Cognitive Approach - assumption 2: Internal processes

Question 1

what are the the main 4 mental processes

Answer 1

• perception
• attention
• Memory
• Language

Question 2

perception

Answer 2

the process of recognising and interpreting sensory input

Question 3

Attention

Answer 3

when the senses are focused on a particular aspect of the environment (to the exclusion of others)
—> has a limited capacity

Question 4

Memory

Answer 4

the processes that are used to acquire, store, retain and retrieve information

Question 5

language

Answer 5

a system of symbols with commonly recognised meanings which enables our thought processes to be communicated to each other

Question 6

describe the perceptual process of when you see a dog

Answer 6

• light hits retina
• turned into electrical signals so the visual message can be transmitted to the brain along the optic nerve
• in the brain these electrical signals undergo neural processing. Therefore you perceive the object and become consciously aware of it
• then you act on what you’ve seen

Question 7

what can perception be influenced by

Answer 7

context, culture, emotions, motivation

Question 8

does attention have a limited capacity

Answer 8

yes

Question 9

what is selective attention

Answer 9

when we focus on a limited range of environmental stimuli and not all of it

Question 10

what is the example from psychology

Answer 10

• Cocktail party effect
• Colin Cherry

Question 11

what was the aim to investigate about the Cocktail party effect

Answer 11

• how people are able to track certain conversations while tuning others out (selective attention)

Question 12

how did the Cocktail party effect experiment work

Answer 12

• 2 auditory message played at each angle to participants (P)
• Cherry asks P to pay attention to a particular message, then repeat what they hear

Question 13

what did Cherry discover through his experiment

Answer 13

• easy to pay attention to one, but when asked about the other message, P couldn’t say anything about it
• P didn’t even notice if the other message content was is another language or played in reverse

Question 14

How do all the mental processes work together when we see a bunch of flowers + what is it known as

Answer 14

• pay attention; perceiving features (petals/stem etc)
• search through memory to find a ‘match’ that we’ve experienced before or seen
• to name it = use knowledge of language
• these process work together within a split second
  THIS IS KNOWN AS INFORMATION PROCESSING

Question 15

Apply this assumption to a behaviour

Answer 15

• Negative cognitive triad proposed by Aaron Beck: depressed people in particular, develop a pattern of negative thinking
• they have unrealistic thoughts about: the self, the world, the future
• they will wrongly perceive things as mostly negative, paying attention to only negative things around them and remember only negative things in their memory = which leads to the dysfunctional thinking patterns about the self, world and future that causes depression