Samenvatting Cognitie & Perceptie
Samenvatting bevat hoofdstukken 1, 3 (Niet: Neurons and knowledge about the environment), 4, 5
(Niet: Methode Event-related potentials; Working memory and the brain), 6, 7, 8, 13.
Elk hoofdstuk heeft zijn eigen begrippenlijst. Enkele begrippen staan WEL in de begrippenlijst, maar
komen NIET voor in de samenvatting. Alle begrippen die WEL in de samenvatting voorkomen, komen
OOK in de begrippenlijst voor! Belangrijke begrippen zijn dikgedrukt.
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Hoofdstuk 1: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology ................................................................................ 3
Cognitive psychology: Studying the mind............................................................................................ 3
Abandoning the study of the mind...................................................................................................... 3
The rebirth of the study of the mind ................................................................................................... 4
Modern research in cognitive psychology ........................................................................................... 4
Begrippenlijst Hoofdstuk 1 .................................................................................................................. 5
Hoofdstuk 3: Perception .......................................................................................................................... 8
The nature of perception..................................................................................................................... 8
Why is it so difficult to design a perceiving machine?......................................................................... 8
Information for human perception ..................................................................................................... 8
Conceptions of object perception ....................................................................................................... 9
The interaction between perceiving and taking action ..................................................................... 10
Something to consider ...................................................................................................................... 12
Begrippenlijst Hoofdstuk 3 ................................................................................................................ 12
Hoofdstuk 4: Attention .......................................................................................................................... 15
Pioneering studies: Attention as selection ........................................................................................ 15
Modern studies: Processing capacity and perceptual load ............................................................... 16
Spatial attention: Overt and covert attention................................................................................... 16
Divided attention: Can we attend to more than one thing at a time? .............................................. 17
What happens when we don’t attend? ............................................................................................. 18
Attention and experiencing a coherent world................................................................................... 18
Something to consider ...................................................................................................................... 19
Begrippenlijst Hoofdstuk 4 ................................................................................................................ 19
Hoofdstuk 5: Short-Term and Working Memory ................................................................................... 22
The modal model of memory ............................................................................................................ 22
Sensory memory................................................................................................................................ 22
Short-term memory........................................................................................................................... 23
, Working memory ............................................................................................................................... 23
Something to consider ...................................................................................................................... 25
Begrippenlijst Hoofdstuk 5 ................................................................................................................ 25
Hoofdstuk 6: Long-Term Memory: Structure ........................................................................................ 28
Comparing short-term and long-term memory processes................................................................ 28
Episodic and semantic memory......................................................................................................... 29
Procedural memory, priming and conditioning ................................................................................. 31
Something to consider ...................................................................................................................... 32
Begrippenlijst Hoofdstuk 6 ................................................................................................................ 32
Hoofdstuk 7: Long-Term Memory: Encoding, Retrieval and Consolidation .......................................... 34
Encoding: Getting information into long-term memory ................................................................... 34
Retrieval: Getting information out of memory.................................................................................. 35
Consolidation: The life history of memories ..................................................................................... 36
Something to consider ...................................................................................................................... 37
Begrippenlijst Hoofdstuk 7 ................................................................................................................ 38
Hoofdstuk 8: Everyday Memory and Memory Errors ............................................................................ 41
Autobiographical memory: What has happened in my life ............................................................... 41
Memory for “exceptional” events ..................................................................................................... 41
The constructive nature of memory .................................................................................................. 43
Memory can be modified or created by suggestion.......................................................................... 44
Why do people make errors in eyewitness testimony? .................................................................... 44
Something to consider ...................................................................................................................... 45
Begrippenlijst Hoofdstuk 8 ................................................................................................................ 46
Hoofdstuk 13: Judgment, Reasoning and Decisions .............................................................................. 48
Making judgments ............................................................................................................................. 48
Deductive reasoning: Syllogisms and logic ........................................................................................ 50
Decision making: Choosing among alternatives ................................................................................ 51
Something to consider ...................................................................................................................... 54
Begrippenlijst Hoofdstuk 13 .............................................................................................................. 55
,Hoofdstuk 1: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology: Studying the mind
Two definitions of the mind:
1. The minds role in memory, problem solving and making decisions: The mind creates and
controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language,
deciding, thinking and reasoning.
2. How the mind operates: The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so
that we can act within it to achieve our goals.
These two definitions are not incompatible. The first indicates different types of cognition while the
second one indicates how the mind operates.
In the 1800s, people believed that it is not possible to study the mind. Luckily, there where some
researchers who did study the mind anyway. One of them was Franciscus Donders: Researching how
long it takes a human to make a decision -> measuring reaction time (how long does it take to
respond to the presentation of a stimulus. He measured two different types of reaction time:
1. Simple reaction time: push a button when you see a light.
2. Choice reaction time: If the left light lights up, press the left button. If the right light lights up,
press the right button.
Mental response (perceiving light and decision making) can’t be measured directly, but must be
inferred from behavior.
Wilhelm Wundt founded the first laboratory of scientific psychology. His approach was called
structuralism. Wundt wanted to make a periodic table of the mind, which would include all basic
sensations involved in creating complex experiences. He wanted to do this by using analytic
introspection. 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.
Hermann Ebbinghaus was interested in determining the nature of memory
and forgetting. Using himself as the participant, he repeated lists of 13
nonsense syllables such as DAX, QEH, LUH and ZIF (so his memory would
not be influenced by the meaning of a word) to himself one at a time at a
constant rate. Ebbinghaus measured how long it took to learn a list for the
first time. Then he waited a specific amount of time (19 minutes, 1 day, 6
days) and then determine how long it took to re-learn the same list. The
time difference between the first time learning the list and the second time
is called savings. You can plot the per cent of savings in a savings curve.
William James wrote the first psychology textbook: “Principles of Psychology”. In this book he would
write descriptions of a wide range of experiences. Some of his observations are still valid today.
Abandoning the study of the mind
In 1913, John Watson founded behaviorism. Watson rejected introspection and observable behavior
was the main topic of the study. Watsons ideas are associated with classical conditioning. For
Watson, what was going on inside our head was irrelevant. He only cared about how pairing stimulus
would affect behavior.
B.F. Skinner introduced operant conditioning. Skinner was not interested in what happened in the
mind, but focused on determining how behavior was controlled by stimuli. But even as behaviourism
, was dominating psychology, events were occurring that eventually led to the rebirth of the study of
the mind. 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.
Although behaviorism was dominating psychology, some researchers were not toeing the
behaviorism line. Edward Tolman did the experiment with the rat and the cheese.
Behaviorists would predict that the rat would turn right (in situation c). The rat turned left. Tolman
said that the rat was developing a cognitive map the first time the rat experienced the maze,
therefore the rat it needed to turn left to get to the food.
Skinner wrote a book (Verbal Behavior) where he claimed that children imitate speech that they hear,
and repeat correct speech because it is rewarded. Naom Chomsky, however, saw language
development as being determined not by imitation or reinforcement, but by an inborn biological
programme that holds across cultures.
The rebirth of the study of the mind
The decade of the 1950s is generally recognized as the beginning of the cognitive revolution. A new
technology was emerging that suggested a new way of describing the operation of the mind: the
digital computer. Computers processed information in 5 stages: input, input processor, memory unit,
arithmetic unit and output. Using this stage approach as their inspiration, some psychologists
proposed the information-processing approach.
Researchers became interested in describing how well the mind can deal with incoming information.
Cherry did an dichotic listening experiment where participants were presented two auditory
messages, one in the left ear and one in the right. The participants had to focus on just one message,
thus ignoring the other. Results show that people can hear the sounds of the message they ignored,
but didn’t hear the message. Donald Broadbent made the first flow diagram of the mind. There is lots
of input, your mind filters the input, which selects an input that you focus on, following by a detector
and then storage in memory.
John McCarthy was one of the first to coin the term artificial intelligence. Newell and Simon claimed
to have succeeded in creating such a program at the first conference dedicated to this topic at
Dartmouth in 1956. They called this program the logic theorist as it was able to create proofs of
mathematical theorems that involved principles of logic.
Modern research in cognitive psychology
Models are representations of structures or processes that help us visualize or explain the structure
or process: structural and process models.
