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- Cognitive psychology: the science of how the mind is organized to produce
intelligent thought and how the mind is realized in the brain
1. Why do people study cognitive psychology?
2. Where and when did cognitive psychology originate?
3. How is the mind realized in the body?
4. How do the cells in the brain process information?
5. What parts of the brain are responsible for different functions?
6. What are the methods for studying the brain?
Motivations for Studying Cognitive Psychology
Intellectual Curiosity:
- A reason why we want to know how the brain works is the natural instinct
of wanting to know → striving to understand the mechanisms that make
intellectual sophistication possible
- Artificial Intelligence is one of these branches that have attempted to
create programs that will enable computer programs to display intelligent
behavior
- We are still a long from from understanding human flexibility in recalling
facts, solving problems, reasoning, learning and processing language
- Scientific discovery is one of the things that is seen as the ultimate
accomplishment of human intelligence → these scientific discoveries can
be explained through human cognitive processes that are studied in
cognitive psychology (understood problem-solving activities)
Implications for Other Fields:
- Other areas in psychology and social sciences have interest in this as well →
basic mechanisms of human thought can explain the behavior of humans
(malfunctions, group behavior, persuasion, decisions)
- Cognitive psychology is the foundation on which all other social sciences
stand. Yet, two reasons why most of them have developed without:
1. Cognitive psychology is not that advanced
2. They have found other ways to explain these phenomena
Practical Implications:
- Successful applications of psychology: guidelines for law enforcement,
basic information-processing, education, brain disorders
The History of Cognitive Psychology
Early History:
- Cognitive psychology can be traced back to the Greeks → this resulted in
discussions between two streams; empiricism and nativism
- Empiricism: knowledge comes from experience
, - Nativism: you are born with a great deal of innate knowledge
- Discussions continued in the 17th, 18th and 19th century (empiricists:
Berkeley, Locke, Hume and Mill + nativists: Descartes and Kant)
- After the philosophical debates, sciences such as astronomy, physics
chemistry and biology developed itself. Only at the end of the 19th century
science was applied to the human cognition. Why? → It was unthinkable
that the human mind was to be subjected to scientific analysis
Psychology in Germany: Focus on Introspective Observation
- 1879: Wundt established first psychological lab in Leipzig
- Wundt u sed the method ‘introspection’; highly trained observers reported
on the contents of their own consciousness under careful conditions →
self-observation
Psychology in America: Focus on Behavior
- American psychologists also had their own approach of introspection;
William James (1980) focused on pragmatism and functionalism →
action-oriented psychology
- Edward Thorndike → theory of learning
- Introspection came to have many forms and theories and it became clear
that there was not one clear approach to formulate the workings of the
mind
- The irrelevance of ‘introspection’ and its contradictions laid the
groundwork for the behaviorist revolution in America (1920)
- John Watson → behaviorism; psychology was only concerned with external
behavior → focus on animal behavior and learning
- Behaviorism was not dominant in Europe, but rather focused on a lot that
contributed to modern cognitive psychology
- Gestalt psychology: activity of the brain and the mind was more than the
sum of its parts → led to conflicts with other streams
- Both introspection and behaviorism were in conflicts with each other and
with itself → not a good approach
The Cognitive Revolution: AI, Information Theory and Linguistics
- Cognitive psychology as we know it today developed itself between
1950-1970. Three main influences:
1. Research on human performance: became popular in World War II
as there was need for knowledge on how to train soldiers and how
to deal with stress
- Donald Broadbent: information theory → abstract way of
analyzing the processing of information (perception and
attention)
, 2. Developments in computer science led to AI
- Allen Newell and Herbert Simon: teaching cognitive
psychologists about AI and AI people about cognitive
psychologists
- Direct influence of AI has been minimal, but indirect influence
has been large → observing how we can analyze the
intelligence of a machine
3. Linguistics; the study of language (1950s)
- Chomsky: new way of structuring languages - showed that
language was much more complex than expected
- Cognitive psychology has grown rapidly since the 1950s. Milestone: Ulric
Neisser’s book Cognitive Psychology (1967) → gave the field legitimacy
(about language, memory and thought)
- In 1970s the field cognitive science emerged (merging psychology, AI,
philosophy, linguistics and neuroscience)
- Difference in cognitive psychology and cognitive science; CS makes use of
logistic analysis, the computer simulation of cognitive processes. CP makes
use of experimental techniques for studying behavior
Information-Processing Analysis
- Information-processing approach has become the most dominant
approach in cognitive psychology → analyzing cognition as a set of steps for
processing an abstract entity called ‘information’
- Example S ternberg (1966): asked people to do a task and ask them to
describe what they were doing - measured how quickly they could make a
judgement - the larger the memory set, the more time they needed to
think (linear relationship)
- His theory exemplifies information-processing:
1. Theory without referencing to the brain
2. Processing of information has a highly symbolic character
3. The processing of the brain can be compared to the way computers
process
4. The measurement of time is a critical variable as information-
processing is believed to be happening in stages
Cognitive Neuroscience:
- There have been discussions about the relations between the mind and
the body:
- Descartes: dualism - the mind and body are two separate entities
- The steady development of knowledge shows that the brain has
influence on all forms of cognition
- Cognitive neuroscience is concerned with how this cognition is realized in
the brain
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