What is cognitive psychology?
Cognitive psychology refers to the scientific study of mental processes.
Do cognitive psychologists examine behaviour?
Yes. Cognitive psychologists study behaviour to infer underlying mental processes.
This is similar to how physicists infer the force of gravity from the behaviour of objects in the gravitational field.
What is cognitive science?
Cognitive science refers to an interdisciplinary effort to understand the mind.
It comprises six fields, including cognitive psychology.
Philosophy examines the mind, helps to formulate and examine the fundamental questions that define the field.
Neuroscience attempts to specify the relationship between the mind and the brain.
Artificial Intelligence models human thought processes with computer hardware and software.
Linguistics studies the relationship between language and cognition.
Anthropology studies the relationship between culture and cognition.
Cognitive psychology refers to the scientific study of mental processes.
What are laws of association?
Laws of association explain why activating some concepts seems to automatically activate others.
What is psychophysics?
Psychophysics refers to the study of the relationship between the physical properties of a stimulus and the properties that the stimulus takes on after it is filtered through subjective experience.
In other words, it studies the relationship between the physical and the psychological.
What is unconscious inference?
According to Hemholtz, our visual systems constantly make inferences about the external environment based on the information gathered and previous experience (c.f. constructive view).
Hemholtz concept of unconscious inference highlights three important principles.
First, perception is not a passive process. The perceiver plays an interpretive role.
Second, perceptual and cognitive processes are influenced by previous experience.
What is structuralism?
Structuralists propose that consciousness can be broken down into three distinct and basic elements: sensations, feelings and images.
Introspection refers to a procedure that requires participants to provide a rigorous and unbiased report of every element of conscious experience that accompanies the presentation of a stimulus.
What is functionalism?
Functionalists propose that psychology should study the functions of the mind – what it does in everyday life.
What is behaviourism?
Behaviourists study observable stimuli and responses.
Although they do not deny that we experience consciousness, they reject the idea that it can be meaningfully studied.
What did Ebbinghaus’ experiment on memory show? Why is it significant?
Ebbinghaus’ experiment captured the forgetting curve, which shows that memory performance declines over time.
His research demonstrated that well-controlled experimental methods could be applied to study complex mental processes.
Moreover, it provided a research paradigm for the study of memory.
What did Bartlett’s research show?
Bartlett’s research shows that memory is a reconstructive process guided by schemata (generalised knowledge structures based on experience).
What is the difference between Ebbinghaus’ and Bartlett’s research on memory?
While Ebbinghaus’ research has high internal validity due to experimental control, Bartlett’s research has high ecological validity and thus more generalisable.
What is Gestalt psychology?
Gestalt psychology emphasises the role of organisational principles that guide mental processing.
They argue that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.
This means that researchers cannot capture the essence of conscious experience by analysing it into its elements (structuralism).
Neither can researchers understand experience and behaviour by not studying conscious experience (behaviourism).
How does behaviourism fail to account for data?
According to behaviourism, responding is essential for learning.
McNamara, Long and Wike (1956), however, demonstrated that learning can occur without responding.
According to behaviourism, reinforcement is essential for learning.
Tlman and Honzik (1930), however, shows that learning can occur without reinforcement.
They discovered a process known as latent learning, the unreinforced learning that is not immediately expressed behaviourally but stored cognitively.
According to behaviourism, does not predict the existence of “cognitive maps” or a mental “lay of the land”.
Tolman (1948), however, demonstrated that rats in a maze utilised these mental maps to navigate.
Lashley argues that S-R connections fail to explain complex behaviours.
Chomsky argued that S-R connections fail to explain language acquisition.
According to him, the novelty and productivity in language can only be explained by appealing to mental representations.
Advances in communications engineering provided a metaphor for how the mind might work: with an information source, transmitter, channel through which messages are transmitted, and a receiver.
What is the information processing model?
The information processing model is a paradigm in cognitive psychology.
According to this paradigm, the computer is a model for human cognition.
There are four basic assumptions in this model.
First, human are symbol manipulators who encode, store, retrieve and manipulate symbolic data.
This data consists of representations that correspond to information from the environment and processes.
Next, thought is characterised as a system of interrelated capacities and processes that all affect each other.
Third, humans are active and creative information scanners and scanners.
Last, cognitive processing occurs in serial where products for a given stage serves as the input for the next, and so on.
Unlike a computer, however, humans do not have a central processing unit, and do not operate in a serial, but parallel, fashion.
What is connectionism?
Connectionism accounts for cognition based solely on the hardware (i.e. the brain).
It makes the following assumptions:
Cognitive systems comprise billions of interconnected nodes that form complex networks.
Nodes can be activated, and the pattern of activation corresponds to conscious experience.
Knowledge is represented in the pattern of nodes distributed throughout the network.
Cognitive processing occurs in parallel.
What is cognitive neuroscience?
Cognitive neuroscience studies the relationship between cognitive processes and their neural substrates.
What is a neuron?
A nerve cell.
What is an action potential?
An action potential is an electrical signal through a neuron.
What is the laterisation of function?
This means that the left hemisphere receives information from and controls the right side of the body, and vice versa.
The corpus callosum allows both hemispheres to communicate.
What are split-brain patients?
Split-brain patients are people who have had their corpus callosum severed to alleviate the severity of epileptic seizures.
What is the limbic system?
A subcortical structure that is integral to learning and remembering new information as well as the processing of information.
What is spatial resolution?
How well the technique pinpoints where the neural activity occurs.
What is temporal resolution?
How well the technique pinpoints when the neural activity occurs.