1. The Cognitive Approach

2. Learning Outcomes
All students MUST: Remember concepts related to cognition approach
Most students SHOULD: Apply cognitive concepts to Psychological behaviours
Some students COULD: Evaluate the cognitive approach

3. Behaviourism S R
Behaviourists are not interested in what happens in between stimulus and response. They don’t think you need to know.
Spider
Fear

4. Social learning theory
Spider
Fear
Social Learning Theorists say that things take place within the organism that mediate between S and R.
You do need to know about the person’s mental processes.

5. S IP R Cognitive approach
Spider
Fear
Cognitive psychologists extend the behaviourist idea and say that our behaviour is determined by the way we process information taken in from our environment.

6. Assumptions of the cognitive approach
The cognitive approach was developed as a reaction against the behaviourist stimulus-response approach.
For cognitive psychologists, it is the events within a person that must be studied if behaviour is to be fully understood.
Unlike behaviourists, cognitive psychologists believe that it is possible to study internal mental processes in an objective way and that insight into mental processes may be inferred from behaviour.

7. Internal mental processes
The cognitive approach is concerned with how thinking and knowing shapes our behaviour.
Humans are basically seen as information processers. The main concern of cognitive psychology is how information received from our senses is processed by the brain and how this processing directs how we behave.

8. Mental processes studied by cognitive psychologists
perception
attention
memory
language
thinking
problem solving
This approach therefore investigates those areas of human behaviour that were neglected by behaviourists

9. Inference Inference and Mental Processes
Inference means reaching a logical conclusion on the basis of evidence and reasoning.
The cognitive approach recognises that mental processes cannot be studied directly but must be studied indirectly by inferring what goes on as a result of measuring behaviour.

24. The role of Schemas

25. Schemas
Packets of information about the world based on past experiences.
They help to interpret new incoming information so that appropriate behaviour can take place in a situation e.g. wearing pyjamas to bed but not to school.
Babies have motor schemas which are innate such as grasping. Schemas develop with age and become more complex the more we are exposed to situations/stimulus around us e.g. restaurants, psychology or a football match.
Schemas allow quick processing of information so that we are not continually overwhelmed by our environment. It saves us having to process every aspect of a situation. Any examples?
It could also distort our interpretations of sensory information or we could store faulty information in our schemas.
perception-test/?r=3q627

27. ?
The mind takes in the impoverished sensory input and matches it to a schema derived from past experience. The schema is used to ‘fill in the blanks’ in the input and to give it a meaning. Your ability to ‘see’ what’s there depends on your having an appropriate schema.

28. Schemata What am I? It has a large metal door Buttons and dials
Gets hot inside
Has hot metal rings on top

29. It’s probably a cooker. You don’t need to have seen this particular cooker before to identify it. Your schema for “cooker” allows you to be able to identify all cookers so long as they don’t veer too far from your mental schema.

30. You have 30 seconds
To write down any words relating to a puppy

31. You have 30 seconds
To write any words relating to my daughter

32. You have 30 seconds
To write anything you know about a Froivus

33. Which task was the easiest?

34. The computer metaphor
In which ways is a brain similar to a computer?

35. Information manipulation processes
The computer metaphor
Input processes
Information manipulation processes
Output processes
In this analogy, the brain would be the hardware and cognitive processes would be the software
Information storage

36. Applications of the approach
Topic area
Application
Cognitive development
Piaget proposed stages of cognitive development which reflect the increasing sophistication of children’s thinking. The information-processing approach sees children's minds as computers that gradually develop in processing ability.
Mood disorders
Beck’s model of depression sees faulty thinking as the cause of depression. Ellis believes emotional and behavioural disorders develop because of irrational beliefs and thoughts
Memory
Models of memory have helped us to understand these cognitive processes further. Knowledge of how memory works has been applied to interviewing witnesses e.g. the cognitive interview
Education
Information–processing theory has been applied to improve educational techniques
Therapy
For example, Ellis’ rational emotive therapy (RET) to restructure faulty thinking and perceptions in depression.

37. Brain teaser
A father and son have a car accident and are both badly hurt. They are both taken to separate hospitals. When the boy is taken in for an operation, the surgeon (doctor) says 'I can not do the surgery because this is my son'. How is this possible?

38. The emergence of cognitive neuroscience
The scientific study of biological structures that underpin cognitive processes.
Study
Neural processes underlying memory, attention, perception and awareness.
Social cognition, the brain regions involved when we interact with others
How impairments in these regions may characterise different psychological conditions

39. How are these biological structures investigated?
It is only in the last 20 years, with advances in brain imaging techniques (i.e. fMRI and PET) and experimental methods, has cognitive neuroscience become one of the most the dominant paradigms in modern psychology.

40. Cognitive Approach : Evaluation
How do you think we might evaluate
the cognitive approach?

41. Cognitive Approach : Evaluation
Strengths Scientific (control, reliable, collect & evaluate evidence, objective) Applications (treatments for mental illness, reducing accidents, economic implications)
Weaknesses Machine reductionist (ignores emotion, motivation) Determinist (assumes no free will)

42. Explain the role of a schema in helping you make sense of the information below (2 marks)

43. Plenary – Apply it (2 marks)

45. Extras

46. Can you?
Explain what is meant by internal mental processes, schema, theoretical and computer models, and cognitive neuroscience (2 marks each)
Outline the use of theoretical and computer models as an explanation of mental processes (3 marks)
Using examples from research, explain the emergence of cognitive neuroscience (4 marks)
Outline two strengths of the cognitive approach in psychology (4 marks)
Outline two weaknesses of the cognitive approach in psychology (4 marks)
Answer the ‘Check it’ questions on page 107

47.
Did Celine Dion really sing “The hot dogs go on” in the 1997 Titanic movie soundtrack?