking down mental activity into sequential units, subprocesses, and flow diagrams.

Mental Representation

An internal code or structure created by the mind that captures defining features of objects or concepts across multiple sensory and functional domains to enable goal-directed action.

Logic Theorist

An early artificial intelligence program created by Allen Newell and Herbert Simon in 1955 that used humanlike reasoning principles to generate proofs for mathematical theorems.

Processing Limits

The principle published by George Miller in 1956 showing that human working memory capacity is constrained to a limited number of units ($7 \pm 2$ bits), necessitating recoding for complex processing.