Cognitive psychology

1. COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
CHAPTER 1

2. “COGNITION IS CONSTANT, THINKING IS WHAT
WE DO.” PG XIII
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3. WHAT IS COGNITION?

4. WHAT IS COGNITION?
•Relatively Early Cognitive Processes
•Perception
•Attention
•Immediate memory
•Object Recognition

5. ATTENTION
•a set of processes through which you
focus on incoming information.
•Attention is flexible and it is easy to shift from
one thing to another. Focus on hearing rather
than sight to overhear a conversation.

6. FOR EXAMPLE
• You drift off and seem distracted,
someone might say “Pay Attention” what
do they want you to do?

7. IMMEDIATE MEMORY
•it is not enough to simply focus on
something
•to fully process something it needs to get
into immediate memory
• take notes, repeating it to yourself or
something similar.

8. GUSTAV FECHNER 1801-1878
•quantification of the relationship between
incoming stimuli and corresponding
perceptions

9. FOR EXAMPLE
•Crowded noisy room someone snaps their
fingers and no one hears it but when the
room is quiet the snap can be easily
heard. This suggest the relationship
between the presentation of the stimulus
and its experience.

10. STRUCTURALISM-WILHELM WUNDT
•Referred to as the father of Structuralism
•in the year 1879, he founded the first
laboratory dedicated to psychological
research

11. STRUCTURALISM-WILHELM WUNDT
•Wundt was a firm believer in the fact that the
mind could be studied effectively by studying
the conscious thoughts of a person.
•It was his student, Edward B. Titchener who
expanded on the ideas that were set forth by
Wundt and came up with the theory of
structuralism as we know of it today.

12. STRENGTHS OF THE THEORY
•Structuralism was the first major school of thought
in psychology, and it paved the way for other
thoughts of psychology to thrive.
• Structuralism was responsible for influencing the
advent of experimental psychology.

13. CRITICISM OF THE THEORY
1)The subject that it chose to study―the
consciousness.
• It was suggested consciousness cannot be
studied under controlled experimentation
because it is a subjective matter, which
cannot be observed and thereby measured

14. CRITICISM OF THE THEORY
2) The tool that was used to measure the
consciousness, i.e. introspection, is not a
scientific method, and it is still not a
reliable method as it can yield different
results based on the subject.

15. FUNCTIONALISM-WILLIAM JAMES

16. FUNCTIONALISM
•William James
• Often referred to as the father of the functionalism
theory
• He based the theory on the evolutionary theory
(theory of natural selection) of Charles Darwin.
• Functionalism studies how consciousness changes
according to the environment

17. CHARACTERISTICS
•The functionalism theory focused on explaining
consciousness in a more systematic and
accurate manner. Rather than concentrating on
the varied elements of consciousness, it
focused on the purpose of consciousness and
behavior.

18. CHARACTERISTICS
•The theory studied the mental life and behavior
of people based on their adaptation to the
environment.
•The theory concentrated less on studying the
composition of the mind and more on
examining the ways in which the mind adapts
to the changing environment and situations.

19. STRENGTHS OF THE THEORY
•This theory influenced the emergence of
theories of behaviorism and applied
psychology.

20. CRITICISM FOR THE THEORY
•Psychologists argued that the theory was
extremely objective in its approach and
completely ignored the subjective
tendencies of human behavior.

21. STRUCTURALISM AND
FUNCTIONALISM
•Structuralism and Functionalism were the
first schools of thought to emerge in the
field of psychology
•Both lost dominance and were replaced by
other theories like psychoanalysis,
humanism, and behaviorism.

22. LAYING THE FOUNDATION FOR
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
• Hermann Ebbinghaus
• (January 24, 1850 — February 26, 1909)
• Founder of experimental psychology of memory.
• Most famous discoveries are the
• Forgetting curve, learning curve, and spacing effect.

23. LEARNING CURVE
•A graphical representation of the rate at
which you make progress learning new
information.

24. LEARNING CURVE

25. FORGETTING CURVE

26. FORGETTING CURVE
•At the beginning your retention is 100% since
this exactly the point in time when you actually
learned the piece of information.
•As time goes on the retention drops sharply
down to around 40% in the first couple of days.

27. FORGETTING CURVE
•The forgetting curve is exponential.
•That means that in the first days the memory
loss is biggest
•Later you still forget but the rate at which you
forget is much, much slower.

28. ASPECTS THAT IMPACT
LEARNING/FORGETTING
•How difficult is the learned material? How easy
is it to relate the information with facts, which
you know already?
•How is the information represented?
•Under which condition are you learning the
material? Are you stressed?
•Are you fully rested and have you slept enough?

29. THE SPACING EFFECT
•Information presented over spaced
intervals is learned and retained more
easily and more effectively.

30. DECLINE OF BEHAVIORISM AND THE
EMERGENCE OF COGNITIVE
PSYCHOLOGY
•As cognitive psychology emerged the
information processing model emerged.
•What is the information processing model?

32. ASSUMPTIONS OF INFORMATION
PROCESSING
•(1) information made available by the
environment is processed by a series of
processing systems (e.g. attention, perception,
short-term memory);
•(2) these processing systems transform or alter
the information in systematic ways;
•

33. ASSUMPTIONS
•(3) the aim of research is to specify the
processes and structures that underlie
cognitive performance;
•(4) information processing in humans
resembles that in computers.
•

34. CONNECTIONISM
•A movement in cognitive science that hopes to
explain intellectual abilities using artificial
neural networks (also known as ‘neural
networks’ or ‘neural nets’).
•Neural networks are simplified models of the
brain composed of large numbers of units (the
analogs of neurons) together with weights that
measure the strength of connections between

35. THE BASIC ASSUMPTIONS OF
CONNECTIONISM
•The processing involved in a given task
does not occur in only 1 location
•The networks underlying cognitive
processing operate largely in parallel

36. CONNECTIONISM
•In connectionism many cognitive
psychologists have turned to structural
aspects to solved the riddles of cognition
• Connectionism is a movement in cognitive science that hopes to
explain intellectual abilities using artificial neural networks (also
known as ‘neural networks’ or ‘neural nets’). Neural networks are
simplified models of the brain composed of large numbers of units
(the analogs of neurons) together with weights that measure the
strength of connections between the units.

37. THE TOOLS USED TO EXAMINE BRAIN
STRUCTURES
•Electroencephalograph EEG
•Transcranial magnetic stimulation
TMS- (current is run through the
brain that interferes with processing (
can get better understanding of
processing and time course of

38. THE TOOLS USED TO EXAMINE BRAIN
STRUCTURES
•Imaging techniques
•Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI, fMR)-
similar to a pet scan in that it reflects brain
activity through blood flow.
•Positron Emission Tomography (Pet)- uses
radioactive tracers

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