PSC 100 UC Davis Cog Psy

Greek Philosopher, Aristotle's thoughts on the mind?

He localized the mind in the heart and thought the function of the brain was to cool the heart

Cognitive Psychology

The science of how the mind is organized to produce intelligent thoughts and how the mind is realized in the brain.

Empiricism

All knowledge comes from experience. (British philosophers such as Berkeley, Locke, Hume, and Mill argued for this)

Nativism

Children come into the world with a great deal of innate knowledge (continental philosophers such as Descartes and Kant argued for this)

Why did cognitive psychology suffer?

Because of our egocentric, mystical, and confused attitudes about ourselves and our own nature, which made it seem inconceivable that the workings of the human mind could be subjected to scientific analysis.

Introspection

First done by german psychologists at the turn of the 20th century. Highly trained observers reported the contents of their own consciousness under carefully controlled conditions

Let us consider a sample introspective experiment.

Mayer and Orth (1901) had their participants perform a free-association task. The experimenters spoke a word to the participants and then measured the amount of time the participants took to generate responses to the word. Participants then reported all their conscious experiences from the moment of stimulus presentation until the Mayer and Orth (1901) had their participants perform a free-association task. The experimenters spoke a word to the participants and then measured the amount of time the participants took to generate responses to the word. Participants then reported all their conscious experiences from the moment of stimulus presentation until the In this experiment, many participants reported rather indescribable conscious experiences, not always seeming to involve sensations, images, or other concrete experiences. This result started a debate over the issue of whether conscious experience could really be devoid of concrete content. In this experiment, many participants reported rather indescribable conscious experiences, not always seeming to involve sensations, images, or other concrete experiences. This result started a debate over the issue of whether conscious experience could really be devoid of concrete content.

Edward Thorndike

Developed a theory of learning that was directly applicable to classrooms. Thorndike was interested in such basic problems as the effects of reward and punishment on the rate of learning. To him, con-scious experience was just excess baggage that could be largely ignored. Many of his experiments were done on animals, research that involved fewer ethical constraints than research on humans.

Discovery about introspection

It was becoming clear that introspection did not give one a clear window into the workings of the mind. Much that was important in cognitive functioning was not open to conscious experience.

John Watson and other behaviorists

John Watson and other behaviorists led a fierce attack not only on introspectionism but also on any attempt to develop a theory of mental operations.

Copyright | Worth Publishers | Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications | Edition 8 | [e-mail] | Printed from www.chegg.com

Behaviorism

held that psychology was to be entirely concerned with external behavior and was not to try to analyze the workings of the mind that underlay this behavior:

Gestalt psychology

Brought to America by German psychologists and claimed that the activity of the brain and the mind was more than the sum of its parts. This conflicted with the introspectionist program in Germany that tried to analyze conscious thought into its parts.

Critiques of Gestalt psychology

In conflict with behaviorism. They were also criticized for being concerned with mental structure at all.

3 main influences in the cognitive revolution that overthrew behaviorism

research on human performance, developments in computer science, par-ticularly AI, which tries to get computers to behave intelligently, and linguistics

Information theory

an abstract way of analyzing the processing of information

Allen Newell and Herbert Simon

both at Carnegie Mellon University, spent most of their lives educating cognitive psychologists about the implications of AI (and educating workers in AI about the implications of cognitive psychology).

Noam Chomsky

a linguist at MIT who began to develop a new mode of analyzing the structure of language. His work showed that language was much more complex than had previously been believed and that many behaviorist formulations were incapable of explaining these complexities. Chomsky's linguistic analyses allowed cognitive psychologists to fight off the prevailing behaviorist conceptions.

George Miller

at Harvard University in the 1950s and early 1960s, was instrumental in bringing these linguistic analyses to the attention of psychologists and in identifying new ways of studying language.

Dominant approach in cognitive psychology

information-processing approach, which attempts to analyze cognition as a set of steps for processing an abstract entity called "information."

Sternberg paradigm

participants were shown a small number of digits, such as "3 9 7," to keep in mind. Then they were shown a probe digit and asked whether it was in the memory set, and they had to answer as quickly as possible. For example, 9 would be a positive probe for the "3 9 7" set; 6 would be a negative probe. Sternberg varied the number of digits in the memory set from 1 to 6 and measured how quickly participants could make this judgment.

dualism

The mind and body are two separate entities

Neuron

a cell that receives and transmits signals through electrochemical activity.

Soma

Main body of the neuron

Dendrites

short branches attached to the soma

Axon

Long tube extending from the soma. Provides the fixed path which neurons communicate with one another

The axon of one neuron extends

toward the dendrites of other neurons. At its end, the axon branches into a large number of arborizations.

synapse

This near contact between axon and dendrite is called a synapse.

Neurotransmitters

The chemicals that are released so neurons can communicate. Released from the axon terminal on one side of the synapse

Is the inside of the membrane more or less negative than the outside?

The inside of the membrane covering the entire neuron tends to be 70 millivolts (mV) more negative than the outside, due to the greater concentration of negative chemical ions inside and positive ions outside.

Is there a greater or lesser concentration of positive sodium ions outside of the membrane

The existence of a greater concentration of positive sodium ions on the outside of the membrane is particularly important to the functioning of the neuron.

excitatory

Synapses that decrease the potential difference

inhibitory

those that in-crease the difference