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Cognitive Psychology

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Title: Cognitive Psychology

1
Cognitive Psychology Chapter 1.1 Introduction
2
8/7/2015

Outline
Course and Instructor
What is Cognitive Psychology?
Where did Cognitive Psychology come from?
Psychological Antecedents
Two Revolutions
Precursors from other disciplines
Information processing approach

Study Questions. Define and briefly describe
Cognitive Psychology. Why might we consider
cognitive psychology to be a scientific
revolution? Why might we consider it to not be a
revolution?
3
Introduction

Course and Instructor
Course web site
Cognitive Psychology
Neissers (1968) definition
Cognitive Psychology refers to all processes by
which the sensory input is transformed, reduced,
elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.

4
Introduction

Cognitive Psychology
Ascrofts definitions
Cognition the mental events and knowledge we use
when we recognize an object, remember a name,
have an idea, understand a sentence, or solve a
problem.
Cognitive Science the scientific study of
thought, language, and the brain - in short the
study of the mind.

5
Introduction

True or False

A canary can breath
A canary can fly

6
Introduction

Studying mental processes
The sentence verification task

Dependent Variable - Measurement variable - Y
axis - E.g, RT,
Independent Variable - Manipulated variable -
X axis - E.g, Sentence type
7
Introduction

Read the following

8
History of Cognitive Psychology

Birth of Experimental Psychology
The Longitude Prize of 1714
The Chronological and the Lunar Method
John Harrison and Nevil Maskelyne
Greenwich mean time and star-transits
The eye and ear method
Interpolate the transit 4 measures
The Royal Astronomer fires his assistant

9
History of Cognitive Psychology

Birth of Experimental Psychology
Bessels solution
Trained astronomers differed by as much 1.1 s
(1820s)
Introduced correction factors (personal
equations)
Introduction of chronometers
Early investigations in cognitive processing
Wundt The personal equation as psychology
Attending to two stimuli at the same time
Willful Attention
Reaction Time

10
History of Cognitive Psychology

The Birth of Experimental Psychology
Neurophysiology - Helmoltz
Finite timing of nerve impulses
Subtractive method
Donders (Reaction Time and Mental Processes,
1865)
A-task SRT
B-task SRTCategorizationselection
C-task SRTCategorization
Wundts Experimental Laboratory at Leipzig
Published over 53,000 pages
Wundts Structuralism

11
History of Cognitive Psychology

The Death of Experimental Psychology
Titcheners Structuralism
Introspection as a method
William James and Functionalism
First Introductory textbook
Influence of Darwin
Freuds Psychodynamics hit America
1909 Clark University Lectures

12
History of Cognitive Psychology

The Death of Mentalism

John B. Watson (1913). Psychology as the
behaviourist views it.

Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a
purely objective experimental branch of natural
science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction
and control of behavior. Introspection forms no
essential part of its methods, nor is the
scientific value of its data dependent upon the
readiness with which they lend themselves to
interpretation in terms of consciousness. The
behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary
scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing
line between man and brute. The behavior of man,
with all of its refinement and complexity, forms
only a part of the behaviorist's total scheme of
investigation.
13
History of Cognitive Psychology

The Death of Mentalism

On Structuralism

I do not wish unduly to criticize psychology. It
has failed signally, I believe, during the
fifty-odd years of its existence as an
experimental discipline to make its place in the
world as an undisputed natural science.
Psychology, as it is generally thought of, has
something esoteric in its methods. If you fail to
reproduce my findings, it is not due to some
fault in your apparatus or in the control of your
stimulus, but it is due to the fact that your
introspection is untrained. The attack is made
upon the observer and not upon the experimental
setting. In physics and in chemistry the attack
is made upon the experimental conditions. The
apparatus was not sensitive enough, impure
chemicals were used, etc. In these sciences a
better technique will give reproducible results.
Psychology is otherwise. if you can't observe 3-9
states of clearness in attention, your
introspection is poor. If, on the other hand, a
feeling seems reasonably clear to you, your
introspection is again faulty. You are seeing too
much. Feelings are never clear..
14
History of Cognitive Psychology

The Death of Mentalism

On Functionalism

My psychological quarrel is not with the
systematic and structural psychologist alone. The
last fifteen years have seen the growth of what
is called functional psychology. This type of
psychology decries the use of elements in the
static sense of the structuralists. It throws
emphasis upon the biological significance of
conscious processes instead of upon the analysis
of conscious states into introspectively isolable
elements. I have done my best to understand the
difference between functional psychology and
structural psychology. Instead of clarity,
confusion grows upon me. The terms sensation,
perception, affection, emotion, volition are used
as much by the functionalist as by the
structuralist. The addition of the word 'process'
('mental act as a whole', and like terms are
frequently met) after each serves in some way to
remove the corpse of content' and to leave
'function' in its stead. Surely if these concepts
are elusive when looked at from a content
standpoint, they are still more deceptive when
viewed from the angle of function, and especially
so when function is obtained by the introspection
method...
15
History of Cognitive Psychology

The Death of Mentalism

On Studying conscious or unconscious processes

This leads me to the point where I should like to
make the argument constructive. I believe we can
write a psychology, define it as the science of
behaviour, and never go back upon our
definition never use the terms consciousness,
mental states, mind, content, introspectively
verifiable, imagery, and the like. I believe that
we can do it in a few years. It can be done in
terms of stimulus and response, in terms of habit
formation, habit integrations and the like.
16
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17
History of Cognitive Psychology