Cognitive Approach concepts

Cognitive psychology

• Cognitive psychologists explore how the human mind acquires and uses knowledge

• The cognitive approach assumes humans are information processors, that cognitive processes can be studied scientifically, and that mental representations guide behavior

Experiment

• Procedure is standardized (replicable)

• Can establish cause and effect relationships

• Data can be statistically analyzed to determine the role of chance in the results

• A control condition is used

• Demand characteristics can occur

True experiment

Participants are randomly allocated to conditions (decreases likelihood that individual characteristics impact results)

Laboratory experiment

• Highly controlled to prevent extraneous variables

• Low ecological validity

Field experiment

• Done in a natural setting

• Cannot prevent extraneous variables and are difficult to replicate

Quasi experiment

• Participants are grouped by a trait or behavior

• Doesn’t show direct causation but implies a causal relationship (less control over pre-existing variables)

Correlational study

• Tests the correlation between variables (not cause and effect)

• Variables are only observed (not manipulated)

• Limited control (high likelihood of extraneous variables)

• High external validity (conclusions can be generalized to other populations)

Case study

• And in-depth study of an individual (or group of people) with a particular condition

• Allow researchers to study phenomena that cannot be produced ethically in a lab

• The use of triangulation increases validity

• Holistic approach

• Cannot be replicated (low reliability)

• Difficult to generalize to other people

• Cannot establish cause and effect relationships

Questionnaire

• They produce rich, qualitative data about someone's opinions and/or attitudes

• Cannot establish cause and effect

• Easy to administer and generate a lot of data

• Cannot be analysed statistically and are open to researcher bias

• Social desirability effect can happen

Protection from undue stress/harm

• Undue stress is a higher level of stress than experienced on a daily basis

• Participants should not be humiliated

• Participants should not be forced to reveal private information

• Nothing should be done to participants that will permanently damage their mental or physical health

Informed consent

• Participants must be told the nature of the study before it begins (what the research is about and what potential problems might arise)

• Participants must be informed of their rights, including the right to withdraw from the study (psychologists should not pressure or coerce participants who no longer want to be in the study and their data must be withdrawn)

• Parents must give consent for children

• Parents or guardians generally given consent for those with mental or physical disabilities if they cannot understand the implications of being in an experiment

• Informed consent is difficult when the nature of the study involves complex terminology (specifically in the biological approach)

Deception

• If a psychologist tells you what an experiment is about, you might change your behavior (demand characteristics)

• Deception includes misinformation and not revealing the entire aim of the study

• Slight deception is allowed in some cases when it doesn’t cause stress to the participants, but its necessity must be justified and approved by an ethics board

Debriefing

• At the end of the experiment, participants must be told the real aims and purpose of the experiment, and any use of deception should be justified to the participants

• Participants should leave the experiment in the same physical and psychological condition they arrived in

• All data must be guaranteed to be anonymized (the identities of the participants must not be revealed when the data is published or with any use of the data after)

Models of memory

• Memory used to be thought of as a place in the brain

• Memory used to be studied post-mortem, by stimulating certain areas of the brain during operations, with case studies of people with brain damage, or animal studies

• Different types of memory are processed and stored in different parts of the brain

• Memory models are hypothesized representations of memory

• Memory includes encoding, storage, and retrieval of information

Short-term memory

Takes in important sensory information, limited capacity, lasts around 12 seconds

Long-term memory

Takes in information that is rehearsed or attended to, theoretically has unlimited capacity and lasts forever

Declarative memory

Memory of facts and events (“knowing what”), memories can be consciously recalled (explicit), includes both semantic and episodic memory, expressed through recollection, includes:

• Semantic memory: factual knowledge

• Episodic memory: autobiographical memory of events and experiences

Procedural memory

Memory of how to do something, includes habits, unconsciously recalled (implicit), expressed through performance

Transactive memory

Relying on other people to retain information for you, you don’t know the thing but you know where to find it

Multi-store model*

• Developed by Atkinson and Shiffrin

• Memory consists of separate locations where memories are stored

• Memory processes are sequential

• Memory stores operate in a singular, uniform way

• STM is the gateway for information to reach LTM

• Various memory stores operate with the permanent memory store through attention, coding, and rehearsal

• Rehearsal keeps information active in STM until it gets transferred to LTM

• Information first enters the sensory store (most importantly the visual and auditory stores), stays there for a few seconds, then a bit of information moves on to the short term store

• STM capacity is about 7 +/-2 items (Miller) and lasts for 6-18 seconds, but rehearsal can keep information in STM for up to 30 seconds

• Information in STM can be displaced by other information

• Supported by HM and Glanzer and Cunitz

• MSM is considered too simplistic, although it does provide a good account of the basic mechanism of memory (encoding, retrieval, and storage), and many theories support it

• Primacy effect: the tendency to remember words at a beginning of a list because they have been rehearsed and moved to long term storage

• Recency effect: the tendency to remember words at the end of a list because they are still in short term memory and haven’t yet been displaced by new information

Working memory model*

• Developed by Baddeley and Hitch as an elaboration on STM in the multi-store model

• Working memory model divides short term memory into multiple stores

  • Central executive: decides how and when the sub-systems are used

    • Focuses, divides, switches attention from the automatic level (routines, relies on schema in long-term memory, controlled by environmental stimuli) to supervisory attention (planning, decision making, emergency situations, self-regulation, can consider multiple courses of action)

    • Has a limited capacity and cannot attend to many thing simultaneously

    • Modality-free (not specific to one sense)

  • Phonological loop: verbal STM, made up of the articulatory control system and the phonological store

    • Articulatory control system:

      • “Inner voice”

      • Holds information in verbal form

      • Basically words heard or seen and repeated like an inner voice

    • Phonological store: 

      • “Inner ear”

      • Holds traces of auditory memory (words heard) that last 1.5-2 seconds if not rehearsed by the articulatory control system

      • Can retrieve information directly from senses (auditory material), from LTM (verbal information), and from the articulatory control system

  • Visuospatial sketchpad: visual STM, “inner eye”

    • Includes storage and manipulation of visual patterns and spatial movements in 2D or 3D

    • Information comes from sensory memory or LTM

  • Episodic buffer: temporary, holds several sources of information simultaneously active

    • Holds auditory/visual information and information from LTM

    • Serves as a temporary and passive display until information is needed

    • Has a limited capacity

    • Is responsible for conscious awareness

• Working memory model is oversimplified and some parts are not well explained

• Working memory model allows the ability to multitask in only some situations to be understood

Schema

• a mental representation derived from prior experience or knowledge

• Bottom-up information is interpreted by the top-down influence of schemas to determine the appropriate behavior in a situation

• Schemas help in forming predictions, organizing knowledge, recalling information, and making sense of experiences (basically simplifies the world around us)

• Assimilation: adding new information to an existing schema

• Accommodation: replacing an existing schema

• Scripts: patterns of behavior learned through interactions; dependent on cultural context (i.e. not universal)

Schema theory

• Describes how people process information, relate it to prior knowledge, and then use it

• Assumes that people actively (not passively) process information

• Can explain how memory works, and it is believed that schema processing impacts memory at every stage:

  • Encoding (sensory information → memory)

  • Storage (creation of a biological trace of memory, either consolidated or lost)

  • Retrieval (using stored information in thinking, problem solving, and decision making)

• Useful for understanding how people sort information, interpret it, and make inferences

• Contributes to understanding of memory distortion/false memories

• Not clear how schemas are actually acquired or how they specifically impact cognitive processing

• Robust theory and has led to a lot of research

Evaluation

Testable - Barlett, Brewer and Treyens

Empirical evidence - biological research

Applications - how memory works, memory distortion, depression and anxiety (abnormal psychology), relationships (mate selection), health campaigns (health psychology)

Construct validity - very vague and hypothetical, schemas cannot be observed

Unbiased - applied across cultures, most research conducted in Western countries

Predictive validity - predicts behavior, but not exactly what someone will remember

Thinking and decision making*

• Thinking: using knowledge/information to interpret and make predictions about the world; includes decision making, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning

• Decision making: identifying and choosing options based on the values/preferences of the person deciding

Dual process model:

• System 1: automatic, intuitive, effortless

  • Uses heuristics (fast)

  • High confidence, put prone to error

  • More likely to be used with a high cognitive load (many things to think about/information needs to be processed quickly)

  • Humans as cognitive misers/ego depletion?

• System 2: slow, conscious, rational

  • Assumed to require more effort

  • First considers all interpretations then eliminates possibilities based on sensory evidence to reach an answer

  • Less confidence

• Both systems are used for problem solving: system 1 provides a quick answer, then system 2 further analyses the situation for a more accurate conclusion

• System 1 is activated first, so it can interfere with system 2

• Biological evidence that different types of thinking are processed in different parts of the brain

• Wason selection task (and other tests for cognitive biases) have reliable results

• Reductionist; doesn’t explain how systems 1 and 2 interact and the role of emotion in thinking

• System 1 and system 2 aren’t always clearly defined, particularly in terms of “fast” processing

Reconstructive memory

Reconstructive memory: the theory that memories are not a perfect photograph of an event, but rather they are actively reconstructed each time they are recalled

• Can be influenced by schema, new information, and other factors

• Has implications in the reliability of eyewitness testimony

• Leading questions and post-event information can influence the accuracy of recall (misinformation effect)

Biases in thinking and decision making

Cognitive biases are patterns of thinking and decision making that are consistent but inaccurate (includes heuristics)

Heuristics are mental shortcuts that quickly generate answers with little to no thought

• Anchoring bias: the tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information presented when making subsequent decisions

• Peak-end rule: judging experiences based on how you felt at the peak and end, not an average of every moment

  • Happens with both positive and negative experiences

  • You still remember moments that weren’t the peak and end, you just don’t use them to inform your judgment

  • Is problematic when studying relationships retrospectively

• Framing effect: when people react to choices depending on how they are framed

  • Part of prospect theory (the idea that how people choose between options that involve risk when the probability of each outcome is known involves heuristics)

  • People tend to prefer a definite win to a possible win (positive framing), but a possible loss to a definite loss (negative framing)

  • Culture plays a role; people from individualistic cultures are generally more loss-averse than those from collectivistic cultures

• Thinking processes are difficult to explain, so explanations of thinking are more like rationalizations

• A lot of research on cognitive biases lacks ecological validity and cross-cultural support (and assume that cognitive biases are universal)

Influence of emotion on memory

Flashbulb memory theory

• A flashbulb memory is a highly detailed and vivid snapshot of a surprising/emotional moment

• Proposed by Brown and Kulik

• Flashbulb memory could be genetic (Quervain et al showed that people with different variations of the α2b-adrenoceptor in the amygdala have different prevalences of flashbacks)

• Flashbulb memories may just be vivid because they are rehearsed (flashbulb memories follow a story-telling schema)

• Neisser and Harsch demonstrated that flashbulb memories are associated with higher confidence but lower accuracy

• Personal importance plays a smaller role in flashbulb memory formation in collectivistic cultures compared to individualistic cultures (individual experiences are typically downplayed in collectivistic cultures, so there would be less rehearsal), but national importance has similar impact on flashbulb memory formation across all cultures

• Strengths:

  • Has biological evidence (McGaugh and Cahill, Sharot)

  • Led to researching showing that different types of memory are processed in different parts of the brain

• Limitations:

  • Issues with construct validity (levels of personal relevance and surprise, amount of rehearsal)

  • Cultural differences imply that rehearsal is the biggest factor (not surprise)

  • It is difficult for the accuracy of memories to be verified

  • Emotional state during an event can’t be measured (a causal explanation cannot be established)

Special mechanism hypothesis: there is a special biological mechanism that creates a permanent memory of an event with an exceptionally high level of surprise

• This implies that flashbulb memories are different from normal memories and are resistant to forgetting

• Modern research has found that the amygdala is likely a large part of this biological mechanism (it makes sense evolutionarily to remember fearful experiences well)

• Connects to McGaugh and Cahill (stories that produce an emotional response are more likely to be remembered)

Importance-driven model (of flashbulb memory): highlights that personal consequences determine the intensity of emotional reactions; modern view of flashbulb memory

Influence of emotion on decision making

Most models don’t address the role of emotion on decision making, but many researchers assume that because emotion increases cognitive load, it increases dependence on system 1 thinking

Somatic marker hypothesis: good decisions are made by assessing appropriate emotional information relevant to the situation

• Demasio noticed that patients with bilateral damage in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex consistently made bad decisions even if they had made those bad decisions before 

• The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is involved in somatic markers (feelings associated with emotions)

• Bechara et al developed the Iowa gambling task (4 decks of cards, 2 have good results than progressively worse results, 2 have bad results than progressively better results) and demonstrated that those with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex had difficulty determining the strategy and didn’t have a difference in anticipatory skin response between the two decks

• DeMartino et al showed that participants were more likely to gamble when a financial situation was presented in a negative frame, and also had increased activity in the amygdala when choosing a loss-averse option

• Most research on the somatic marker hypothesis uses the Iowa gambling task

• Wright and Racow used a balloon pumping gambling task and found that bad decisions (bursting the balloon) led to an increased emotional response (skin galvanization), but there was no evidence that somatic markers prevented future bad decisions