PYC3703
Cognitive Psychology
The aims of cognitive psychological research are to enhance our understanding of the mind
so that these insights can be applied in education and industry, and to help us understand
mental dysfunctions and the cognitive consequences of brain injury.
Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
What is the mind?
The mind creates and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, thinking
and reasoning = mind's role in memory, problem solving and making decisions
This definition reflects the mind's central role in determining our various mental abilities
Cognition operates outside conscious control.
Indicates different types of cognition - the mental processes, such as perception, attention and memory
The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals = how
the mind operates
This definition reflects the mind's importance for functioning and survival.
Indicates something about how the mind operates (it creates representations) and its function (it enables us to act and
to achieve goals).
Early work in cognitive psychology
1800s = belief that it is not possible to study the mind.
Reasons:
It is not possible for the mind to study itself
The properties of the mind simply cannot be measured.
"cognitive psychology" was not coined until 1967
1868: Donders
Determining how long it takes for a person to make a decision.
Measured reaction time-how long it takes to respond to presentation of a stimulus.
Measures of reaction time.
1. Measured simple reaction time by asking his participants to push a button as rapidly as possible when they saw a
light go on.
2. Measured choice reaction time by 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.
Presenting the stimulus (the light) causes a mental response (perceiving the light), which leads to a behavioural
response (pushing the button).
Donders' experiment is important because
1. It was one of the first cognitive psychology experiments
2. It illustrates something extremely significant about studying the mind: Mental responses cannot be measured directly,
but must be inferred from behaviour.
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 was called structuralism.
According to structuralism, our overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience = sensations.
Wanted to create a "periodic table of the mind," which would include all of the basic sensations involved in creating
complex experiences.
Used analytic introspection, a technique which trained participants to described their sensations, feelings and thought
processes in response to stimuli.
In one experiment, Wundt asked participants to describe their experience of hearing a five-note chord played on the
piano.
Structuralism was not a fruitful approach and was therefore abandoned in the early 1900s.
Wundt is seen as leading the shift in the study of the mind from the rationalist approach to the empiricist approach,
emphasizing the role of experiments in gaining knowledge about the human mind.
1885: Ebbinghaus' memory experiment: What is the time course of forgetting?
University of Berlin, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus.
Was interested in determining the nature of memory and forgetting-specifically, how rapidly information that is learned is
lost over time.
Used a quantitative method for measuring memory.
1
Goldstein, E.B. & Van Hooff, J.C. (2018). Cognitive Psychology (1st EMEA Edition). Cengage Learning.
, Using himself as the participant, he repeated lists of 13 nonsense syllables such as DAX, QEH, LUH and ZIF to himself
one at a time at a constant rate.
He used nonsense syllables so that his memory would not be influenced by the meaning of a particular word
Determined how long it took him to learn a list for the first time (i.e., recall correctly).
He then waited for a specific amount of time (the delay) and then determined how long it took him to re-learn the list for
the second time.
H e re-learned the list more rapidly than when he had learned it for the first time.
To determine how much information was retained after a particular delay, Ebbinghaus proposed a measure called savings
Longer delays result in smaller savings.
Smaller savings meaning more forgetting.
A savings curve, shows that memory drops rapidly for the first two days after the initial learning and then levels off.
Demonstrated that memory could be quantified and that functions like the savings curve could be used to describe a
property of the mind.
1890: William James' Principles of Psychology
Described significant observations about the mind in his textbook, Principles of Psychology.
James' observations were based on observations about the operation of his own mind.
cognitive topics included thinking, consciousness, attention, memory, perception, imagination and reasoning.
Abandoning the study of the mind
1913: Watson founds behaviourism
Dissatisfied with the method of analytic introspection because
(1) it produced extremely variable results from person to person, and
(2) these results were difficult to verify.
Watson proposed a new approach called behaviourism.
The goals of this approach:
(1) Rejects introspection as a method
(2) observable behaviour, not consciousness is the main topic of study.
closely associated with classical conditioning (Ivan Pavlov).
Watson used the idea of classical conditioning to argue that behaviour can be analyzed without any reference to the mind.
what is going on inside our heads, 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 – operant conditioning, which focused on how behaviour is strengthened by the presentation of positive
reinforcers, or withdrawal of negative reinforcers.
focused solely on determining how behaviour was controlled by stimuli.
Critique was that a simple stimulus-response theory cannot explain that people often respond to different aspects of the
same stimulus event
Setting the stage for the re-emergence of the mind in psychology
Edward Tolman
In one of his experiments, Tolman (1938) placed a rat in a maze.
Initially, the rat explored the maze. After this, the rat was placed at A and food was placed at B, and the rat quickly
learned to turn right at the intersection to obtain the food.
This is exactly what the behaviourists would predict, because turning right was rewarded with food.
However, when Tolman (after taking precautions to be sure the rat couldn't determine the location of the food, placed the
rat at C.
While behaviourists would predict the rat to go right, the rat turned left at the intersection to reach the food at B.
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.
Skinner's book Verbal Behaviour:
Argued that children learn language through operant conditioning.
Children imitate speech that they hear, and repeat correct speech because it is rewarded.
1959, Noam Chomsky
Published a review of this book, in which he pointed out that children say many sentences that have never been rewarded
by parents, and that during the normal course of language development, they go through a stage in which they use
incorrect grammar, even though this incorrect grammar may never have been reinforced.
Chomsky saw language development as being determined by an inborn biological programme that holds across cultures.
The rebirth of the study of the mind
The 1950s is generally recognized as the beginning of the cognitive revolution
2 Goldstein, E.B. & Van Hooff, J.C. (2018). Cognitive Psychology (1st EMEA Edition). Cengage Learning.
, A shift away from behaviourism.
Introduction of the digital computer
The first digital computers were developed in the late 1940s
in 1954 IBM introduced a computer that was available to the general public.
In university research laboratories, they were used to analyze data and suggest a new way of thinking about the mind.
Flow diagrams for computers
One of the characteristics of computers that captured the attention of psychologists was that they processed information
in stages
Proposed the information-processing approach to studying the mind-an approach that traces sequences of mental
operations involved in cognition.
The operation of the mind can be described as occurring in a number of stages.
Flow diagrams for the mind: Information processing stages
Beginning in the 1950s, researchers became interested in describing how well the mind can deal with incoming
information.
When we decide to attend to one thing, we must withdraw attention from other things.
Cherry’s dichotic listening experiment: presented participants with two auditory messages, one to the left ear and one to
the right ear, and told them to focus their attention on one of the messages (the attended message) and to ignore the
other one (the unattended message).
The result of this experiment was that when people focused on the attended message, they could hear the sounds of the
unattended message but were unaware of the contents of that message.
This result led Donald Broadbent (1958), to propose the first flow diagram of the mind
This diagram represents what supposedly happens in a person's mind when selectively directing attention to one stimulus in the
environment.
Provided a way to visualize and analyse the operation of the mind in terms of a sequence of processing stages, and proposed a
model that could be tested by further experiments.
Artificial intelligence and information theory
John McCarthy was one of the first to coin the term artificial intelligence, making a machine behave in ways that would be called
intelligent if a human were so behaving.
Newell and Simon claimed to have succeeded in creating such a programme (Dartmouth) in 1956.
They called this programme the logic theorist as it was able to create proofs of mathematical theorems that involved
principles of logic.
George Miller (19 56) wrote a paper disclosing strict limitations to the processing capacity of the human mind.
The experiments in his paper showed that people can hold only about seven items simultaneously in their mind or
"immediate memory".
Focused on basic perceptual skills and, used the term "bits."
Reasoned that, to enable further processing, memory processes must acutely recode the information that is carried in
complex stimuli into smaller units.
Lead to the "the mind as a computer metaphor".
The notion that many of our cognitive functions have a limited capacity became, and still is, a central theme in modern
cognitive psychology.
The cognitive "revolution" took a while
These events -represented the beginning of a shift in psychology from behaviourism (the study of stimulus-response relations) to
cognitive psychology (the study of mental processes we cannot observe directly).
The shift occurred over a period of time
1967, Ulrich Neisser published a textbook with the title Cognitive Psychology.
Emphasized the information-processing approach to studying the mind.
This new approach turned out to be very successful in explaining many aspects of human behaviour and as a result,
cognitive psychology became one of the dominant approaches in Psychology.
Cognitive Psychology thus accepts the existence of unobserved (cognitive) processes that can be scientifically studied via
the creation and evaluation of mental models.
Modern research in cognitive psychology
The role of models in cognitive psychology
Models are representations of structures or processes that help us visualize or explain the structure or process.
Structural models
Structural models are representations of a physical structure (e.g. the brain).
A model can mimic the appearance of an object.
Structures can also be represented by diagrams that don't resemble the structure itself but that instead indicate how
different areas of the brain are connected.
One purpose of models is to simplify.
Building a model of the brain: it can be taken apart to reveal different structures.
Structural models are designed to represent the structures involved in specific functions.
3
Goldstein, E.B. & Van Hooff, J.C. (2018). Cognitive Psychology (1st EMEA Edition). Cengage Learning.
, Process models
Process models represent the processes that are involved in cognitive mechanisms
Boxes usually represent specific processes and arrows indicate connections between processes.
An example of a process model is given in Figure 1.13, representing the operation of memory.
Process models make complicated processes easier to understand and provide a good starting point for research.
Models simplify complex systems and processes
Cognitive strategies in enhancing learning
Spacing and interleaving:
Repeated presentation and reviewing of information facilitates learning and improves memory.
When distributed over time (this is called spacing)
Repetition of information may initially lead to slower learning but will ensure more durable retention.
Intermixing different topics within a particular domain (interleaving) will improve performance.
Interleaving requires students to practice discrimination between topics, problems, concepts or principles.
Accomplished by mixing up several topics during study and by repeatedly returning to the same topics in different
contexts.
Retrieval-based learning:
The act of retrieving information from memory might be beneficial for learning.
Retrieving information from memory increases the chance that the same information will be retrieved again in the near
future.
This is a fundamental characteristic of our memory.
Can be done by repeated test taking
Note taking and elaboration:
Students take their laptops into the classroom, which often distracts attention from the contents of the lecture and the
actual learning process.
Taking notes by hand led to superior performance in tests of both factual and conceptual understanding.
the laptop note takers produced more notes than the longhand note takers; and more notes means more
information to review.
However, the laptop notes showed greater precise overlap with the lecture than the longhand notes, suggesting
that students who used their laptop for note taking were just simply transcribing content without thinking about it.
Elaboration and active involvement with the materials is necessary for efficient learning.
ASSUMPTIONS
An assumption is a statement or a fact whose truth is presupposed.
In an assumption something is taken for granted without there necessarily being sufficient evidence.
An assumption is a ‘fact’, statement, or claim for which no conclusive proof or evidence is given, but
which is nevertheless accepted (either implicitly or explicitly) as true.
When researchers study cognition they have to make implicit or explicit assumptions about what the mind
is and how it works.
Assumptions are typically influenced by the dominant technology of the time.
It is generally assumed in cognitive psychology that the mind is an information processing system and a
computer metaphor is typically used to describe its operation.
This computer metaphor of mind stems from the beginning of the computer era in the 1960 and 1970s
and is largely inspired by information theory and the early development of cybernetics and computer
science.
The human cognitive system can be described at two different levels, a software description (ie the mind) or
a hardware description (ie the brain).
Some researchers criticize the computer approach arguing that human goals are very fluid and complex
(whereas computer programs are much more rigid), and that artificial intelligence researchers have not
4 Goldstein, E.B. & Van Hooff, J.C. (2018). Cognitive Psychology (1st EMEA Edition). Cengage Learning.
