Cognition, Exam 1 Material

Cognitive Psychology - Definiton

the study of mental processes, which includes determining the characteristics and properties of the mind and how it operates.

Difference between the ancient greek’s way of thinking

Plato: Innateness - mental processes arise from the brain

Aristotle: Empiricism - knowledge comes from experience.

Always a fight between nature vs nurture. Plato believes that mental processes are something that you were born with, the brain is the organ that handles the mind. Aristotle focused on the concept of memory, he thought that there is some memory that I have, where does memory come from? It probably comes from past experiences. Because the memory is coming from experience, the knowledge I have must be coming from nurture, my own experience.

Rene Descartes

Born with innate ideas

Mind-body dualism

“I think therefore I am” – rational/skeptical approach

He was thinking about how the mind works, but also came up with this idea called mind and body dualism, the brain and mind are a dual entity, they are interacting and influencing each other. The mind is innate, but the way we gain knowledge is through rational thinking/skeptical thinking, he wants you to put doubts on what you see/hear, so you don't have a different perception. By taking a skeptical approach, you are gaining the knowledge and therefore he is doing actual thinking, therefore he knows that humans exist.

The idea that the mind and brain are still separate, so it comes from birth.

John Lock, what was he a part of and what did he believe

British Empiricism

Tabula Rasa - the mind starts as a blank state, it is not innate, it is stuff from the external world

Knowledge comes from sensation and reflection

philosophers to psychologists

These are philosophers; they are not conducting experiments to prove that this is how it works. They are thinking and speculating about the human mind.

FC Donders

father of mental chronometry (something related to time)

Reaction time

How long does it take to do something?

Subtraction method

How long does it actually take to do a specific process?

Donders DEMO/subtraction method

It probably took 200 ms to respond to the circle.

Reaction time, how long it took to tap the hand after the dot was shown

For both hands, probably around 350 ms

Subtraction method

For the first activity, it took 200 ms. For the second, 350. (350-200=150) It takes about 150 ms to make a decision.

Behavior = Process A + Process B

Herman Von Ebbinghaus

• Pioneered the scientific study of memory

  • Discovered forgetting curve, saving score, and spacing effect

• How much information actually gets saved in memory, and how much gets lost after you first learn something. 

• Had nonsense words, how long does it take me to memorize them? 

• If I want to recall this list after 5 min, how much will I remember? Is there a time I have to restudy the list, how long will it take me to rememorize it? Interested in over time, how much memory is lost/saved. About 2-5 min in between or something like that he used different delays. 

• Ebbinghaus was the first to determine how forgetting occurs over time. 

Wilhelm Wundt

• First psychological laboratory

  • Structuralism

    • As a main means to examine the structures of the human mind. An approach to psychology that explained perception as the adding up of small elementary units called sensations.

  • Introspection

    • Want people to have their own introspection on what they are seeing and furling when exposed to a stimulus. To a rose, for example, they report the sensation of what they are seeing, they report what kind of color it is, what texture it is, what brightness it is, basic sensations. Once people say oh I see a rose, that's wrong, because he wants introspection, he wants people to see past just the name of the objects. How well can people report those? 

  • Avoid stimulus error

    • When people are bringing their own knowledge to give the error, that's an error in their answers; they have  people that are trained to give a specific answer, so they are trained (the subject) on what set of answers they should give.

Introspection as a methodology, limitations (3)

• Effort to assess mental processes. 

  • Amount of introspection, the amount of thinking it takes to recognize and assess your own processes. I thought of this, and it led me to that.

• Avoid stimulus error. 

  • Can be trained to avoid stimulus error, how to train without experimenter bias. 

• Gestalt movement

  • Even if we know very basic building blocks of processes, it doesn't give us the full scope on how they work as a whole.

William James

• First educator to offer psychology course in US

  • Functionalism

    • Focused on the processes of mental functions, like how perception works. 

  • Principles of Psychology.

Behaviorist approach, systemic

• Limitation of introspection as a methodology

• Scientific rigor - emphasized objective scientific methods

• Behavior as either

  • Reflexes produced by responses to stimuli in an environment

  • A consequence of prior experience (reinforcement and punishment of that behavior)

John Watson

• Founder of behaviorism

• Focused on observable behaviors

• Mental processes are not scientific, not observable.

Pavlov

• Research on reflexes

• Simple associations, conditioned reflex

• Classical conditioning.

Skinner

• Developed the Skinner box or conditioning chamber

• Operant conditioning

  • Reinforcement

  • Punishment

• All your behavior = a function of learning, reinforcement and associations.

structuralism

An approach to psychology that explained perception as the adding up of small elementary units called sensations. According to structuralism, our overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience the structuralists called sensations. Thus, just as chemistry developed a periodic table of the elements, which combine to create molecules, Wundt wanted to create a “periodic table of the mind,” which would include all of the basic sensations involved in creating our experiences.

breaking down mental processes and consciousness into their most basic foundational elements—such as sensations, images, and feelings—using a controlled method called introspection.

analytic introspection

A procedure used by early psychologists in which trained participants described their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli.

forgetting/savings curve

memory drops rapidly for the first 2 days after the initial learning and then levels off

behaviorism

The approach to psychology states that observable behavior provides the only valid data for psychology. A consequence of this idea is that psychologists do not consider consciousness and unobservable mental processes worthy of study.