Two topics

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Two topics

• What is Cognitive Psychology about?
• Interaction with the world
• The cognitive psychology of the Couch Potato
• What methods does Cognitive Psychology use?
• How are questions framed?
• Three steps in empirical research

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1. What is Cognitive Psychology about?

• From Reeds text (p. 3)
• Cognitive psychology refers to all processes by
  which the sensory input is transformed, reduced,
  elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.
• What is sensory input? Transformation? Reduction?
  thats our subject this term

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1. What is Cognitive Psychology about?

• Interaction with the world.
• Input
• External influences on input whats out there?
• Internal influences on input what do you
  notice?
• Perception
• Storage
• Retrieval
• Response selection

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Cognitive Psychology of the Couch Potato

• One way to illustrate the complexity and
  sophistication of human cognition is to consider
  the cognitive psychology of the couch potato.
• Well look at what is regarded as a pointless,
  undemanding task that doesnt require much skill.
  Anybody can do it.
• How hard could it be?

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Thinking about the couch potato will

• Illustrate what Cognitive Psychology is about.
• Give you new respect for humans as a species.
• If our simplest activities are significant
  achievements, how should we evaluate our most
  complex, demanding operations?

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Couch Potato Cognitive Tasks

• Eating potato chips
• Perception
• Perceiving people
• Perceiving objects
• Perceiving actions
• Language
• Syntax, vocabulary, and prosody
• Inferences figurative language
• Humour
• Memory comprehension tasks

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A. Eating potato chips

• To manage this you must
• Guide hand into bag not down outside
• Control grip aperture and pressure dont break
  chip dont let it fall
• Raise hand to mouth not to cheek or ear

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B. Perception

• To watch television, you must not only see the
  images on the screen, you must perceive them.
  That is, you must
• attach meaning to the images arriving at your
  retina.
• Things you must perceive include people

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Perceiving people

• Are they young or old?

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Perceiving people

• Happy or sad?

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Perceiving people

• Male or female?

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B. Perception

• Watching television requires perceiving
• People

• Objects

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Perceiving objects
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Perceiving objects
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B. Perception

• Watching television requires
• People
• Objects

• Actions

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Perceiving actions
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Perceiving actions
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C. Language

• Language tasks required for television watching
  include
• Understanding vocabulary what do individual
  words mean?
• Pragmatics
• Syntax The cat bit the dog vs. the dog bit the
  cat.
• Prosody the affective and pragmatic value of
  intonation.

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C. Language

• Language tasks (continued)
• Understanding utterances, inc. inferences
• The dog barked. The baby woke.
• Literal vs. figurative language same external
  form, different meanings
• A rolling stone gathers no moss
• Understanding humour

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D. Memory comprehension tasks

• Memory tasks in television watching
• Remembering histories of characters
• Who is Chandler? What would he do if a waiter
  spilled soup on him?
• Who is Tony Soprano? How would he respond to a
  neighbour in need of help?

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D. Memory comprehension tasks

• Understanding story, relationships
• How would the story develop if Chandler found
  his wife was having an affair with a friend of
  his?
• How would the story develop if Tony Soprano
  found his wife was having an affair with a friend
  of his?

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D. Memory comprehension tasks

• Suspending disbelief
• Does the Federation really exist? Klingons?
• In the show 24 Hours, the action unfolds during
  one 24 hour day. But you watch it over 24 weeks.
  How can you accept that the time elapsed is both
  one day and 24 weeks?

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Conclusion

• Being a couch potato is a very complex task. It
  requires accurate sequencing of movements using
  gross and fine motor control, perception,
  understanding of vocabulary, sentence structure,
  prosody, figurative language, and pragmatics,
  memory encoding and retrieval, comprehension of
  narrative, and deliberate suspension of disbelief.

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2. Method

• How are issues framed? What do we count as
  evidence?
• Cognitive Psychology is an empirical discipline.
• Disagreements among practitioners are settled by
  appeals to objectively-obtained data.

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2. Method

• This reliance on objective ways of settling
  disagreements and insistence on accepting only
  conclusions backed up by adequate experimental
  evidence distinguishes psychology from other
  disciplines such as sociology, MIT, anthropology,
  political science, history, and womens studies.
• Like physics, chemistry, and biology, we search
  for causes through experiments rather than simple
  observation.

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2. Method

• Three steps in empirical research
• 1. Develop theories
• 2. Generate predictions about behaviour
• Based on theories
• 3. Test predictions

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2. Method an example

• Topic Visual word recognition
• General theory people have a memory trace in
  their heads for each word they can recognize in
  writing.
• Issue how are traces organized?

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2. Method an example

• Theory A Traces are organized by
  frequency-of-use you search among common words
  first, rare words last.
• Theory B Traces are organized by length you
  search among short words first, long words last.
• In order to test these theories, we use them to
  generate competing predictions about human
  performance.

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2. Method an example

• Prediction from Theory A
• Ave. response time to common words should be
  shorter than average response time to rare words
• Prediction from Theory B
• Ave. response time to short words should be
  shorter than average response time to long words

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2. Method an example

• In fact, when you do these tests, you find that
• reaction times (RTs) to common words are faster
  on average than RTs to rare words
• there is very little effect of word length on RT
• Conclusion Theory A wins.

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2. Method

• In your reading, pay attention to research
  paradigms - what is a participant in an
  experiment asked to do? What cognitive processes
  are required, in what order, for them to carry
  out that task adequately?
• Independent variables
• Dependent variables
• RT
• Accuracy/error rate