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Introduction to cognitive psychology (Y1) - Coggle Diagram
Introduction to cognitive psychology (Y1)
What is cognitive psychology?
Scientific study of mental processes - how we process the environment, memorise information, use language to communicate and make decisions
Sometimes we are aware of our cognitive processes, often they are automatic
Influence our development, understanding of social situations and are outputs of biological and neurological activity
Mainly an experimental science - aiming to establish causation through independent variables and dependent variables
It is about information processing - how we acquire, store, retrieve and use information
How do we acquire information about the world - perception
What information do we chose to process - attention
How we represent information about the world - categorisation
How we store and retrieve information about the world - memory
How do we communication information - language
How do we process information and choose what action to take - decision-making, problem solving and creativity
Emerged as direct opposition to the reductionist nature of behaviourism
Emerged at a time of advances in computer technology
Came to encompass many aspects of processing such as -
-> Language - systems of communication and personal expression built on by symbols
-> Reasoning - how we make decisions, solve problems and draw conclusions
-> Categorisation - a class of concepts that share common properties, through which we understand the world
-> Memory - the mental processes we use to hold and manipulate the internal representations in our mind
-> Attention - mental processes governing our awareness of a stimulus to the exclusion of others
Wundt
Psychology is the science of immediate experience - every mental event has an emergent form or quality, allowing us to break down experiences to their smallest constituents
Apperception - we do not just perceive the visual world, we apperceive it because we are inherently interpreting based on experience
Gain inisight into processing by accessing this information through introspection - Wundt thought it was unbiased, it is not
Thought metre experiment - 1/10th of a second to voluntarily change focus between the pendulum position and bell position, could not look at both
-> Both stimuli register sequentially
Introspection - cognitive psychologists attacked introspection as they stated we do not have awareness of all our cognitive processes - automatic
Nisbett and WIlson (1977):
Provided participants in a department store with 4 identical pairs of stockings, and were asked to state which one was the best quality - 12% chose the left one, and 40% chose the right one - no reasoning as to why
People can be unaware of stimulus that influenced their behaviour
People can be unaware of their response to a stimulus
People can be aware of the stimulus, and of their behaviour, but unaware of the causal connection between stimulus and their behaviour
Priming studies - shown to influence behaviour without having any conscious recognition
Bargh et al (1996) - gave people a list of rude word anagrams to decode, and then introduced them into a conversation - found they were more likely to interrupt, which did not happen with the neutral or polite word lists
More likely to interrupt based on the linguistic information they were primed with despite stating they did not feel aggressive
Participants are poor at understanding their own thoughts and emotions - issue with introspection
Introspection criticised for experimenter bias - structuralism, the school of thought of breaking behaviour down into its components is also criticised for bias and subjectivity from experimenters and participants
Interested in structure of consciousness
Origins
Behaviourism - started just before 20th century, critiqued the weaknesses of introspection
Psychology should be objective, quantify stimulus-reaction, same laws as animals and no place for concepts such as mental processes, consciousness and mind
Does not explain complex cognition well e.g. language requires combining concepts to create new meaningful sentences
Behaviourism became dominant approach in 1930-50s and psychology subjects often white rats
Mind is a black box - cannot see it and we can only observe what goes in and what comes out
Skinner - general theory of behaviour, history of reinforcement drives behaviour, operant conditioning, measured by how subjects behave
Functional fixedness - thumbtacks, candle and matches and asked to fix candle to wall without wax dripping
Gestalt psychology - Duncker (1930s) - attach candle to wall using tack box
The idea that we perceive objects based on their function - do not see thumbtack box as included
HEURISTICS - the shortcuts we create to cognitive information
AI and the psychology of problem solving - Newell and Simon (GPS - general problem solver)
GPS was an advanced computer program developed as computer science advanced - both humans and computers manipulate symbols - symbols acting as representations of something else
Created computer programs that processed information in the same way as the brain
Created early models of proving logical theorems - chess and Tower of Hanoi
Used Means-End analysis comparing desired to actual state
Reliance on heuristics - imperfect satisficing solutionsdue to lack of processing power - we do the same - applying the basic rule without quickest route
Problem spaces rapidly became too complex - more complex it got, the worse the AI was at the task - took mental shortcuts
Human brains also take a shortcut when we run out of processing power
Cognitive revolution - Broadbent (1958) - proposes computer-mind analogy
Mind is a digital computer, both have receptors for inputs and effectors for outputs
Both are characterised by a airly small short-term memory and channels of limited capacity
Fair amount of processing is carried out serially
Miller - the Magical Number 7
The capacity of short term memory is limited to 7 +- 2 items
Memory conceptualised as a little store
There is a new way of thinking, inspired by limited computer memory, that fits experimental data well
Cognition as information processing - behaviour is explained by showing how internal representations are transformed by mental operations - like a computer running a programme
Information processing can be described at different levels of analysis (Marr)
-> Computational level - computational cognitive psychology - how does it do it, and what is the process?
-> Implementation level - cognitive neuroscience - what is the system physically made of?
Wundt opens Leipzig lab, using introspection - James (1890) publishes a textbook that focuses on the function of consciousness, and research today still focuses on separating the primary (what content is immediately available to the consciousness) and secondary memory (larger, seen as a repository of previous experiences)
Psychologists actively research cognition in Europe in the 20th century and US behaviourism emerges - Piagetian theory of cognitive development, and Aphasia studies in relation to lying (Broca and Wernicke)
WW2 ends Gestalt and Wurzburg schools of thought, but also alerted psychologists to the importance of attention and vigilance in human behaviour, with the war effort speeding up the development of digital computers, essential for modern cognitive psychology
Gestalt - perception and problem solving
Wurzburg - high-level thinking and philosophical questions
Cognitive revolution from 1956 onwards is a foundational date for cognitive psychology - Broadbent, Newell and Simon and Chomsky's linguistic theories and use of information theory
Newell and Simon - information processing approach, schema and heuristics - symbolic approach led to AI systems that behave intelligently without the characteristic human mechanisms
Chomsky - criticised Skinner's radical behaviourism, suggesting that language was more complicated and gave birth to linguistics - connectionism
1956 - Miller
Cognitive psychology split into subfields and has increasingly impacted other fields of study:
Schema development - now in depression, education, memory, stereotypes and language
Cognitive neuropsychology - brain lesions studied with hope cognitive deficits will shed light on typical functioning
Semantic networks - knowledge is represented as a network of nodes connected by links - nodes are concepts and links are relationships between them; capture memory aspects, with priming involving activating one node to spread to the rest
Production systems - rules stored in long term memory - productions are made up of conditions (IF) and actions (THEN) - condition satisfaction leads to the action executing
-> Working memory selects productions; these theories do not address the influence of contrasting conditions however, where some are met and others are not, and the action produced
Have a modular property - removal of one production means others can still be retained; productions capture rule like behaviour, and have been used to simulate the errors children make when learning about subtraction
Produced models of learning such as how we acquire procedural knowledge
Unified theories of cognition - embodied as computer programs, aim to provide a single theory explaining every aspect of cognition
Influence of engineering - information theory; the idea of processing coding and encoding processes, flowcharts, algorithms and buffers have all contributed to the field of memory study
Cognitive psychologists have focused on falsification but have not focused on analysing large amounts of data in theories rather than one gran theory, only sometimes explaining one phenomenon
Newell - tried to create a UTC in 1990 - such as memory parameter then being applied to all other scenarios of memory
Soar (Newell 1990) - cognition is problem solving (production system simulating phenomena of learning, problem solving, categorisation and natural language understanding
CHREST (Gobet et al, 2001) - role of perception in cognition is knowledge is the growth of a network o perceptual chunks, linked to possible actions
ACT-R (Anderson et al, 2004) - most sophisticated production sytem in whih cognitio is the activation of production rules and declarative elements in LTM and the simulated phenomena range from simple perceptual tasks and memory tasks to solving algebra
Also simulated brain imaging data, alongside error and response times
1980s - cognitive psychologists begin to use models inspired by the biology of the brain (connectionist models - artificial neural networks) - critical developments in brain imaging techniques in the early 1990s leads to the growth of cognitive neuroscience, using knowledge from biology to explain the brain
Rosenblatt (1958) - perceptrons, or neurons that recognise patterns, but this was disputed - models such as back-propogation overcame issues with perceptrons as it was a more powerful learning algorithm
Connectionism is nodal with links - level of activation leads to different information being produced and received
Could carry the principle of any type of learning - resurgence of connectionism used to simulate language acquisition and perception
-Symbolic approach is useful for - explaining high level aspects of cognition such as prolem solving
Connectionism is useful for lower levels of cognition such as perception
Cognitive neuroscience - emergence of brain scanning techniques has empowered study of brain lesions - aim is to identify a double integration horizontally, between different functions and areas, and laterally from neuronal levels to high levels like recognising language
Frameworks - loose collection of concepts and mechanisms; computer analogies assume categorisation is the same in both humans and computers, and instead a framework of information processing is likely a more successful theory
Models then provide additional details
Neisser (1967) - information framework approach in which he argued computer programs were an oversimplification of mental processes; focused on perception and attention
Branches of cognitive psychology
Judgement, reasoning and decision-making
The Linda Problem - use of some word associations in an item about an individual can prompt us towards picking a certain answer
Select B as it encompasses answer A and additional information
Demonstrates representativeness - Kahneman and Tversky - heuristics
Looked at how people make judgements about uncertain conditions, and estimate probabilities
Reasoning - how we make decisions / solve problems and draw conclusions
Are there more words containing K or starting with T?
Easier to recall words starting with T
Availability heuristic - our tendency to use information that comes to mind quickly and easily when making decisions
Anchoring - Loewenstein and Prelec (2003) - asked participants to provide the last two letters of their social security number, how much they would pay for a range of items (wine, chocolates)
-> Those with highest SS number provided the higher estimates - anchored number perception is higher because of what they recalled initially
Sunk cost fallacy - Arkes and Blumer (1985)
Individuals commit the sunk cost fallacy when they continue a behaviour or endeavour as a result of previously invested resources (time, money or effort)
If the cost outweighs the benefit, the extra costs incurred - inconvenience, time or money - are held in a different mental account than those under no sunk cost
Other heuristics -
Confirmation bias; when we tend to focus on information that supports our opinion and ignore that which does not
Gambler's fallacy - incorrect belief that, if a particular event occurs more frequently than normal in the past, it is less likely to happen in the future
Dunning-Kruger effect - those who are most incompetent are also less able to accurately assess their own ability / knowledge
Concepts and categories
How we store out knowledge and information about things - Rosch
Studies showed that categories are organised around prototypes - a graded structure can be seen in reaction times, frequency of recall, ease of recognition and other tasks
Inferring the nature of cognition through measures of processing
Typicality is based on the number of features each concept share within a category
Concepts are properties, and in combination produce an object or symbol, and then categorisation is items of similar concepts / properties being grouped together
We can then generalise our actions based on our categorisation of objects and experiences
Categories are internal psychological representations that provide a means of understanding the world
A category is a class of concepts that share some common properties - naming of concepts that share common properties
Sometimes categorisation is easy, sometimes it is not - fuzzy boundary of categories where some objects do not quite fit the expected concepts
Language
Human systems of communication and personal expression which have been built upon symbols or representations
Words are abstract symbols - we use context of other words to determine the visualisation of the symbol; pragmatics (chicken is ready to eat, she hit the man with an umbrella, I saw her duck - all had two outcomes, we categorise and choose based on context)
Gricean Maxims of pragmatics - rules for conversation for effective, cooperation communication where all interlocutors are understood
Maxims of quality - make true contributions
Maxims of quantity - contribution is informative as required for the current purposes of the exchange
Maxims of relation - relevancy
Maxims of manner - being clear, brief and as orderly as you can in what you say, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity
McGurk Effect - we do not just use the sound of speech to understand what someone is saying - we also use visual information like lip movements
Speech sounds are often mis-categorised when the auditory cues in the stimulus conflict with the visual cues from the speaker's face
Memory
Mental processes we use to hold and manipulate the internal representations in our mind
Working memory - temporary information store
Short term memory - low capacity store for active, readily available information
Long term memory - store for informative knowledge
Ebbinghaus
-> Studies of memory (1885) - studied memory through meaningless syllables - trigrams - with no semantic content to help retention
-> Followed Wundt in acting as his own research subject
-> The forgetting curve - forgetting slows down over time - extends psychophysics to higher mental function
-> Forget 70% of what you learn after 2 days unless consolidated
Miller's law of seven - between 5-9 items in the working memory; chunking of similar information improves the amount we learn, with human memory capacity typically including strings of words or concepts ranging from 5-9
This information on the limits of the capacity for processing information has become one of the most cited papers in cognitive psychology
Attention
Change blindness - a phenomenon of visual perception that occurs when a stimulus undergoes a change without this being noticed by its observer
Shows the fallibility of our attentional systems
Higher acuity in the fovea - less cones in eye means our attention is guided by where highest acuity is - we spot more in these areas and pay most attention to them
We pay attention to something = more acuity = higher processing
Attention - mental processes governing our awareness of a stimulus to the exclusion of others - can experimentally manipulate situations to show when the mind 'fills the gaps'
Inattentional blindness -
failure to recognise an unexpected stimulus due to nothing other than inefficiencies and failure of attention
Shows fallibility of our attentional systems (Drew et al, 2013 and Kuhn & Findlay, 2000 and Kuhn et al 2008)
Eye movements driven by cognition - Yarbus, 1967 - when given an image to look at with no task, eye movements cover all of it
When given a task, eye movements focus here - pay attention to what is important
Too much information to take all of it in - attention narrows down the environment:
Perception - organisation, identification and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment - we do not just take in visual information
Concave dragon - perception based on information
Methods
Experimental methods - dependent variables often used include -
Eye movement, response time, percentage of correct responses and types of error, as well as thinking out loud tests (verbal protocols)
Also use brain imaging technology
Stenberg (1966) - access to STM being either serial or parallel (can you retrieve information only in the order memorised, or is it equally retrievable) - shown number sets and then asked if number appeared
Search is serial - took longer with longer datasets to recognise number and that the search is exhaustive (scanning does not stop ater answer is found)
Commonly use healthy adult participants who are typically psychology students
Use of mathematical models - rate of forgetting for example:
However, they are making assumptions that are often not met, and force undesirable simplification
Use of computer models - human cognition on an abstract level is roughly similar to a digital computer;both have input and output, serial processing, programs and different memory types
This is the information processing approach - Newell and Simon's problem solving domains
Can also be used for computer modelling to understand complex systems that evolve a function over time - laws can be turned into computer programs - for example, human cognition can be measured and then run through a program to predict an outcome
-> Can also be developed to explain low-level aspects of cognition and they can simulate phenomena at the brain level
Theories are useful for explaining and summarising data, sometimes to the point of making scientific laws, and allow us to predict behaviour
Subfields and applications of cognitive psychology -
Identified either through the type of behaviour they study or the type of experimental method they used
Can also be grouped by basic or applied research
Focus on practical issues and this has produced many important applications
-> Human-computer interaction - principles from perception and short term memory research have been used to improve computer designs