History of Cognitive Psychology 01 24 2015 What did Aristotle say about memory and recollection Memory the ability to hold a perceived experience in your mind o A memory is a mental picture which is imprinted on the part of the body Recollection of an imprint is when the present experiences a person remembers are similar with elements of past sensory experiences o When an imprint is recalled it may bring forth a large group Dualism mind and body as separate but interactive machines of related imprints What did Descartes say about the mind o mind brain debate I could be in a dream i e matrix I think therefore I am o Evidence of his mind s existence We are born with innate ideas What did Lock say about the mind postulated that at birth the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa Contrary to Cartesian philosophy we are not born with innate ideas o knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception argued that the associations of ideas is the basis for all knowledge o Fire pain What is introspection Introspection careful systematic self observation of one s own conscious experience Analyze consciousness into its basic elements and study how these o elements would include ideas like sensations emotions and were related images Analyze own sensations o Report your experience of seeing a red flower o Report all the sensations associated with seeing the flower o by trained subjects Problem of subjectivity o prior knowledge unconscious bias What is the forgetting curve Over time we lose memory of lists Dramatic drop in just one day Studies consonant vowel consonant CVC words that don t mean anything then plotted how many of those words you remember over time Why did Ebbinghaus use the CVC for stimuli Focused on studying the factors that effect human memory and how to control the process of memory by using nonwords in order to control prior knowledge What was the difference between Functionalism and Structuralism Functionalism psychology should focus on the function or purpose of consciousness rather than its structure When you break it down into parts you are losing what consciousness is about Consciousness is holistic What is a problem with structuralism A movement in psych to break down the mind into a study of parts introspection a person being trained to describe in an atomic way the experience of consciousness and explain the mind If you can understand the fundamental building blocks of the mind then you can treat it as a science Consciousness should not be broken down into parts functionalism What were some contributions of William James Consciousness allows us to adapt to our environment Stream of Thought There are no elementary sensations A thunder clap needs the surrounding silence Rebelled against artificiality and narrowness of Structuralism Introspection does not show elements exist independently of the observer Simple sensations do not exist in consciousness experience Habits o Explains much of human behavior o Physical basis of habit o Nervous system pathways form like ruts in a road o Humans are programmed to develop habits They keep us moving o Explains difficulty in breaking them o Intended changes should enlist the support of others Memory o Hailed Ebbinghaus different individuals had different gifts for visual tactile auditory and verbal memory o Demonstrated that memory was not necessarily facilitated by effort o Tip of the tongue phenomenon o Debunked the prevailing Doctrine of Formal Discipline Memorizing one thing will make you better at memorizing an unrelated subject What is the basic idea behind Gestalt psychology Gestalt Psychology consciousness and behavior must be studied as a whole rather than in separate disciplines Principle of Totality The conscious experience must be considered globally by taking into account all the physical and mental aspects of the individual simultaneously because the nature of the mind demands that each component be considered as part of a system of dynamic relationships What were psychological tests first used for Tests used to place people in various positions in the military and was used for immigrants Why did the cognitive revolution happen off the revolution What was Skinner s argument about free will Chomsky said behaviorism could not explain language which kicked Organisms tend to repeat responses that lead to positive outcomes and not repeat responses that lead to negative ones This simple principle would go on to form the foundation of behavior modification used in schools prisons factories and hospitals Skinner s work sparked heated debates over the concepts of free will and determinism in his work Beyond Freedom and Dignity If all our behavior was determined by external stimuli what choice did we really have concerning our behaviors and desires What is operant conditioning using reinforcement or punishment to change behavior What were the limitations of behaviorism Behaviorism was founded by John B Watson in 1913 It stated that scientists should only study observable behavior and that consciousness should be abandoned because ultimately consciousness and perceptions are private events and cannot be objectively verified This means that psychology would suffer from a lack of reliability Behaviorism sparked the nature vs nurture debate with its strong emphasis on stimulus and response S R psychology o Stimulus any detectable input from the environment o Response a reaction to a stimulus o Behavior any overt and observable response or activity by an organism What did Tolman show in his rat research best known for his studies of learning in rats using mazes animals could learn facts about the world that they could subsequently use in a flexible manner Latent learning animals can learn the connections between stimuli without a significant biologically significant e g rewards o Rats learned layouts of maps without explicit rewards What findings strengthened the Cognitive revolution Renewed the belief that thinking was a physical experience and needed to be studies even though it was unobservable o Piaget studied children s cognitive development o Chomsky studied language acquisition and cognitive roots What is connectionism Computer models of the brain neurological plausibility the models are clearly closer to brain function than are traditional rule based models parallel constraint satisfaction different sources of activation can converge on the representation graceful degradation when the model is
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