Summary of the substance of the book Brain and Cognition for the course Cognition and Behavior, consisting of chapters: H1, H3, H4, H5, H6, H7, H8, H9, H11, H12, H12.3, H13.
Cognitive psychology: the branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind.
- The mind creates and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions,
language, deciding, thinking and reasoning.
- The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to
achieve our goals.
Cognitive psychology; Studying the mind
Cognition: the mental processes, such as perception, attention and memory, that are what the mind
does.
Studying the mind: Early work in cognitive psychology
1868: Donders’ pioneering experiment: How long does it take to make a decision?
Donders was interested in determining how long it takes for a person to make a decision. He
determined this by measuring reaction time: how long it takes to respond to presentation of a
stimulus.
He used two measures of reaction time:
- Simple reaction time: push a button as rapidly as possible when they saw a light go on.
- Choice reaction time: using two lights and asking his participants to push the left button
when they saw the left light go on, and the right button when they saw the right light go on.
- One of the first cognitive psychology experiments.
- Mental responses (perceiving the light and deciding which button to push, in this example)
cannot be measured directly, but must be inferred from behavior. The fact that mental
responses cannot be measured directly, but must be inferred from observing behavior, is a
principle that holds not only for Donders’ experiment but for all research in cognitive
psychology.
1879: Wundt’s psychology laboratory: Structuralism and analytic introspection
Wilhelm Wundt founded the first laboratory of scientific psychology at the University of Leipzig in
Germany. Wundt’s approach, which dominated psychology in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was
called structuralism.
Structuralism: according to structuralism, our overall experience is determined by combining basic
elements of experience which were called sensations. Thus, just as chemistry developed a periodic
table of the elements, which combine to form molecules, Wundt wanted to create a “periodic table
of the mind,” which would include all of the basic sensations involved in creating complex
experiences.
Wundt thought he could achieve this scientific description of the components of experience by using
analytic introspection: a technique in which trained participants described their sensations, feelings
,and thought processes in response to stimuli.
- analytic introspection required extensive training because it is difficult to describe an experience in
terms of basic, fundamental elements.
Structuralism was abandoned in the early 1900s.
Wundt is seen by many as leading the shift in the study of the mind from the rationalist approach to
the empiricist approach, emphasizing the pivotal role of experiments in gaining knowledge about the
human mind.
1885: Ebbinghaus’ memory experiment: What is the time course of forgetting?
Ebbinghaus was interested in determining the nature of memory and forgetting – specifically, how
rapidly information that is learned is lost over time.
Rather than using Wundt’s method of analytic introspection, Ebbinghaus used a quantitative method
for measuring memory.
To determine how much information was retained after a particular delay, Ebbinghaus proposed a
measure called savings: Savings = (original time to learn the list) – (time to re-learn the list after the
delay).
Thus, if it took 1.000 seconds to learn the list the first time and 400 seconds to re-learn the list after
the delay, the savings would be 1.000 – 400 = 600 seconds.
Longer delays result in smaller savings.
According to Ebbinghaus, this reduction in savings provided a measure of forgetting, with smaller
savings meaning more forgetting. (See fig. 1.5 and 1.6 in book).
Savings curve: the plot of per cent savings versus time shows that memory drops rapidly for the first
two days after the initial learning and then levels off.
- this curve was important because it demonstrated that memory could be quantified and that
functions like the savings curve could be used to describe a property of the mind – in this case, the
ability to retain information.
Ebbinghaus’ savings curve. Ebbinghaus considered the per cent savings to be a measure of the
amount remembered, so he plotted this versus the time between initial learning and testing. The
decrease in savings (remembering) with increasing delays indicated that forgetting occurs rapidly
over the first two days and then occurs more slowly after that.
Notice that although Ebbinghaus’ savings method was very different from Donders’ reaction time
method, both measured behavior to determine a property of the mind.
1890: William James’ Principles of Psychology
William James, one of the early American psychologists, described significant observations about the
mind in his famous textbook, Principles of Psychology (1890). James’ observations were based not on
the results of experiments but on observations about the operation of his own mind.
, Person Procedure Results and Contribution
Conclusions
Donders (1868) Simple reaction time Choice reaction time First cognitive
vs choice reaction takes 100 milliseconds psychology
time. longer; therefore, it experiment.
takes 100 milliseconds
to make a decision.
Wundt (1879) Analytic introspection. No reliable results. Established the first
laboratory of scientific
psychology.
Ebbinghaus (1885) Savings method to Forgetting occurs Quantitative
measure forgetting. rapidly in the first one measurement of
to two days after mental processes.
original learning.
James (1890) No experiments; Descriptions of a wide First psychology
reported observations range of experiences. textbook; some of his
of his own experience. observations are still
valid today.
Abandoning the study of the mind
Many early departments of psychology conducted research in the tradition of Wundt’s laboratory,
using analytic introspection to analyze mental processes. This emphasis on studying the mind was to
change, however, being largely replaced by a focus on “pure” observable behavior. This approach
became known as behaviourism, devoting its efforts to the strict study of stimulus-response or input-
output relationships.
1913: Watson founds behaviourism
Around 1913, Watson became dissatisfied with the method of analytic introspection because:
- It produced extremely variable results from person to person, and
- These results were difficult to verify.
In response to what he perceived to be deficiencies in analytic introspection, Watson proposed a
new approach called behaviourism.
- Watson rejects introspection as a method.
- Observable behavior, not consciousness (which would involve unobservable processes such
as thinking, emotions and reasoning), is the main topic of study.
Watson wanted to restrict psychology to observable behavioural data and rejected the idea of going
beyond those data to draw conclusions about unobservable mental events.
Watson’s ideas are closely associated with classical conditioning as originally studied by Ivan Pavlov
from around 1890. Pavlov demonstrated that dogs could be made to salivate to the sound of a bell,
when this (neutral) sound was previously paired to the arrival of food. Watson showed that the same
principles applied to human behaviour and he used the idea of classical conditioning to argue that
behaviour can be analyzed without any reference to the mind. For Watson, what is going on inside
our head (or inside the head of Pavlov’s dog), either physiologically or mentally, is irrelevant. The
only thing he cared about was how pairing one stimulus with another stimulus affected behaviour.
, 1938: Skinner’s operant conditioning
B.F. Skinner introduced operant conditioning: focused on how behaviour is strengthened by the
presentation of positive reinforcers, such as food or social approval (or withdrawal of negative
reinforcers, such as a shock or social rejection).
Like Watson, Skinner was not interested in what was happening in the mind, but focused solely on
determining how behaviour was controlled by stimuli.
Time line showing early experiments studying the mind in the 1800s and the rise of behaviourism
in the 1900s:
One general critique was that a simple stimulus-response theory cannot explain that people often
respond to different aspects of the same stimulus event, and which aspect that is, is not known until
the response is made. For example, the controlling stimulus aspect is defined after the fact, in terms
of the meaning it has to the individual, not in terms of its external, objective qualities as would be
suggested by the stimulus-response theory.
(- example, one painting, two people; person A looks at the technique of the painting, person B looks
at the content. They respond to different aspects of the same stimulus event).
Setting the stage for the re-emergence of the mind in psychology
Although behaviourism dominated Psychology, for many decades, some researchers were not toeing
the strict behaviourist line. One of these researchers was Edward Tolman and the other, ten years
later, was Noam Chomsky.
Maze used by Tolman (1948). (a) The rat initially explores the maze. (b) The rat learns to turn right to
obtain food at B when it starts at A. (c) When placed at C, the rat turns left to reach the food at B. In
this experiment, precautions are taken to prevent the rat from knowing where the food is based on
cues such as smell.
Behaviourist would predict the rat turning right at the intersection to obtain the food when placed at
C, but the rat turns left to reach the food. Tolman’s explanation of this result was that when the rat
initially experienced the maze it was developing a cognitive map: a conception within the rat’s mind
of the maze’s layout. Thus, even though the rat had previously been rewarded for turning right, its
mental map indicated that it should turn left to reach the food. The use of the word cognitive, and
the idea that something other than stimulus-response connections might be occurring in the rat’s
mind, placed Tolman outside of mainstream behaviourism.
Language development
It wasn’t until about a decade after Tolman introduced the idea of cognitive maps that developments
occurred that led to a resurgence of the mind in psychology. Ironically, one of these developments
was the publication, in 1957, of Skinner’s book Verbal Behaviour. In his book, Skinner argued that
children learn language through operant conditioning. According to this idea, children imitate speech
that they hear, and repeat correct speech because it is rewarded.
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