Cognitive Psychology

What is Cognitive Psychology?    

• Investigation of how information…

  • Enters our mind

  • Stored in our mind

  • How it’s used

• Involves many topics

  • Memory

  • Judgment

  • Decision-making

  • Language

  • Perception

• Late 1800s

  • What is mind?

• Early 1900s

  • Behaviorism dominates, no mind

• 1950s +1960s → Focus on mind

  • Developmental Psychology

    • How do skills develop?

  • Rise of computers

    • Human mind is similar to a computer

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850)

• Found copy of Fechner’s book

  • Psychology → Natural science

• To study memory

  • Objective, experimental procedures

  • Mean and variability

    • Compared means from one condition to another

  • 5 Memory Findings

    • As the amount of material increases, longer study time needed for mastery

    • As the number of repetitions increases, recall time decreases

    • After learning as time increases, amount of remembered material decreases and levels off the forgetting curve

    • Info spaced out is better remembered than massed info

    • Easier to learn meaningful material than nonsense material

British Psychology and the New Look

• Further foundations for cognitive revolution

• British Psychology

  • During WWII, British scientists studied human mind to save country from Nazis

  • Frederic Bartlett

    • Studied memory

      • Behaviorists pushed back

    • Participants read Native American folktale

      • Structure and content → Odd for British participants

    • Participants reconstructed story → Included British elements

    • Memory isn’t identical to facsimile of event

      • Mind reconstructs event, which includes biases

  • Donald Broadbent

    • Filter Model of Attention

      • Bottleneck, selects which info gets through

    • Dichotic Listening Task

      • Hear different info in left and right ear (Attends to one ear)

    • Listeners

      • Better memory of attended ear

      • No memory of unattended ear

  • Alan Turing

    • English mathematician

    • Founded artificial intelligence

      • Investigates how human mind can be programmed into computers

    • Can machines think

      • Proposed objected answer with the Turing Test/Imitation Game

        • Interrogator asks questions to both computer and person

          • Both hidden from interrogator

          • Answers typed on computer screen

        • Can distinguish between computer and person

          • Human → Convince they are human

          • Computer → Answer as if they were human

        • If interrogator can’t distinguish, the computer passes Turing Test and can think

• New Look

  • Mental states and emotions affect perception

  • Jerome Bruner

    • Leader of the New Look

      • Stressed cognitive processes

      • Initially popular, but died out

        • Predated cognitive revolution of 1950s

      • Emotion influences perception

      • Participants estimated size of coins

Development in 1950s

• Perception

  • James J. Gibson

    • Developed ecological psychology

    • Study perception as occurs in natural environment

    • Studying perception in a lab is too limiting

    • Emphasizing connection between movement and perception

    • Gibson’s Ecological Psychology

      • Affordances

        • What object or surface furnishes viewer

        • Viewers perceive affordances

        • Chair → Sit-on-able

        • Solid concrete → walk-able

      • Magical Number: 7 + / -2

        • Short term memory

          • Holds between 5 and 9 chunks of information

• Mind → Analogous to computer

• Psychologists

  • George Miller

  • Noam Chomsky

    • Studied linguistics

      • Reviewed Skinner’s Verbal Behavior

        • First sign at cognitive revolution

    • Skinner learned language through operant conditioning

    • Chomsky said language is too complex to explain through operant conditioning and that people are preprogrammed to learn language

    • Universal Grammar

      • Syntax → Grammatical rules

      • Generative → Ability to create new phrases

      • Children are born to learn new syntax

      • Basic understanding of language organization principles

Cognitive Revolution of 1960s

• Psychologists

  • Ulric Neisser

    • How sensory information is transformed, stored, and used by mind

    • Defined cognition

    • Integrate research topics…

      • Perception

      • Decision making

      • Language

      • Memory

    • Flashbulb Memories

      • Clear and vivid recollection of significant event shared by others

        • JFK assassination

    • Mnemonics

      • Strategy to enhance retrieval

        • HOMES/PEMDAS

    • Memorists

      • People with excellent memory

  • Elizabeth Loftus (1944)

    • Studied memory

    • 1980s → many cases of people accused of child sexual abuse

    • Psychoanalysis suggests that repressed memories of childhood abuse are recalled memories later

    • No evidence of repressed memories, false memories implanted by therapists

    • “Lost in the Mall Technique”

      • Paticipants’ family provided real stories of participants

      • Researcher present 4 stories to participants

        • One false story

      • Could they identify false story?

        • 25% believed the false story happened

    • Misinformation Effect

      • Misleading information after event

        • Leads to false memories

      • Car accident

        • Later → Broken glass?

        • People → “Yes”

        • Reality → No broken glass

        • Doubt accuracy of eyewitness testimony

  • Anne Treisman (1935)

    • Studied attention

    • Broadbent → Don’t remember unattended stream

    • Treisman thought that people might remember unattended stream if info is important

    • Cocktail Party Effect

      • Focus on your conversation

      • Block out other conversations

      • Remember if name is called out

    • Feature Integration Theory

      • Need attention to bind object’s features into whole

        • Color or shape

Judgment and Decision-Making

• Kahn Tvery → Anchoring and adjustment

  • Estimate value based on random starting point