Introduction to Cognitive Psychology

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Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
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Objectives

• Define Cognitive Psychology
• Understand the evolution of cognitive theories
  from Plato to cognitive psychology including the
• philosophical Antecedents of Psychology
• psychological Antecedents of Cog Psychology
• emergence of Cognitive Psychology
• Discuss research methods in cognitive psychology
• Discuss major themes in cognitive psychology

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1. What is Cognitive Psychology?

• The study of how people perceive, learn,
  remember, and think.
• Includes study of
• How people perceive various shapes
• Remembering and forgetting
• How they learn language

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From Plato to Cognitive Psychology

• Nature of reality
• Reality resides not in the concrete objects we
  perceive but in the abstract forms that these
  objects represent
• How to investigate reality
• Observation is misleading
• The route to knowledge is through logical
  analysis

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ARISTOTLE And Empiricism

• Nature of reality
• Reality lies only in the concrete world of
  objects that our bodies sense
• How to investigate reality
• The route to knowledge is through empirical
  evidence, obtained through experience and
  observation
• Observations of the external world are the only
  means to arrive at truth

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RENE DESCARTES and Rationalism

• Cogito ergo sum
• Mental representations
• Descartes raised, directly or indirectly,
  virtually all the significant issues related to
  the foundations of the science of the mind
• He had taken the principles from his writings on
  meteors, optics, mathematics, and mechanics and
  considered their applicability to human phenomena
• Innate ideas

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JOHN LOCKE and British Empiricism

• tabula rasa (blank slate)
• Learning
• Humans are born without knowledge
• No innate ideas

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Structuralism Wilhelm Wundt

• Goal of psychology
• To understand the structure of the mind and its
  perceptions by analyzing those perceptions into
  their constituent components
• Method
• Introspection looking inward at pieces of
  information passing through consciousness

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Functionalism - William James

• Goal of psychology
• To study the processes of mind rather than its
  contents
• Method
• Various methods introspection, observation,
  experiment

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Behaviorism

• Goal of psychology
• To study observable behavior
• Any hypotheses about internal thoughts and ways
  of thinking are nothing more than speculation
• We can not say anything meaningful about
  cognition
• Method
• Animal experiments, conditioning experiments
• Proponents
• John Watson, B.F. Skinner

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Dominance of Behaviorism in the United States

• Germany Gestalt Psychologywhat are themental
  processes that determine perception?
• England Frederick Bartletts studies of memory
• Russia Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luriaa
  sociocultural perspective on development
• France/Switzerland Jean Piaget
• Why?

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Behaviorisms Legacy

• Behaviorisms rules on what counts as evidence
• The evidence for proposed explanations had to
  come from behavior
• Hypothetical-Deductive (H-D) Method
• hypothesize the existence of inner states to
  explain behavior
• Evaluation of hypotheses by testing the
  correctness of the predictions made from them

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Karl Lashley Challenges Behaviorism

• Psychobiological arguments against behaviorism
• Playing piano
• Behaviorist explain complex behavior using
  stimulus-response (chaining)
• Thus, an activity such as rapidly playing a song
  on a piano would involve an associative chain of
  stimuli and responses
• Such associative chains can not explain the
  behavior- there is no time for feedback

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George Miller Magical Number 7

• Distinguishing phonemes
• Making absolute distinctions among items
• Remembering distinct items
• My problem is that I have been persecuted by an
  integer.
• For seven years this number has followed me
  around, has
• intruded in my most private data, and has
  assaulted me
• from the pages of our most public journals
• There seems to be some limitation built into us
  either by learning or by design of our nervous
  system, a limit that keeps our channel capacity
  in this general range
• Surmounted limit by chunking

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Noam Chomsky and Language

• Linguistic arguments against behaviorism
• Arguments from language acquisition
• Behaviorists can not explain how children can
  produce novel sentences they never heard
• Infinite number of sentences we can produce can
  not be learned by reinforcement there must be a
  cognitive algorithmic structure in our mind
  underlying language

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Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968)
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Concept Formation

• Jerome Bruner
• involved cognitive processes
• hypothesis testing about a concept by making
  guesses about which attributes are essential for
  defining the concept.
• Concept attainment according to Bruner et al.
  1967233) is "the search for and listing of
  attributes that can be used to distinguish
  examples from non-examples of various categories
• Merrill Tennison and component display theory
• Concept formation focuses on attributes and
  examples
• Instruction should be designed to reduce
  overgeneralization, under-generalization and
  misconception.

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• The End