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• Cognitive psychology studies the mind.

What is the Mind?

• The mind creates and controls mental functions like perception, attention, memory, and language.
• The mind is a system that creates representations of the world, enabling action and goal achievement.
• Cognition refers to mental processes such as perception, attention, and memory.
• Cognitive psychology studies mental processes to understand the mind's characteristics and operation.

Studying the Mind: Early Work in Cognitive Psychology

• In the 1800s, studying the mind was considered impossible due to the inability to measure its properties or for the mind to study itself.

Donders's Pioneering Experiment: How Long Does It Take to Make a Decision?

• Franciscus Donders, a Dutch physiologist, conducted one of the first cognitive psychology experiments.
• The term "cognitive psychology" was not coined until 1967.
• Donders measured reaction time to determine how long it takes to make a decision.
• Reaction time measures how long it takes to respond to a stimulus.
• Donders used two types of reaction time measurement: simple and choice.

Simple and Choice Reaction Time

• Simple reaction time involves pushing a button as quickly as possible upon seeing a light.
• The process involves perceiving the light and then pushing the button.
• Reaction time is the time between the presentation of the stimulus and the behavioral response.
• Choice reaction time involves using two lights, where participants push a left or right button depending on which light goes on.
• The choice reaction time task adds decisions by requiring participants to first decide which light is illuminated and then which button to push.

Donders's Reasoning

• Donders reasoned that the difference in reaction time between simple and choice conditions indicates the decision-making time.
• Since the choice reaction time took 1/10th of a second longer than simple reaction time, Donders concluded that the decision-making process took 1/10th of a second
• Mental responses cannot be measured directly but must be inferred from behavior.
• Donders measured the relationship between stimulus presentation and response, inferring mental processes from reaction times

Wundt's Psychology Laboratory: Structuralism & Analytical Introspection

• William Wundt founded the first scientific psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig in Germany.
• Wundt's approach, dominating psychology in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was called structuralism.
• Structuralism determines overall experience by combining basic elements of experience called sensations.
• Wundt aimed to create a "periodic table of the mind" that included all basic sensations involved in creating experience.
• Wundt used analytical introspection
• Analytic introspection is a technique where trained participants describe their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli.
• Analytic introspection required extensive training to describe experience in terms of elementary mental elements.

Ebbinghaus's Memory Experiment: What is the Time Course of Forgetting?

• Ebbinghaus studied memory and forgetting, specifically how rapidly learned information is lost.
• Ebbinghaus used a quantitative method for measuring memory.
• Using himself as the participant, he repeated lists of 13 nonsense syllables one at a time at a constant rate.
• He used nonsense syllables so his memory would not be influenced by meaning.
• Ebbinghaus determined how long it took to learn a list for the first time.
• He then waited for a specific amount of time (the delay) and then determined how long it took to relearn the list.
• Ebbinghaus made errors when first trying to remember the list but relearned it more rapidly the second time.
• He used "savings" to determine how much was forgotten after a delay.
• Savings = Original time to learn the list - time to relearn the list after the delay.
• Longer delays result in smaller savings.
• According to Ebbinghaus, the reduction in savings measured forgetting, with smaller savings indicating more forgetting.
• A savings curve plots percent savings versus time.
• Memory drops rapidly for the first 2 days after initial learning and then levels off

William James's Principle of Psychology

• William James taught Harvard's first psychology course and made observations about the mind.
• James's observations were based on his own mind's operation rather than experiments.
• Paying attention involves withdrawing from other things.
• James considered cognitive tasks such as thinking, consciousness, attention, memory, perception, imagination, and reasoning.
• A negative reaction to Wundt's analytic introspection was a major force in psychology rejecting the study of mental processes.

Abandoning the Study of the Mind

• Watson became dissatisfied with analytic introspection because it produced variable results and was difficult to verify.
• In response to perceived deficiencies in analytic introspection, Watson proposed behaviorism.
• Watson rejected introspection as a method.
• He said observable behavior, not consciousness (thinking, emotions, reasoning), should be studied.
• Watson restricted psychology to behavioral data and rejected drawing conclusions about unobservable mental events.
• Watson aimed to replace the study of the mind with the study of directly observable behavior.
• Watson's ideas are associated with classical conditioning.
• Classical conditioning involves pairing one stimulus with another, where a neutral stimulus causes changes in response.
• Watson's inspiration was Ivan Pavlov's research demonstrating classical conditioning in dogs.
• Watson used classical conditioning to argue that behavior can be analyzed without referencing the mind.

Skinner's Operant Conditioning

• B.F. Skinner introduced operant conditioning.
• Operant conditioning focuses on how behavior is strengthened by positive reinforcers.
• Like Watson, Skinner focused solely on how stimuli controlled behavior, not on what was happening in the mind.

Setting The Stage For the Reemergence of the Mind in Psychology

• Edward Chance Tolman was a behaviorist who used behavior to infer mental processes.
• A cognitive map is a mental representation of the physical environment's layout.
• Skinner argued children learn language through operant conditioning by imitating and repeating rewarded speech.
• Noam Chomsky pointed out that children say novel sentences and use incorrect grammar not reinforced by parents.
• Chomsky saw language development as determined by an inborn biological program across cultures, not by imitation or reinforcement.

The Rebirth of the Study of the Mind

• The 1950s is recognized as the beginning of the cognitive revolution.
• The cognitive revolution shifted psychology from behaviorism's focus on stimulus-response relationships to understanding the mind.
• Thomas Kuhn defined a scientific revolution as a shift from one paradigm to another.
• A paradigm is a system of ideas that dominate science at a particular time.
• A scientific revolution involves a paradigm shift.
• The paradigm shift from behaviorism to the cognitive approach provided a new way to look at behavior.
• Psychology was dominated by experiments on how rewards and punishments affect behavior, which led to behavioral therapies.
• In the 1950s, the new cognitive paradigm began to emerge.
• The digital computer was introduced as a way of describing the operation of the mind.

Introduction of the Digital Computer

• The first digital computer was developed in the late 1940s.
• In 1954, IBM introduced a publicly available computer.

Flow Diagrams For Computers

• Computers processed information in stages: input processor, memory unit, and arithmetic unit.
• Psychologists used this as inspiration for the information-processing approach to studying the mind.
• The information-processing approach traces sequences of mental operations in cognition.
• According to the information-processing approach, the mind's operation occurs in stages.

Flow Diagrams For the Mind

• Colin Cherry (1953) showed that when people focus on an attended auditory message, they could hear the unattended message's sounds but were unaware of its contents.
• Donald Broadbent (1958) proposed the first flow diagram of the mind.
• Input includes both attended and unattended messages.
• A filter lets through the attended message and filters out the unattended message.
• The detector records the information that gets through the filter.
• Broadbent's flow diagram analyzed the mind's operation in terms of processing stages.

Conferences on Artificial Intelligence & Information Theory

• John McCarthy defined artificial intelligence as making a machine behave intelligently like a human.
• Herb Simon and Alan Newell created the "logic theorist" program that used humanlike reasoning to solve problems.
• George Miller proposed that the human mind can only process about seven items.
• Miller's principle states that there are limits to the amount of information we can take in and remember.

The Evolution of Cognitive Psychology

• Neisser wrote what was the first cognitive psychology textbook: "Cognitive Psychology" (1967).
• Neisser did not focus on "higher mental processes" like thinking or problem-solving initially due to limited knowledge.
• He argued there was a complete absence of physiology; he was interested in how the mind operates, not its physiological mechanisms.

Studying Higher Mental Processes

• Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin's (1968) model of memory was a step towards studying higher mental processes.
• The model pictures information flow in the memory system through 3 stages: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.
• Sensory memory holds incoming information briefly and passes most of it to short-term memory.
• Short-term memory has limited capacity and holds information for seconds.
• Long-term memory is a high-capacity system for holding information for long periods.
• This model opened the way for studying each part separately and subdividing them into smaller units.
• Endel Tulving proposed that long-term memory is subdivided into 3 components: episodic memory, semantic memory, and procedural memory.
• Episodic memory is for events in your life.
• Semantic memory is for facts.
• Procedural memory is for physical actions.

Studying The Physiology of Cognition

• Physiological research provided insights into the "behind the scenes" neural activity that creates the mind.
• Two techniques dominated early research on the mind: neuropsychology and electrophysiology.
• Neuropsychology studies the behavior of people with brain damage.
• Electrophysiology measures electrical responses of the nervous system.
• Positron emission tomography (PET) was introduced in 1976 to see which brain areas activate during cognitive activity.
• PET used radioactive tracers injected into a person's bloodstream.
• PET was replaced by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which didn't use radioactive tracers and had higher resolution.

New Perspectives on Behavior

• Current cognitive psychology involves sophisticated flow diagrams, higher mental processes, and physiological research.
• Researchers began taking research out of the laboratory.
• Understanding the mind requires studying people moving through and acting in the environment.
• Cognitive psychology features more research on cognition in "real-world" situations.
• Researchers realized humans are not "blank slates" and began demonstrating the importance of knowledge for cognition.