Cognitive Psychology: History and Overview

Cognitive Psychology: History and Overview

• Cognitive psychology studies mental processes enabling human function, focusing on the mind.
• The mind creates mental representations of the world and controls cognitive functions (perception, attention, memory, emotion, language, decision-making, and reasoning).
• Cognition is the mental process of interacting with the world.
• Recognizing, recalling, communicating, reasoning, and decision-making are cognitive processes.
• The mind enables survival and functionality.

Early Attempts to Study the Mind

• Fechner & Weber (psychophysics) investigated mind-world connections, measuring psychological experience from stimuli.
• Broca (brain damage) linked specific brain areas to specific functions, establishing mind-brain connections. Broca's aphasia involves damage to the frontal lobe, affecting speech production.
• Donders (reaction time) performed early cognitive psychology experiments, demonstrating mental processes through behavioral observation.
  • Simple reaction time: Responding to a single stimulus.
  • Choice reaction time: Responding to one of multiple stimuli.
• Wundt (structuralism & introspection): Established the first psychology lab and outlined structuralism-breaking down perception into elemental sensations and analytic introspection, a method for detailed self-reporting of mental processes.

The Emergence of Behaviorism

• Behaviorism focused on observing and controlling behavior through observable behavior.
• Pavlov (classical conditioning): Developed classical conditioning by pairing neutral stimuli with responses to create conditioned stimuli and responses.
• Watson (Little Albert): Introduced behaviorism's goals for prediction and control, highlighting observable actions and environmental stimuli. Demonstrated fear conditioning in his famous experiment.
• Skinner (operant conditioning): Developed operant conditioning techniques, emphasizing the role of reinforcement in behavior shaping using the Skinner box, without believing in free will.
• Tolman (cognitive maps): Challenged behaviorism with research showing rats' ability to form mental maps, indicating mental representation.
• Thorndike (trial and error): Observed that animals learn through trial and error to achieve goals.

The Cognitive Revolution

• The cognitive revolution marked a shift in psychology away from behaviorism to explain behavior in terms of mental processes.
• Computers served as models, emphasizing information-processing stages.
• Neisser coined "cognitive psychology" in 1967.
• Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968): Proposed a three-stage memory model (sensory, short-term, long-term). This model shows a progression from initial input to storage and later output of responses.

Neuroscience and Cognition

• Cognitive neuroscience investigates the biological underpinnings of cognition.
• Tools like fMRI and PET measure brain activity during cognitive tasks.
• Localization of function: Demonstrates specific cognitive functions associated with particular brain structures (e.g., Broca's and Wernicke's areas).
• Distributed representation: Cognitive processes activate multiple brain areas.
• Neural networks: Interconnected brain areas communicate.
• Connectome and functional connectivity: describe the brain's structure and workings.
• Default mode network: Brain activity at rest, often associated with self-reflection.

Perception

• Perception is the experience resulting from sensory stimulation.
• Sensory receptors detect environmental stimuli.
• Stimulus energy leads to sensory receptors, then neural impulses, and finally, brain processing.
• Perception involves bottom-up (stimulus-driven) and top-down (expectation-driven) processing.
• Gestalt principles: Rules guiding perceptual organization into meaningful wholes. These suggest mental predisposition towards organization.
• Regularities in the environment and knowledge influence perception.
• Bayesian inference: We estimate probabilities based on past experiences to interpret current sensory information.
• Perception and action interact, with visual input processed for both action and understanding.
• Mirror neurons: Respond to watching actions as if performed by the observer.