reasonable inferences about the

Cognitivism internal mental process that

underlie the responses.

Ulric Neisser’s Cognitive

Psychology published in 1967 EDWARD CHACE
Basic assumptions in Cognitive TOLMAN’S: PURPOSIVE
Perspectives BEHAVIORISM

1. Some learning processes may be

unique to human beings
 Process involved in learning are
often quite different for human
beings than they are from
animals.
2. Learning involves the formation of
mental representations or
associations that aren’t necessarily
reflected in overt behavior changes.
 An internal mental change rather
than external behavior change
 Learning can occur without a
change in behavior.
3. People are actively involved in their
own learning.
 People can control their learning
through the ways in which they
mentally process their
experiences.
 Reciprocal causation, self-
regulation and the importance of
attention and retention in
successfully modeling someone
else’s behavior.
4. Knowledge is organized
 All either directly or indirectly
interconnected learning process
itself contributes to this
organization
 Learn more effectively when
they relate new information and
experiences to things they
already know.
5. The focus of scientific inquiry must
be on objective, systematic
observations of people’s behavior
but behaviors often allow reasonable
inferences about unobservable
mental processes.
 The study of learning must be an
objective endeavor that bases its
theories on the results of
empirical research.
 By observing people’s response
to various stimulus conditions,
they believe they can draw
 Purposive Behaviorism- stressed
the goal-directed nature, the
organism behaves in order to
achieve that result.
 Was a prominent learning
theorist during the heyday of
behaviorism, yet his work had
distinctly cognitive flair.
1. Learning is an internal change
 Learning is an internal process
that isn’t necessarily reflected in
an organism’s behavior.
 Latent learning- reinforcement
influences performance rather
than learning, in that it increases
the likelihood that a learned
behavior will be exhibited.
2. Behavior is purposive
 Learning should be viewed
not as the formation of
stimulus- response
connections but as a process
of learning that certain events
lead to other events (i.e
learning that following a
particular path through a
maze lead to reinforcement)
 An organism has learned that
a certain response leads to
end result, the organism
behaves in order to achieve
that result.
3. Expectations affect behavior
 An organism learns that
certain behaviors produce
certain kinds of results it
begins to form expectations
about the outcomes of its
behaviors.
 The organism’s expectation
of reinforcement affects the
response that it precedes.
  When organism’s
expectations for
consequences aren’t met,
their disappointment revealed
itself in their behaviors. ( i.e
rat experiment of Elliot
wherein the rats had bran
mash before and then change
in behavior when the
reinforcement was changed
into sunflower seeds. Overt
behavior: slowing down)
 The change in behavior is
called the depression effect
4. Learning results in an organized
body of information
 The general arrangement of
the maze.
 Cognitive maps also known
as mental maps.
Gestalt psychology
 Emphasized the importance of
organizational processes in
perception, learning and problem
solving.
1. Perception is often different from
reality.
 Is usually attributed to
Wertheimer’s description and
analysis of an optical illusion
known as the phi phenomenon
(blinking lights)
2. The whole is more than the sum of
its parts.
 Human experience can’t be full
understood if various aspects of
experience are studied as
separate, isolated entities.
 Interrelationships among
seemingly separate stimuli can be
seen in Kohler’s (1929)
transposition. (Chickens
recognizing darker color to
another)
3. People are predisposed to organize
experiences, and to do so in
predictable ways
 Gestalt means “structured
whole”
 Suggested that human beings
tend to structure their
experiences in similar
predictable ways.
 Proximity- People tend to
perceive as unit those things that
are close together in space.
 Similarity- Perceive as a unit
those things that physically
resemble another.
 Closure- Filled in missing
segments of what appeared to be
continuous straight lines to
perceive four rectangles.
 Pragnanz- Organize their
experience as simply, concisely,
symmetrically and completely
as possible.
4. Learning follows the law of
Pragnanz
 Proposed that learning involves
formation of memory traces
 Memory Traces- are subject to
the law of pragnanz so that over
time they tend to become
simpler, more concise and more
complete than the actual input
5. Problem solving involves
restructuring and insight.
 A more cognitive view of
how people and other primate
species solve problems.
 Ex. Chimpanzees tackling
variety of problems.
 Problem solving involves
mentally combining and
recombining various
elements of a problem
eventually creating an
organization structure that
solves the problem.
 Restructuring- arranging the
problem elements in various
ways.
 Insight- Eureka moment.
Arrived at a solution in the
problem.
Verbal Learning Research
- Verbal learning is the process of
acquiring, retaining and recalling
of verbal material. At its most
elementary level, it can
be defined as a process of building
associations between a stimulus and
a response, with both of them
being verbal.
- Language-based learning has been
on how people learn meaningful
verbal material (e.g prose passages)
- facilitation- learning one set of
1. Serial Learning
- Involves learning set of items in
a particular sequence
2. Paired Associate Learning
- Examples are foreign language
vocabulary words and English
equivalents and learning capital
cities.
Ciao-Hello
Buongiorno-Good morning
Serial Learning Curve
- People learn the first few items
and last few items more quickly
and easily than they learn the
middle items.
1. Serial learning is characterized by a
particular pattern
- Primacy effect- first items in a
serial learning curve to be
learned and remembered easily.
- Recency effects- The tendency
for the last items to be learned
and remembered.
2. Overlearned material can be more
easily recalled later on
- Overlearning- learn material to
mastery and then practice it for
additional study trials, enables
you to remember new
information more accurately at a
later time
3. Distributed practice is usually more
effective than massed practice
- Distributed Practice- spreading
study time out over several
occasions.
- Massed Practice- Study time
occurs all at once.
4. Learning in one situation often
affects learning and recall in another
situation
- Retroactive inhibition- learning
of the second set often
diminishes their ability to recall
the first set.
- Proactive inhibition- trouble
remembering the second set.
- Retroactive and Proactive
information can actually improve
the recall of information learned
at another time.
- Facilitation- is most likely to
occur when two situations have
similar or identical stimuli and
have similar responses as well.
5. Characteristics of the material affect
the speed with which people can
learn it.
- Items are more quickly
learned when they’re
meaningful.
- Nonsense syllables-
Meaningfulness and
evoke association, thus
making them relatively
easy to learn
JAD- Jade
MON- Money
- Items are easier to learn
and to remember when
they are pronounceable.
- Concrete items (turtle,
hammer or sandwich) are
easier to remember than
abstract items concrete
items can be mentally
visualized.
6. People often impose meaning on
new information
- When a stimulus word
has many other words
associated with it one of
those associations might
in turn be associated with
the response to be learned
7. People organize what they learn
- Students tend to recall
things in category clusters
- Free recall- when people
are allowed to recall
items of a serial learning
task in whatever order
they prefer.
8. People often use encoding strategies
to help them learn
- People often change or
encode information in
some way to make it
easier to learn
- Forming mental visual
images can more
accurately remember a
 list of words than people
who haven’t been given
imagery instructions
- Ex. Remembering DUP-
TEZ as “deputize”
9. People are more likely to learn
general ideas than to learn words
verbatim
- When people focus on
learning ideas rather than
on learning information
word for word, their
learning is faster and their
recall more accurate
Contemporary
Cognitive Perspectives
Developed by George A.
Miller
Information Processing Theory
 How people perceive stimuli around
them, how they “put” what they’ve
perceived in their memories, how
they find what they have learned
when they need to use it and how
they use what they’ve learned to
tackle new tasks and problems
Constructivism
 Acquiring it from the outside world
 Individual Constructivism- Within
each learner or reflecting
 Social Constructivism- Theories that
focus on how people work together
to create new knowledge, perhaps at
a single sitting or perhaps to a
lengthy time period.
Contextual Theories
 Ideas that people thinking and
learning are inextricably intertwined
with their physical bodies or with
their immediate physical, social, and
cultural environments
 Some environmental supports for
learning and performance are
concrete and easily observable (i.e
calculators or computers)
Theories of Embodiment- People’s brain
function in close connection with the rest of
their bodies and with certain concrete
objects in their immediate physical
surroundings.
Theories of distributed cognition- focus on
how people often think and perform more
effectively when they can take advantage of
physical objects or cultural creations or
instead they can think about and discuss
ideas with their fellow human beings
General Educational Implications of
Cognitivists Approaches
1. Students control their own learning
through the cognitive process in
which they engage
- If students are to learn
anything they must make
active responses in the
classroom.
- Teachers must consider
not only what students
need to learn but also
how students can best try
to learn it.
2. Students actively construct rather
than passively absorb their
knowledge.
- When learners attempt to
make sense of the objects
and events around them,
they combine some of
what they observe with
their existing knowledge
and beliefs to create ever
expanding and
distinctively unique
understandings of the
world.
3. Instructional practices can have a
significant impact on how students
mentally process in the classroom.
- Environmental support
systems can also have
positive impacts on the
quality of students’
learning and performance
levels.