Cognitive Psychology Chpt 1

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Cognition

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Mental Activity that describes the acquestion, storage, transformation, and the use of knowledge.

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Cognitive Psychology

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Has two meanings
1- Sometimes it is a synonym for the word cognition, and so it refers to the variety of mental activities we just listed.
2- Sometimes it refers to a particular theoretical approach to psychology.

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Cognitive Psychology

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A theoretical orientation that emphasizes people's thought processes and their knowledge.
Example: A cognitive explanation of ethnic stereotypes would emphasize topics such as the influence of these stereotypes on the judgements we make about people from different ethnic groups.

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Empirical Evidence

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Also known as scientific evidence that is obtained by careful observation and experimentation.

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Who studied the Empirical Evidence?

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Aristotle. He is considered the first cognitive psychologist.

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Introspective

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Meant that carefully trained observes would systematically analyze their own sensations and report them as objectively as possible.

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Recency Effect

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Refers to the observation that our recall is especially accurate for the final item in a series of stimuli.

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Who discovered the Recency Effect?

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Mary Whiton Calkins

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Hermann Ebbinghaus

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First person to scientifically study human memory.
-DAX

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Who discovered Introspection?

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Wilhelm Wundt

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William James

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Wrote the Principles of Psychology.
Book addresses perception, attention, memory, understanding, and reasoning.

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Behaviorism

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Psychology must focus on objective, observable reactions to stimuli in the environment, rather than introspective.

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John B. Watson

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Most prominent early behaviorist.
Typically studied animals.
They believe that researchers can not objectively study mental representations such as an image, idea,or thought.

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Operational Definition

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A precise definition that specifies exactly how a concept is to be measured.

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Gestalt Psychology

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Emphasizes that we humans have basic tendencies to actively organize what we see; furthermore the whole is greater than the sum of its part.

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Gestalt

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Overall quality that transcends the individual elements.

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Frederic Bartlett

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Studied the human memory. He wrote a book called Remembering an Experimental and Social Study. This book is known as one of the most popular books in the history of cognitive psychology.

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Information processing approach

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Argues that:
1-Our mental progresses are similar to the operations of a computer.
2-Information processes through our cognitive system in a series of stages, one step at a time.

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The Atkinson-Shiffrin Model

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proposed that memory involves a sequence of separate steps; in each step, information is transferred from one area to another.

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Sensory Memory

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A storage system that records information from each of the senses with reasonable accuracy

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Short-term Memory/ Working Memory

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Holds only the small amount of information that you are actively using.
These memories are fragile, and can be lost within about 30 seconds.

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Long term Memory

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This has enormous capacity because it contains memories that are decades old. Memories stored here are permanent, compared to the information stored in working memory.

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Cognitive Neuroscience

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Combines the research techniques of cognitive psychology with various methods for assessing the structure and function of the brain.

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Social Cognitive Neuroscience

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The use of neuroscience techniques to explore the kind of cognitive processes.

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Brain lesions

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Refers to the destruction of an area in the brain. Most often they are caused by strokes, tumors, blows to the head, and accidents.

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Positron Emisson Tomography Scan
PET SCAN

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Researches measure blood flow in the brain by injecting them with a low dose of radioactive chemicals just before the person works on a cognitive task. Parts of the brain activate during the test, and a camera makes an image of the accumulated radioactive chemical in various regions of the brain.

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Fuctional Magnetic reasonance imaging Scan
fMRI

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These are based on the principle that oxygen rich blood is an index of brain activity.

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Event-Related Potential technique
ERP

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Records the very brief fluctuations in the brain's electrical activity, in response to a stimulus such as an auditory tone.

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Artifical Intelligence
AI

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A branch of computer science. It seeks to explore human cognitive processes by creating computer models that show "intelligent behavior" and also accomplish the same tasks that humans do.

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Computer Metaphor

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Our cognitive processes work like a computer that is a complex multipurpose machine that processes information quickly and accurately.

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Pure artificial Intelligence

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Is an approach that designs a program to accomplish a cognitive task as efficiently as possible. Even if the computer's processes are completly different from the processes used by humans.

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Computer Simulation/Computer Modeling

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Attempts to take human limitations into account.

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Connectionist Approach

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Argues that cognitive processes can be understood in terms of networks that link together neuron like units; in addition many operations can proceed simultaneously rather than at one step at a time.

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Cerebral Cortex

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Is the outer layer of the brain that is essential for your cognitive processes.

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Serial Processing

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The system must complete one step before it can proceed to the next step in the flowchart.

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Parallel Processing

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Numerous signals handled at the same time, rather than serial processing.

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Cognitive Science

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The interdisciplinary field that tries to answer questions about the mind.

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William James focused on this rather than nonsense syllables or introspection technique?

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Everyday psychological experiences.

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Principles of Psychology provides

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Clear, detailed, descriptions about people's everyday experiences.

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Gestalt psychologists focused on

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the importance of problem solving.

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Frederic Bartlett proposed that

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People make systematic errors when trying to recall stories. He proposed that human memory is an active, constructive process, in which we interpret and transform the information we encounter.

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The birth of cognitive psychology?

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1956
Also known as the cognitive revolution

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Jean Piaget

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Studied that children's cognitive strategies in order to conduct experiments about scientific principles.

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Ecological Validity

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If the conditions in which the research is conducted are similar to the natural setting where the results will be applied.