essay on 8 marker on assessing whether cognitive psychology demonstrates nature or nurture, including 2 PEEL paragraphs and a balanced conclusion assessing both sides of this debate for top band marks
Assess whether cognitive psychology demonstrates
nature or nurture. (8 marks)
One argument for cognitive psychology demonstrating nurture is that
cognitions are shaped by environmental factors. These include education,
upbringing, culture and conditioning. Nurturists would argue that people may
be powerless in resisting these factors, therefore they are passive and their
behaviour may be strongly influenced by the environment. Bartlett’s theory of
reconstructive memory suggests that retrieval of stored memories is an active
process of reconstruction, incorporating new information learned after
encoding memories. For example, schemas which are packets of stored
information about a specific event or object learned through previous
experiences and cultural norms, dictate how we recall information stored in
our long term memory. Bartlett’ serial reproduction of the War of the Ghosts
showed that participants recalled a Native American story differently after
some intervals, changing some details in the story such as hunting seals which
became fishing. This might have been influenced by modern cultural norms
and expectations which altered participants’ memory of the story. This
conveys that memory is shaped by external influences beyond our control
such as culture and social pressure as these influence how accurate our
reconstruction of memories might be. This supports the idea of cognitive
psychology demonstrating the nurture side of the debate. On the other
hand, Tulving’s theory of long term memory (LTM) may support the nature
side of the debate. This is because brain scans conducted by Tulving (1986)
conveyed the higher activity in the back cortex when semantic memory was
used, and the higher activity levels in the frontal lobes when episodic
memories were used. This suggests that some memory functions may come
from nature, which is our biology, our brain structure.
One argument for cognitive psychology demonstrating nature is that
cognitions are shaped by chemical processes in the brain. The nature side of
the debate suggests that behaviour is driven by internal factors present in our
biology, which are innate and unchangeable. This means that everything we
do is mapped out for us from birth by innate characteristics. The multi-store
model proposes that memory is subdivided into 3 separate stores which are :
the sensory register, short term and long term memory. These have different
durations, types of encoding and capacity. For example, Baddeley (1966b)
found that participants had difficulty recalling semantically similar words in
the third list C, which suggests that LTM uses mainly semantic encoding, and
acoustically similar words in list A, which implies that STM relies mainly on
acoustic encoding. These findings were based on a laboratory experiment
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