Fatema Mun,

Roll no-9,

Anuja Deshpande Chavan,

8/10/2012,

Cognitive Psychology

Paradigms of cognitive psychology Introduction:

Paradigms include the assumptions investigators make in studying a phenomenon. Paradigms also specify what kinds of experimental methods and measures are appropriate for an investigation. Paradigms are thus intellectual frameworks that guide investigators in studying and understanding phenomena.

Discussion: 1) Information Processing Approach

The information processing approach characterizes thinking as the environment providing input of data, which is then transformed by our senses. The information can be stored, retrieved and transformed using mental programs, with the results being behavioral responses.
The development of the computer in the 1950s and 1960s had an important influence on psychology and was, in part, responsible for the cognitive approach becoming the dominant approach in modern psychology (taking over from behaviorism). The computer gave cognitive psychologists a metaphor, or analogy, to which they could compare human mental processing. The use of the computer as a tool for thinking how the human mind handles information is known as the computer analogy. One way of conceptualizing attention is to think of humans as information processors who can only process a limited amount of information at a time without becoming overloaded. Broadbent and others in the 1950's adopted a model of the brain as a limited capacity information processing system, through which external input is transmitted.

Broadbents Filter Model

Donald Broadbent is recognized as one of the major contributors to the information processing approach. The filter model was hypothesized to work in the following way: as information enters the brain through sensory organs (in this case, the ears) it is stored in sensory memory. Before information is processed further, the filter mechanism allows only attended information to pass through. The selected attention is then passed into working memory, where it can be operated on and eventually transferred into long-term memory. In this model, auditory information can be selectively attended to on the basis of its physical characteristics, such as location and volume. For Broadbent, this explained the mechanism by which we can choose to attend to only one source of information at a time while excluding others. This model was established using the dichotic listening task. In this type of experiment, a participant wears a pair of headphones and listens to two different auditory streams, one in each ear. The participant then pays attention to one stream while ignoring the other. After listening, the participant is asked to recall information from both the attended and unattended channels. Broadbent's research using the dichotic listening task showed that most participants were accurate in recalling information that they
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Fatema Mun,

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Anuja Deshpande Chavan,

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Cognitive Psychology

actively attended to, but were far less accurate in recalling information that they had not attended to. This led Broadbent to the conclusion that there must be a "filter" mechanism in the brain that could block out information that was not selectively attended to. Treismans Attenuation Theory

Treisman's (1964) model retains this early filter which works on physical features of the message only. The crucial difference is that Treisman's filter ATTENUATES rather than eliminates the unattended material. Attenuation is like turning down the volume so that if you have 4 sources of sound in one room (TV, radio, people talking, baby crying) you can turn down or attenuate 3 in order to attend to the fourth. In this model, the information enters our brain through our sensory organ i.e. ears, our sensory information. When the information is processed further i.e. the attended information gets narrowed into our unconscious mind while we give our full attention on the unattended message. Treisman agreed with Broadbent that there was a bottleneck, but disagreed with the location. Treisman carried out experiments using the speech shadowing method. Typically, in this method participants are asked to simultaneously repeat aloud speech played into one ear (called the attended ear) whilst another message is spoken to the other ear. In one shadowing experiment, identical messages were presented to two ears but with a slight delay between them. If this delay was too long, then participants did not notice that the same material was played to both ears. When the unattended message was ahead of the shadowed message by up to 2 seconds, participants noticed the similarity. If it is assumed the unattended material is held in a temporary buffer store, then these results would indicate that the duration of material held in sensory buffer store is about 2 seconds.

2) PDP/ Connectionism Approach

Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) approach is a relatively new way to study psychological phenomena compared to more traditional formalization of human cognition. Whereas most conventional psychological theories postulate serial-ordered mechanisms to account for various aspects of human cognition, the PDP approach assumes that people understand through the interplay of multiple sources of knowledge, and as such, parts of the mechanism interact with each other simultaneously. Specifically, PDP models propose sets of large number of interconnected information processing units as the mechanistic accounts of human cognitive phenomena. The units stand for conceptual objects (such as features, letters, words, etc.) or abstract elements and so each contains certain aspect of the information. They influence other aspects and at the same time are influenced by them. Information processing takes place through the interaction among these units. A typical PDP model begins with a set of processing units. At each point in time, each unit has an activation state, and generates an output according to a particular threshold function. Units are connected to one another to form a pattern of connectivity. Each connection between two units
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Fatema Mun,

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Anuja Deshpande Chavan,

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Cognitive Psychology

carries a weight that specifies how the output of the first unit feeds into the second unit as input. A connection can be either excitatory if the weight is a positive number, or inhibitory if the weight is a negative number. The absolute value of the weight, however, decides the strength of the connection. Because a unit receives input from a number of other units, a propagation rule is applied to determine the overall input to the unit. This net input, together with the current activation state of the unit is then combined to produce a new state of activation according to a certain activation rule. Finally, connection weights undergo modification with experience. Thus the system can evolve by changing the pattern of connectivity. Rumelhart Model

As previously mentioned, the models we will use to illustrate the theory are variants of an architecture first proposed by Rumelhart (Rumelhart 1990; Rumelhart & Todd 1993) Rumelhart was interested in

understanding how the propositional information stored in a hierarchical propositional model which could be acquired and processed by a connectionist network employing distributed internal representations. Thus, the individual nodes in the Rumelhart networks input and output layers correspond to the constituents of propositions the items that occupy the first (subject) slot in each proposition, relation terms that occupy the second slot, and the attribute values that occupy the third slot. Each item is represented by an individual input unit in the layer labeled Item, each relation is represented by the individual units in the layer labeled Relation, and the various possible completions of three element propositions are represented by individual units in the layer labeled Attribute. When presented with a particular Item and Relation pair in the input, the networks job is to turn on the attribute units in the output that correspond to valid completions of the proposition. For example, when the units corresponding to canary and can are activated in the input, the network must learn to activate the output units move, grow, fly, and sing. The particular items, relations, and attributes used by Rumelhart and Todd (1993) were taken directly from the hierarchical propositional model described by Collins and Quillian (1969), so that, when the network has learned to correctly complete all of the propositions; it has encoded the same information stored in that propositional hierarchy. The network consists of a series of nonlinear processing units, organized into layers, and connected in a feed forward manner. Patterns are presented by activating one unit in each of the Item and Relation layers, and allowing activation to spread forward through the network, modulated by the connection weights. To update a units activation, its net input is first calculated by summing the activation of each unit from which it receives a connection multiplied by the value of the connection weight; this is then transformed to activation according to the logistic transfer function. To find an appropriate set of weights, the network is trained with back propagation (Rumelhart et al. 1986).

Fatema Mun,

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Anuja Deshpande Chavan,

8/10/2012,

Cognitive Psychology

Spelke, Breinlinger, Macomber, and Jacobson (1992) speak of children reasoning from principles stated in propositional form.

This idea may provide a useful basis for deriving predictions for experiments, whether or not anyone actually believes that the principle is held in explicit propositional form and enters into a reasoning process that follows specified rules of inference. But it may also carry additional implications that lead to unjustified conclusions. For example, the notion that a theory contains explicit principles and/or rules carries with it the tendency to suppose that there must be a mechanism that constructs such principles and/or rules. Yet it is easy to show that the full set of possible principles/rules vastly outstrips those that children appear to actually use; and that the subset that children appear to use is underdetermined by actual evidence. Thus the tacit invocation of explicit principles/rules ends up motivating the suggestion that there must be initial domain constraints guiding at least the range of possible principles that might be entertained. If, however, behavior is not governed by explicit principles or rules, it is only misleading to consider the difficulties that would arise in attempting to induce them. By proposing that learning occurs through the gradual adaptation of connection weights driven by a simple experience-dependent learning process, the PDP approach avoids these pitfalls and allows us to revisit with fresh eyes the possibility that structure can be induced from experience. With these observations in mind, we are now in a position to consider the relationship between the PDP approach to semantic cognition and theory-based approaches. One possible stance would be to suggest that the PDP framework constitutes an implementation of a theory-based approach-one that simply fills in the missing implementation details. Though in some ways this suggestion is appealing, we have come to feel that such a conclusion would be misleading, since the representations and processes captured by PDP networks are quite different from the devices provided by explicit scientific theories. While the knowledge in PDP networks may be theorylike in some ways, it is expressly not explicit in the way it would need to be in order to constitute a theory by our definition. Thus, we would argue that the PDP framework provides a useful alternative framework for understanding the acquisition, representation, and use of semantic knowledge.

3) Evolutionary approach
The goal of research in evolutionary psychology is to discover and understand the design of the human mind. Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it. The mind is a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This way of thinking about the brain, mind, and behavior is changing how scientists approach old topics, and opening up new ones. The standard social science model 4

Fatema Mun,

Roll no-9,

Anuja Deshpande Chavan,

8/10/2012,

Cognitive Psychology

Both before and after Darwin, a common view among philosophers and scientists has been that the human mind resembles a blank slate, almost free of content until written on by the hand of experience. According to Aquinas, there is "nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the senses." Working within this framework, the British Empiricists and their successors produced elaborate theories about how experience, diverted through a small handful of inborn mental procedures, inscribed content onto the mental slate. David Hume's view was typical, and set the pattern for many later psychological and social science theories: "...there appear to be only three principles of connection among ideas, namely Resemblance, Contiguity in time or place, and Cause or Effect." Over the years, the technological metaphor used to describe the structure of the human mind has been consistently updated, from blank slate to switchboard to general purpose computer, but the central principle of these Empiricist views has remained the same. Indeed, it has become the leading orthodoxy in mainstream anthropology, sociology, and most areas of psychology. According to this orthodoxy, all of the specific content of the human mind originally derives from the "outside" -- from the environment and the social world -- and the evolved architecture of the mind consists solely or predominantly of a small number of general purpose mechanisms that are content-independent, and which sail under names such as "learning," "induction," "intelligence," "imitation," "rationality," "the capacity for culture," or simply "culture." According to this view, the same mechanisms are thought to govern how one acquires a language, how one learns to recognize emotional expressions, how one thinks about incest, or how one acquires ideas and attitudes about friends and reciprocity -- everything but perception. This is because the mechanisms that govern reasoning, learning, and memory are assumed to operate uniformly, according to unchanging principles, regardless of the content they are operating on or the larger category or domain involved. (For this reason, they are described as content-independent or domain-general.) Such mechanisms, by definition, have no pre-existing content built-in to their procedures, they are not designed to construct certain contents more readily than others, and they have no features specialized for processing particular kinds of content. Since these hypothetical mental mechanisms have no content to impart, it follows that all the particulars of what we think and feel derive externally, from the physical and social world. The social world organizes and injects meaning into individual minds, but our universal human psychological architecture has no distinctive structure that organizes the social world or imbues it with characteristic meanings. According to this familiar view -- what we have elsewhere called the Standard Social Science Model -- the contents of human minds are primarily (or entirely) free social constructions, and the social sciences are autonomous and disconnected from any evolutionary or psychological foundation (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). Three decades of progress and convergence in cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience have shown that this view of the human mind is radically defective. Evolutionary psychology provides an alternative framework that is beginning to replace it. On this view, all normal human minds reliably develop a standard collection of reasoning and regulatory circuits that are functionally specialized and, frequently, domain-specific. These circuits organize the way we interpret our experiences, inject certain recurrent concepts and motivations into our mental life, and provide universal frames of meaning that allow us to understand the actions and intentions of others. Beneath the level of surface variability, all humans share certain views and assumptions about the nature of the world and human action by virtue of these human universal reasoning circuits. 5

Fatema Mun, -

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Anuja Deshpande Chavan,

8/10/2012,

Cognitive Psychology

Wasons Research

Wason's research leads some psychologists to the conclusion that "People do not naturally think like scientists -- most people are really bad at simple logic. Perhaps this is because our minds work mainly by simple association of positive instances." The evolutionary-psychology reinterpretation is, "People are naturally good at detecting cheaters -- because this is an essential adaptation for the mutual humanity that is at the foundation of hominid social organization. People are not nearly as good at general hypothesis testing, because there has never been any similar selective urgency -- our ancestors did not compete for mates by solving physics problem sets -- but there may well be other adaptations for reasoning about other specific sorts of things." Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, presents a view of human nature that emerges from this perspective: The study of the human mind has recently been moved into the natural sciences through biology, computer science, and allied disciplines, and the result has been the revelation of a wholly new and surprising picture of human nature. Instead of the human mind being a blank slate governed by a few general purpose principles of reasoning and learning, it is full of "reasoning instincts" and "innate knowledge" -- that is, it resembles a network of dedicated computers each specialized to solve a different type of problem, each running under its own richly coded, distinctly nonstandard logic. The programs that comprise the human mind (or brain) were selected for not because of their generality, but because of their specialized success in solving the actual array of problems that our ancestors faced during their evolution, such as navigating the social world, reasoning about macroscopic rigid objects as tools, "computing" or perceiving beauty, foraging, understanding the biological world, and so on.

4) Ecological Approach
Ecology, or ecological science, is the scientific study of the distribution and abundance of living organisms and how the distribution and abundance are affected by interactions between the organisms and their environment. The environment of an organism includes both physical properties, which can be described as the sum of local abiotic factors such as solar insolation, climate and geology, as well as the other organisms that share its habitat.

The Empirical Foundations of Laves Practice Theory Apprenticeship Learning in Tailor Shops in Liberia

Lave began to develop her theory of practice based on the findings from her extensive fieldwork on apprenticeship learning of tailors in Liberia. The research involved five field trips to Monrovia during the period 197378. She spent time in the tailor shops in Tailors Alley, getting to know Vai and Gola tailors who occupied a poor and margin allocation at the periphery of the business district of the city of Monrovia. She was interested in what the apprentices learned and how they learned in the absence of planned teaching, and wanted to see the outcomes from the years of apprenticeship. Tailor apprenticeship involved sustained opportunities to observe masters and other apprentices at work, to learn the full process of producing garments, and to learn about the pricing and selling of finished products. A kind of curriculum existed in apprenticeship learning in the sense that apprentices first learned to make cheaper clothes (like underwear and childrens garments) and gradually proceeded to making more official land 6

Fatema Mun,

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Anuja Deshpande Chavan,

8/10/2012,

Cognitive Psychology

expensive clothes (like suits) worn by those occupying higher positions in the social hierarchy. Apprentices learning started from simpler tasks like sewing by hand and finishing already tailored clothes, and gradually progressed to more demanding tasks such as cutting out garments from pieces of cloth. The learning process was subdivided by type of garment, and by type of task, in a way that minimized risks of serious errors and experiences of failure (1990, 21). Apprentices products were not evaluated by masters or compared, since the ongoing taken for granted expectation was equal accomplishment by all learners (1996). Apprentices would decide themselves when the garments they had made were good enough to sell, and by selling they learned what customers were willing to pay for their products (Lave 1996). Masters were embodied exemplars of what apprentices were becoming. However, apprentices not only reproduced existing practices or acquired skills of making garments; generating new styles and procedures is a natural part of the craft. For Lave (1996), an important observation was that apprentices were learning many things at once: they were learning about major social identities and divisions in the society that they were in the business of dressing, they were learning how make a living by making clothes, they were learning to lead a specific kind of life as tailors, and in the process of becoming practicing tailors they were learning respect for their craft. Thus the success of learning without teaching is based on that learning is not separated from practice, that divisions between learning and doing do not exist, that social identity and knowledge are merged, as are education and occupation, and form and content of learning. When success is not measured against predefined goals, when there is no fear of failure, when comparisons among learners are noticeably absent, avoidance of blame is not what motivates learners and rewards are intrinsic. Lave (1996) stressed that the assumption that teaching is a necessary prerequisite if learning is to occur cannot be correct. If learning is about people becoming kinds of persons knowledgeably skilled persons then learning is necessarily a context-embedded, situated activity rather than learners being offered a pool of knowledge to acquire or absorb. The Adult Math Project

Laves ethnographic research among the apprentice tailors thus led her to challenge the idea of the transferability of knowledge and skills. The Adult Math Project (AMP, 197880) was subsequently designed by Lave and her colleagues Michael Murtaugh and Olivia de la Rocha. In the AMP project, Lave and her colleagues (Lave, Murtaugh, and de la Rocha1991) studied the use of mathematics in everyday activities, observing grocery shopping in supermarkets, Weight Watchers cooking, and money flow management in house-holds. These kinds of everyday activities as observed by Lave and her colleagues have not always been considered as relevant objects for cognitive research, because of its aim of developing general models of human information processing and problem solving. The major finding from the Adult Math Project (AMP) was that there exists, in different settings, an infinite number of different types of arithmetics (1988, 63). Mathematics taught at schools is but one type of arithmetic practice. Lave (1996) argues that everyday math is not an application of informal learning as opposed to formal learning and mathematics but something fundamentally different from school mathematics. The Adult Math Project involved both observation of arithmetic use of in everyday situations and school-type mathematical tests conducted with the same participants. When the study participants success in situated arithmetic practices and results from tests in mathematical skills were compared, there was no correspondence in success rates across contexts.
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Fatema Mun,

Roll no-9,

Anuja Deshpande Chavan,

8/10/2012,

Cognitive Psychology

Conclusion:
This way, in paradigms of cognitive psychology, each approach has different theories/research/applications.

Fatema Mun,

Roll no-9,

Anuja Deshpande Chavan,

8/10/2012,

Cognitive Psychology

References:
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/EP-primer.html http://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/hum100/evolutionary_psychology.html http://www.academia.edu/680601/Talja_Sanna_2010_Jean_Laves_Practice_Theory

http://dericbownds.net/uploaded_images/Rogers_preprint.pdf http://psych.stanford.edu/~jlm/papers/RogersMcC08BBSFinalProof.pdf