Cognitive Psychology - Departmentals Exam

The mind

Creates and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning.

The mind

It is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals.

The mind (first definition)

This indicates different types of cognition—the mental processes, such as perception, attention, and memory, which is what the mind creates.

The mind (second definition)

This indicates something about how the mind operates (it creates representations) and its function (it enables us to act and achieve goals).

Cognition

The mental processes involved in perception, attention,

memory, language, problem-solving, reasoning, and decision making.

Cognitive Psychology

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

Cognitive Psychology

The branch of psychology concerned with

the scientific study of the mental processes involved in perception, attention, memory, language, problem-solving, reasoning, and decision making.

Franciscus Donders

Dutch physiologist that did one of the first experiments that today would be called a cognitive psychology experiment

Reaction time

Donders was interested in determining how long it takes for a person to make a decision. He determined this by measuring?

Reaction time

The time it takes to react to a stimulus.

1. Simple reaction time

2. Choice reaction time

Two types of measures of reaction time according to Donders:

Simple Reaction Time

Donders measured this by asking his participants to push a button as rapidly as possible when they saw a light go on

Choice Reaction Time

He measured this by using two lights and asking his participants to push the left button when they saw the left light go on and the right button when they saw the right light go on

Wilhelm Wundt

He founded the first laboratory of scientific psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany.

Wilhelm Wundt

His approach, which dominated psychology in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was called structuralism.

Structuralism

An approach to psychology that explained perception as the adding up of small elementary units called sensations.

Sensations

Structuralism is an approach to psychology that explained perception as the adding up of small elementary units called?

Wilhelm Wundt

He wanted to create a "periodic table of the mind" would include all of the basic sensations involved in creating our experiences.

Analytic Introspection

Wundt thought he could achieve this scientific description of the components of experience by using?

Analytic Introspection

A technique in which trained participants described

their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli.

Wilhelm Wundt

He considered by many today to be the "father of experimental psychology," made a substantial contribution to psychology by his commitment to studying behavior and the mind under controlled conditions.

Too subjective

Problem of analytic introspection

Hermann Ebbinghaus

German psychologist from University of Berlin, Leipzig

Hermann Ebbinghaus

He was interested in determining the nature of memory and forgetting—specifically, how rapidly information that is learned is lost over time.

Nonsense syllables

Ebbinghaus used ___ so that his memory would

not be influenced by the meaning of a particular word.

The delay

He then waited for a specific amount of time (___) and then determined how long it took to relearn the list.

Savings

Measure used by Ebbinghaus to determine the magnitude of memory left from initial learning.

William James

He was one of the early American psychologists

William James

He taught Harvard's first psychology course and made significant observations about the mind in his textbook, Principles of Psychology (1890).

William James

No experiments; reported observations of his own experience

John B. Watson

He founded the approach to psychology called behaviorism

Behaviorism

Watson founded the approach to psychology called?

Behaviorism

The approach to psychology, founded by John B. Watson, which states that observable behavior provides the only valid data for psychology. A consequence of this idea is that consciousness and unobservable mental processes are not considered worthy of study by psychologists.

John B. Watson

He was dissatisfied by the method of analytical introspection

Little Albert Experiment

Watson and Rosalie Rayner (1920) subjected Albert, a 9-month-old boy, to a loud noise every time a rat (which Albert had originally liked) came close to the child. After a few pairings of the noise with the rat, Albert reacted to the rat by crawling away as rapidly as possible.

Classical Conditioning (Pavlov)

How pairing one stimulus (such as the loud noise presented to Albert) with another, previously neutral stimulus (such as the rat) causes changes in the response to the neutral stimulus.

Classical Conditioning (Pavlov)

A procedure in which pairing a neutral stimulus with a stimulus that elicits a response causes the neutral stimulus to elicit that response.

B.F. Skinner

He introduced operant conditioning

Operant Conditioning

Focused on how behavior is strengthened by the presentation of positive reinforcers, such as food or social approval (or withdrawal of negative reinforcers, such as a shock or social rejection).

Edward Tolman

Professor of psychology at the University of California at

Berkeley from 1918 to 1954

Edward Tolman

Considered himself a behaviorist because his focus was on measuring behavior;— in reality, he was one of the first cognitive psychologists, because he used behavior to infer mental processes.

Edward Tolman

In one of his experiments, he placed a rat in a maze. Rats run in a maze, rats run faster when rewarded using previous knowledge of the maze

Edward Tolman

He believed that the rats he placed on a maze was developing a cognitive map of the maze

Cognitive Map

Mental conception of a spatial layout

B.F. Skinner

Published a book entitled Verbal Behavior

B.F. Skinner

In his book, he argued that children learn language through operant conditioning. According to this idea, children imitate speech that they hear and repeat correct speech because it is rewarded.

Noam Chomsky

A linguist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

(MIT)

Noam Chomsky

He saw language development as being determined not by imitation or reinforcement, but by an inborn biological program that holds across cultures.

Noam Chomsky

His idea that language is a product of the way the mind is constructed, rather than a result of reinforcement, led psychologists to reconsider the idea that language and other complex behaviors, such as problem-solving and reasoning, can be explained by operant conditioning.

Noam Chomsky

He pointed out that children say many sentences that have never been rewarded by parents, and may go through a stage in which they use incorrect grammar, even though this was not reinforced.

Noam Chomsky

He saw language development as being determined by an inborn biological program that holds across cultures.

Scientific Revolution

Occurs when there is a shift in thinking from one scientific paradigm to another

Paradigm

A system of ideas, which guide thinking in a particular field

Paradigm shift

A shift in thinking from one paradigm to another

Information-processing Approach

The approach to psychology, developed beginning in the 1950's in which the mind is described as processing information through a sequence of stages

William James

"Attending to one thing requires withdrawing from others."

Colin Cherry

Who presented participants with two auditory messages, one to the left ear and one to the right ear. They were told to focus their attention on one of the messages (the attended message) and to ignore the other one (the unattended message).

Donald Broadbent

Who proposed the first flow diagram of the mind?

Input - Filter - Detector - To memory

The flow diagram of the mind according to Donald Broadbent:

Input

Sounds of both attended and unattended messages

Filter

Lets through the attended message and filters out the unattended message

Detector

Records the information that passes the filter

Cocktail Party Effect

The filter explains everyday experience, such as focusing on a friend at a noisy party. This ability is called?

Cocktail Party Effect

The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli, especially at a party where there are a lot of simultaneous conversations

John McCarthy

He organized the 1956 Dartmouth conference, titled "Summer Research Project on AI". This was the first use of the term AI

AI

McCarthy defined this as making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving

John McCarthy

He defined AI as "making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if they were so behaving

Herb Simon and Alan Newell

They both aimed to create a computer program that could create proofs for problems in logic

Herb Simon and Alan Newell

They both developed the logic theorist program

The Logic Theorist Program

The program could create proofs of mathematical theorems using humanlike reasoning processes

The Logic Theorist Program

It was considered a "real thinking machine"

George Miller

He presented "The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two"

George Miller

He proposed that human information-processing capacity is limited, to about seven items

1956

In what year is the the birthday of cognitive science?

Ulrich Neisser

He published and coined the term "cognitive psychology" and emphasized the information-processing approcah

Cognitive Psychology

Neisser stated that the purpose of this book was to "provide a useful and current assessment of the existing state of the art" Most of the book focuses on vision and hearing

Cognitive Psychology

It describes how information is taken in, held in memory for short periods, and used to see simple patterns, Much of the discussion centers on the intake of information and brief memory, such as remembering strings of numbers

Sensory Memory

Holds incoming information for a fraction of a second

Short-term Memory

Has a limited capacity and holds information for seconds

Rehearsal

This keeps information from being forgotten

Long-term Memory

A high capacity system that stores information for long periods

Remembering

Involves bringing information from long-term memory back into short-term memory

1. Episodic Memory

2. Semantic Memory

3. Procedural Memory

Endel Tulving proposed three types of long-term memory:

Episodic Memory

Memory for events

Semantic Memory

Memory for facts

Procedural Memory

Memory for physical actions

1. Neuropsychology

2. Electrophysiology

Two early techniques dominated physiological research:

Neuropsychology

Study of behavior after brain damage providing insights since the 1800's

Electrophysiology

Measurement of electrical activity of neurons, mostly in non-human animals

Positron Emission Technology (PET)

Made it possible to see active brain areas during cognitive activities

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

PET was replaced by?

Neuropsychology

The study of the behavioral effects of brain damage in humans

Electrophysiology

Techniques used to measure electrical responses of the nervous system

Brain imaging

Technique such as fMRI that results in images of the brain that represents brain activity. In cognitive psychology, activity is measured in response to specific cognitive tasks

Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)

Allow research to stimulate real-world environments under controlled conditions

Virtual Reality (VR)

Places real-world visual information

Augmented Reality (AR)

Augments parts of the visual world

Stephen Palmer

He showed that perception is influenced by knowledge of the environment. Objects appropriate to a scene (e.g., bread in a kitchen) were identified more accurately than inappropriate objects.

Cognitive Neuroscience

The study of the physiological basis of cognition

Levels of analysis

The idea that a topic can be understood by studying it at many different levels (e.g., behavioral, brain structures, neurons, or chemical processes), with each approach adding a new dimension to our understanding