Introduction to Cognitive Psychology

Thursday, 26 January 2023 11:37 am

Cognitive psychology defined

• Study of how people perceive, learn, remember, and think about information.
• May study how people perceive various shapes, why they remember some facts,
but forget others, or how they learn language
• We may learn something about how people think by studying how people have
thought about thinking

Dialectic
○ Progression of ideas often involves a dialectic
○ Developmental process whereby ideas evolve over time through a pattern of
transformation
▪ Example: thesis -> antithesis -> synthesis
○ It is important to understand the dialectic because sometimes we may be
tempted to think that if one view is right, another seemingly contrasting view
must be wrong

Philosophical antecedents of psychology: Rationalism versus Empiricism

Two different approaches to understanding the human mind (roots):

○ Philosophy
▪ Seeks to understand the general nature of many aspects of the world, in
part through introspection (examination of ideas and experiences)
○ Physiology
▪ Seeks a scientific study of life-sustaining functions in living matter,
primarily through empirical (observation-based) methods

Rationalism Empiricism
Believes that the route to We acquire knowledge via empirical
knowledge is through logical evidence - obtained evidence through
analysis experience and observation
Important in theory development Leads directly to empirical investigations of
psychology
Rationalist theories without any Mountains of observational data without an
connection to observations may organizing theoretical framework may not be
not be valid meaningful
Thesis Antithesis
René Descartes John Locke

René Descartes viewed the introspective as superior

John Locke believed that humans are born without knowledge (tabula rasa or
"blank slate") and therefore must seek knowledge through empirical observation.
Immanuel Kant argued that both rationalism and empiricism have their place. Both
must work together in the quest for truth.

Early dialectics in the Psychology of Cognition

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Early dialectics in the Psychology of Cognition

Structuralism
• First major school of thought in psychology
• Seeks to understand the structure of the mind and its perceptions into their
constituent components
• Wilhelm Wundt used introspection
• Study of sensory experiences through introspections (we analyze our own
perceptions)
• Edward Titchener helped bring structuralism to the United States
• Other early psychologists criticized both method (introspection) and the focus
(elementary structures of sensation) of structuralism

Functionalism
• Alternative to structuralism
• Suggested that psychologists should focus on the processes of thought rather than
on its contents
• Seeks to understand what people do and why they do it
• Held that the key to understanding the human mind and behavior was to study the
processes of how and why the mind works as it does
• Unified by the kinds of questions they asked
• Pragmatists believe that knowledge is validated by its usefulness
• William James - lead in guiding functionalism toward pragmatism
- Wrote Principles of Psychology
• John Dewey - profoundly influenced contemporary thinking in cognitive psychology

Associationism: An Integrative Synthesis

• Examines how events or ideas can become associated with one another in the mind
to result in a form of learning
• Associations may result from contiguity, similarity, or contrast
• Hermann Ebbinghaus - first experimenter to apply associationist principles
systematically
- Studied his own mental processes
- Studied how people learn and remember material through rehearsal
(conscious repetition of to-be-learned material)
- Found that frequent repetition can fix mental associations more firmly in
memory
• Edward Lee Thorndike - role of "satisfaction" is the key to forming associations:
"law of effect"
- Law of effect - stimulus will tend to produce a certain response over time if an
organism is rewarded for that response
- An organism learns to respond in a given way (effect) in a given situation if it is
rewarded repeatedly for doing so (satisfaction)

From Associationism to Behaviorism

• Theoretical outlook that psychology should focus only on the relation between
observable behavior and environmental events or stimuli
• Ivan Pavlov - studied involuntary learning behavior
- Observed dogs salivate in response to the sight of the lab technician who fed
them
- Classically conditioned learning

- Effective conditioning requires contingency (form of reward and punishment

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 - Effective conditioning requires contingency (form of reward and punishment
• Considered as an extreme version of associationism
• Focuses entirely on the association between the environment and an observable
behavior

Proponents of Behaviorism
• John Watson - father of radical behaviorism
▪ Concentrate only on the study of observable behavior
• B.F. Skinner - believed that virtually all forms of human behavior, not just
learning, could be explained by behavior emitted in reaction to the
environment
▪ Rejected mental mechanisms
▪ Believed that operant conditioning could explain all forms of human
behavior
□ Operant conditioning - involving the strengthening and weakening
of behavior, contingent on the presence or absence of
reinforcement or punishments

Criticisms of Behaviorism
• Did not account as well for complex mental activities such as language
learning and problem solving
• Some psychologists wanted to know what went on inside the head
• Often proved easier to use the techniques of behaviorism in studying
nonhuman animals than in studying human ones

Behaviorists Daring to Peek into the Black Box

• Some psychologists rejected radical behaviorism
• Black box - mind that is best understood in terms of its input and output, but
whose internal processes cannot be accurately described because they are not
observable
• Edward Tolman - understanding behavior required taking into account the
purpose of, and the plan for, the behavior
▪ All behavior is directed toward a goal
• Bandura - learning appears to result not merely from directs for behavior, but
it can also be social, resulting from observations of the rewards or
punishments given to others

Gestalt psychology
• States that we best understand psychological phenomena when we view
them as organized, structured wholes
• We cannot fully understand behavior when we only break phenomena down
into smaller parts
• Studied insight, seeking to understand the unobservable mental event

Emergence of Cognitive Psychology

• Cognitivism - belief that much of human behavior can be understood in terms of
how people think
• Rejects the notion that psychologists should avoid studying mental processes

Early role of Psychobiology

• Karl Spencer Lashley - considered the brain to be an active, dynamic organizer
of behavior
• Donald Hebb - proposed the concept of cell assemblies as the basis for

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 • Donald Hebb - proposed the concept of cell assemblies as the basis for
learning in the brain
• B.F. Skinner - language acquisition and usage could be explained purely in
terms of environmental contingencies
• Noah Chomsky - stressed both the biological basis and creative potential of
language

Engineering, Computation, and Applied Cognitive Psychology

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) - attempt by humans to construct systems that show
intelligence and, particularly, the intelligent processing of information

Cognition and Intelligence

• Intelligence - capacity to learn from experience, using metacognitive processes to
enhance learning, and the ability to adapt to the surrounding environment
- Involves (1) capacity to learn from experience, (2) the ability to adapt to the
surrounding environment
• Metacognition - people's understanding and control of their own thinking process
• Cultural intelligence (CQ) - used to describe a person's ability to adapt to a variety of
challenges in diverse cultures

Three Cognitive Models of Intelligence

▪ Three-stratum model, theory of multiple intelligences, and the triarchic
theory of intelligence

Carroll: Three-Stratum Model of Intelligence

1. Stratum I includes many narrow, specific abilities
▪ Spelling ability, speed of reasoning
2. Stratum II includes various broad abilities
▪ Fluid intelligence, short-term memory, long-term storage and retrieval,
information-processing speed
3. Stratum III is just a single general intelligence

Gardner: Theory of Multiple Intelligences

▪ Intelligence comprises multiple independent constructs, not just a single,
unitary construct
▪ Distinguishes eight distinct intelligences that are relatively independent
of each other
▪ Mind is modular. Modularity theorists believe that different abilities -
such as Gardner's intelligences - can be isolated as emanating from
distinct portions or modules of the brain.

Gardner's Eight Intelligences

Type of Intelligence Tasks Reflecting This Type of Intelligence

Linguistic Reading a book; writing a paper, a novel, or a poem;
intelligence and understanding spoken word
Logical- Solving math problems, logical reasoning
mathematical
intelligence
Spatial intelligence Used in getting one place to another, reading a map,
and in packing suitcases in the trunk of a car so that

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 and in packing suitcases in the trunk of a car so that
they all fit in
Musical intelligence Singing a song, composing a sonata, playing
instruments
Bodily-kinesthetic Used in dancing, playing sports
intelligence
Interpersonal Used in relating to other people
intelligence
Intrapersonal Used in understanding ourselves
intelligence
Naturalist Used in understanding patterns in nature
intelligence

Sternberg: The Triarchic Theory of Intelligence

▪ Emphasize the extent to which they work together in his triarchic theory
of human intelligence
▪ Three aspects: creative, analytical, and practical
○ Creative abilities are used to generate novel ideas
▪ Create, invent, design
▪ We solve new kinds of problems that require us to think about the
problems and its elements in a new way
○ Analytical abilities ascertain whether your ideas are good ones
▪ Analyze, compare, evaluate
▪ We solve familiar problems by using strategies that manipulate the
elements of a problem or the relationships among the elements
○ Practical abilities are used to implement the ideas and persuade others of their
value
▪ Apply, use, utilize
▪ We solve problems that apply what we know to everyday contexts

▪ Cognition is the center of intelligence

▪ Three different kinds of components
□ Metacomponents - higher-order executive processes used to plan,
monitor, and evaluate problem solving
□ Performance components - lower-order processes used for
implementing the commands of the metacomponents
□ Knowledge-acquisition components - the processes used for
learning how to solve the problems in the first place

Research Methods in Cognitive Psychology

Goals of Research
○ Data gathering
▪ Reflects on empirical aspect of the scientific enterprise
▪ Aid researchers in describing cognitive phenomena
▪ Theory - an organized body of general explanatory principles regarding a
phenomenon, usually based on observations
▪ Hypotheses - tentative proposals regarding expected empirical
consequences of the theory, such as outcomes of research
▪ Statistical significance - indicates the likelihood that a given set of results
would be obtained if only chance of factors were in operation

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 would be obtained if only chance of factors were in operation

Distinctive Research Methods

○ Laboratory or other controlled experiments
○ Psychobiological research
○ Self-reports
○ Case studies
○ Naturalistic observation
○ Computer simulations and artificial intelligence

Experiments on Human Behavior

○ Independent variables - aspects of an investigation that are individually
manipulated or carefully regulated
○ Dependent variables - outcome responses, the values of which depend on
how one or more independent variables influence or affect the participants in
the experiment
○ Confounding variables - type of irrelevant variable that has been left
uncontrolled in a study

Psychobiology Research
○ Investigators study the relationship between cognitive performance and
cerebral events and structures
○ Techniques used in psychobiological research
▪ Individual's brain postmortem, relating the individual's cognitive function
prior to death to observable features of the brain
▪ Studying images showing structures of or activities in the brain of an
individual who is known to have a particular cognitive deficit
▪ Obtaining information about cerebral processes during the normal
performance of a cognitive activity

Self-reports, Case Studies, and Naturalistic Observation

○ Self-reports - an individual's own account of cognitive processes
○ Case studies - in-depth studies of individuals
○ Naturalistic observation - detailed studies of cognitive performance in
everyday situations and nonlaboratory contexts

Cognitive science - cross-disciplinary field that uses ideas and methods from
cognitive psychology, psychobiology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, linguistics,
and anthropology

Fundamental Ideas in Cognitive Psychology

1. Empirical data and theories are both important - data in cognitive psychology
can be fully understood only in the context of an explanatory theory, and
theories are empty without empirical data
2. Cognition is generally adaptive, but not in all specific instances
3. Cognitive processes interact with each other and with noncognitive processes
4. Cognition needs to be studied through a variety of scientific methods
5. All basic research in cognitive psychology may lead to applications, and all
applied research may lead to basic understandings

Key Themes in Cognitive Psychology

1. Nature versus nurture
2. Rationalism versus empiricism

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2. Rationalism versus empiricism
3. Structures versus processes
4. Domain generality versus domain specificity
5. Validity of causal inferences versus ecological validity
6. Applied versus basic research
7. Biological versus behavioral methods

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