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COG4013

Chapter 1
Overview on Cognitive Psychology

Ms Valarmatdi
Lecturer

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The Complexity of Cognition

• Cognition involves
– Perception
– Paying attention
– Remembering
– Distinguishing items in a category
– Visualizing
– Understanding and production of language
– Problem solving
– Reasoning and decision-making
• All include “hidden” processes of which we may not
be aware

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The Complexity of Cognition

• Cognitive Psychology
– The branch of psychology concerned with the
scientific study of the mind (mental
process/functioning)
– Cognition : process in which sensory input is
transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored,
recovered and used
– refers to the mental processes, such as
perception, attention, and memory, that are
what the mind does

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Some Questions to Consider

• How is cognitive psychology relevant to everyday

experience?
• Are there practical applications of cognitive
psychology?
• How is it possible to study the inner workings of the
mind when we can’t really see the mind directly?
• How are models used in cognitive psychology?

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The First Cognitive Psychologists

• Donders (1868)
– Measuring how long it takes a person to make
a decision
– Analyze cognitive activity into separate stages
– Earlier, it was assumed that mental operations
involved in responding to a stimulus occurred
instantaneously.
– Reaction-time (RT) experiment
•Measures interval between stimulus
presentation and person’s response to
stimulus

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The First Cognitive Psychologists

• Donders (1868)
– Simple RT task: participant pushes a button
quickly after a light appears
– Choice RT task: participant pushes one button
if light is on right side, another if light is on left
side
– Discrimination RT task: 5 light bulbs and one
response button. When the target light goes on
you must press the button

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The First Cognitive Psychologists

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The First Cognitive Psychologists

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The First Cognitive Psychologists

• Donders (1868)
– Choice RT – Simple RT = Time to make a
decision
• Choice RT = 1/10th sec longer than Simple RT
• 1/10th sec to make decision
– Mental responses cannot be measured directly
but can be inferred from the participant’s
behavior
– Conclusion: More stages, more time!!

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The First Cognitive Psychologists

• Wundt (1897)
– First psychology laboratory
– University of Leipzig, Germany
– RT experiments

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The First Cognitive Psychologists

• Wundt (1897)
– Approach
Structuralism: experience is determined by
combining elements of experience called
sensations (building block or structure of
psychological experience)
– Method
Analytic introspection: participants trained to
describe experiences and thought processes in
response to stimuli

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The First Cognitive Psychologists

• William James (1904)
– Approach
Functionalism: Consciousness
– understanding function of the mind, the ways
it helps us adapt.
– Mental states are defined by what they do
rather than by what they are made of.
– How and why we behave the way we do????
– Behaviors' function in a person’s life

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The First Cognitive Psychologists

• Ebbinghaus (1885/1913)
– Experimental study of memory
– Read list of nonsense syllables aloud many
times to determine number of repetitions
necessary to repeat list without errors
– After some time, he relearned the list
• Short intervals = fewer repetitions to relearn
– The savings curve /forgetting curve

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The First Cognitive Psychologists

• Ebbinghaus
(1885/1913)
– Savings = (Original
time to learn the
list) – (Time to
relearn the list
after a delay)
– Savings curve
shows savings as a
function of
retention interval

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The First Cognitive Psychologists

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The First Cognitive Psychologists

• John Watson (behaviorist) noted two problems

with this:
– Extremely variable results from person to
person
– Results difficult to verify
• Invisible inner mental processes

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The Rise of Behaviorism

• John Watson proposed a new approach called

behaviorism
– Eliminate the mind as a topic of study
(introspective methods)
– Instead, study directly observable behavior
– Behavior is influenced by stimuli, individual’s
history (reinforcement and punishment),
motivational state

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The Rise of Behaviorism

• Watson and Rayner (1920) – “Little Albert”

experiment
– Classical conditioning of fear
– 9-month-old became frightened by a rat after a
loud noise was paired with every presentation
of the rat

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The Rise of Behaviorism

• Watson and Rayner (1920) – “Little Albert”

experiment
– Behavior can be analyzed without any
reference to the mind
– Examined how pairing one stimulus with
another affected behavior

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Classical Conditioning

• Pair a neutral event with an event that

naturally produces some outcome
• After many pairings, the “neutral” event
now also produces the outcome

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Pavlov’s Discovery: Classical Conditioning

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The Rise of Behaviorism

• B.F. Skinner (1940s through 1960s)

– Interested in determining the relationship
between stimuli and response
– Operant conditioning
• Shape behavior by rewards or punishments
• Behavior that is rewarded is more likely to
be repeated
• Behavior that is punished is less likely to be
repeated

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The Rise of Behaviorism

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The Reemergence of the Mind in Psychology

• Tolman (1938) trained rats to find food in a four-

armed maze
• Two competing interpretations:
– Behaviorism predicts that the rats learned to “turn
right to find food”
– Tolman believed that the rats had created a
cognitive map of the maze and were navigating to
a specific arm

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The Reemergence of the Mind in Psychology

• Tolman (1938)
• What happens when the rats are placed in a different
arm of the maze?
• The rats navigated to the specific arm where they
previously found food
– Supported Tolman’s interpretation
– Did not support behaviorism interpretation

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The Reemergence of the Mind in Psychology

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The Decline of Behaviorism

• A controversy over language acquisition

• Skinner (1957) – Verbal Behavior
– Argued children learn language through
operant conditioning
• Children imitate speech they hear
• Correct speech is rewarded

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The Decline of Behaviorism

• Chomsky (1959)
– Argued children do not only learn language
through imitation and reinforcement
• Children say things they have never heard and
cannot be imitating
• Children say things that are incorrect and
have not been rewarded for
– Language must be determined by inborn
biological program (The Nativist Theory)

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Studying the Mind

• To understand complex cognitive behaviors:

– Measure observable behavior
– Make inferences about underlying cognitive
activity
– Consider what this behavior says about how
the mind works

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The Cognitive Revolution

• Shift from behaviorist’s stimulus-response

relationships to an approach that attempts to
explain behavior in terms of the mind
• Information-processing approach
– A way to study the mind created from insights
associated with the digital computer

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The Cognitive Revolution

• Early computers (1950s)

– Processed information in stages
• How much information can the mind
absorb?
• Attend to just some of the incoming
information?

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The Cognitive Revolution

• Cherry (1953)
• “Dichotic” listening
– Present message A in left ear
– Present message B in right ear
– To ensure attention, shadow one message
• Participants were able to focus only on the
message they were shadowing

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The Cognitive Revolution

• Broadbent (1958)
– Flow diagram representing what happens as a
person directs attention to one stimulus
– Unattended information does not pass through
the filter

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The Cognitive Revolution

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The Cognitive Revolution

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Artificial Intelligence and Information Theory

• Artificial Intelligence
– “making a machine behave in ways that would
be called intelligent if a human were so
behaving.” (McCarty et al., 1955)
– Newell and Simon created the logic theorist
program that could apply rudimentary logic to
creating mathematical assumptions/hypothesis

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Modern Research in Cognitive Psychology

• How research progresses from question to

question
– Start with what is known
– Ask questions
– Design experiments
– Obtain and interpret results
– Use results as the bases for new research
questions and experiments

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The Role of Models in Cognitive Psychology

• There are two kinds of models to be aware of:

1. Structural Models
2. Process Models

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Structural Models
• Representations
of a physical
structure
• Mimic the form
or appearance
of a given object

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Process Models
• Represent the processes that are involved in
cognitive mechanisms, with boxes usually
representing specific processes and arrows
indicating connections between processes

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Process Models

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