Cognitive Psychology - An Introduction

• Module I provides an introduction to cognitive psychology

Cognitive Psychology - An Introduction

• Focuses on the area of psychology studying cognitions/thoughts, and their connection to experiences/actions
• Cognitive psychology aims to apply research to everyday events and challenges
• It seeks to understand the basic concepts within cognitive psychology and mental representations

Introduction

• Cognitive psychology is a study of cognitive processes that the mind undertakes
• Examples are paying attention to conversations, judging vehicle speed, memorizing information
• These processes are often automatic but crucial for daily function
• The chapter introduces foundational figures and research methods in cognitive psychology

Cognitive Psychology Defined

• Cognition stems from the Latin "cognoscere," meaning "to know," encompassing knowledge acquisition, storage, retrieval, and processing
• Cognitive psychology studies mental cognitive processes
• These include perceiving, attending, remembering, thinking, categorizing, reasoning and deciding
• The study involves how people perceive, learn, remember, and think about information
• Cognitive psychologists explore why individuals remember certain facts, forget others, and acquire language

History of Cognitive Psychology

• The study of higher mental processes has been ongoing since the 19th century
• Late 19th century American psychologists shifted from behaviorism adopting a mind model resembling a computer
• Four main time periods mark the development of cognitive psychology:
  • Initial Development
  • Growth of Cognitive Psychology
  • Rise of Cognitive Science
  • Newer Directions (Connectionism and Cognitive Neuroscience)

Initial Development

• From the 1920s-1950s, behaviorism was a dominant force in American psychology
• Behaviorism focused on learning associations, primarily in nonhuman species, limiting theories to stimulus-response
• External research approaches led to the decline of behaviorism

Communications Research and the Information Processing Approach

• During World War II concepts around signal processing and communication were developed
• These concepts had a significant impact on psychologists
• Shannon's 1948 paper on Information Theory proposed that information is communicated through a signal via stages/transformations
• It suggested parallels between human perception/memory and the communication process
• The "information processing" approach views cognition as information flow within an organism
• Information theory introduced concepts of quantifying information in "bits"

The Generative Linguistics Approach

• Noam Chomsky's work in linguistics was an external influence leading to modern cognitive psychology
• His 1957 book, Syntactic Structures, explored the mental units required to represent the linguistic knowledge of a language speaker
• Chomsky argued that association alone couldn't fully represent the knowledge of syntax
• A component capable of transforming syntactic structures was needed
• Chomsky's review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (1959) was a significant document as it undermined behaviorism

The Growth of Cognitive Psychology

• The 1960s had advances in pattern recognition, memory, and psycholinguistics

Pattern Recognition

• Cognitive approach provided a 2-stage view of object recognition
  • Describing the input object in terms of important features
  • Matching this description to stored object descriptions in visual memory
• Ulrich Neisser (1964) furthered empirical studies through a computer model (Selfridge, 1959), suggesting objects are matched to multiple visual memories in parallel

Memory Models and Finding

• Broadbent's attention and memory model sparked rival models throughout the 1960s
• STM and LTM were qualitatively different structures, and information transfers to LTM

The Rise of Cognitive Science: Memory and Language

• Early 1970s had memory and language intersecting
• John Anderson and Gordon Bower's Human Associative Memory (1973) presented a linguistic memory model and combined information processing with AI
• Other models followed from Kitsch (1974), Norman, Rinehart, and the LNR Research Group (1975), Anderson (1976), and Schunk and Abelson (1977)

Newer Directions: Connectionism and Cognitive Neuroscience

• The two main paths in cognitive psychology are connectionism and cognitive neuroscience

Connectionist Modeling

• Computer models used complex symbols as representations processing them via rule-based fashion
• "Connectionist" (or parallel distributed processing) models attracted interest in the early 1980s
• These models form neural networks with interconnected nodes that vary in strength

Cognitive Neuroscience

• A growing interest exists in cognition's neural foundations, known as "cognitive neuroscience"
• Contemporary consensus suggests standard information processing analyses can be enlightened by understanding implementation in the brain

Current Issues in Cognitive Psychology

• Current important issues include:
  • Nature versus Nurture
  • Rationalism versus Empiricism
  • Structures versus Processes
  • Domain generality versus Domain specificity -Validity of causal inferences versus Ecological validity
  • Applied versus Basic research
  • Biological versus Behavioural methods

Future Trends in Cognitive Psychology

• Trends in cognitive psychology include:
  • Cognitive neuroscience becoming increasingly central
  • The prominence of statistical models based on Bayesian probability theory
  • Increased emphasis on embodiment

Basic Concepts in Cognitive Psychology

• Core principles in cognitive psychology are presented through mental representations and information processing

Mental Representations

• Human minds operate using representation and computation
• A mental representation is an internal code for information that cannot be observed by others and allows individuals to perceive, comprehend, decide, and act

Information Processing

• Cognitive psychology studies the individual as an information processor, like a computer
• Human information processing studies behavior and thought
• It focuses on how humans encode, process, store, and retrieve information
• The architecture, subsystem operations via behavioral, psychophysiological, and brain-imaging methods are revealed
• Information-processing models describe the flow, predict response times, error rates, and other performance aspects
• There are also top-down and bottom-up theories
  • Top-down processing facilitates pattern recognition using contextual handwriting -Bottom-up processing starts at the sensory input