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COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

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

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGIST

Study how people perceive various shapes, why they remember some facts but forget others, or how they learn language.

Heuristics

are mental shortcuts we use to process information.

Example of Availability Heuristic

Thinking about an issue and certain examples that immediately come to our mind

HELP US UNDERSTAND MUCH OF WHAT GOES ON IN OUR EVERYDAY LIVES

UNDERSTANDING COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY CAN?

DIALECTIC

Is a developmental process whereby ideas evolve over time through a back-and-
forth exchange of ideas; in a way, it is like a discussion spread out over an extended
period of time

DIALECTICAL PROCESS

1. thesis

2. antithesis

3. synthesis

thesis

is (a statement of belief) proposed

antithesis

(statement countering the thesis) emerges

Synthesis

• integrates viewpoints

• or integrates the most credible features of each two views

• If a __ advances our understanding of a subject, it then serves as a new thesis.

Western culture

Process objects independently of the context

Eastern cultures

Look at objects embedded in their surrounding context

Asians

Emphasize the context more than the objects embedded in those contexts

1. Philosophy

2. Physiology

two approaches to understanding the human mind:

Philosophy

seek to understand the general nature of many aspects of the world, in part through introspection, the examination of inner ideas and experiences.

Introspection

is a method of examining inner ideas and experiences

inward, within

from intro (introspection)

look

spect (introspection)

Physiology

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

Plato and Aristotle

• 2 Greek Philosopher have profoundly affected modern thinking in psychology and many other field

• disagreed regarding how to investigate ideas

Plato

• was a rationalist

• believes that the route to knowledge is through thinking and logical analysis

• reason as a source of knowledge or justification

• does not need any experiment to develop new knowledge

• the only route to the truth is reasoned contemplation

Aristotle

• was an empiricist

• believes that we acquire knowledge via empirical evidence that is, we obtain evidence through experience and observation.

• They design experiments and conduct studies in which they could observe the behavior and processes of interest to them.

• the only route to the truth is meticulous observation

Rene Descartes

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

• “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am) is his famous expression

• only proof of his existence is that he was thinking and doubting (methodical doubt)

• one could not rely on their senses because it is proven to be deceptive (like illusion)

John Locke

• british empiricist

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

• life and experience “write” knowledge on us

• the study of learning was the key to understanding the human mind, and believed that there are no innate ideas

tabula rasa

meaning “blank slate”

Immanuel Kant

• German Philosopher, synthesized the view of Descartes and Locke, arguing that both rationalism and empiricism have their place.

• Both must work together in the quest of truth.

• He believed in the concept of the inner self (the empirical self-consciousness) and outer self (transcendental apperception)

1. Structuralism

2. Functionalism

3. Pragmatism

4. Associationism

5. Behaviorism

6. Cognitivism

7. Gestalt Psychology

PSYCHOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

STRUCTURALISM

• was the first major school of thought in psychology.

• seeks to understand the structure (configuration of elements) of the mind and its perceptions

• analyzing those into their constituent components (affection, attention, memory, and sensation).

• They were also interested in how those elementary components work together to create the mind

Wilhelm Wundt

• was a German psychologist whose ideas contributed to the development of structuralism

• is often viewed as the founder of structuralism in psychology

• used introspection as a method in his research

Introspection (2)

• is the conscious observation of one's own thinking process

• aim is to look at the elementary components of an object or process.

• The introduction of ___ as an experimental method was an important change in the field

• the main emphasis in the study of the mind shifted from rationalist approach to the empiricist approach of observing behavior to draw conclusions about the subject of the study

1. People may not always be able to say exactly what goes through their mind or may not be able to put it into adequate word.

2. What they say may not be accurate.

3. The fact that people are asked to pay attention to their thoughts or to speak out loud while they are working on a task may itself alter the processes that are going on.

Challenges in the method of Introspection

Edward Titchener

• was viewed as the first full-fledged structuralist and bring this school of thought to US.

• His experience relied solely on the use of introspection, exploring psychology from the vantage point of experiencing individual.

Functionalism

• suggested that psychologists should focus on the processes of thought rather than on its contents.

• seeks to understand what people do and why they do it

• the key to understanding human mind and behavior was to study the processes of how and why the mind works as it does.

Pragmatism

• believed that knowledge is validated by its usefulness.

• concerned not only with knowing what people do; they also want to know what we can do with our knowledge of what people do.

William James

• leader in guiding functionalism toward pragmatism.

• His chief contribution was his book 'Principles of Psychology'

• Core topics in the field: attention, consciousness, and perception

John Dewey

• an early pragmatist

• who profoundly influenced contemporary thinking in cognitive psychology

• remembered for his pragmatic approach to thinking and schooling.

Associationism

• was more influential way of thinking that a rigid school of psychology.

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

1. contiguity

2. similarity

3. contrast

Associations may result from:

contiguity

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

Similarity (2)

associating things with similar features or properties

Contrast

associating things that show polarities, such as hot/cold, light/dark, day/night

Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve

• Shows that the first few repetitions result in a steep learning curve.

• Later repetitions result in a slower increase of remembered words.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

• the first experimenting to apply associationism principles systematically

• he studied his own mental processes like making nonsense syllables that consisted of a consonant and a vowel followed by another consonant

• studied how people learn and remember material through rehearsal- the conscious repitition of material to be learned

• Found that frequent repetition can fix mental association firmly in memory

rehearsal

- the conscious repetition of material to be learned

Edward Lee Thorndike

satisfaction is the key to forming associations which he termed this principle the 'law of effect

Law of Effect

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

Behaviorism

• EXTREME FORM OF ASSOCIATIONISM

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

• The idea was to make physical whatever might have called ‘mental

Ivan Pavlov

• Nobel Prize-winning physiologist

• studied involuntary learning behavior; the response indicated the form of learning

• he paved way for the development of behaviorism

• classical conditioning

classical conditioning

• more than just an association based on temporal contiguity (food and conditioned stimulus occurring at about the same time)

• effective conditioning requires contingency (presentation of food being contingent on the presentation of the conditioned stimulus.

• Contingencies in the form of reward or punishment

radical behaviorist

• any hypotheses about internal thoughts and ways of thinking are nothing more than speculation

• Tried to influence the way people handle problems in everyday life, from child-rearing, to schooling, even to close personal relationships.

John Watson

• father of radical behaviorism

• he believe only on the study of observable behavior and dismissed thinking as more than a subvocalize behavior

• Believed that psychologists should concentrate only on the study of observable behavior

• Dismissed thinking as nothing more than subvocalized speech

B.F. Skinner

• a radical behaviorist

• believed that virtually all forms of human behavior, not just learning, could be explained by reactions to the environment.

• applied his experimental analysis of behavior to many psychological phenomena,
  such as learning, language acquisition, and problem solving

operant conditioning

• involving the strengthening or weakening of behavior

• contingent on the presence or absence of reinforcement (rewards) or punishments.

1. Behaviorism did not account as well for complex mental activities, such as language learning and problem solving

2. More than understanding people’s behavior, some psychologists wanted to know what went on inside the head

3. Using the techniques of behaviorism to study nonhuman animals was often easier than studying human ones

Criticism of Behaviorism

BEHAVIORIST DARING TO PEEK INSIDE THE BLACK BOX

the mind is the black box that is best understood in terms of its input and output, but whose internal process cannot be accurately described because they are not observable

Edward Tolman

• a critic

• thought that understanding behavior required taking into account the purpose of, an the plan for, the behavior.

• he believed that all behavior is directed toward a goal.

• introduce the cognitive map

• sometimes viewed as a forefather of modern cognitive psychology

Walter Freeman

psychiatrist, ‘ice pick’ or transorbital lobotomy; he inserted ice pick-like instrument through the orbit of the eyes into the frontal lobes where it was moved back and forth, and patient rendered unconsciousness by means of a strong electric shock.

Lobotomy

involves the cutting the connections between the frontal lobes of the brain and the thalamus (it is being severed)

Psychosurgery

- 1950’s, ten thousands Americans had been subjected to this one. Patient felt reduced tension and anxiety after surgery; however many people died or were permanently incapacitated

Albert Bandura

• learning appears not only by direct rewards for behavior but it can be social

• His theory is called social learning theory/social cognitive learning theory

• he emphasize two approaches in learning: enactive and vicarious learning which emphasizes how we observe and model our own behavior after the behavior of others.

• social learning opens the way to considering what is happening inside the mind of the individual

GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY

• The maxim: “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.”

• states that we best understand psychological phenomena when we view them as organized, structured wholes.

• We cannot fully understand behavior when we only break phenomena down into
  smaller part

Gestaltist

studies insight or internal mental processes, to understand the unobservable mental event by which someone goes from having no idea about how to solve a problem to understanding it fully in what seems a mere moment of time

Cognitive Revolution

in early 1950’s it took place in response to behaviorism

Cognitivism

• is the belief that most human behavior explains how people think

• It rejects the behavioristic notion that psychologists should avoid studying mental
  processes just because they are unobservable

Karl Spencer Lashley (1)

• brashly challenged the behaviorist view that the human brain is passive organ merely responding to the environmental contingencies outside the individual.

• he consider the brain to be an active, dynamic organizer of behavior.

• he sought to understand how the macro-organization of the human brain made possible complex.

Donald Hebb

• proposed the concept of cell assemblies as the basis for learning in the brain.

Cell assemblies

• are coordinated neural structures that develop through frequent stimulation.

• They develop overtime as the ability of one neuron (nerve cell) to stimulate firing in a connected neuron increases

Noam Chomsky

• stressed both the biological basis and the creative potential of language.

• Pointed out the infinite numbers of sentences we can produce with ease

• He thereby defied behaviorist notions that we learn language by reinforcement

Alan Turing

• he suggest that soon it would be hard to distinguish the communication of machines from that of humans.

Turing Test

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

• the interrogator communicates via computer screen and keyboard with a real human and a computer.

• The interrogator’s task is to find out who is the computer by asking as many and varied questions necessary

Artificial Intelligence

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

• like chess playing programs that can beat human, ‘Siri’ - personal assistant in Apple and you can ask her to place a call, put appointments in calendar, or even tell weather forecast

Psychobiology

move rapidly to this time and now has been expanded and is called cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology and AI.

George Miller

• ‘the magic number seven’

• since number 7 appear in the literature of perception and memory, he wondered whether there was some hidden meaning in its frequent reappearance like most people can remember about seven items of information.

Jerry Fodor

• popularized the concept of the modularity of mind.

• he argued that the mind has distinct modules or special-purpose systems, to deal with linguistic and, possible other kinds of info.

Modularity

implies that the processes that are used in one domain of processing, such as linguistic or the perceptual domain, operate independently of processes in other domains

Modular approaches

are useful in studying some cognitive phenomena such as language but have proven less useful in studying other phenomena such as intelligence.

Domain general processing

- opposing view, according to which the process that apply in one domain, such as perception or language, apply in many other domains as well.

Franz Joseph Gall

• phrenologist, the idea of the mind as modular.

• believed that the pattern of bumps and swells on the skull was directly associated with one’s pattern of cognitive skills.

Phrenology

not a scientifically valid technique, the practice of mental cartography lingered and eventually gave rise to ideas of modularity based on modern scientific techniques.

• Laboratory or other controlled experiments

• Neuro scientific research

• Self-reports

• Case studies

• Naturalistic observation

• Computer simulations

• AI

RESEARCH METHODS IN COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Data gathering

• empirical aspect of scientific enterprise

• Once there are sufficient data on the cognitive phenomenon of interest, cognitive
  psychologists use various methods for drawing inferences from the data

Theory

• - is an organized body of general explanatory principles regarding a phenomenon;

• we test the __which results to generation of hypothesis

Hypothesis

• tentative proposals regarding expected empirical consequenes of the theory such as outcomes of research.

Experimentation

- test the hypothesis

Statistical Analysis

to determine statistical significance - 0.05 stat sig level; meaning that the likelihood of a given set of data would be a mere 5% if only chance factors were operating - we can decide to retain or reject hypothesis.

Investigative Cycle

Theories give rise to hypotheses that can be tested and often lead to a revision of the theory.

1. independent variable

2. dependent variable

Two kinds of variables

independent variable

• Aspects of an investigation that are individually manipulated, or carefully regulated, by the experimenter, while other aspects of the investigation are held constant.

• manipulated or carefully regulated

Dependent Variable

• Outcome responses, the values of which depend on how one or more independent variables influence or affect the participants in the experiment.

• can be measured

Controlled Variables

• Irrelevant variables that are held constant.

• The variable of light needs to be held constant.

Confounding Variables

• Type of irrelevant variable that has been left uncontrolled in a study

• Time of the day

1. percent correct

2. reaction time

Two common dependent variables:

Percent correct

• The researcher investigates how many of the items the participant can answer correctly, or how long it takes him to respond to a stimulus under particular circumstances.

• Can tell the investigator, respectively, the accuracy and speed of mental processing

Reaction Time

• often use subtraction method - estimating the time a cognitive process takes by subtracting the amount of time info processing takes with the process from the time it takes without the process.

Neuro scientific Research

study the relationships between cognitive performance and cerebral events and structures.

• Techniques for studying an individual’s brain postmortem (after the death of an individual), relating the individual’s cognitive function before death to observable features of the brain

• Techniques for studying images showing structures of or activities in the brain of an individual who is known to have a particular cognitive deficit

• Techniques for obtaining information about cerebral processes during the normal performance of a cognitive activity

Categories of the techniques used in neuroscientific research:

Postmortem studies

(studying the brain after the death of an individual). It give insight into how lesions (injury in the brain) may be associated with cognitive deficits. Recent technological developments study individual with cognitive deficits in vivo (while the individual is alive)

Imaging Techniques

to study structures of or activities of the brain who have known to have deficits

Obtaining Information about cerebral processes during the normal functioning of cognitive activity such as sleeping

They use animal participants, like studies mapping neural activity in the cortex conducted in cats and monkey.

Self-reports

• An individual’s own account of cognitive processes

• the reliability of it will be based on the candor of the participants

• participants may misreport info about his cognitive processes because of forgetting