Chapter 1

Monday, August 15, 2022

4:47 PM

THINKING ABOUT THINKING

Cognitive science
The scientific study of thought, language, and the brain.

Intuitive analysis of examples such as "How many hands did Aristotle have?" indicates that
many processes occur automatically(very rapidly and below the level of consciousness.)

MEMORY AND COGNITION DEFINED

Memory
The mental process of acquiring and retaining information for later retrieval and the
mental storage system that enables these processes .
Cognition
The collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, remembering,
thinking and understanding, as well as the act of using these processes.
Ecological validity
Generalizability to the real world situations in which people think and act
Reductionism
Attempting to understand complex events by breaking them down into their
components.

AN INTRODUCTORY HISTORY OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Empiricism
Observation as the basis for all science
Tabula Rasa
Aristotle's insistence that the mind was a blank slate at birth
Introspection
A method in which one looks carefully inward, reporting on inner sensations and
experiences
Structuralism
The structure of the conscious mind, the sensations, images, and feelings that were
the very elements of the mind's structure.
Functionalism
An approach in which the functions of consciousness, rather than its structure are of
interest.
Behaviorism
The scientific study of observable behavior
Verbal learning
The branch if experimental psychology that dealt with humans as they learned verbal
material, composed of letters, nonsense syllables , or words
EARLY PSYCHOLOGY

Four early psychologists are of particular interest for cognitive psychology.

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920)
A lot of early psychologists were students of Wundt
Directed more than 200 doctoral theses on psychological topics
His work on language, child psychology, and other applied topics was
rejected or ignored at the time.
To study sensation, perception and attention, Wundt used self-observation
or INTROSPECTION.
His goal was to study consciousness scientifically
Problems with introspection
Not the same from person to person which means its not reliable
Participants had to be highly trained
Increases biases
Not everyone is good at it because some people arent self aware
Introspection illusion
We're confident in our own interpretation of consciousness but we
think other people get it wrong
Apperception
Seeing things as a unified whole instead of individual components
Edward Titchener
Englishman who went to Cornell University in America in 1892
Worked with Wundt and also believed critically in introspection
The way he studied introspection was less scientific
Had subjects report thoughts and feelings when given stimuli
Instead of just asking "do you hear a sound yes or no" he had them
report thoughts and feelings
Titchener studied STRUCTURALISM
Take a stimulus or experience and break it down into its parts
Studies the varied elements of consciousness
Ultimately declined because Titchener was the ultimate authority to
validate observations which is unscientific.
Bro told people they perceived wrong

Hermann von Ebbinghaus

Contemporary of Wundt in Germany but never studied with him in person
Read Wundt's work, decided that a study of the mind by objective
methods was possible, and set about the task of finding out how to do it.
Studied memory in pure form by memorizing NONSENSE SYLLABLES
(trigrams?) studied them multiple times with time in between to study
forgetting
Studied forgetting as a function of time, degree of learning or over
learning, and even the effect of nonsense versus meaningful material.
Forgetting Curve and Savings Score
 SAVINGS SCORE
Formula for calculating how much you could relearn
Number of trials to learn - number of trials to relearn/ number
of trials to learn x100(for percent)

William James
American Contemporary of Wundt Titchener and Ebbinghaus, studied at
Harvard
Provided an alternative to Titchener's rigid system
Created FUNCTIONALISM, which was influenced by the writings of
Darwin
With functionalism he asked the questions "How does the mind function"
and "how does it adapt to new circumstances" "how consciousness
changes according to the environment"
***Suggested that memory consists of TWO PARTS***
An immediately available memory that we are currently aware of
(primary memory)
A larger memory that is the repository for past experience
(secondary memory)
Did not enjoy experimentation and didn’t do much research but his ideas
were influential.

BEHAVIORISM AND NEOBEHAVIORISM

John B Watson decided that observable, quantifiable behavior was the proper topic of
psychology, not concepts of thought, mind and consciousness
Skinner also studied behaviorism with conditioning
Behaviorism was successful because the work done on learning and conditioning
seemed more beneficial opposed to endless debates in structuralism.
There was a "behaviorist era" where most psychologists focused on these observable
behaviors instead of cognitive topics until the 1940s.

There was a shift after WWII

Need to study practical problems of war: perception, judgement, thinking,
decision making and attention
Behaviorism mostly focused on learning

VERBAL LEARNING

Based on the research by Ebbinghaus

Done during the behaviorist era in 1920s and 1930s
Verbal learning was the way to study memory during the behaviorist era. Still had an
emphasis on using objective methods.
Serial learning, paired-associate learning, and free recall were the accepted methods
 Verbal learning paved the way for people to start accepting cognitive psychology
again.
Adequate psychology of learning and memory needed more than observable
behaviors.
Bousfield reported that words that were associated with each other, such as car and
truck, tended to cluster together in memory

LINGUISTICS

In 1959 Noam Chomsky wrote a rejection of a purely behaviorist explanation

(Skinner) of language to challenge behaviorism.

ANALOGY TO A COMPUTER
You have input in the environment
Theres mediational process (mental event)
Output (behavior)

Cognitive psychology is interested in studying the mediational process. What goes on

in the mind that we cant see.

SUMMARY

The modern history of cognitive psychology began in 1879 with Wundt and the
beginnings of experimental psychology as a science
The behaviorist movement rejected the use of introspections and substituted the study
of observable behavior
Modern cognitive psychology, which dates from approximately 1960, rejected much
of the behaviorist position but accepted its methodological rigor.
Many diverse viewpoints assumptions, and methods converged to help form cognitive
psychology.

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND INFORMATION PROCESSING

Channel Capacity
Any channel, any physical device that transmits messages or information- has a
limited capacity.
Response Time
A measure of the time elapsed between some stimulus and the person's response to
the stimulus
RT is typically measured in milliseconds, ms, which is a thousandth of a
second.
Accuracy
Correct recall of information.

MEASURING INFORMATION PROCESSES

CHANNEL CAPACITY

Psychologists found the concept of channel capacity from communications

engineering interesting.
Similar to computers, humans are a limited capacity channel. There is a limit to
how many things you can do or think about at a time.

THE COMPUTER ANALOGY

Human processing may be similar to the steps and operations in a computer

program, similar flow of info from input to output.

TIME AND ACCURACY MEASURES

Two of the most prominent behavioral measures used to study cognition are the
TIME it takes to do a task and the
ACCURACY of that performance

RESPONSE TIME

We can study cognition using response times.

Mental processes take time, and differences in time between different
mental processes or different people can tell us things.
For example, one study researched fourth graders and college students
solving math problems.
This showed that mental processes were faster in adults, and were
faster when multiplying 2x3 than 6x9

ACCURACY

Accuracy can be used to determine how much material has been saved in
memory
Not only are we interested in what material is accurately remembered, but
also what wrong responses are given and why.
For example, if the correct answer was apple but the response of pear
was given, that still tells us something about memory and grouping.

SUMMARY

Human mental processing might be analogous to the sequence of steps and

operations in a computer program
Measuring the mental processes of cognition has relied heavily on time
and accuracy measures
Differences in response time can yield interpretations about the speed or
difficulty of mental processes.
 Accuracy of performance also offers evidence about underlying mental
processes.

INFORMATION PROCESSING AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE

Encoding
The act of taking in information and converting it to a usable mental form.
Standard Theory
Theory of memory also called the modal model, developed by Atkinson and Shiffrin.
One of the first models to receive widespread acceptance
Sensory memory
A brief storage of information where information is momentarily registered until it is
recognized, and possibly transferred to short term memory
Short term memory
The second stage of the standard theory model, in which the duration seems to be
between 15 and 30 seconds, and 7 "chunks" of information can be recalled at a time.
Long term memory
The final stage of the multi-store memory model providing lasting retention of
information and skills.
Process model
A hypothesis about the specific mental processes that take place when a simple, rapid
task is performed
Lexical decision task
A timed task in which people decide whether letter strings are or are not English
words
Word Frequency Effect
It takes longer to judge words of lower frequency than higher-frequency words
Assumption of Sequential Stages of Processing
It is assumed that there is a sequence of stages or processes that occur on every trial, a
set of stages that completely account for mental processing
Assumption that stages are Independent and Nonoverlapping
The assumption that any stage was assumed to finish its operation before the next
stage could begin, and the duration of any single
stage had no bearing or influence on others.
Parallel processing
Multiple mental processes can operate simultaneously

THE STANDARD THEORY

The standard theory includes 3 components

Sensory memory
Short term memory
Long term memory

At the input end, environmental stimuli enter the system, with each sense modality
having its own sensory register or memory
 Some of this information is selected and forwarded to short term memory
The short term store can transmit information to and receive information from long
term memory.
Short term memory is also the component responsible for response output,
communicating with the outside world.

A PROCESS MODEL

The first stage of the process model is ENCODING

The second stage is a SEARCH through long term memory
After the outcome of a search is returned to working memory a DECISION is made
Based on the decision a RESPONSE is prepared and executed, either verbal or
physical.

LEXICAL DECISION AND WORD FREQUENCY

Lexical decision task

A timed task in which people decide whether letter strings are or are not English
words
It was concluded that if the two words are associated and if you’ve seen the words
more has an effect on the search stage of the process model.

REVEALING ASSUMPTIONS

Conclusions about the process model come with assumptions

First that there are SEQUENTIAL STAGES OF PROCESSING
This assumption means that there aren't any stages of processing that are
missing, or stages included that don't actually occur
The second assumption is that stages are INDEPENDENT AND NON
OVERLAPPING
This assumption means one and only one stage can be completed at one
time, which might not be reality.
Didn’t account for CONTEXT EFFECTS
An example of context effects is priming
If youre a doctor you might be more likely to answer faster for
medical words. You were primed for those words.
For example, you are likely to decide motor is a word faster during a
Lexical task if you’ve seen motor used in a sentence recently.
Priming isn't taken to account with the earlier process models.

PARALLEL PROCESSING

There is some evidence that multiple mental processes can operate simultaneously,
going against the independent and overlapping assumption.
 Salthouse (1984) did a study on skilled typists. His data argues for a four process
model
The input stage encoded the to be typed material
A parsing stage broke large reading units (words) into separate characters
A translations stage transformed the characters into finger movements
And a execution stage triggered the keystrokes.
His evidence indicated the stages operate in parallel
While one letter is typed, another is translated into a finger movement, and the
input stage is encoding upcoming letters. (around 8 letters ahead)

SUMMARY
The modal model of memory suggested that mental processing can be understood as a
sequence of independent processing stages, such as the sensory, short term, and long term
memory stages.
Process models are appropriate for fairly simple, rapid tasks that are measured by response
times, such as the lexical decision task
There is substantial evidence to suggest that cognition involves parallel processing and is
influenced by context; for example, reseach on skilled typing shows a high degree of
parallel processing.