The rise of cognitive psychology Flashcards
(27 cards)
What were the Contributing factors for the rise in cognitive psychology?
· Mathematical & technological advances
· Development of the computer
· Symposium on Information Theory
-New approaches published
What was the cognitive movement?
- Different disciplines
- Flourished 1950s-1960s
- Different kind of disciplines, not just psychology (e.g. linguistics)
What happened with technology Before and during WWII?
- Goal of technology was information handling
- Need for communication over long distances
- Cracking sophisticated codes
- Programming more flexible machines
- New focus on technology such as radio and TV transmission
- Needed in the war
- Everything planned in code
What is Boolean logic (George Boole)?
- Information presented as logical operations
- 0 (false) and 1 (true)
- and (both must be true)
- or (one or the other or both must be true)
- xor (one or the other, but not both must be true)
- not (negation)
How can Boolean logic be used when using alarms?
- Two inputs and one output
- Good when designing machines
- E.g. responding when a window is open and alarm goes off
- P = it is daytime; NOT(P) is true when nighttime
- Q = window open
- R (robbery in progress) = NOT(P) AND Q
What is a Turing machine ?
- hypothetical machine (accurately describes how computers work)
- More complex machine
- Birth of the digital computer
Boolean Operations on the brain
- McCulloch and Pitts (1943) paper
- Human brain performs Boolean operations too
- Model of a neuron – MCP neuron
- Creates neural networks and MCP sends signals
- Threshold = needs to be passed to send the signal
- Needs to be equal to or more than the threshold
What did Lashley do?
- S-R associations not enough
- Anticipatory speech errors showed evidence of planning
- How could such errors be explained by S-R association chains?
Metaphor to understand the mind and research
- Why don’t computers need a homunculus?
- Information feedback - current state and end-state are compared and discrepancies are used to bring performance closer to the desired end-state
- Behaviour is shaped by goals
How does the Turing test work?
- Human interacts with machine; human unaware
- Performance has reached human level
- Goal of artificial intelligence
- Tool to simulate cognitive processes
- If humans believe they are playing against a human – test is passed
- Watson machine example
What is Symposium on information theory?
- Behaviourism under pressure
- Turning point: 1956
- Information Theory Symposium – quantification, storage, communication of information
What did Miller say about STM?
- Limits of short-term memory
- 7 +/- 2
Cognition includes processes where sensory input is:
– Transformed – Reduced – Elaborated – Stored – Recovered – Used
Who is Neisser?
- Publishes “Cognitive Psychology”
- Cognition
- All processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.
- Even if these processes operate in the absence of relevant stimulation
Who are behaviourists?
Conducted research on animal learning. Needed to include cognitive processes into their models
Who are Cognitive Psychologists?
Conducted research and included mental representations
When did it shift from behaviourism to cognitive psychology/
By mid 1970s, psychologists were largely interested in cognitive psychology, not behaviourism
Features of cognitive psychology
- Mental representations – information patterns that represent knowledge and is gained through observations and algorithms are used
- Complex processes: Top-down processes
- Experimental methods: Scientific Method
Mental representations-Boxes-and-arrows diagrams
- Every box and arrow must be there, or product would not be good
- How information processing works and how selective attention works
- Describes the functionality
Broadbent’s Filter Model of Attention
- Filters out information it needs
- Past experiences
- Sensors – short term store – selective filter – limited capacity filter - either long term store or output system (then to effectors)
Top down processing
- Boxes-and-arrows diagrams a good start
- Computational models – computer programs that simulate human information processing
- Allows us to create predictions and test theories
Challenges with Top down processing ?
- Challenge faced: complexity of information processing
- Automated translation of text
- Syntactic ambiguity: John saw the man on the mountain with a telescope. The cow was found by a stream by a farmer.
- Homonyms – more than one meaning
What is Top down process ?
Information from a higher processing stage is fed back to previous processing stages and influences processing at these stages. (direction in both ways)
What is bottom-up process?
sense basic feature of stimuli and then integrate them
