PARADIGMS OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

By Balaji Niwlikar

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Introduction
 Cognitive psychology –
 Branch of psychology that studies mental processes including how people
think, perceive, remember, and learn. Cognitive psychology sees the
individual as a processor of information.
 Term ‘cognitive psychology’ in the book Cognitive Psychology by Ulric
Neisser in 1967.
 Paradigm
 "a typical example or pattern of something; a pattern or model”.
 A body of knowledge structured according to what its proponents consider
important .
 It include the assumptions investigators make in studying a phenomenon.
 It specifys what kinds of experimental methods & measures are
appropriate for an investigation.
 Thus intellectual frameworks that guide investigators in studying and
understanding phenomena.
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PARADIGMS OF COGNITIVE PSY
CHOLOGY
 Paradigms that cognitive psychologists use in
planning and executing their research.

1. Information Processing Approach(1960-70s)

2. The Connectionist Approach- (1980s)
3. The Evolutionary Approach
4. The Ecological Approach

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Information Processing Approach

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INFORMATION PROCESSING
APPROACH
 It arose in the 1940s and 1950s, after World War II (Sternberg &
Sternberg, 2012).
 Goal - to understanding human thinking in relation to how they
process the same kind of information as computers (Shannon &
Weaver, 1963).
 Used the computer metaphor.
 Dominate in 1960 & 70s.
 Rooted in structuralism, in that its followers attempt to identify the
basic capacities and processes we use in cognition.
 The approach treats cognition as essentially computational in nature,
with mind being the software and the brain being the hardware.
 The information processing approach in psychology is closely allied to
the Computational theory of mind in philosophy;
 It is also related, though not identical, to cognitivism in psychology
and functionalism in philosophy (Horst, 2011).
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INFORMATION PROCESSING
APPROACH
 “boxes-and-arrows” models of cognition
 In information-processing models, cognition is
typically assumed to occur serially.
 This approach focuses researchers on the
functional aspects of cognition—what kinds of
processes are used toward what ends.
 information processors look to computer
science
 Tools used experimental and quasi-
experimental techniques in their investigations.

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INFORMATION PROCESSING
APPROACH
 Cognition can be thought as information(what we see,
hear, read ,think about ) passing through a system.
 Assumption-
 Information is processed(received, stored, transferred,
retrieval,etc) in stages.
 Peoples cognitive abilities=systems of interrelated capacities
(different attention spans, memory capacities, and language
skills).
 people, like computers, are symbol manipulators
 Goal-
 To determine the stages & storage places are and how they work.
 To find the relationships between these capacities, to explain how
individuals go about performing specific cognitive tasks.

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INFORMATION PROCESSING APPROACH

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INFORMATION PROCESSING
APPROACH
 Information processing model: The Working
Memory-
 It must pass through three stages of mental

processing; sensory memory, short-term

memory, and long-term memory.
 Working Memory Model(Baddedely)-
 It includes the central executive, phonologic

loop, episodic buffer , visuospatial sketchpad,

verbal information, long term memory, and
visual information (Sternberg & Sternberg,
2012)
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INFORMATION PROCESSING
APPROACH
 Cognitive development theory- Piaget’s Cognitive
Development Theory –
 During the sensorimotor stage, newborns and toddlers rely
on their senses for information processing to which they
respond with reflexes.
 The preoperational stage, children learn through imitation
and remain unable to take other people’s point of view.
 The concrete operational stage is characterized by the
developing ability to use logic and to consider multiple
factors to solve a problem.
 formal operational, in which preadolescents and
adolescents begin to understand abstract concepts and to
develop the ability to create arguments and counter
argument.

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INFORMATION PROCESSING
APPROACH
 Sternberg's Triarchic Theory of Intelligence
 Three different components: creative,
analytical, and practical abilities(Sternberg &
Sternberg, 2012)
 He says that information processing is made
up of three different parts,
◦ Metacomponent(planning and evaluating problems)s,
◦ performance components(follow the orders of the
metacomponents), and
◦ knowledge-acquisition components (learns how to
solve the problems).

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The Connectionist Approach
 in the 1980s, as alternative
 Connectionism or parallel-distributed processing, or
PDP
 cognition as a network of connections among simple (and
usually numerous) processing units (McClelland, 1988).
=neural networks
 connectionist models assume that cognitive processes
occur in parallel.
 connectionists look to cognitive neuropsychology and
cognitive neuroscience for information to help them
construct their theories and models
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The Evolutionary Approach
 Our most significant cognitive abilities
 -Ability to perceive three-dimensional objects correctly and the
ability to understand and produce language.
 Is it easy to program these abilities in computers. ???
 Like other animal minds, the human mind is a biological system,
one that has evolved over generations- laws of natural selection.
(Cosmides & Tooby, 2002; Richerson & Boyd, 2000).
 We understand a system best if we understand the evolutionary
pressures on our ancestors.
 people have special-purpose mechanisms (including cognitive
mechanisms) specific to a certain context or class of problems
(Cosmides and Tooby , 2002)
 Ex. grammar acquisition, mate acquisition, food aversion, way
finding
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The Evolutionary Approach
 Explaining how a system of reasoning works, they believe, is
much easier if we understand how evolutionary forces shaped the
system in certain directions rather than other ,equally valid ones.
 Ex- creating and enforcing social contracts.
 To do this, people must be especially good at reasoning about
costs and benefits, and be able to detect cheating in a social
exchange .
 Therefore, evolutionary psychologists predict that people’s
reasoning will be especially enhanced when they are reasoning
about cheating.
 The evolutionary approach centers on questions of how a
cognitive system or function has evolved over generations.

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The Ecological Approach
 Lave (1988) described the results of the Adult Math Project as
“an observational and experimental investigation of everyday
arithmetic practices”
 (2x2)+ (1x3) =?
 Irappa ate 4 apple & Leena ate 10 apple, How many ice creams
did the two of them have together?”
 The ecological approach stresses the need to consider the context
of any cognitive process to understand more completely how that
process functions in the real world.
 Overlap --psychologists+anthropologists+evolutionarist-
 Focus-all cognitive activities are shaped by the culture and by
the context in which they occur.

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The Ecological Approach
 A major proponent of this viewpoint was J. J. Gibson ,whose work on
perception
 It influences of both the functionalist and the Gestalt schools on the
ecological approach
 Functionalists - the purposes performed by cognitive processes,
 Gestalt psychology’s - the context surrounding any experience is
likewise compatible with the ecological approach.
 Matters -Personal experience, goals, interests, and practical daily living
 Tools-- thus this tradition relies less on laboratory experiments or
computer simulations and more on naturalistic observation and field
studies to explore cognition.
 The ecological approach stresses the need to consider the context of
any cognitive process to understand more completely how that process
functions in the real world.
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References:-
 Galotti,K.M.(2004).Cognitive Psychology: In
and Out of the Laboratory, Fourth Edition.
Thomson Wadsworth.

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