Introduction and
History of Cognitive Psychology

I.                   Cognition – a collection of mental processes and
activities used in perceiving, remembering, thinking and understanding, as well
as the act of using these processes.

a.       Memory
– mental processes involved in the acquisition and retention of information for
later removal

                                                              i.      3 mental activities – awareness of a stimulus when the
original stimulus is no longer present

1.      Acquisition

2.      Retention

3.      Retrieval

II.                History of Cognitive Psychology – evolved from the
disciplines of philosophy and physiology

a.       Wundt
– first psychology lab in Germany in 1879

                                                              i.      Introspection: a method in which one looks carefully
“inward” and reports on current inner sensations and experience

                                                            ii.      Psychology should study “conscious processes and
immediate experience”

                                                          iii.      Rules: “observers” are well trained, observations can
be replicated, and controls ensure systematic study of variables of interest

b.      Titchner

                                                              i.      Student of Wundt

                                                            ii.      Elements or components of the mind

                                                          iii.      Structuralism- the study of the structure of the
concious mind, including sensations, images, and feelings.

                                                          iv.      Unable to replicate using introspection

                                                            v.      Both this approach and introspection lost popularity

c.       Ebbinghaus

                                                              i.      The mind’s ability to form associations

                                                            ii.      A more objective technique/method for the study of
cognitive activity

                                                          iii.      List of nonsense syllables with CVC letter construction

1.      Prevent
previous knowledge from influencing memory

2.      Prime
word and target word

3.      Studied
savings and forgetting

                                                          iv.      Associations

d.      James

                                                              i.      Functionalism- study of funciton of conciousness
“asking WHY?”

1.      Memory
consists of 2 components

a.       One
part processes information that is immediately available or currently in your
awareness

b.      The
other part of memory serves as a repository of past experiences

e.       Watson

                                                              i.      Dominated american psychology from about 1910 until the
1950s

                                                            ii.      Study only behavior because it is both observable and
quantifiable

                                                          iii.      No reference to internal mental processes

                                                          iv.      More “scientific”

1.      Little
advancement was made in cognitive psychology

                                                            v.      Towards the end of the era, some pseudo behaviorists
began to study more than S-R relationships

1.      Became
interested in how the organism intervened between the stimulus and response

2.      S-O-R

                                                          vi.      Behaviorism

                                                        vii.      Cognition was discouraged

f.       Dissatisfaction
with behaviorism

                                                              i.      Behaviorism could not explain a lot of questions about
human activity

g.      “Cognitive
revolution” began in 1950s

                                                              i.      Behaviorism was rejected

                                                            ii.      Chomsky

1.      Language
is too novel

2.      Not
simply a product of S-R, but rather language follows rules stored in memory

III.             Current Directions

a.       Information
processing approach – cognitive activity occurs via a series of stages

                                                              i.      Similarities between humans and computers

1.      Humans
are active processors of information

a.       Input à do something with it à output

2.      Both
are limited in terms of how much info they can process at one time

3.      Both
can store a large amount of info

4.      Computers
can perform some tasks like human

                                                            ii.      Differences and Limitations to this approach

a.       In
some instances, computers do not accurately simulate human performance

                                                                                                                                      i.      Computers can outperform humans in some areas

2.      Hardware
is different

                                                          iii.      Serial processing

1.      Computers
process information serially; humans process information in a parallel fashion

                                                          iv.      Parallel processing

1.      Parallel
processing is many items are processed simultaneously

2.       

b.      Parallel
distributed processing (PDP) approach (AKA: neural networks/connectionist
model)

                                                              i.      McClelland, Rumelhart, and colleagues

                                                            ii.      A series of networks that are linked together by
neuron-like units

                                                          iii.      Brain activity occurs at nodes or different locations
across the brain

1.      Nodes
interconnected via neurons

2.      Once
threshold is met, activity in one node influences activity in other nodes

a.       Producing
either excitation or inhibition in connected nodes

IV.             Breadth

a.       Cognitive
neuroscience

                                                              i.      How cognitive theories explain/compliment the structure
and function of the brain

                                                            ii.      Ss engage in some cognitive in some cognitive task and
measure, via PET or fMRI, brain activity

b.      Cognitive
science

                                                              i.      Interdisciplinary field that studies the internal
representations of the external world

                                                            ii.      Includes computer science, philosophy, psychology,
neuroscience, anthropology, etc.