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P t I Hi t & C t li tiPart I – History & Conceptualizations

What is Cognitive Psychology?Formal Definition

“all processes by which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.” (Neisser, 1967)

Relationships and Applications

(Andrade, 2010) (Wiseman et al., 2003)

Information Processing Model EmpiricismExperimental Method

Quantifiable Observations

Philosophy and Origin

How do Cognitive Psychologists think? How do Cognitive Psychologists think?Muller-Lyer Illusion

Why do you think it happens?

Explanation

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How do Cognitive Psychologists think?Which river is longer, the Amazon or the Nile?

Cognitive Science

Much more General

Cog Psy studies the way humans do think while Cog Scistudies all the ways we COULD think too.

Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Philosophy, Cog Psy, Computer Science

Questions relevant to Cognitive Psychology

1. Why do we remember some things and not others?

2. What kinds of mistakes in thinking do "normal" people make?

3. How do our imaginations use images to help us think?

4. Why are we so good at guessing what other people mean?

5. Why do people sometimes say things they don't mean: slips of the

tongue?

6. How do children think?

7. How do they progress toward thinking like adults?

8. Why are some things hard, and some easy?

9. Why is it that some objects in the world are easy to operate, and some

Questions relevant to Cognitive Psychology

9. Why is it that some objects in the world are easy to operate, and some

aren't?

10. What are the kinds of things that people can do better than

computers, and why?

11. What are our limitations as human information processors?

Cognitive Psychology is YoungUlrich Neisser’s book in 1967

The journal Cognitive Psychology in 1970

What was going on before this?

Back to Empiricism

Ancient HistoryPlato and Aristotle’s idea of a wax tablet

Some are too hard and some are too softWhy are some ideas learned and some forgotten?

Relevant to some of the ways we study cognition todayEncoding & Retrieval

Plato’s, then Aristotle’s, aviary metaphor

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A little less ancient history

John Locke (1690) and Thomas Hobbes (1651)

The Source of All Knowledge is SensationBritish Associationism

Associationists vs. RationalistsMajor figures of the debate

Ideas from James Mill and Immanuel Kant

Some early playersHermann Ludwig von Helmholtz

Speed of a nerve impulse

What does that mean for research?

Kinnebrook gets fired!

Some early players (cont.)Wilhelm Wundt

Reaction Times (get used to these)

Introspectionism

Relevance to Cognitive PsycChronometer

Some early players (cont.)William James

Against many of Wundt’s views

Functionalism

Relevance to Cognitive Psyc

Back across the pondGestalt Psychologists

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”

Complex Behavior

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Gestalt Principles Gestalt Principles

Some early players (cont.)Herman Ebbinghaus

Inspired by Fechner

Memory for nonsense syllables (CVC)

How is memory for CVCs different from memory for meaningful material?

Rigorous methodology

Behaviorism

BehaviorismWhat is behaviorism?

External vs. Internal events

Stimulus-Response machines

Behaviorist FolkJohn Watson

Classical Conditioning

B.F. Skinner

Operant Conditioning

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Information Processing ApproachReaction against behaviorism

Edward Tolman (1948): “Cognitive maps in rats and men”

Bousfield (1951): Clustering in word recall

George Miller (1956): Magic Number 7

Information Processing ApproachClaude Shannon’s theory

SOURCE (MSG) transmitter

(signal) CHANNEL (signal)

receiver (MSG) DESTINATION

(signal) = possibility of noise creeping into channel

Information Processing ApproachComputer metaphor not perfect

Tracing flow of information

Humans very different than computers with regards to information processing (this will become obvious)

Representations and Processes

INPUT INFORMATION OUTPUTPROCESSING

Understand “2”

I Say “2” Square it You Say “4”

Representation Cognitive Operation

Recognize FaceFace

Retrieve Name Say/Use

Representations and Processes

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Representations and Processes Representations and ProcessesWhy is it important to cognitive psychology that we can still recognize the pictures?

Selective Attention

Mental Operations

Representations and ProcessesRecognition = Representation + Processes

We can have very different representations of the same thing

Examples

Representations and ProcessesTop-down vs. Bottom-up Processing (a very important distinction)

Foreign Language example

Reading?

Top-down vs. Bottom-up ProcessingRead the following out loud

It’s hard work digging clay,Save it for a rainy clayy y

Day vs. Clay

Therefore, context matters

Top-down vs. Bottom-up Processing

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Top-down vs. Bottom-up Processing Top-down vs. Bottom-up Processing

Why is a raven like a writing desk?