Cognitive Psychology

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Cognitive Psychology

• Scope, assumptions, and methods

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Cognitive Psychology

• Field of psychology focused on understanding the
  process of thinking
• The study of human mental processes and their
  role in thinking, feeling, and behaving

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Cognitive Psychology

• Encompasses a wide range of mental processes
  including
• Perception, attention, and memory
• Intelligence, Language, Reasoning,
  Problem-Solving, Decision-Making
• Creativity

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Cognitive Psychology

• An important contributor to the interdisciplinary
  field of cognitive science
• Cognitive science is the study of intelligence
  and intelligent systems
• Cognitive science draws on knowledge from
  cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer
  science, neuroscience, and philosophy

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Cognitive Psychology

• A relatively new discipline that has "come of
  age"
• Exerts a strong influence on the broader
  discipline of psychology
• Psychological specialties such as clinical,
  counseling, developmental, health, and social
  psychology draw heavily on cognitive
  psychological concepts

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Historical foundations of Cognitive Psychology

• As is the case with psychology in general,
  cognitive psychology has a "short history but a
  long past"
• The long past refers to the historical
  foundations of psychology itself, beginning with
  the Greek philosophers and including the views of
  rationalism, empiricism, structuralism,
  functionalism, associationism, and behaviorism

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Historical foundations of Cognitive Psychology

• The predominate force in academic psychology
  during the first half of the 20th century was
  behaviorism ("the great white rat era")
• The belief was that psychology should deal only
  with publicly observable and therefore measurable
  behavior.

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Historical foundations of Cognitive Psychology

• The short history of cognitive psychology begins
  in the 1950s, with the occurrence of the
  cognitive revolution, a fundamental shift in
  psychology's approach to explaining behavior
• A number of factors, many associated with WWII,
  were responsible for bringing about this
  revolution

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Factors contributing toThe Cognitive Revolution

• Psychologists assisting in the war effort on
  tasks such as improving marksmanship, efficient
  piloting, surveillance, monitoring,
  code-breaking
• Understanding these activities required concepts
  beyond those offered by behaviorism

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Factors contributing toThe Cognitive Revolution

• Disappointment/Disenchantment with the
  behaviorist approach
• Complex behavior could not be readily explained
  using only terms and concepts such as stimulus,
  response, and reinforcement

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Factors contributing toThe Cognitive Revolution

• Neo-Behaviorists willing to "peek into the black
  box"
• Edward Tolman
  Cognitive maps, Purposive behavior

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Factors contributing toThe Cognitive Revolution

• Gestalt psychology
• Kohler, Wertheimer
• The whole is different than the sum of its
  parts Importance of perception

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Factors contributing toThe Cognitive Revolution

• New knowledge from the field of linguistics
• Chomsky showed that behaviorism could not
  explain the acquisition and use of language.

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Factors contributing toThe Cognitive Revolution

• New knowledge regarding memory and distinct
  memory systems
• output (recall) often does not accurately
  reflect input.

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Factors contributing toThe Cognitive Revolution

• New discoveries about the brain
• Lashley Equipotentiality
• Hebb Cell assemblies

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Factors contributing toThe Cognitive Revolution

• Research on cognitive development
• Piaget showed qualitative rather than
  quantitative changes in the development of mental
  abilities

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Factors contributing toThe Cognitive Revolution

• Development of Human Factors and Communications
  Fields
• Limited-capacity processor view
• Communications terminology (channel,
  operator, etc)

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Factors contributing toThe Cognitive Revolution

• Advances in computer technology
• information-processing approach (input,
  output, algorithms, etc)
• artificial intelligence

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The birth of a new discpline Cognitive Psychology

• September 1956, MIT Symposium
• 1967, Neisser published "Cognitive Psychology.
  The first textbook for the new field.
• "the floodgates holding back the many pressures
  of consciousness and subjectivity were suddenly
  opened"

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Cognitive Psychology

• By taking this course you will be engaging in one
  of humankind's greatest quests
• the mind seeking to understand the mind

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The focus of this course

• The science of mental life as defined by
  contemporary research methods, theories, and
  findings.

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Research methods of Cognitive Psychology

• Introspection
• Verbal protocols / Self-report
• Behaviorial measures
• Reaction time (RT)
• Error rate
• Physiological measures
• Psychophysiological
• Neuroimaging

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Research methods of Cognitive Psychology

• Computer simulation
• Goal is to produce human-like processing
• Artificial intelligence
• Goal is to create most efficient processing
• It is common and fruitful for multiple methods to
  be applied to any given research question

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Research Strategies of Cognitive Psychology

• Populations studied
• People with typical cognitive abilities
• People with impaired cognitive abilities
• People with known neurological impairment
• New trend studies of animal cognition

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Core concepts in Cognitive Psychology

• The information processing approach
• Assumes that the mind is a processor of
  information, computing answers in a manner
  similar to a computer
• Assumes that all thoughts are calculations

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Core concepts in Cognitive Psychology

• Mental representation
• An unobservable internal code for information
  that is different from and greater than the
  physical representation
• Provides the basis for all cognitive abilities
• "All that you know OF the world and your only
  basis for acting ON the world, is found in your
  mental representations"

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Core concepts in Cognitive Psychology

• Stages of processing
• The basic assumption that mental representations
  are created, modified, and used through a series
  of stages
• Tied to the information processing approach
• Rationale for use of the subtraction method

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Core concepts in Cognitive Psychology

• Serial vs parallel processing
• Questions whether the "stages" of processing
  occur sequentially or simultaneously
• Tied to the connectionist or PDP approach
• Rationale for use of computer simulation and
  mathematical modeling

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Core concepts in Cognitive Psychology

• Ecological validity
• Artificiality of experimental stimuli
• Ecological validity
• Artificiality of experimental tasks
• Ecological validity
• Possibility of affective interference in
  laboratory settings, esp physiological testings

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Descriptions Explanations in Cognitive
Psychology

• Behavioral
• Provide valuable descriptions but no explanation
• Cognitive
• Provide theoretical explanations
• Physical
• Provide a physiological link between a behavior
  and its cognitive explanation

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Descriptions Explanations in Cognitive
Psychology

• Metaphors
• Attempt to explain human behavior by comparing it
  to a known physical process
• Theories
• Attempt to explain behavior in terms of
  unobservable hypothetical mental processes
• Models
• Attempt to provide visual illustrations linking
  the hypothetical mental processes with behavior

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Explaining attentional deficits in schizophrenia

• Metaphorical explanation
• "The leaky filter hypothesis"
• Theoretical explanation
• "The inhibitory deficit theory"
• A Model

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What you will learn in this class

• Basic organization function of the brain
• Fundamental cognitive processes perception,
  attention, and MEMORY
• Higher-level processes Problem-Solving,
  Decision-Making, Language, and Creativity
• Individual differences development, gender,
  culture, psych/neuro impairment