Introduction to Cognitive Psychology

• Cognitive psychology is the study of the mind, thought, language, and the brain
• Cognitive revolution started in the late 1950s, focusing on questions like "How do we read?" and "How do we use language?"
• Cognitive psychology includes perceiving, remembering, using language, reasoning, and solving problems
• Many mental processes occur automatically, very rapidly, and are below conscious awareness

History of Cognitive Psychology

• Modern history began in 1979 with Wilhelm Wundt and the beginnings of experimental psychology as a science
• Modern cognitive psychology emerged in the 1960s, moving away from behaviourism, but valuing its methods
• It combined various perspectives and approaches, representing an evolution in psychology rather than a complete scientific revolution

Memory and Cognition

• Memory involves mental processes used to learn and store new information for later use
• Three kinds of mental activities are Acquisition, Retention, and Retrieval
• Cognition is the collective of mental processes used in perceiving, remembering, thinking, understanding, and using those processes
• Ecological validity refers to the generalizability to real-world situations
• Reductionism is an attempt to understand complex events by breaking them down into components

Anticipation of Psychology

• A basis of all science is Empiricism, which insists on observation and perception
• Aristotle believed that the mind is a "blank slate" at birth, known as "tabula rasa"

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)

• Introspection is a method used to carefully look inward and report on inner sensations and experiences
• Wundt aimed to create a reliable scientific method with trained observers focusing on immediate, conscious experiences
• Reports intruded by memory were excluded

Edward Titchener

• Structuralism focuses on the structure of the conscious mind, including sensations, images, and feelings
• Titchener had the final say on whether introspection reports were correct, leading to unscientific practices

Hermann Von Ebbinghaus

• Ebbinghaus pioneered the experimental study of memory
• Ebbinghaus discovered the forgetting curve and the spacing effect
• Ebbinghaus was the first person to describe the learning curve

William James

• Functionalism focuses on the functions of consciousness rather than its structure
• Darwin wrote about functionalism and was influenced by James

Behaviourism and Neobehaviourism

• Behaviourism is the scientific study of observable behaviour
• The behaviourist movement dismissed introspection and focused on observable behavior

Verbal Learning

• Verbal learning studies the learning of verbal material (letters, syllables, words) in various paradigms like serial learning, paired associate learning, and free recall
• Communication engineering studies devices that transmit information with a limited capacity
• Humans behave like limited-capacity information channels

Cognitive Psychology and Information Processing

• Noam Chomsky reshaped linguistics by introducing the Chomsky hierarchy, generative grammar, and universal grammar
• Universal grammar suggests that all human language is based on an innate mental structure

Measuring Information Processes

• Cognitive psychology aims to reverse engineer the brain like engineers analysing devices they can't access
• Cognitive psychology seeks to understand perception, memory, reasoning, and problem-solving by making cognitive processes observable
• Channel Capacity/bandwidth of human cognition has a limited capacity for processing information
• Information processing helps ask the question: How much information can we handle at once and what happens when we exceed our limits?
• Computer Analogy: Human information processing is like a computer program, helping psychologists understand cognitive tasks.

Interpreting Graphs

• Fourth graders took longer than college students to complete a multiplication problem study
• Response time increased with problem difficulty but less so for college students due to stronger memory retrieval
• Stored knowledge speeds up recall, evident in graph data

Time and Accuracy Measures

• Response time (RT) is the time that passes from when a stimulus is presented until a person reacts
• Differences in response time can provide insights into the speed/difficulty of mental processes, leading to conclusions about cognitive functions and events
• Accuracy is the degree of agreement between an observation/measurement and the true/actual value
• Accuracy was first used in the seminal work by Ebbinghaus, and offers evidence about underlying mental processes

Information Processing and Cognitive Science

• The Standard Theory, also called the modal model says, mental processing can be understood as a sequence of independent processing stages

Memory

• Sensory Memory: Mental representation of how environmental events look, sound, feel, smell and taste
• Sensory memory includes a long-term component useful for such activities as recognizing a color or a familiar voice
• Short-term Memory refers to memory systems that retain information for a limited time, usually up to 30 seconds
• Short term memory is a temporary working memory system with several control processes like encoding, maintenance rehearsal, retrieval, updating, and inhibition
• Long-term Memory: Stage of the Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model in which informative knowledge is held indefinitely
• Encoding is the act of taking in information and converting it to a usable mental form which is then passed to STM

A Process Model

• Process Model: Hypothesis about the specific mental processes that take place when a particular task is performed. Typically appropriate for fairly simple, rapid tasks measured by RT.

A Process Model for Lexical Decision

• Lexical decision task: procedure involves measuring how quickly people classify stimuli as words or nonwords

Lexical Decision and Word Frequency

• Word frequency effect: it takes longer to judge words of lower occurring frequency than higher frequency words

Assumptions

• Sequential stages of processing are stages or processes that occur completely for mental processing
• Independent and nonoverlapping: Each stage must finish before the next one starts, and the length of one stage doesn't affect the others
• Parallel Processing: Multiple mental processes can operate simultaneously

Context Effects

• Context effects: influence of environmental factors on one's perception of a stimulus
• Top-down or or conceptually driven processing: when existing context or knowledge influences earlier or simpler forms of mental processes

Issues

• Verbal protocol: verbalisation of thoughts while solving a problem