Summary of Cognitive Psychology - PSY654 (Chapters 1 - 10, 12 and 13)
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Course
PSY654 (PSY654)
Institution
Ryerson University (Ru
)
Book
The Handbook of Adult Clinical Psychology
This document contains a comprehensive set of detailed notes taken from the textbook for PSY 654 (Cognitive Psychology; Chapters 1 - 10, 12 and 13). The notes summarize key concepts, theories, and findings discussed in the chapters required for the course, providing a structured and accessible reso...
Goldstein, B. (2008). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday
Experience, (3rd ed.). United States: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive Psychology is the branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind
Cognitive Psychology: Studying the Mind
o The mind can be thought of in a number of different ways
o What is the Mind?
The mind creates and controls mental functions such as perceptions, attention,
memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning
Minds central role in determining our various mental abilities
What the mind does
The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act
within it to achieve our goals
Important for functioning and surviving- enables us to act and achieve our goals
Cognitions: the mental processes such as perception, attention, memory and so on,
that are what the mind does
The above 2 definitions are not incompatible
The mind is something to be used
How do we remember things?
Cueing, unique/salient (flashbulb events), emotion, schemas/scripts, semantic
All influence the retrieval of information
o What is Cognition?
Interaction between perception, attention and memory
Simons & Chabris found that about 50% of participants asked to count the number of
passes failed to stop the large gorilla
Meaning that perception requires attention and that we don’t always see things that
are put right in front of us; known as attentional blindness (selective attention)
Conway, Cowan & Bunting found about 33% of participants could hear their own
name across a crowded room when attending to another conversation (cocktail party
effect)
Show differences in working memory and the ability to inhibit distracting
information
Interaction between attention and memory
Ability or inability to inhibit information
Strayer and colleagues have spent considerable time looking into the dual-task
decrements associated with driving and mobile phone use
Use of a hands-free mobile phone leads to the same driving problems as a non-
hands free
Doing two things at once-> dual task; shows the capacity of cognition
How can we ensure that signal detection of prohibited items is maximised at the
airport
, Mandel has shown that even when it comes to making risk assessments for
terrorist attacks, individuals do not reason logically
Visual processing
False alarm and errors begin to occur
Critical Aspects of Cognition
Perception
Attention
Memory
Above 3 must be acquired through our sensory systems and then be
reliably stored
Reasoning
Language
Decision making
Memory is key for the above 3
Must then be manipulated, compared and contrasted
Outcomes are expressed verbally and non-verbally
o Studying the Mind: Early Work in Cognitive Psychology
In 1800's, those believed that it is not possible to study the mind; cant study itself or
the properties cant be measured
Donders did the very first cognitive psychology experiment
Donders Pioneering Experiment: How Long Does It Take To Make A Decision?
He was interested in determining how long it takes for a person to make a
decision
More specifically, he wanted to measure reaction time to reflect cognitive
processes
He determined this by measuring reaction time, how long it takes to respond to
a stimulus
His reaction time experiment involved two types of reaction time: a) the simple
reaction time task, and b) the choice reaction time task
Ex. Simple reaction time task: raising our hand every time a shape appears
on the screen; choice reaction time task: raising our left hand when a
green shape appears and our right hand when a blue shape appears
Simple reaction time: took 300 MS
Choice reaction time: 400 MS
Difference is 100 MS
Wanted to determine the time it took to decide which hand to raise for
the choice reaction time task
This experiment illustrates that mental responses (perceiving the light and
deciding which hand to raise) cannot be measured directly, but must be
inferred from behaviour
Mental chronometry is the use of response time in perceptual-motor tasks to
infer the content, duration, and temporal sequencing of cognitive operations
a) We can indirectly measure mental events through behaviour
B) We can map out the stages involved in these mental events
C) We can record the total time it takes to complete these mental events
D) By comparing behaviours (and RTs) we look at individual processes
Ebbinghaus's Memory Experiment: What is the Time-Course of Forgetting?
, Ebbinghaus's was interested in determining the nature of memory and
forgetting- how info that is learned is lost over time
He presented nonsense syllables such as DAX, QEH, to himself one at a
time, using a device called a memory drum
He remembered all the words and the number of trials it took him to do
this
He waited a range from right after to 31 days after
He repeated the procedure and noted how many trials it took him
to remember without any errors
He used the saving method to analyze his results, calculating the
savings by subtracting the # of trails needed to learn the list after a
delay from the # of trails it took to learn the list the first time
Found that 3 days later you could still remember something
Information never really decays fully
Procedural memory is resilient to decaying
Explicit-> implicit = impacted by schedule of training
Savings were greater for shorter intervals then for long
Ebbinghaus's "savings curve" shows savings as a function of
retention interval
Memory drops for the first 2 days after the learning and then
levels off
Both Ebbinghaus's and Donder's measured behaviour to determine a property
of the mind
We can make inferences about the nature of mental processes by looking at
behavioural rates of success and failure
Mental Inferences
Ebbinghaus found that the savings on relearning an original list decreased
with time
After about 50 hours, memory did not get any worse
Memory decays but also leaves some loose material
If you remember something from your distant past now, the
likelihood is that you’ll remember it for ever
Wundts Psychology Lab: Structuralism and Analytic Introspection
Founded first lab in psychology
His approach was structuralism; according to this, our overall experience is
determined by combing elements of experience the structuralists called
sensations
He wanted to create a periodic table of the mind; including the sensations
Believed he could achieve this through introspection, a technique in
which trained participants described their experiences and thought
processes in response to stimuli (not very useful)
He never actually achieved his goal of explaining behaviour in terms of
sensations
Via introspection, Wundt thought that it was possible to get at the atomic units
of mental processes
Complex experiences could simply be boiled down into combinations of
simpler sensations and processes
, Memory interference, memory associations, episodic memory, feeling of
knowing and semantic memory
William James: Principles of Psychology
James observations were based on introspections about the operation of his
own mind
Abandoning the Study of the Mind
o Watson Found Behaviourism
His problems with introspection were 1) it produced extremely variable results from
person to person, 2) these results were difficult to verify because they were
interpreted in terms of invisible inner mental processes
He suggested that cognitions are pointless
Proposed behaviourism; prediction and control of behaviour
Watson 1) rejects introspection as a method and 2) observable behaviour, not
consciousness is the main topic of study
Said introspection is hard to verify
Only thing we can reliably study is behaviour
Watsons ideas are associated with classical conditioning- how pairing how stimulus
with another, previously neutral stimulus causes changes in the response to the
neutral stimuli
Pavlov demonstrated classical conditioning
Paired food with a bell causing the dog to salivate to the sound of the bell
Watson used classical conditioning to argue that behaviour can be analyzed without
any reference to the mind
o Skinners Operant Conditioning
Operant Conditioning, which focused on how behaviour is strengthened by the
presentation of positive reinforcers
Like Watson, Skinner wasn’t interested in what was happening in the mind, but
focused on determining the relationship between stimuli and responses
o Setting the Stage For the Re-emergence of the Mind in Psychology
Tolman, a behaviourist, focused on measuring behaviour; used behaviour to infer
mental processes
Ex. Rat Maze; placed Tolman outside the mainstream behaviourism
Tolman introduced the idea of cognitive maps
Skinner argued that children learn language through operant conditioning
Children imitate speech that they hear and repeat correct speech because
it is rewarded
Chomsky, a linguist, said children say many sentences that have never
been rewarded by parents (I hate you) and that during the normal course
of development, they go through a stage in which they use incorrect
grammar even though this incorrect grammar may never have been
reinforced
Chomsky say language development as being determined not by imitation
or reinforcement, but by an inborn biological program that holds across
cultures
He believed that language is a product of the way the mind is constructed,
as opposed to being caused by reinforcement
The Rebirth of the Study of the Mind
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