Lecture 1 - What is Cognition Flashcards
What was the HMAS Sydney and why is it such a good example of the application cognitive psychology theories?
The HMAS Sydney was an Australian world war ii battle ship that was sunk by the German Kormoran battle ship in 1941.
Whilst there were no Australian HMAS Sydney suvivours there were 25 Kormoran survivours.
When these survivours were rescued they all had different accounts about where the HMAS and Kormoran had sunk. The Australian people thought this meant that they were lying and as such disregarded their accounts for the next 60 or so years.
In the 90s and early 2000s Kirsner and Dunn (two psychologists) used the memory experiments conducted by Sir Frederick Bartlett’s on story re-telling done in 1932 to analyse the accounts of the german survivours to see whether they matched the patterns of memory retrieval seen in Bartlett’s experiments. Along with an understanding of selective attention Kirsner and Dunn used their analysis to predict where the Kormoran and HMAS Sydney had sunk. They proposed this location in 2004 and in 2008 the two ships were found only a few miles away from their prediction (even though the accounts ranged thousands of miles in difference).
Who was Sir Frederick Bartlett?
Sir Frederick Bartlett conducted experiments in 1932 looking at memory using a Native American story of The War of Ghosts to understand
Who were Kim Kirsner and John Dunn and what did they predict in 2004?
Kim Kirsner and John Dunn were cognitive psychologists in the 1990s who analysed the accounts of the 25 german survivours of the Kormoran and using this analysis predicted where the Kormoran and HMAS Sydney sunk. This prediction was made public in 2004.
Define Cognitive Psychology
The study of how the mind encodes, represents and processes information.
Can categorisation be predicted by the confusability of an object, based on the findings of Shepard, Hoval and Jenkins (1961)?
No. Based on their methods of determining confusability of objects (based on identification) confusability of objects could not predict the error rate of categorisation observed in their experiment.
Why is Tupaia’s Map significant in the field of Cognitive Psychology ?
Tupaia’s Map is the map Tupaia drew for the European explorers on The Endeavour (Captain Cook etc). Tupaia was a polynesian navigation expert. Initially no one could read Tupaia’s map and the European’s just thought that Tupaia did not know where the islands were. Tupaia’s map has now been understood and it reflects the different way of viewing navigation that Tupaia and his people had - the difference being that Tupaia and his people viewed navigation from a more individual-centred view, such that the world moves around the person, not the person moving within the world.
This historical fact highlights differences in how people represent their world in their mind.
Did Kirsner and Dunn use Zipf’s Law and Sir Frederick Bartlett’s War of the Ghosts data to infer that the German Survivours were not lying?
Yes. They found that the variation seen in the german surviours accounts was consistent with variation due to random error. Using this information is what allowed them to predict where the ships had sunk and which turned out to be very close to where they were later found in 2008.
