Chapter 1: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology

What is Cognitive Psychology? Better Question: “What isn’t cognitive psychology?” Cognition (Official Definition): The mental processes that are involved in perception, attention, memory, language, problem solving, reasoning, and decision making. Cognition (Gallagher Definition): How the brain gathers, stores, and uses information.

Cognition vs. Consciousness Consciousness: a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience (feeling), sapience (knowledge), and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment. - Cognition and Consciousness are related, but the latter is much more difficult to study.

Relevance Perception - Gathering Information Requires an understanding of how the brain codes information

Relevance Attention - Determining what gets processed - you can’t do it all!

Relevance Memory - Recovering stored information Eyewitness testimony, Alzheimer’s Disease

Relevance Language - How are thoughts assembled and put into words? Broca’s Aphasia Dyslexia

Relevance Reasoning, problem-solving, decision-making What really governs our choices? Is it ever possible to be unbiased?

Add these numbers up 1000 40 30 20 10

Answer?

Cognitive Psychology is actually Meta-Cognition Meta Cognition: Thinking about how you think Studying cognitive psychology can be an investigation of the self You have much to gain by understanding how you (and others) think? What if someone understands your thought processes better than you do?

Thought is Instantaneous! It sure feels that way I see a bird! I have the answer! I’m late for class! Thought feels instantaneous because we don’t (or can’t) pay attention to what goes into it.

First Cognitive Psychologists Franciscus Donders (1818-1889) Dutch Physician Conducted experiments in mental chronometry Measuring the time course of cognitive processes

First Cognitive Psychologists Donders (1868) reaction time experiment first well-documented cognitive experiment Simple RT and Choice RT Inference: decision took 0.1 second More this afternoon…

“The mind is a tabula rasa (blank slate).” - John Locke This statement has at least Two implications: Once something is “written” on it, that information remains unaltered The mind passively accepts information as it is presented (It doesn’t enhance, or otherwise alter the incoming information).

What do you see?

Unconscious Inference von Helmholtz (1821-1894) Your mind makes assumptions about what is going on and “decides” to complete the upper object and make it a rectangle. You can’t help it!

First Cognitive Psychologists Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) Physics and physiology professor Franciscus Donders (1818-1889) Physiologist, Ophthalmologist and inventor They didn’t consider themselves psychologists, per se. They were interested in vision and always thought of it as a function of the mind

Lab Exercise 1 We’ll conduct a demonstration of Donders’ classic experiments Thought is not instantaneous Reaction time is positively correlated with the complexity of a task

First Psychologists Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) Leipzig, Germany First Psychology Lab Introspective methods

Wundt’s Work Structuralism (that’s what Americans called it) was all about looking for the elements of consciousness/thought. His subjects tried to study their own minds while they were thinking His lab gained attention and spurred psychology by giving people theories to oppose! i.e. “We cannot study memory.”

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) Studied memory using nonsense syllables Worked alone

Behaviorism John B. Watson (1878-1958) Problems with introspection 1913 paper threw the “mind” out of psychology Behaviorism: Measure externals not internals Successful for about 50 years Pavlov B. F. Skinner

Behaviorism’s Success WWI devastates Germany German theories become unpopular regardless of their scientific merit Behaviorism gave clear reproducible results (Pavlov, Skinner) The US becomes an economic and academic superpower and it’s message fit the American philosophy: We are all equal and anyone can be anything with the right training

Behaviorism overdid it Methods and results are valid and useful, but they don’t explain it all… Berland & Beland’s Misbehavior of Organisms (1961) Many studies showed how the mind can be studied indirectly E. C. Tolman (1948) cognitive maps Gestalt psychology and perceptual organization (1911) Skinner’s 1957 “Verbal Behavior” and Noam Chomsky’s critique (1959)

Rise of Cognitive Psychology Cherry (1953) – dichotic listening task Simon & Newell (1956) – logic theorists computer program – F 1.7, p. 13 Broadbent’s (1958) – filter theory and attention processes Lashley – location of memory – engram Hebb – cell assemblies Uric Neisser’s book – cognitive psychology – 1967 Information processing – the computer metaphor Abstract constructs – a theoretical set of processes and representations that are useful in explaining data

Figure 1.7 (p. 13) (a) flow diagram for an early computer; (b) flow diagram for an early computer program.

Figure 1.8 (p. 13) Broadbent’s diagram

Modern Approaches to Cognitive Psychology Behavioral and physiological approaches Davachi, Mitchell, & Wagner (2003) study Day 1 – 200 “place” words and 200 “read” words – presented an adjective – with the “read” words Ps were to form an image of the adjective backwards Day 2 – after 20 hours, 400 old words and 400 new words – recognize – F 1.11, p. 17 data Later fMRI of brain activity – perirhinal cortex More activity for place during learning More activity for recognized than forgotten Inference? Cognitive Science – interdisciplinary approach

Check the Assignments! Assign 1 is posted!