History of Psychology, Ch. 11

Cognitive psychology

Transformation in which behaviorism crumbled when psychologists could not find explanations for much of human behavior due to the limited models of the time. They could not continue to ignore mental processes.

Cognitive revolution

All the processes by which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. Is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation.

Cognition

Emphasized the study of perception, learning, thinking, and problem solving. Best known for phrase: “The whole is different from the sum of its parts.”

Gestalt psychology

Aspect of Gestalt psychology that opposes a reductionistic analysis of elemental parts, because it recognizes that there are perceptual qualities in the wholes of experience that cannot be found in any study of the parts.

Holistic

Aspect of Gestalt psychology that studies experience as it occurs, in meaningful units.

Phenomenological

Founder of Gestalt psychology. Influenced by Austrian philosopher/psychologist Christian von Ehrenfels.

Max Wertheimer

Psychologists who built the Gestalt psychology system together.

Kurt Kofka, Wolfgang Kohler

Form of apparent movement demonstrated by Wertheimer with a stroboscope. He interpreted the movement as an experience not reducible to its elements. No amount of introspection could cause the apparent movement to be seen as its actual physical occurrence.

Phi movement/phenomenon

Psychologist who interpreted behaviors of rats running in mazes through a cognitive-behaviorist lens. Posited the existence of intervening variables like cognitive maps and expectancies, which were necessary to explain the results of the study.

Edward Tolman

Innate aspects of the mind that are important for perception, learning, and memory. Help structure the perceptual world into meaningful wholes.

Organizing tendencies

Psychologist who studied waiters who could remember what food a customer ordered until the bill was paid, at which point memory of the order was lost. Proposed that incompleteness creates a kind of psychological tension that kept the memory intact, and it disappears once the tension is relieved.

Kurt Lewin

Greater memory for incomplete tasks, versus completed tasks.

Zeigarnik effect

Psychologist who studied chimpanzees and chickens. Results suggested that successful problem solving meant seeing the problem as a whole, by linking all the elements together. If the problem wasn’t solved, the animals lacked the insight needed to solve the problem.

Wolfgang Kohler

Published the book Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, which believed memory was greatly influenced by social/cultural factors. Studied this effect using a Native American folktale The War of the Ghosts. Found the mind actively constructs incoming information, thus memory is construction, not just reconstruction. Introduced concept of schema.

Frederic Bartlett

A cognitive framework that organizes past experiences related to particular concepts. Generated from experience. Evidenced in the way our culture and own personal experiences influence memories we have.

Schema

Took place September 1948 at the California Institute of Technology. Significant because it posed a direct challenge to the adequacy of behaviorism as an explanatory system for complex human behavior.

Hixon Symposium on Cerebral Mechanisms in BehaviorP

Physiological psychologist who gave an address at the Hixon Symposium on the problem of serial order. Identified some major components needed for cognitive science.

Karl Spencer Lashey

Mathematician and speaker at the Hixon Symposium who promoted the computer metaphor for operation of the brain.

John von Neumann

Borrowed by psychologists from computer engineers to depict cognitive processing in humans.

Flow chart

Used flow charts to describe the actions of his model of selective attention- Given the array of sensory information humans encounter, there has to be a sensory filter early in the perceptual process that removes much of the irrelevant information.

Donald Broadbent

3-stage model positing a sensory memory storage, short-term memory storage, and long-term memory storage.

Information-processing model of memory

Published a book w/ a number of studies on concept formation. Given a mixed array of stimuli, how do individuals determine the categorizations used to form groups from subsets of these stimuli?

Jerome Bruner

Coined the term flashbulb memory and studied the tip of the tongue phenomenon. Explored the degree to which language is limited by thought in 1958 book Words and Things.

Roger Brown

Scathingly criticized Skinner’s 1957 book Verbal Behavior as naive. Was especially interested in the structure/syntax of language and argued a behavioral account was simply not feasible given the number of possible sentences that could be uttered. Distinguished between surface structure vs. deep structure of a sentence.

Noah Chomsky

Sequence of words in a sentence.

Surface structure

Actual meaning of a sentence.

Deep structure

Reveals how one sentence structure can be changed into another that conveys the same deep structure meaning.

Transformational grammar

Investigated the intelligibility of speech in a noisy aircraft (problem stimulated by WWII). Discovered the working memory capacity as about 5-9 items for auditory stimuli, and this capacity was fixed, but more info could be processed if formed into chunks.

George Miller

Published a book in 1967 that named the field of cognitive psychology.

Ulric Nessier