APPLIED COGNITIVE
SPECIALISATION SUMMARY
Summary of Literature Required
2017/2018
INTERNATIONAL BACHELOR IN PSYCHOLOGY (IBP)
,Introduction to Applied Cognitive Psychology
Application of fundamental knowledge of cognitive psychology to almost all aspects of every-day
modern life. The outcome is always a result of the interaction between the cognitive and physical
functioning of the users and the particular characteristics of the environment. The desired goals of
any system are rarely singular or isolated. We often need a collection of indicators to cover the scope
of the interaction. We want to improve the interaction between the user and the environment to
better meet the intended goals.
Factor: intervention, manipulation or method meant to affect or change either cognition or
environment
Indicator: particular depended variables
Domain: general thematic setting, might also influence the optimal target of the manipulation
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,Fundamentals of Cognition
Chapter 6 – Cognition
Human information-processing system represented by different stages at which information gets
transformed (perception, central processing/transforming, responding)
Senses: gather information – perceived to provide interpretation, aided by prior knowledge stored in
LTM (top-down processing)
Action delayed – ‘think about’ or manipulate perceived information in working memory (temporary,
effort-demanding store)
Learning and retrieval: create more permanent representation of the information in LTM
Mental/cognitive resources (pool of attention/mental effort), limited availability
Attention: limited resources in selecting sensory channels
Dividing attention between tasks. Feedback loop
Greatest number of fatal accidents in commercial aviation – controlled flight into terrain (pilot flies a
perfectly good airplane into the ground) – failure of selective attention
Selection of channels to attend (and filtering of channels to ignore)
Salience: bottom-up, attentional capture, chosen by designers to signal important events via alarms
and alerts, abrupt onsets, distinct, auditory, and tactile stimuli, change blindness/attentional
blindness
Effort: selective attention may be inhibited if it is effortful
Expectancy & value: top-down/knowledge-driven, look at/sample the world where we expect to find
information, modified by how valuable it is to look at/ how costly to miss
Most direct consequence of selective attention selection is perception (extraction of meaning from an
array (visual) or sequence (auditory) of information, meaning may be extracted without attention
(‘cocktail party effect’)
Analysing the raw features of a stimulus or event
Unitized: sets of features that occur together, co-occurrence familiar – more rapid and automatic than
perceptual processing
Stimuli either perceived in clear or degraded form – poor bottom-up processing
Top-down processing: ability to correctly guess what a stimulus or event is, even in the absence of
physical (bottom-up) features – based upon expectations (past experience) and associations between
the perceived stimulus or event and other stimuli present in the same context
• Maximize bottom-up processing – increasing visible legibility/audibility, paying attention to
confusion caused by similarity of message sets
• Maximize automaticity and unitization – familiar perceptual representations
• Maximize top-down processing when bottom-up may be poor – provide best opportunities for
guessing (avoid confusions, use smaller vocabulary, create context, exploit redundancy, poor
perception of negation in sentences (our perceptual system appears to treat the positive
meaning of the sentence as the default state of the message)
Redundancy and context increased – length of perceptual messages is increased, reducing the
efficiency of information transfer – help gain perceptual accuracy at the expense of efficiency
Comprehension instead of automaticity as the duration of the perceptual process increases, very
much driven by top-down processing, also relies on working memory
Working Memory: relatively transient, limited to holding a small amount of information
Long-term Memory: storage of information and retrieval at a later point in time, forgetting –
retrieval fails
Central Executive: attentional control system
Visuospatial Sketchpad: analogue spatial form (visual imagery)
Phonological Loop: verbal information in acoustical form
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, Upper limit/capacity of Working Memory: 7 +/- 2 chunks of information, units of an item bound
together by familiarity
Chunking reduces number of items in working memory, makes use of meaningful associations in long-
term memory, aids in retention of the information, more easily rehearsed
Perceptual chunks: spatial separation between them
Strength of information in working memory decays over time unless it is periodically reactivated or
pulsed (maintenance rehearsal), interval for reactivating depends on the length of time to proceed
through the whole string
A familiar combination (own phone number) will occupy six, not ten, slots of working memory, half-
life of items in working memory: 7 seconds for three chunks, 70 seconds for one chunk
High confusability – similarity – more likely that the discriminating details will be gone
Resource limited:
• Minimize working memory load
• Provide visual echoes (visual material can be easily rescanned)
• Provide placeholders for sequential tasks
• Exploit chunking – physical chunk size (three to four letters/numbers per chunk), meaningful
sequences (should already have an integral representation in working memory), superiority of
letters over numbers: letters induce better chunking than numbers – greater potential for
meaningfulness, keeping numbers separate from letters
• Minimize confusability (spatial location salient and discriminating)
• Avoid unnecessary zeros in codes to be remembered
• Consider working memory limits in instructions – long sentences create vulnerabilities, as do
unfamiliar words or codes, congruence between order of the text and the order of action
• Negation imposes an added chunk in working memory
Learning: processing of storing information in long-term memory, instructions/training: designed to
facilitate learning
General knowledge – semantic memory, specific events – event memory
Strength: determined by frequency and recency, emergency procedures should be supported by
external visual checklists rather than reliance upon memory
Every item linked/associated with other items
Info more available as a function of the richness or number of associations that can be made with
other items, doing the mental work to form meaningful associations – active role of working memory
in learning, memories may be based solely on frequency and recency (rote memory), more rapidly
forgotten
Decay of item strength and association strength: exponential curve, very rapid decline in memory
within the first few days
Memory retrieval often fails because of weak strength due to low frequency or recency, weak or few
associations with other information, interfering associations
Recall: retrieve the required item, lost faster than recognition: perceptual cue provided in
environment, triggers association
We store items in connection with related information (associative networks, each piece of
information associated with other related information), semantic networks – linked to other
associated information
Important that the designer creates the structure of the database to be compatible/congruent with
the organization of the user’s semantic network
Organized around central concepts/topics, entire knowledge structure about a particular topic –
schema, schemas that describe typical sequence of activities – scripts
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