Cognitive Psychology Notes

Cognitive psychology explores how individuals acquire, process, store, and retrieve information.
It studies mental processes like thinking, perceiving, remembering, and learning.
It investigates internal mental processes such as attention, memory, language, problem-solving, and decision-making.
Cognitive psychology studies how people perceive, learn, remember, and think about information.

Why do people remember certain experiences and forget the names of people they've known for years?
Why remember childhood acquaintances but forget people met recently?
Why do objects appear farther away on foggy days, leading to dangerous misjudgments?

Cognitive psychology studies how people perceive, learn, remember, and think about information.

Structuralism:
- Seeks to understand the mind's structure by analyzing perceptions into their constituent components.
- Example: Analyzing the perception of a flower in terms of colors, geometric forms, and size relations.
- Introspection:
  - Looking inward at pieces of information passing through consciousness.
  - Example: Analyzing sensations experienced when looking at a flower.
  - Wundt advocated studying sensory experiences through introspection.
Functionalism:
- Seeks to understand what people do and why they do it.
- Focuses on the functions of the mind rather than its structures.
- Unified by the questions they asked, not necessarily by their answers or methods.
- Pragmatism:
  - Knowledge is validated by its usefulness.
  - Concerned with what we can do with our knowledge of what people do.
Associationism:
- Examines how events or ideas become associated in the mind, leading to learning.
Behaviorism:
- Focuses solely on the relationship between observable behavior and environmental stimuli.
- Considers internal thoughts and ways of thinking as speculation.
Gestalt Psychology:
- We understand psychological phenomena best when viewing them as organized, structured wholes.
- Cannot fully understand behavior by breaking phenomena into smaller parts.
- Example: Understanding the perception of a flower requires considering the whole experience, not just forms, colors, and sizes.

Perception:
- How we interpret and make sense of sensory information, such as recognizing objects and faces.
- The process by which individuals interpret and organize sensory information.
- Influenced by past experiences, expectations, culture, and context.
Attention:
- Selectively concentrating on a particular aspect of the environment while ignoring others.
- Focusing one's mind on a stimulus or task, allocating cognitive resources.
- Helps filter out irrelevant information and prioritize mental resources.
Memory:
- Processes used to acquire, store, retain, and retrieve information.
- Involves encoding, storing, and retrieving information.
Language (Psycholinguistics):
- A system of communication using symbols (words or gestures) to convey meaning.
- Behaviorist perspective: Language is learned behavior through conditioning and reinforcement.
- Involves mental processes such as memory, attention, and problem-solving.
- A complex system of rules and structures for creating and understanding messages.
Thinking:
- Mental processes involved in acquiring, processing, and organizing information.
- Encompasses reasoning, decision-making, problem-solving, and creative thinking.
Problem-Solving:
- Finding solutions to difficult or complex issues.
- Identifying the problem, generating potential solutions, evaluating options, and implementing the best course of action.