DONDERS 1868: HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO MAKE A DECISION?

• Donders was interested in determining how long it takes for a person to make a decision by measuring reaction time —how long it takes to respond to the presentation of a stimulus.
• He used two measures of reaction time
  
  • He measured simple reaction time by asking his subjects to push a button as rapidly as possible when they saw a light go on
  • He measured choice reaction time by using two lights and asking his subjects to push the left button when they saw the left light go on and the right button when they saw the right light go on
• Donders reasoned that the difference inreaction time between the simple and choice conditions would indicate how long it took tomake the decision that led to pushing the correct button. Because the choice reaction timetook one-tenth of a second longer than simple reaction time, Donders concluded that thedecision-making process took one-tenth of a second.

WUNDT’S 1879: STRUCTURALISM AND ANALYTIC INTROSPECTION

• Wundt wanted to create a “periodic table of the mind,” which would include all of the basic sensations involved in creating experience based on structuralism
  
  • According to structuralism, our overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience the structuralists called sensations
• Wundt thought he could achieve this scientific description of the components of experience by using analytic introspection
  
  • a technique in which trained subjects described their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli
• No reliable results
• Established the first laboratory of scientific psychology

EBBINGHAUS’S 1885 MEMORY EXPERIMENT: WHAT IS THE TIME COURSE OF FORGETTING?

• Ebbinghaus used a measure called savings method , calculated as follows, to determine how much was forgotten after a particular delay: Savings = ( Original time to learn the list ) – ( Time to relearn the list after the delay )
• Forgetting occurs rapidly in the first 1 to 2 days after originallearning
• Contributed with a quantitative meassure of cognition i.e. Plotted his saving's curve to project the rapid decline in memory.

WILLIAM JAMES’S 1890 PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY

• made significant observations and codified his observation in his textbook, Principles of Psychology
• Some of the observations hold true
  
  • The observation that paying attention to one thing involves withdrawing from other things still rings true today and has been the topic of many modern studies of attention

Process models

• Process models represent the processes that are involved in cognitive mechanisms,
  
  • i.e. with boxes usually representing specific processes and arrows indicating connections between processes

Function

• One purpose of models is to simplify.
• We can appreciate this purpose by considering how we might build a model of the brain. Of course,
• this model isn’t anything like a real brain, because it doesn’t show what is happening inside each structure and how the structures are connected to each other.

The mind’s central role

• Based on the mind’s role in memory, problem-solving, and making decisions we can define the mind as:
  
  • The mind creates and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning .

Mind's operation

• Based on the view that the mind is an operating system, we may define the mind as:
  
  • The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals

Cognition

• Both these definitions involve cognition
• i.e.: —the mental processes, such as perception, attention, and memory, that are what the mind does

1900s challenge to the views on cognition

• In the early 1900s, negative reactions to Wundt’s technique of analytic introspection and the emergence of John Watson’s new approach called behaviourism shifted the focus away from studying mental processes. Behaviourism focuses on objectively studying observable behaviours and deemed consciousness or mental processes, unobservable events.