Cognitive Psychology: Key Concepts, History, and Techniques

The cognitive approach is a theoretical orientation that emphasizes a person's

mental processes and knowledge

Scientific study of psychology began with

Wundt

When scientific psychology arose in Germany in the late 1800s, Wundt and other researchers focused mainly on the study of:

mental processes, mainly using the method of introspection

Studies of human memory were first undertaken by:

Ebbinghaus

Much of the earliest human memory research (such as that conducted by Ebbinghaus) used:

nonsense syllables and other relatively meaningless stimuli

During the first half of the twentieth century, some strict behaviorists:

said that psychology should focus only on objective reactions to environmental stimuli.

According to some psychologists, modern cognitive psychology was "born":

at a symposium held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956.

The rise of cognitive psychology was heavily influenced by:

disenchantment with behaviorism and fascination with developments in linguistics, memory, and developmental psychology

The information-processing approach to the study of cognition began in the

1950s

In the information-processing approach:

a mental process can be understood by comparison with the operations of a computer

A recent trend in cognitive psychology involves a heavier focus on studying:

real-life issues in natural settings

A study investigating brain structures that are active when a person is judging whether someone's face is trustworthy would be using the approach called:

social cognitive neuroscience

Positron Emission Tomography (PET)

is a technique in which researchers inject a small amount of radiation into the subject's blood to measure activity in the brain.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

is a less-invasive way to study activity of the brain.

Which of the following techniques are most likely to be used by cognitive neuroscientists?

PET, fMRI, and ERP

Computer programs that play the game of chess, such as "Hydra," are programmed using the approach called:

pure AI

The approach in which a computer is programmed to perform in a way that resembles the way humans perform a cognitive task is called:

computer simulation

Another name for the connectionist approach is

parallel distributed processing

The distinction between whether or not cognitive activities are performed as a sequence of separate operations or as a simultaneous processing of many signals involves the issues of:

serial processing and parallel processing

What best describes cognitive science?

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of internal representations involved in thinking.