Cognitive Psychology PDF

Cognitive Psychology - study of how people perceive, learn, remember, and think about information. Cognition - the collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, learning, remembering (act of using those processes) Plato - reality resides not in the concrete objects we perceive bu...

Cognitive Psychology - study of how people perceive, learn, remember, and think about information. Cognition - the collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, learning, remembering (act of using those processes) Plato - reality resides not in the concrete objects we perceive but in the abstract forms that these objects represent. (through logical analysis) Aristotle- Reality lies only in the concrete world of the objects that our body sense (through empirical evidence) Rene Descartes - Mental representations John Locke - Tabula rasa, learning Rationalism - phenomena can be understood through careful thought and logical proof, reason is the best route to knowledge, logical deduction. (Descartes - Cogito, ergo sum ) Empiricism - phenomena are to be investigated by careful objective observation, methodological (Aristotle and John Locke) EARLY DIALECTICS IN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF COGNITION Structuralism - understanding the structure of the mind by analyzing those perceptions into their components (INTROSPECTION - WILHEM WUNDT, EDWARD TITCHENER) Functionalism - study the process rather than the contents (INTROSPECTION, OBSERVATION, EXPERIMENT - WILLIAM JAMES) Associationism - study of linking together two events Mental processes - operate by the association of a mental state with its successor states Behavior - occurs because of trial and error Knowledge comes from experience - John Locke, David Hume, John Stuart Mills Behaviorism - study observable behavior, any hypotheses about internal thoughts and ways of thinking are nothing more than speculation. We cannot say anything meaningful about cognition. (ANIMAL EXPERIMENTS, CONDITIONING EXPERIMENTS - JOHN B WATSON, B.F. SKINNER) Psycho- Physiological -the study of the relationship between physiological signals recorded from the body and brain to cognitive and emotional processes. (H. VON HELMHOLTZ, G.FECHNER, C.WOLFF, W. WUNDT) Gestalt - understand the psychological phenomena as organized structured whole. The whole differs from the sum of its parts. (EXPERIMENT, OBSERVATION - MAX WERTHEIMER, WOLFGANG KOHLER) Cognitivism - the belief that much of human behavior can be understood in terms of how people think Karl Lashley - brain is an active dynamic organizer of behavior Donald Hebb - concept of cell assembles the basis of learning in the brain Noam Chomsky - both the biological and the creative potential of language Alan Turing - analogy between computers and human minds RESEARCH METHODS IN COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY - Theory Development - Hypotheses formulation - Hypotheses testing - Data Gathering - Data Analysis - Ecological Validity (The degree to which particular findings in one context may be considered relevant outside of that context) Psychobiological Research - study animal brains and human brains, using postmortem studies Case Studies - emerge in intensive study of single individuals, drawing general conclusions and behavior Naturalistic observation - observe real life situations Simulations - attempt to make computers simulate human cognitive performance on various task AI - attempt to make computers demonstrate intelligent cognitive performance regardless whether the process resembles human cognitive processing. KEY THEMES IN COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY - Data without theory is meaningless, theory without data is empty - Cognitive process (memory, learning, attention, perception) interact with each other and with non cognitive (motivation, effort) process - Cognition needs to be studied through variety of scientific methods - Basic research in CP may lead to application, applied research may lead to basic understanding. - Cognition is generally adaptive, but not in all specific instances KEY THEMES IN COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY Nature Vs Nurture Rationalism Vs. Empiricism Structure vs processes Validity of causal inferences vs ecological validity Applied vs basic research Biological vs behavioral methods Domain generality vs domain specificity Attention - is it a mechanism or a pool of resources Automatic vs controlled processing - study of consciousness and control Data driven vs conceptually driven processing - processing driven by environment or existing knowledge Representation - how information is represented, same memory codes or different? Implicit vs explicit processing - aware vs unaware: can information for which you have no conscious awareness affect your behavior? Metacognition- our own perceive awareness of our own cognitive systems and capabilities EVERYDAY EXAMPLES OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY Attention - sometimes a person’s cognitive processing system gets overloaded. When that happens, it becomes necessary to focus one’s attention on certain things. Formation Concept - aspect of cognitive psychology focuses on the human ability to organize experiences into categories. Judgment and decisions - study of decision making. Any behavior, implicit or explicit, requires judgment and then a decision or a choice. Language Processing - study of how language is acquired, comprehended, and produced. Learning - study of new cognitive or conceptual information that is taken in and how that process occurs Memory - a large part of cognitive psychology. Learning the types of memory covers the process of acquiring, storing, and retrieving memory, including facts, skills, and capacity. Perception - includes the senses and how people process what they sense Problem solving - a way that humans achieve goals. This aspect focuses on how people approach determining how to solve problems. Achieving goals - moving toward accomplishing a goal can include different kinds of reasoning as as perception Reasoning - the process of formulating logical arguments. It involves making deductions and inferences and why some people value certain deductions over others. AREAS OF APPLICATION IN COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY Moral Development - how moral dilemmas change a person’s moral reasoning based on where the individual is in the stages of moral development. Eyewitness testimony - cognitive psychology can explain how a witness’ testimony is affected by stress or leading questions. Forgetting - this area covers long and short term memory as well as how forgetting occurs. Cognitive psychologists consider how learning new information can potentially lead to forgetting old information, as well as other factors that can lead to the loss of previously known formation. Selective attention - human have a limited capacity for paying attention Child development - deals with the processes of cognitive process as children pass through various stages of development Cognitive behavioral therapy - approach to therapy combines cognitive theory with behavioral methods. Learning styles - investigates the different ways in which people learn Education - teachers apply principles of how people perceive, pay attention to, organize, understand, learn, and remember information in everything that they do. Information processing - suggests that people process information they receive rather than just responding to stimuli. Cognitive Interview - interview witnesses use cognitive interviewing techniques designed to maximize what they remember. Face recognition - being able to recognize another person’s face requires cognitive processing