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Introduction to Cognitive Psychology - Coggle Diagram
Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
What is Cognitive Psychology?
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of the mind, focusing on the processes and mechanisms that underlie human cognition, such as perception, attention, memory, and thinking.
Historical Approaches
Structuralism (Wundt)
Mental activity can be broken down into basic components
used introspection
criticised for lack of objectivity
Functionalism (william james)
focused on the function of mental processes rather than their structure
asked what mental processes are for
Behaviourism (watson, skinner)
the mind treated as a black box
focus only on human behaviour
rejected internal mental processes
cognitive revolution (neisser, chomsky)
reintroduced the mind as an object of scientific study
mind viewed as an information-processing system
Key Concepts
mental representations: physical states (e.g. neural patterns, symbols, computer data) that convey information about objects, events, or categories
human computer analogy: input - processing - output
behavioural measures: reaction time (RT) and accuracy used to infer mental processes