Chapter 1

Question 1

Cognitive psychology

Answer 1

Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes such as “attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and thinking”

Question 2

Memory

Answer 2

the mental processes of acquiring and retaining information for later retrieval; the mental storage system that enables these processes.

Question 3

Cognition

Answer 3

the collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, remembering, thinking and understanding , and the act of using those processes.

Question 4

Ecological validity

Answer 4

principle the research must resemble the situations and task demands that are characteristic of the real world rather than rely on artificial laboratory settings

Question 5

Reductionism

Answer 5

scientific approach in which a complex event or behaviour is broken down into its constituents; the individual constituents are then studied independently

Question 6

Why do we use reductionism in the study of cognitive psychology?

Answer 6

Because human cognition is highly complex and we would be overwhelmed attempting to study it in its entirety; its more effective to study the particular cognitive mechanisms independently

Question 7

• Structure/Representation

Answer 7

the knowledge you possess; the information in your memory

Question 8

Process

Answer 8

an operation on an external stimulus or on an internal representation
-executing a process can use an existing memory representation, update or reinterpret an existing representation, or create a new representation

Question 9

Cognition vs Performance

Answer 9

• cognition = what is actually going on in the mind

* performance = the observable behaviour that we must use as evidence of cognition

Question 10

Kant’s “transcendental method”

Answer 10

work backward from observed effects to infer their causes
– Factory analogy
• We derive inferences based on observations
in order to construct theories
• Theory: system of explanatory ideas that helps us to describe and understand a complex domain
• Model: a metaphor, a suggestion of how some part of the system might work by likening it to some physical system

Question 11

What did Diogenes of Apollonia add to cognitive thinking?

Answer 11

shifts emphasis (around 500bc) from sensation/perception to the integration of sensory information
• “common sense”
• theory of air as the vehicle for cognition

Question 12

Platos contribution

Answer 12

• around 380BC
• the object of mind
• universals as separate from particulars
• “wax tablet metaphor” plus innate knowledge

Question 13

Aristotle

Answer 13

around 350BC
-‘Tabula Rasa’ -blank slate
-universals as components of particulars
-

Question 14

Aristotle doctrine of association

Answer 14

• contiguity
• similarity
• contrast

Question 15

St Augustines thoughts

Answer 15

around 500BC
-memory is the stomach of the mind
(digest, ruminate, store, forget)

Question 16

Great cognitive thinkers from Germany?

Answer 16

• Helmholtz
• Fechner
• Weber
• Donders

Question 17

Psychophysics

Answer 17

the systematic study of the relation between the physical characteristics of stimuli and the sensations that they produce

Question 18

Who had the first psychological laboratory? what did they study

Answer 18

Wilhelm Wundt, in Leipzig Germany (1879)

• interested in simple (sensation, perception, attention) physical processes
• not interested in higher (e.g., memory) process
• introspection

Question 19

What is Structuralism and who created it?

Answer 19

• it is the goal to find the structural elements of the mind, using introspection
• Edward Titchener invented it and studied it in Cornell (1892)

Question 20

What did Hermann Von Ebbinghaus contribute?

Answer 20

-1885 Germany
-contributed association formation
-saving
-forgetting curves
-nonsense syllables-CVC’s
Ebbinghaus would learn a list (e.g., of 16 items) to a criterion of mastery (e.g., two perfect recitations), then set the list aside. Later, he would relearn the same list, noting how many fewer trials he needed to relearn it

Question 21

Who is the father of Functionalism and what is it?

Answer 21

• William James (Harvard 1890)
• focuses on the functions of consciousness rather than its structure
• memory has two parts- short (immediate) and long term (repository)
• his work with James Lange: we are afraid because we run, not we run because we are afraid. emotions arise from actions

Question 22

Two fathers of Behaviourism? what is it?

Answer 22

John B. Watson & B.F. Skinner

• the objective ‘reaction’ to Wundt and introspection, only stimuli and response matter
• goal is to catalogue connections between still and responses
• avoid “mentalism”

Question 23

What other events/theories helped give rise to Cognitive Psychology

Answer 23

• WWII effect on Behaviourism (rats in cages didn’t describe soldiers behaviour in war)
• Information/communication theory (Shannon & Weaver 1948)
• Linguistics and psycholinguistics (Noam Chomsky 1959)
• Computers and computer models (Newell, Shaw, & Simon 1958)

Question 24

Empiricism

Answer 24

-philosophical position originating from Aristotle, that advances observation & observation based data as the basis for all science

Question 25

Verbal Learning

Answer 25

the experimental branch pf psychology that dealt with how humans learned verbal material composed of letters, nonsense syllables, or words. The groundbreaking research by Ebbinghaus started the verbal learning tradition.