Week 1

Front 1

What is cognitive psychology?

Back 1

Cog psy is the study of how people perceive, learn, remember and think about information

Front 2

Why is cog psy important

Back 2

it focuses on the mental processes that underpin everyday functioning (everyday cog is complex: i.e problem solving, decision making etc)

Front 3

Types of cognitive processes

Back 3

there are four types of processes

1. can occur together or in close successions
2. can proceed rapidly
3. can proceed automatically
4. are covert (not directly observable)

Front 4

Philosophical roots: who were the first to theories about memory and learning?

Back 4

Artistotle (empiricist position)

Plato (nativist position)

Front 5

Who followed Artistotle in the empiricist position? (17th-19th centuries)

Back 5

John Locke, David Hulme, John Stuart Mill, George Berkeley

Front 6

Who followed Plato in the nativist position? (17th-19th centuries)

Back 6

Rene Descartes and Emmanuel Kant

Front 7

What is the empiricist position? (John Locke)

Back 7

• kinda an environment over genetics view
  
• knowledge from own experiences
• acknowledge genetics, but emphasis malleable, changeable aspects
• environments = important to intellectual abilities

Front 8

What is the Nativist position? (Rene Descartes)

Back 8

• genetics (constitutional factors) over environments
• individuals differences in abilities are attributed to biologically endowed capacities (i.e. you're born with it)
• hard-wired functions are present at birth (such as the ability to learn language)

Front 9

Early schools of experimental psychology

Back 9

Structuralism: Wilhelm Wundt

• 1879, established first psy research lab in Leipzig, Germany
• defined psy: scientific study of conscious experience
• analysed conscious experience into its basic elements and the relations between them

Front 10

What were Wilhelm Wundt main claims?

Back 10

• raw materials of consciousness are sensory
• any conscious thought (idea) can be defined in terms of 4 properties

1. mode (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory)
2. quality (colour, texture, shape)
3. intensity
4. duration

• with proper training, people cann detect and report the workings of their own minds (introspection)

Front 11

What is functionalism? (WWilliam James)

Back 11

functionalism is interested in:

• conscious experience (as Wundt)
• why the mind works as it does (its functions)

Not interested in:

• elements of consciousness

main points

• the mind lets the individual adapt to his/her environment
• mental phenomena should be studied in real-life situations (not in the lab)

Front 12

What is behaviourism? (J.B. Watson, Skinner)

Back 12

• focus on observable responses to stimuli (operant and classical conditioning)
• criticized introspection as too subjective, unscientific
• images and thoughts= verbal labels for bodily processes (Skinner)
• emphasis on precise definition of concepts, experimental control
• did not study higher mental processes

Front 13

What is Gestalt Psychology? (Max Wertheimer)

Back 13

• humans organise what they perceive

• psy phenomena are best understood when viewed as organised, structured wholes. whole > sum of parts

• proposed laws explaining why components of patterns are seen to belong together

• relevant to perception, insight in problem solving

• opposed to introspection

Front 14

what is Genetic epistemology ?

Back 14

Jean Piaget (1896-1980)

• studied cognitive development
• genetic epistemological approach sympathetic to Gestalt psy
• children at different stages of development use different mental structures to perceive, remember and reason about the world
• more in lifespan development

Front 15

Individual differences (Sir Francis Galton)

Back 15

• what is the nature of mental abilities?
• are intellectual abilities inherited?
• developed

1. many tests and questionnaires to measure intellectual abilities
2. statistical techniques to analyse the data

• forerunner to psychometric
  

Front 16

What happened during the cognitive revolution?

Back 16

• 1990-1950, behaviourist tradition dominated
• during and after ww2, behaviourist assumptions began to be questioned, based on developments in psy and other disciplines
• post revolution: mental representations seen as:

1. necessary to explain human behaviour
2. able to be studied

Front 17

Noam Chomsky's trends contributing to cog revolution?

Back 17

Linguistics

• chomsky rejected behaviorist explanations of language acquisition in favor of nativist approach

1. proposed an innate implicit system of rules

Front 18

What is memory research (cog revolution)

Back 18

• behaviourist concepts could not account for many phenomena
  

1. different kinds of memory
2. organisation of memory (late 1950's)

Front 19

Cognitive development (cog revolution)

Back 19

• Piaget's stage theory stimulated interest in cog processes
• notion of stage is not consistent with behaviourist ideas

Front 20

Neuroscience contribution to cog revolution

Back 20

• new research on localisation of function
• effects of early experience in nervous system development (Hubel and Weisel)

Front 21

Computer metaphor contribution to cog revolution

Back 21

• human cog processes likened to operating computer
• artificial intelligence

Front 22

2 current trends (since 1970's)

Back 22

1. cognitive science

• an interdisciplinary field encompassing (cog psy, linguistics, philosophy, cog neuroscience, computer science and anthropology)
• researchers in these fields investigate common questions

Front 23

What are the common assumption of cognitive science?

Back 23

• cognition must be analysed at the level of representation, rather than

1. how nerve cells work
2. historical or cultural influences

• thinking involves manipulation of internal representations of external worlds (Hunt, 1989)

Front 24

what is cognitive neuropsychology?

Back 24

• study cognitive deficits in brain-damaged individuals
• relate patterns of brain damage to patterns of cognitive performance

Front 25

Research methods in cognitive psy

Back 25

1. Naturalistic observation

• researcher observes people (Unobtrusively) in familiar everyday settings
• advantage: ecological validity (behaviours studied occur naturally)
• disadvantages (lack of experimental control (can infer relationships, but canot isolate casuses) observer biases can creep in

Front 26

what are the advantages and disadvantages to introspection?

Back 26

A: person has greater access to own mental processes than an external observer has = more complete picture

D: self -reports might be biased, distorted

D: reporting while performing task might=mental overload

D:not suitable for all groups (kids cant)

D: poor test-re-test reliability

Front 27

What are other forms of experiments?

Back 27

• controlled observation
• clinical interviews
• experiments and quasi experiments
• imaging studies of the working brain (PET,fMRI)

Front 28

What does a positron emission tomography (PET) scan do?

Back 28

• increased neuronal activity-depletion of glucose and oxygen =temporary increase in blood flow to active area
• small amount of radio tracer is introduced into blood stream
• detect localized changes in energy demands of brain

Front 29

what is a paradigms?

Back 29

• a body of knowledge that selects and highlights certain issues for study
• includes assumptions about (how a phenomenon should be studied, and the kinds of methods and measures that are appropriate to use)

Front 30

what are the 4 current paradigms?

Back 30

1. information processing approach
2. connectionist approach
3. evolutionary approach
4. ecological approach

Front 31

Describe information processing approach

Back 31

• dominant approach in 1960s, 1970s, still influential
• mental processes comparable to computer operations (to some extent)
• computer and human mind are symbol manipulating systems
• mental process interpreted as information proceeding through system in series of stages, from stimulus to responses
• roots in structuralism
• research topics ; identifying, understanding basic capacities and processes in cognition; individual differences, developmental differences in basic capacities and processes
• research methods (reliance on experiments, quasi-experiments

Front 32

What is the connectionist approach (form 1980s)

Back 32

• connectionism replaces computer metaphor with a brain metaphor
• mountcastle's (1979) findings

1. neurons of cortex are; more numerous than previously thought, arranged in a parallel fashion, massively interconnected

• computer functions are depicted using flow charts showing sequences of stages in processing (more parallel processing in brain?)

Front 33

What is connectionist approach (AKA PDP; parallel distributed process) FIVE major points?

Back 33

1. many cog operations are based on parallel, not serial operations
2. neural activity underlying a particular cognitive action is typically distributed across a broad area of cortex (nodes), not limited to a single pin-point sized location
3. nodes are interconnected. when activation of a node reaches threshold, it can affect other connected nodes in excitatory (+) or inhibitory (-) fashion
4. learning occurs when connection between two activated nodes is strengthened
5. incomplete or faulty information can be tolerated to some extent= graceful degradation not catastrophic failure

• that diagram with all the different features that you can pin point to describe a person

Front 34

describe the evolutionary approach (cosmides and tooby)

Back 34

• human mind is a biological systems that has evolved over generations, according to laws of natural selections
• adaption= specialised areas of competence
• special-purpose cognitive mechanism specific to particular classes of problems modules)

1. module for perceiving 3 dimensional objects
2. module for understanding and producing language
3. module for creating, enforcing social contract (cheater detection)

Front 35

describe ecological approach (Lave)

Back 35

• all cog activities are shaped by the culture and by the context in which they occur
• study cognition using field studies, naturalistic observations in real world contexts
• roots in functionalism
• also influences by Gestalt Psychology