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CogPsych 1

Chapter 1: What is Cognitive Psychology?

TermDefinition
What is cognitive psychology? The branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind.
Early history of cognitive psychology 1860-1870s: Psychophysics (Fechner, Weber), 1868: Donder's Pioneering Experiment 1879: Wundt's psych lab at Leipzig 1885: Ebbinghaus' Memory Experiments
In 1868, He was interested in determining how long it took for a person to make a decision. He measured two types of reaction: simple - press button fast, and choice - used two lights, subjects pressed left if left light on. Choice longer by 0.1s than simple etc
What did Donders' experiment acheive? Mental responses cannit be perceived directly but msut be inferred by behaviour.
What is structuralism? Overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experienced called sensations. The goal was to describe irreducible structures that comprised thought.
What did Wundt want to acheive? He hoped to create a "periodic table of the mind", which included all the basic sensations. He did this through analytic introspection.
What is analytic introspection? Trained subjects described their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli in terms of elementary mental structures.
What was Ebbinghaus' Memory experiment? He repeated lists of 13 nonsense syllables to himself one at a time at a constant rate. He used a measure called savings to determine how much was forgotten after a delay, which provided a measure of forgetting. He discovered the savings curve.
How is savings calculated? Savings = (Original time taken to learn the list) - (Time to relearn the list after the delay)
What does the savings curve show? It shows that memory drops rapidly for the first 2 days after initial learning and then levels off.
What did William James outline in his textbook Principles of Psychology? Functionalism: an emphasis on function of mental processes and not structures.
Why did John Watson found behaviourism as a reaction to analytic introspection? 1) It produced extremely variable results from person to person 2) Results were difficult to verify
What are the four principles of behaviourism? 1) Focus only on the observable 2) Explain only behaviour and not internal states e.g. thoughts 3) Theories should be parsimonious 4) Goal: Break down behaviour into irreducible structures. Emphasis on classical conditioning to explain all
What did B.F. Skinner contribute? He introduced operant conditioning, showing that reinforcing a rat with food for pressing a bar maintained or increased the rat's rate of bar pressing.
Describe Tolman's rat in a maze experiment. The rat was placed at one in the maze and food in another end of the maze. After the rat learnt to turn right, he placed the rat at a different end of the maze. Interestingly, the rat turned a different direction to reach the food.
How did Tolman explain his rat in a maze experiment's findings? When the rat initially experienced the maze, it was developing a cognitive map of the maze. Thus even though the rat had been rewarded for turning right, its mental maze indicated it should turn left to reach the food.
What was the argument between B.F. Skinner and Noam Chomsky on the former's book Learning Behaviour? Skinner argued that children learnt language through operant conditioning. However, Noam pointed out that children say many sentences that are not rewarde and incorrect grammar that is not reinforced. He argued for an internal biological language program.
What is the information-processing approach? Traces sequences of mental operations involved in cognition through stages like a computer.
What are models? Representations of structures or processes that help us cisualize or explain the structure or process.
What are structural models? Representations of a physical structure.
What are process models? They represnet the processes that are involve in cognitive mechanisms, with boxes representing specific processes and arrows indicating connections between processes.
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