Cognitive Psychology Overview

Study Notes

Focuses on how the mind is organized and operates to produce intelligent thought, realized within the brain.
John R. Anderson is a significant figure, being a Professor at Carnegie-Mellon University and a pioneer in intelligent tutoring systems used by over 5 million children in U.S. schools.
Anderson has received numerous awards in psychology and cognitive science, emphasizing the rarity of his involvement in undergraduate textbook writing.

The human mind is more complex than current artificial intelligence systems, demonstrating superior capabilities in facts recall, problem-solving, reasoning, learning, and language processing.
While AI seeks to model cognitive processes, achieving a complete replication of the mind's abilities is still a challenge.
Cognitive psychology serves as a foundational basis for other social sciences, influencing areas such as clinical psychology, social psychology, political science, and linguistics.

Understanding cognitive processes can enhance the design of training systems and computer interfaces, optimize knowledge acquisition, and improve eye-witness testimony evaluations in legal situations.
Effective study methods, like the PQ4R technique, can be derived from insights into how the mind works.

Ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato considered knowledge, memory, and thought, though their perspectives delayed scientific exploration of cognition.
Wilhelm Wundt founded psychology in 1879 as the study of conscious experience, but faced challenges due to the reliance on introspective methods.
John B. Watson proposed behaviorism around 1914, claiming psychology should focus solely on observable behaviors and ignore internal mental activity.

Behaviorist principles struggled to explain cognitive performance during WWII tasks.
Computer and AI metaphors revolutionized thoughts about human cognition, with programs capable of replicating logical theorem proofs.
Noam Chomsky critiqued behaviorism, highlighting its inadequacies in explaining language acquisition.

Cognitive psychology gained popularity through models akin to computer processing, shifting focus from behaviorism by attributing internal states to both computers and humans.
These models involve specific processes and representations used to achieve cognitive tasks.

Emerged in the 1990s as brain imaging technology linked cognitive processes to specific brain activity regions.
Cognitive neuroscience studies how mental functions are realized in the brain, moving from a computer model of the mind to a brain-focused model.