This is a short but powerful summary of first 12 chapters of the book 'Cognitive Psychology', written by Goldstein.
Mandatory literature for the course Cognitie en Perceptie (Informatiekunde) at the University of Amsterdam
- Cognitive psychology — branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind
Cognitive Psychology: Studying the Mind
- What is the mind?
• Mind creates and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language,
deciding, thinking, and reasoning.
- Memory, problem-solver, make decision & consider probabilities
- Cognition — mental processes, such as perception, attention, and memory, that are what the mind
does
• Mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our
goals.
- Associated with normal functioning
- How mind operates (creates representations) and its functions (enables us to act & achieve goals)
- Studying the Mind: Early work in Cognitive Psychology:
• Franciscus Donders — Cognitive Psychology Experiment: How long it takes for a person to make a
decision?
- Measuring reaction time — how long it takes to respond to presentation of a stimulus
• Simple reaction time — asking subjects to push a button as rapidly as possible when they saw a
light goes on
• Choice reaction time — using two lights and ask subjects to push the left button when they saw the
left light go on and right button when they saw right light go on
- Reaction time = time between presenting stimulus and behavioural response
- Difference between simple and choice reaction time indicate how long it took to make the decision
for correct button — Donders concluded tat the decision-making process took one-tenth of a second
- Important experiment: 1) First cognitive psychology experiment; 2) Mental responses must be
inferred from behaviour (cannot be measured directly)
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• Wilhelm Wundt’s Psychology Laboratory: Structuralism and Analytic introspection
- Structuralism — our overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience the
structuralists called sensations. — “Periodic table of the mind”
- Analytic introspection — trained subjects described their experiences and thought processes in
response to stimuli (describe in terms of elementary mental elements)
- e.g Experience hearing a five-note chord played on piano (Whether subjects were able to hear each of
the individual notes that mad up the chord)
• Ebbinghaus’s memory experiment: What is the time course of forgetting?
- How rapidly information that is learned is lost over time?
- Quantitative method for measuring memory:
• Repeated lists of 13 nonsense syllables: DAX, QEH, LUH, ZIF one at a time at constant rate
• Determine how long it took to learn a list for the first time, then wait for a period of time (delay),
then determine how long it took to relearn the list
- Savings — determine how much was forgotten after a particular delay:
• Savings = (Original time to learn the list) - (Time to relearn the list after the delay)
• Longer delays → smaller savings
• Smaller savings → more forgetting
- Savings curve (forgetting curve) — memory drops rapidly for the first 2 days after initial learning →
levels off
- Memory could be quantified & able to describe property of mind (e.g ability to retain information)
• William James’s Principles of Psychology
- Observed that paying attention to one thing involves withdrawing from other things
Person Procedure Results & Conclusions Contribution
Donders Simple reaction time Vs. Choice reaction time takes 1/10 First cognitive psychology
(1868) Choice reaction time sec longer; therefore it takes experiment; mental responses can
1/10 sec to make a decision be inferred from behaviour
Wundt (1879) Analytic introspection No reliable results Established the first laboratory of
scientific psychology
Ebbinghaus Savings method to Forgetting occurs rapidly in the Quantitative measurement of mental
(1885) measure forgetting first 1 ~ 2 days after original processes
learning
James (1890) No experiments; Descriptions of a wide range of First psychology textbook
reported observations experiences
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Abandoning the Study of the Mind
- John Watson Founds Behaviorism
• Problems with analytic introspection:
- 1) produced variable results from person to person
- 2) Results were difficult to verify (interpreted in terms of invisible inner mental processes)
• New approach — Behaviourism — Purely objective, experimental branch of natural science.
Theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behaviour
- 1) Rejects introspection as method
- 2) Observable behavior, not consciousness
• “Little Albert” experiment
- Pair loud noise with a rat
- Classical conditioning — how pairing one stimulus (e.g loud noise presented) with another,
previously neutral stimulus (e.g rat) causes changes in the response to the neutral stimulus
- Similar to Pavlov’s experiment: Pairing bell with food, measure dog’s salivation
• Cared about how behaviour was controlled by stimuli
- Skinner’s operant conditioning
• Operant conditioning — how behaviour is strengthened by the presentation of positive reinforcers (e.g
food/social approval) or withdrawal of negative reinforces (e.g shock/social rejection)
• e.g Reinforcing a rat with food for pressing a bar ↑ rat’s rate of bar pressing
- Setting the Stage for reemergence of the mind in psychology
• Edward Chance Tolman: Used behaviour to infer mental processes
- 1) Place rat in maze. Rat explores maze
- 2) Place rat at A. Place food at B. Rat turns right to obtain food
- 3) Place rat at C. Rat turns left for food.
- Cognitive map — conception within the rat’s mind of maze’s layout
• Noam Chomsky: language development not by imitation or reinforcement, but by an inborn biological
program that holds across culture
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Rebirth of the Study of Mind
- Cognitive revolution (1950s) — Shift in psychology from the behaviourist’s stimulus
- Introduction of the Digital Computer
• Flow diagrams for computers:
- Information is received by input processor → store in a memory unit → processed by an arithmetic
unit → output
- Information-processing approach — traces sequences of mental operations involved in cognition
- Experiment: how well people are able to focus their attention on information when other information
is being presented at the same time
• Flow diagrams for the mind:
- Colin Cherry (experiment):
• Present subject with 2 audio messages (1 left ear, 1 right ear)
• Focus on one message (attended message) and ignore the other (unattended message)
• Result: Hear sounds of unattended message but unaware of the content
- Donald Broadbent: Flow diagrams of the mind:
• Input (sound of both attended & unattended messages) → filter lets through attended message and
filters out unattended message → detector records information through filter
• Provided a way to analyse the operation of mind in terms of sequence of processing stages
• One of the standard ways of depicting the operation of the mind
- Conferences on Artificial Intelligence and Information Theory
• John McCarthy: program computers to mimic operation of human mind — Organized Conference
- Artificial Intelligence — making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a
human were so behaving
• Herb Simon & Alan Newell: Create a computer program to create proofs for problems in logic
- Logic theorists: able to create proofs of mathematical theorems that involve principles of logic, use
humanlike reasoning process
• George Miller: “The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two” — there are limits to the human’s
ability to process information — information processing of human mind is limited to about 7 items
- Similar to Broadbent’s filter model
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