History of cognition (lec. 2)

Question 1

Philosophical foundations of cognitive psychology

Answer 1

• Ancient Greek philosophers considered the locus of the mind (sensations, memory) and basis of human personality
• Many took an analytic approach to understanding the human mind by breaking it down into ‘parts’ to study
• Aristotle, Plato were two key figures who studied human knowledge

Question 2

Plato

Answer 2

• First early philosopher to consider the human mind
• Rationalism: knowledge is the result of observation & prior reasoning
• Since internal thoughts and external observations interact, the world is a ‘reflection of our reality’ (observation does not always lead to certainty
• There is an innate aspect to mental processes and reasoning
• “A good decision is based on knowledge and not just on
  numbers”

Question 3

Aristotle

Answer 3

• Combined philosophical and scientific approaches to thinking
• Empiricism: All knowledge comes from experience (we know nothing before observation)
• The basis of thought is forming associations based on observations: The mind is nothing before forming associations. Foundation of many cognitive theories that emphasize associations

Question 4

The link between philosophy and cognition

Answer 4

• Studying Philosophy: asking questions about how and why we think
• Studying Cognition: gathering evidence to support the answers
• Philosophy from both Western and Eastern Countries are linked to Cognition, like Indian Buddhism : rejects the notion of a permanent self and suggests to study cognitive processes during an experience

Question 5

Structuralism

Answer 5

*Identifying the basic building blocks of the complex thoughts or the conscious experience. Understanding these elements will help understand more complex cognitive processes, like perception, memory and learning
*Emphasized systematic, controlled observation for understanding the structure of the mind
*Introspection is self report (people report their thoughts or observations)

Question 6

Wilhelm Wundt

Answer 6

• Founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research and practiced Structuralism
• Goal: identify the simplest units of the mind that he thought followed certain laws to create complex thoughts. He wanted to establish a ‘mental’ periodic table of elements
• Asked what is the mind made of using introspection

Question 7

Wundt’s empirical introspectio

Answer 7

• Experimental self-report or observation about conscious experience
• Mental chronometry: Estimating time for a participant to perceive something (“I see it”; “I hear it”). Ex. the ‘thought meter’

Question 8

Criticisms of structuralism

Answer 8

• Simplistic approaches (focusing on simple sensory processes)
• Introspection considered too subjective, it is self report

Question 9

Functionalism (1800s)

Answer 9

*Not interested in breaking down mental states to basic elements
*Cognition is about serving a function and so must adapt to current goals. Basic goal is to ask why the mind works (focuses on the “usefulness of knowledge)
* Contributed an emphasis on the adaptive functions of our mind (How we use cognitive processes based on setting - Context matters)
*William James

Question 10

William James and pragmatism

Answer 10

• Pragmatic = opposed searching for basic mental elements
• Believed that consciousness is personal (it cannot be broken down into parts as it is constantly changing)
• Emphasized an eclectic methodological approach (eeded to study the usefulness and variability of accessing knowledge in the real world)

Question 11

Functionalism criticism

Answer 11

It’s difficult to study some of these ideas
(consciousness, imagery), especially if cognition is
always changing

Question 12

Behaviorism (1900s)

Answer 12

In the 1900s, psychology is struggling to be taken seriously as a
science. This resulted in a shift from studying the mind to behaviour:
* Focused on what can be observed (input, output): Behaviourism did not consider mental processes
* Focused on animal research because there it is highly controlled (assumes all species obey the same laws of behaviour)

Question 13

Notable behavioralist contributions

Answer 13

Classical Conditioning (Pavlov)
* Learning by making associations between cue, a stimuli and the natural response
Instrumental Learning (Thorndike) and Operant Conditioning (Skinner)
* Behaviour is contingent on a schedule of reinforcements, rewards and punishments
* Rewards encourage behaviors
* Punishment reduce behaviors

Question 14

Problems with behaviorism

Answer 14

Overestimated the scope of their
explanations
* Cannot account for complex human
behavior
* The assumption that learning is the
same for all individuals and across
species is false

Question 15

Behavioralism and language

Answer 15

• Language is learned through conditioning
• Latent learning: learning in the absence of conditioning
• Children learn to apply language rules to new situations: Children will pluralize objects by adding an ‘s’ even if they have never seen/hear the word (ex. “mices”). We need to refer to mental processes (rules) to explain this behavior

Question 16

The cognitive revolution (1950s)

Answer 16

• Accepted that there are internal mental state
• Accepted the scientific method to study these states, like Behaviorism and other fields
• Driven by technology: the computer is the mascot of this movement, this led to the view of the mind as a processor of information

Question 17

Information processing view of the brain

Answer 17

The mind and brain is like a computer: nformation processing in humans resembles that in computers
1.Information from environment is processed by a series of processing systems
2.These processing systems change information in systematic ways
3.Cognitive research aims to understand the processes and structures that underlie cognitive tasks ( attention, memory, etc)

Question 18

Limits of the information processing view

Answer 18

Waugh & Norman’s model of memory (which shows that rehearsal can make learned information stay in the primary memory) shows that we can’t just store all the information that we want in out cognitive processing systems. We often have to select info to process (and what we don’t select is forgotten). We can’t rehearse information while doing another complex task. Time is often a good indicator of the limits of information processing systems.

Question 19

Why do we process information?

Answer 19

We process information to reduce uncertainty
* The more uncertain something is, the longer it will take it to process
* The amount of information processed is inversely related to how much we expect that information to occur. If we don’t know what to expect, we must process more

Question 20

How stressful is uncertainty?

Answer 20

A study showed that uncertainty of getting a shock was associated with more stress
than certain shock (there was a greater stress response when shock delivered 50% than 100% of the time, due to uncertainty). The stress response is measured by skin conductance and pupil diameter.

Question 21

William Hick experiment (1952)

Answer 21

• Research Question: what is the relationship between choice reaction time, a proxy for processing, and the amount of information within an event?
• Hick conducted a behavioral experiment measuring reaction time to detect light.
• Participants saw a display of 10 lamps. A lamp lit up every few seconds. Participants were asked to press a button when a lamp lit up. Across trials, the number of lamps that could light up:
• For some trials: one of the ten lamps would light up (high certainty)
• For some trials: any of the ten lamps could light up (low certainty)

Question 22

Hick’s law

Answer 22

The more information to process, the longer it takes to make a response to that information. In his experiment, people were slower (higher reaction time) to detect a light if any lamp could light up than when only one lamp could light up.

Question 23

Choice overload bias

Answer 23

The greater the number of choices (or uncertainty of choice) taxes information processes. It leads to educed satisfaction, lower confidence and more regret.

Question 24

Decision fatigue

Answer 24

We have a limited amount of cognitive processing, and making decisions uses cognitive processing. Thus, decisions become harder to make - and worse - throughout the day, as we fatigue our system. For example, judges are more likely to grant parole to prisoners early in the day. A way to reduce decision fatigue is to make big decisions in the morning, and to develop daily routines (to avoid making some decisions everyday)

Question 25

Ecological/external validity

Answer 25

The extent to which the findings of a research study can be generalized to real-life naturalistic settings. Do we act the same way when doing computer experiments as we do in the real world? Traditional approaches that try to control for confounding variables do not appreciate the complexity of cognition. They use highly controlled, often artificial stimuli. Removing confounding variables to understand principles of cognition in its ‘pure form’ raises the question: is there any pure form, really?