Introduction to cognitive

Question 1

Dr. Smith believes that overt, observable behaviour is the only valid way that we can study people. Dr. Smith is a _____________

Answer 1

Behaviourist

Question 2

Representations are …

Answer 2

The form information is stored in the mind

Question 3

Is the P300 ERP a measure or concept ?

Answer 3

measure

Question 4

Is amnesia a measure or concept?

Answer 4

concept

Question 5

Is blink rate a measure or concept?

Answer 5

measure

Question 6

Is frequency of laughter a measure or concept?

Answer 6

measure

Question 7

Is overconfidence a measure or concept?

Answer 7

concept

Question 8

Is percent accuracy a measure or concept?

Answer 8

measure

Question 9

Is working memory a measure or concept?

Answer 9

concept

Question 10

Is attention a measure or concept ?

Answer 10

concept

Question 11

Are hesitations a measure or concept?

Answer 11

measure

Question 12

Is top down processing a measure or concept ?

Answer 12

concept

Question 13

Are confidence judgements a measure or concept ?

Answer 13

measure

Question 14

Is reaction time a measure or concept ?

Answer 14

measure

Question 15

Is recognition memory a measure or concept ?

Answer 15

concept

Question 16

Is happiness a measure or concept ?

Answer 16

concept

Question 17

What is a core principle of cognitive psychology ?

Answer 17

Information processing

Question 18

Dr. Jones believes that studying in the morning enhances memory. She uses Ebbinghaus’s word recall task with two groups of students and find that those that study in the morning don’t recall more words. Is this theory correct?

Answer 18

The theory may be correct, the data contradicts it

• It’s a plausible theory, the data contradicts it, but it doesn’t mean the theory is wrong.
• Can’t say paradigm is perfectly aligned to her theory, or that the theory is definitely correct/wrong

Question 19

What is a paradigm?

Answer 19

A commonly used experimental design

Question 20

What are the challenges of studying cognition?

Answer 20

• Key concept= using objective measures (e.g. speed, accuracy) to make inferences about representations
• therefore cognition is a challenge to study because you cannot directly measure the thing that you are making theories about

Question 21

Are all schemas representations?

Answer 21

All schemas are representations, but not all representations are schema

Question 22

What is cognitive psychology?

Answer 22

The scientific study of mental processes, from perception, attention, memory, language, judgement and decision making, reasoning etc..
to creativity, learning, consciousness, animal

Question 23

What is cognition?

Answer 23

• cognition is a function
• thought is invisible and intangible
• therefore we can only gather data that we can objectively verify and make inferences about i

Question 24

What are the philosophical foundations of cognitive psychology?

Answer 24

• Behavioursim
  and
  -Information processing

Question 25

What is behaviourism?

Answer 25

Two twin ideas: 1) an idea that there is no mind = shouldn't talk about mental states and try and make theories about what people say they think- should look at the observable 2) a method: build psychology by measuring only the observable (skinner)

Question 26

What is information processing ?

Answer 26

Thinking about the mind as an information processor | - Take input info in - transform it = way to understand the mind

Question 27

What is the difference between data and theory?

Answer 27

- Data= evidence | - Theory = claims about what the data means

Question 28

What are representations ? | What is the centrality of representations? (why are they important to cognitive psychology)

Answer 28

- The form that the information is stored in (Therefore understanding representations = how they are created, stored, transformed, how produce output Memory, perception etc. can be thought of what you do with representations e.g. memory storing representations)

Question 29

What do representations allow you to do?

Answer 29

Allow you to impose structure on variable information, as you can't store raw perceptions because they have no meaning

Question 30

What did Newell do ? How did he affect the methological approach of cognitive psychology ?

Answer 30

Newells recommendations for progress in psychology: - said psych work at the time was a good idea but will never go anywhere/help us understand the mind - claimed we need to build theories - its about the theories and processing that account for multiple phenomena -

Question 31

What were Newells suggestions?

Answer 31

- Formal models to be precise specification between input and output - Models of cognition, not of tasks. Should be modelling complex tasks - General models= model that is the same theory that you can apply to multiple tasks

Question 32

How does cognitive psychology work?

Answer 32

experiments- paradigms & models - theories