Summary

Summary of Cognitive Psychology - PSY654 (Chapters 1 - 10, 12 and 13)

5 views 0 purchase

Course
PSY654 (PSY654)

Institution
Ryerson University (Ru )

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...

[Show more]

Preview 4 out of 72 pages

View example

Summarized whole book? No
Which chapters are summarized? Chapters 1-10, 12 and 13
Uploaded on December 23, 2024
Number of pages 72
Written in 2013/2014
Type Summary

CA$12.66

Add to cart

Add to wishlist

100% satisfaction guarantee
Immediately available after payment
Both online and in PDF
No strings attached

Chapter 1

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

The benefits of buying summaries with Stuvia:

Guaranteed quality through customer reviews

Stuvia customers have reviewed more than 700,000 summaries. This how you know that you are buying the best documents.

Quick and easy check-out

You can quickly pay through credit card or Stuvia-credit for the summaries. There is no membership needed.

Focus on what matters

Your fellow students write the study notes themselves, which is why the documents are always reliable and up-to-date. This ensures you quickly get to the core!

Frequently asked questions

What do I get when I buy this document?

You get a PDF, available immediately after your purchase. The purchased document is accessible anytime, anywhere and indefinitely through your profile.

Satisfaction guarantee: how does it work?

Our satisfaction guarantee ensures that you always find a study document that suits you well. You fill out a form, and our customer service team takes care of the rest.

Who am I buying these notes from?

Stuvia is a marketplace, so you are not buying this document from us, but from seller rjwest80. Stuvia facilitates payment to the seller.

Will I be stuck with a subscription?

No, you only buy these notes for CA$12.66. You're not tied to anything after your purchase.

Can Stuvia be trusted?

4.6 stars on Google & Trustpilot (+1000 reviews)

52355 documents were sold in the last 30 days

Founded in 2010, the go-to place to buy study notes for 14 years now

Start selling

Summary

Summary of Cognitive Psychology - PSY654 (Chapters 1 - 10, 12 and 13)

Document information

Subjects

Connected book

Written for

Seller

Content preview