User:Atcovi/Spring2024/Psyc 410 Human Cognition/Ch. 1

What is Cognitive Psychology?

Cognitive psychology studies the "cognition" and the way our mind encodes, stores, and uses information. How do we know our world and how do we use this knowledge of the world to make ourselves valuable?

Cognitive psychology attempts to understand the rules and how the mind processes information.

Mental representations --> encoded/stored info of the environment (turtle in the image).
Computations --> processing steps (encoded, converted from analogue --> digital format, saved for future uses).

An Explanation of Cognition at Multiple Levels

Computational level of analysis (what the mind is trying to compute and why) ["help children understand how to combine quantities so that they become proficient in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division"]
Algorithmic level of analysis (understands the rules, mechanisms, and representations) ["eye movements can be measured in order to understand the role of attention or the relative priority given to face parts when people are trying to recognize faces"]
Implementational level of analysis (what and which parts of the brain are activated in order to enable cognition) ["something relating to the brain, like fMRI scans"]

History

Ancient Greeks had a mind for cognitive psychology. They believed people had an innate knowledge and can be accessed through questioning.

John Watson, the founder of behaviorism, believed objective measures of behavior needed to be made, not subjective measures of the mind. He came up with operant conditioning (operants to influence) and classical conditioning (an organism's actions and its consequences). Reinforcers are rewarding outcomes that increase the probability of an action being done again, while punishments are non-rewarding outcomes designed to decrease the probability of said action being done again. Behaviorism led to behavioral neuroscience, using animals to explore unknown psychological processes.

Some of these cognitively oriented researchers include:

Ernst Weber, 1830s: Weber's Law and the just-noticeable difference [I just noticed it changed!].
Gustav Fechner, 1850s: Fechner’s Law, founded psychophysics (the study of the relationship between physical stimuli and mental experience).
Hermann von Helmholtz, 1850s: The mind is involved in "unconscious inference", essentially where the mind guesses so our sensory impulses are converted into representations of the external world. He also conducted research on the measurement of a nerve impulse, led to reaction times being measured in cognitive psychology.
Fransciscus Cornelius Donders, 1860s: Speed of higher mental processes can be measured just like the speed of nerve transmission. Through Donder's subtraction method, we can figure out the time where one figures out what stimulus they are dealing with and what response is appropriate. Obvious drawback is that this assumes cognitive processes take place serially + unaffected process are unaffected by another task.

Pioneering Psychologists

He wanted to look into the world of the consciousness. He came up with structuralism. He used introspection only after 'rigorous training'. --> Wilhem Wundt.

Believed memory could be measured experimentally. He tested himself and came up with the forgetting curve. --> Hermann Ebbinghaus.

Gestalt Movement vs. Structuralism, Functionalism

In this figure, for example, even the most detailed description of the individual elements would not describe the cube that many people see when looking at this display.

The Gestalt movement aroused due to opposition to Structuralism's take that conscious experience can be measured through the sum of more basic perceptual elements. They believe that the "whole" we experience is more than the sum of its parts. For example, figures with individual, unique shapes can't explain the image of a cube that the shapes are making.

Though, this approach does not provide insight into the nature of conscious experience.

William James came up with Functionalism, where focus should be centered on the functions of the mind.

Cognitive Revolution

In the mid 1900s, the study of 'scientific psychology' wasn't established at the time. Many scientists, at the time, implemented a subjective test of measure known as introspection. The cognitive revolution shifted the sphere to recording observable actions.

"The Cognitive Revolution was driven by multiple converging factors, including psychological findings that were difficult to attribute to the associative learning principles of behaviorism and new perspectives from within and outside the field that emphasized information processing itself as a topic of study." Advancements in other fields, including computer science [surprise? nah], allowed us to explore cognition with more tools and modules than before.

In 1959, Noam Chomsky went against Skinner's idea that language development resulted from reinforcements. Chomsky explained that there are certain aspects of language development that cannot be justified through behaviorism, thus playing a role in the cognitive revolution.
In 1930, Edward Tolman & his rat gang proved that rats can develop cognitive maps of their surroundings without reinforcements/punishments.
In 1948, Claude Shannon [?] proved that the nature/processing of "information" can be done without actually knowing the message. Shannon paid a role in the concept of information theory, which focuses on the processes by in where information is coded, stored, transmitted, and reconstructed - whilst supporting the study of information processing. This was further pushed forward by Alan Turing with his Turing machine.
Artificial intelligence was developed by Simon and Newell in 1956 (vacuum-tube computers that provide theorems) and Simon, Newell, and Shaw in 1957 (a computer that could do theorems, puzzles, and chess). This gave way to computational modeling in order for us to understand our brain.

Information-Processing Approach

Took popularity after the 1950s. American social psychologists, such as Jerome Bruner and Ulric Neisser, looked into cognition from emotions (how do emotions affect conscious perception?). They believed that meaning can shape cognition, toxic research setting of cognitive psychology can be discouraging, and the lab experiments may not reflect the real world accurately.
George Miller of the US [7+/-2] focused explicitly on the information storage people have in order to understand memory.
Donald Broadbent of the UK constructed a filter model of attention, focusing on the flow of info as it passed through a "selection process".

Symposium [symphony of perspectives] on Information Theory (1956) [conference]

Integrated dfferent approaches = part of cognitive psychology.

Cognitive Psychology in Relation to Other Areas

Daniel Kahneman worked on judgement and decision-making altered assumptions in relation to economic decisions, was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.
Cognitive science covers many fields, including cognitive psychology, computer science and neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience makes the connection between cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
Studying emotion is difficult because it is subjective and hard to make objective measurements.
Cognitive psychology believes that emotions can take place in the same places where logic occurs. The somatic marker hypothesis is where internal emotions ("somatics"), such as increased heart rate around a crush, guide us to interpret and evaluate the world around us. This is where our cognition influences our emotions.
Constructivist theory of emotion - "The theory suggests that our past experiences guide us in making sense of incoming stimuli, and emotions would then be actively constructed from sensory input, previous learning, and language." (cognition forms emotions)

Legacy

Spectrums have changed.
Limitations exist: Information-processing approach does not consider relevance of cognition in daily life & the meaning, or subjective emotional experience, behind cognition, which is lost in majority of computational experiments.