cognitive psych: ch 1 textbook

Sam study

Comatose/unresponsive patient showed brain activity similar to healthy people while watching a suspenseful movie → suggests he was consciously processing/following the plot despite being unable to communicate.

Mind

Responsible for cognition, perception, memory, language, decision-making, actions, and consciousness. Many mental processes occur outside conscious awareness.

What is another way to define the mind?

A system that creates representations of the world so we can act within it and achieve our goals.
Mind → represents the world → helps us act & achieve goals

What is cognition?

Mental processes created by the mind, such as:

• Perception

• Attention

• Memory

• Thinking

• Reasoning

What is cognitive psychology?

The study of mental processes, including the characteristics of the mind and how the mind operates.

What are some major functions of the mind?

Remembering → problem-solving → making decisions → perceiving → thinking → reasoning

What is reaction time?

The amount of time between the presentation of a stimulus and a person's response.

Simple vs. choice reaction time

• Simple: See stimulus → respond

• Choice: See stimulus → make a decision → respond

• Choice reaction time is longer because a decision has to be made.

What did Donders conclude from his reaction-time experiment?

Choice reaction time took 1/10 of a second longer, so he concluded it took about 1/10 second to make the decision.

What important principle did Donders demonstrate about studying the mind?

Mental processes cannot be measured directly, so they must be inferred from observable behavior.

What is structuralism?

The idea that our overall experience is created by combining basic elements of experience called sensations.

What is analytic introspection?

A method where trained participants describe their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli.

What happened to structuralism?

It did not produce reliable/useful results and was abandoned in the early 1900s.

How did Ebbinghaus study memory?

He memorized lists of nonsense syllables, waited different amounts of time, and measured how long it took him to relearn them.

What is the savings method?

Measures memory by comparing how long something takes to learn originally vs. relearn later.

Formula:
Savings = Original learning time − Relearning time

What did Ebbinghaus's savings curve show?

Forgetting occurs rapidly during the first 1–2 days, then slows/levels off.

Remember: Longer delay → smaller savings → more forgetting

What was William James's main idea about attention?

Paying attention to one thing requires withdrawing attention from other things.

Behaviorism

Approach that focuses on observable behavior rather than mental processes

Why did Watson reject introspection?

Results varied between people and were difficult to verify

Little Albert Experiment

Watson paired a rat with a loud noise, causing Albert to eventually fear the rat alone
→ Example of classical conditioning

Classical Conditioning

Learning by pairing two stimuli so that one eventually produces a response on its own

Pavlov’s Experiment

→ Bell + food → salivation
→ Eventually, bell alone → salivation

Operant Conditioning

→ Behavior is strengthened or changed by its consequences/reinforcement

Skinner’s Rat Experiment

→ Press bar → receive food → bar pressing increases

Tolman’s Rat Experiment

→ Rats could find food from a new starting point, suggesting they learned a mental map rather than just a specific turn

Skinner’s Theory of Language

→ Children learn language through imitation and reinforcement

Chomsky’s Theory of Language

→ Language cannot be explained by reinforcement alone; humans have an inborn biological ability for language

Cognitive Revolution

Shift in the 1950s from behaviorism to studying how the mind operates

What changed during the Cognitive Revolution?

→ Psychology shifted from stimulus-response relationships → mental processes

Paradigm

→ A system of ideas that dominates a scientific field at a particular time

Paradigm Shift

→ A change from one dominant way of thinking to another

Scientific Revolution

→ A shift from one paradigm to another

Behaviorism → Cognitive Approach

→ Shift from studying observable behavior/rewards & punishments → studying mental processes

What helped inspire the Cognitive Revolution?

→ Digital computers, attention research, artificial intelligence, and information theory

Why were digital computers important to cognitive psychology?

→ They inspired psychologists to think of the mind as an information processor

Information-Processing Approach

→ The mind processes information through a sequence of stages

Computer Information Processing

→ Input → storage/memory → processing → output

Colin Cherry’s Attention Experiment (1953)

→ Gave participants two different messages, one in each ear, and told them to focus on only one

What did Cherry’s experiment find?

→ People could hear the sounds of the unattended message but were generally unaware of its content

Donald Broadbent’s Filter Model (1958)

→ The mind filters incoming information, allowing attended information through while blocking unattended information

Broadbent’s Filter Model Steps

→ Input → Filter → Detector → Memory

Cocktail Party Effect

→ Ability to focus on one conversation while filtering out other conversations/noise

Newell & Simon — Logic Theorist

→ Early AI program that used human-like reasoning to solve logic problems

George Miller — “Magical Number Seven”

→ Proposed that humans have a limited capacity for processing information, around 7 items

Chunking

→ Breaking information into groups to make it easier to remember

Main idea of the Cognitive Revolution

→ The mind can be scientifically studied by examining how it receives, processes, stores, and uses information.

What is sensory memory?

Holds incoming information for a fraction of a second.

What happens when we retrieve a long-term memory?

Information stored in long-term memory is brought back into short-term memory.

What three types of long-term memory did Endel Tulving identify?

Episodic, semantic, and procedural memory.

What is neuropsychology?

Studying the behavior of people with brain damage to understand what different brain areas do.

What is electrophysiology?

Measuring the electrical responses of the nervous system, including the activity of specific neurons.

What is PET?

Positron emission tomography, a brain-imaging technique that shows which brain areas are active during cognitive activities.

What were disadvantages of PET?

A: It was expensive and required radioactive tracers to be injected into the bloodstream.

What is fMRI?

A: Functional magnetic resonance imaging, which measures brain activity without radioactive tracers.

Why was fMRI an improvement over PET?

A: It does not require radioactive tracers and generally provides better spatial and temporal resolution.

What is spatial resolution?

A: How precisely a technique can determine WHERE brain activity occurs.

What is temporal resolution?

A: How precisely a technique can determine WHEN brain activity occurs

Why was fMRI important to cognitive psychology?

A: It allowed researchers to connect cognitive processes with activity in specific areas of the brain, greatly expanding cognitive neuroscience research.