Objectives Chapter 1 1 What is Cognitive Psychology What is Cognition and Cognitive approach Cognitive Psychology o A subdiscipline of experimental psychology o Investigates mental processes that give rise to our perception and interpretation of the world around us How people perceive process store and retrieve information Cognition knowledge Cognitive Approach o Acquisition storage transformation and a use of o A theoretical orientation that emphasizes people s thought processes and their knowledge 2 Why should we learn about cognition cognitive psychology Cognition occupies a major portion of human psychology Almost everything you have done in the past hour requires you to perceive remember use language or think The cognitive approach has widespread influence on other areas of psychology as well as disciplines outside psychology Cognitive Psychology provides an owner s manual for your mind You can better understand how your mind works 3 How Cognitive Psychology can be applied to study of other psychological area e g Clinical Psychology Clinical and Counseling Psychology o Research and treatment of behavioral disorders o EX studying behavioral or pharmacological interventions for depression ADHS anorexia etc 4 What are the origins of cognitive psychology 4 1 Know structuralism and functionalism How do they differ from each other Who were key figures in each movement Know introspection and its limitation Structuralism o Founded by Edward Titchener Wundt s student o As physicists and chemists discerned the structure of matter so Titchener aimed to discover the structural elements of mind like the periodic table of elements in chemistry o It encouraged systematic data collection and empiricism Functionalism Introspection o Founded by William James o What are the functions of our thoughts and feelings How they enable us to adapt survive and flourish o Founded by Wilhelm Wundt o Self reports of experience o Suggested that it is the method of careful reflection and reporting of mental experiences by trained observers o Unreliable too subjective 4 2 Know why the behaviorists sought to change the focus of psychological research Because behaviorists sought to understand how we learn and improved psychology s scientific rigor 4 3 Know what the cognitive revolution beginning around the 1950s 1960s reintroduced to psychology Disappointment with behaviorist approach Shift away from behaviorism o Recaptured interest in the importance of mental processes Thinking is central Highlighted the role of thought and out interpretation of events in behavior 4 4 Know some important figures and what they did Watson and Skinner o Central claim Science is rooted in observation o Children s thought processes Jean Piaget Noam Chomsky o Linguistics Ulric Neisseer o The first person to use the term Cognitive Psychology 5 How does cognitive psychology differ from other areas of psychology o Research on the relationship between cultural differences Social psychology and sense of humor Cognitive psychology o Research on memory or effective learning Objectives Chapter 2 6 Know sensation and perception and be able to differentiate between the two Sensation Detecting and encoding sensory information o Gathering information from the environment into your senses namely from the outside world into you EX detecting the color and shape of the object Perception the interpretation of raw sensory inputs o Involves integration of outside world external stimuli and one s own inner world previous knowledge or experience o Closely tied to thought and memory EX Loud ringing noise that s my alarm clock ringing 1 1Know Sensory Memory too Particularly Iconic memory and Echoic memory Extremely brief sensory activation A lot of sensory input never enters conscious processing Types of sensory memory o Iconic memory Visual o Echoic memory Auditory 1 2Where s the primary visual cortex Occipital Lobe 7 Know Gestalt Psychology Principles in Visual Perception Early 1900s German Psychologists o Gestalt Form Our brains do more than register information about the world We perceive objects as wholes within their overall context Gestalt Principles o Illusory Contours A perceptual experience may be more than the sum of its sensory parts o Figure ground We constantly filter how we attend to sensory information o Motion frames The brain perceives motion by comparing visual 8 Know theories of objects recognition Template Feature analysis Recognition by components Templates theory o Our visual system compares a stimulus with a set of templates or specific patters stored in your memory o However how do you recognize if there are different patterns for the same object o Visual perception requires a more flexible system than matching a pattern using a specific template o Supporting Evidence Letters Feature Analysis Theory o A visual stimulus is composed of a small number of distinctive features o Compare a new letter to stored list of distinctive features o Ex R curved component vertical line diagonal line o Instead of having all different templates you would compare a stimulus with the features o Eleanor Gibson s research Measured time required to decide if two letters are different o Limitations Complex shapes in nature Context Distortion of features with movement Recognition by Components Theory o Irving Biederman A visual object can be represented as an arrangement of simple 3 D shapes namely geons Combining geons to form meaningful objects In general three geons are enough to classify an object 9 Know bottom up and top down processing in visual perception and differences between them Bottom up process data o Sensory detection and encoding construction of whole from parts o Begins with automatic sensory detection and encoding o Emphasizes the importance of the environment and the stimulus in object recognition Top down processes knowledge o Conceptually driven organization and interpretation of information Experiences and expectations o Begins with conscious organization and interpretation o Emphasizes how a person s concepts and mental processes influence object recognition 10 What s the word superiority effect We can identify a single letter more rapidly and accurately when it appears in a meaningful word than when it appears in a meaningless context 11 Know inattentional and change blindness and differences between them Inattentional blindness o Failure to notice that a new object has appeared because attention is focused elsewhere o Reflects
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