Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Week 1—Introduction to Cognitive Psychology (Topic 1: Foundations of…

- - - - Cognition:
        
        Everyday use it jus means individual thought. IN psychology it is a term applied to all mental processes, conscious and unconsiocu, deliberate and indeliberate. It refers to every single mental thought that allows us to function in the world.
      - Cognitive psychology: is the scientific study of mental processes. Internal representations and structures that underlies our conscious and unconscious cognitions. It focuses on theoretical descriptions of cognitive structures and processes.
        
        Because we can't view them directly these representations are viewed as hypothetical constructs which we infer from things we can observe or view directly.
        
        Two main aims of cognitive psychology are: To provide a theoretical description of the mind (mental structures or abstract representations and processes) and second to provide experimental and quantitative evidence regarding mental function.
        
        Cog psych is just one of a group of subjects called cog science. We mean human experimental cog psychology but AI, Cog neuroscience, Pyscholinguistics etc all fall under cognitive science. The integration of these fields under cognitive science has been called the cognitive revolution.
      - History of Cognitive Psychology (Timeline): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XbnQI4DEN6Q3Unkxvh_ZoKN6E6rATFTX/view?usp=sharing
        
        All begins ancient greeks in psychology. Psyche encompassed soul which encompassed mind. Rationalism and empiricism emerged from this thought.
        
        Rationalist schools believed we could explore the mind through thinking itself by examining personal experience and mental processes through intuition and deduction.
        
        Rationalists also often presume that much knowledge like maths is innate and acquired through development without the need to be learned. This view also lead to a generalisation that we all have a core that can't be altered or manipulated.
        
        The empiricists adopted a different approach believing that the fundamental concept of the mind comes from sensation and experience. They also think we're shaped by what happens to us, they're skeptical to the unobservable—preferring evidence of our sense and what emerged from them. They also prize simple expanations over complex explanations of the internal unobservable aspects of mind. Finally the empiricists think humans can be controlled and manipulated very easily because they think we're nothing but our experience.
        
        Modern scientific method involves the interplay between reasoning and absract theorizing from which general observations arise. It's a combo of induction amd dediction.
        
        KANT In kant's CPR he addressed the issue of whether psychology could ever be an empirical subject—he concluded that it couldn't be and that the mind is not immenable to direct study. He thought we could rationally study our own thoughts (ie. instrospection) and he also reasoned that one persons introspection may be different from anothers. He also thought that introspection forces us to separate things that may not be separable.
        
        Kant described the cognitive achitecture—"all our knowledge begins with the sense, proceeds then to understanding and ends with reason".
        
        Kant rejected the possibility of direct study and measurement and said that even though we can't measure the mind we can infer things. Transcendental method.
        
        William Wundt was one of the first experimental psychologists. Like Kant he thought the mind had to be studied through introspection but he thought he could have an experimental way of studying introspection.
        
        He gave people visual images and then attempted to get them to describe their experiences as wither automatic of passive associations and he was then examining how conscious thoughts could become mental images. This last bit of is an active voluntary processes,
        
        This separation of automatic and controlled cognitive processes is still important today and although—unlike Wundt we no longer see the controlled ones.
        
        Wundt was interesfed in conscious experiences as a whole.
        
        1 more item...
        
        Edward B Titchner studied with Wundt and like Wundt used the experimental approach of introspection. He was only interested in the elemental parts of consicous experience rather than whole experience of consiousness like Wundt. He was structuralist by taking the basic themes of Wundt and extending them greatly. He wanted to standardize the experimental method of introspection.
        
        He was focused directly on sensation and proposed that every sensation was made up of four properties—intensity, spatial extent, quality and duration.
        
        For the structuralists the aim was to identity the key sensory features that define "appleness" for example and this is how someone knows what something is.
        This idea—feature analysis— is still in some theories but seen as just one small step of many that are involved in cognitive decision making. The structuralist approach is fundamentally limited as it's only focused on what we can see and leaves our memory, awareness etc.
        
        William James Brought together a disparate body of work in principles of psychology which took him twelve years to write.
        
        Wasn't a great experimentalist and didn't really like them. His writing ranged wider because he wasn't tethered to experimentalism. He used introspection to drive his theories but used a functional introspective approach. James was interested in processes rather than structures ie. the purpose of consciousness rather than the constituents parts of conciseness.
        A structuralist wouild break down a car and attempt to work backward, a functionalist like james would drive the car and then see how the whole thing worked together.
        
        Hermann Ebbinghaus: Unlke Wundt he believed memory could be scientifically studied.
        His paper Memory: a conrribution to exprimental psychology became a landmark paper for cogntivie psych. He combined the principles of control over conditions and the impact of extraneous factors. This led him to using statistics to estimate effects, obtain estimates with measurmeent error., Basically ironed things out with statistics and changed psych in doing so.
        
        He came up with the ebbinghaus forgetting curve. This showed how long we could actuallly remember things. He did these experiments on himself too. It showed that most forgetting happens in the first few minutes and hours and then forgetting slows way down overtime.