COGNATIVE PSYCHOLOGY EXAM
PRACTICE QUESTIONS
Cognition - is from the Latin, cognoscere: to know
Cognition is often used synonymously with thinking
Cognitive psychology is - 1. All processes by which the sensory input is transformed,
reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used (Neisser, 1967)
2. The branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind (Goldstein,
2011)
3. That brach of concerned with how people acquire, store, transform, communicate
informaation (Neisser, 1967).
Put different psychology deals with our mental life: what goes on inside our head,
perceive, attend, remember, think, categorize, reason, decide,
Example of Cognitive psychology - You're walking along a sark, unfamiliar city street.
It's raining and foggy. and you are cold and a bit apprehensive. As you walk past a
small alley, you catch some movement out of the coner of your eye. You turn to look
down the alley and start to make out a shape coming toward you. As the shape draws
nearer, you are able to make out more and more features, you suddently realize that
it's...
What cognitive processes are oing on in this example above - 1. In general this example
illustrates the initial acquisition and processng of information.
2. Attention= mentally focuisng on some stimulus (the mysterious shape)
3. Perception= interpretting sensory information to yield meaningful information;
4. Pattern recognition= classifying a stimulus into a known category.
5. Classifying the shape as something familiar, you call on memory
memory= the storage facilities and retrieval processes of cognition.
Most of these cognitive processes occured in few seconds.
,Cognitive processes include - Perception/object recognition
Attention
Mental imagery/spatial cognition
Memory (encoding, storage, retrieval)
Problem solving
Reasoning
Judgment and decision making
Language
Example of cognitive process - You're in a crownded pubic place, such as a shoping
mall during the holiday season. Thongs of people push past you, and you're hot and
tired. You head for nearby bench, aiming to comine some rest with some people
watching. As you make your way, a young woman about your age jostles up against
you. You both offer polite apologies (oh excuse me! sorry!), glacing at each other as you
do. She immediately exclaims, oh, it's you! How are you? I never thought I' d run into
anyone I know here-can you belive it? You immediately paste a friendfly but vague
smile on your face to cover your frantic mental search: Who is this woman? she looks
familiar, but why? Is she a former classmate? Did you and she attend camp together? Is
she saying anythng that you can use as a clue to place her?
What cognitive processes ae going on in this example - 1. Recognition
2 . Recall
3. Reasoning and problem solving ( when you try to figure out who she is)
4. Knowledge representative
5.language (is used to communicate with her as nnverbal cues or signals)
6.decision makeing: determine how to deal with the situation. Will you admit your
forgetfulness or will you try to cover it up?
The king of problem all scientists face - 1. How to study a naturally occuring
phenomenon with sifficieent experimental rigor to draw firm conclusions.?
Answer: Is to try to isolate the phenomenon and bring it in the laboratory.
With this approach, the challenge is to decide what is essential and what is inessential
about the phenomenon undr study
Historical foundations of cognitive psychology - Topics in cognitive psychology (such as
memory and reasoning) date back at least to Plato and Aristotle (~400 B.C.)
Empiricism and Nativism - Empiricism: knowledge comes from experience.
Nativism: We are born with innate knowledge
Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) (structuralism) - 1. Founder of experimental psychology
and cognitive psychology.
,2. Establushed the first psychology laboratory in 1879
Wundt wanted to identify the simplest units of the mind. He wanted to do this by
creating a table of mental elements. He believed that by doing this he could determine
how these units combine to produce complex mental phenomena.
He wanted to study how varying stimuli would affect or produce differet mental states
3.One of first to use methods of introspection and mental chronometry (Donders, 1868)
Introspection: soul searching.
Wundt's introsepection technique consusted of presenting highly trained oversers
(graduate students) with various stimuli and asking them to describe their cnscious
experimnces. He assumed that the raw materials of consciousness were sensory and
thus below the level of meaning.
He thought that any conscious thought or idea resulted from a combination of
sensations of 4 properties: mode (visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory). quality (color,
shape, texture), intensity, and duration
Wundt believed that with proper training people could detect and report the workings of
their own minds
Structuralism: - is a theoretical paradigm in sociology, anthropology, linguistics and
semiotics positing that elements of human culture must be understood in terms of their
relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure. It works to uncover the
structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.
Alternatively, as summarized by philosopher Simon Blackburn, Structuralism is "the
belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their
interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the
surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture".[1]
covey Wundt's focus on the elemental components of the mind rather than the question
of why the mind workds as it does.
Structuralists were convinced that the proper setting for experimental psychology was
the laboratory, where experimental stimuli can be genralize to determine the true nature
of mind
William James (1842-1910) Aka one of the first American psychologist (Functionalism:)
- ( was not like wundt)
One of the first to study attention
Distinguished between primary and secondary memory
Wrote Principles of Psychology (1890)
Like wundt, he was interested in conscious experience
, Unlike wundt he was not interested in the elelmentary units of consciousness. Instead,
he asked why the mind works the way it does. He assumed that the way the mind works
has a great deal to do with its function= the purpose of its various operations.
James saw habit as the flywheel of society, a mechanism basic to keeping our behavior
within bounds. He saw habits as inevitable and powerful
James said that people should take great care to avoid bad habits and establish good
ones. They can do this by never allowng an exception when trying to establish a good
habit, to seize opportunities to act on resolutons, and to engage in a little gratituitions
effort every day to keep the faculty of effort alive
Functionalism: - .refers to a general psychological philosophy that considers mental life
and behaviour in terms of active adaptation to the person's environment.[1] As such, it
provides the general basis for developing psychological theories not readily testable by
controlled experiments and for applied psychology.
Functionalism arose in the U.S. in the late 19th century as an alternative to
Structuralism (psychology)
Functionalism focus on Darwinian evolutionary theory and tried to extend biological
conceptions of adaptation to psychological phenomena
Functionalists study mental phenomena in rel-life situations
Behaviorism: - rise to Includes classical and operant conditioning
Ignore "black box" to focus on inputs and outputs
Started in the United States in 19 30s. Many regard it has a branch of functionalism.
Focus on the unobservable, subjective processes (ex: expecting, believe, understand,
remember, hope for, deciding, and perceiving).
They reject introspection because they find it untestable. They view psychology as a
purely objective natural science.
Watson believes that images and thoughts resulted from low-level activity of glands or
small muscles
Skinner argues that images, sensations, and thoughts should not be excluded simply
because they are difficult to study. Mental event are triggered by external environmental
stimuli and gave rise to behaviors
Edward Tolman believed that rats have goals and expectations. A rat learns to run a
maze by learning how to get food
