PS260 Cognitive Psychology Exam, Answered

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PS260: Cognitive Psychology Exam, Answered-Cognitive Psychology - the scientific study of all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating Two key ideas of the cognitive revolution - 1. Science of psychology CANNOT study the mental world directly 2. Psychology MUST study the mental world if it wants to understand behaviour Important points of definitions of cognitive psychology - - includes REPRESENTATIONS - knowledge that we already have in memory - importance of PROCESS - operation on an internal or external stimulus Aristotle's Contributions - Doctrine of Association - two components to mental life are IDEAS and ASSOCIATIONS between them 1. Contiguity - related if they share time and space 2. Similarity - relationships between concepts that are similar 3. Contrast - relationships between ideas that are opposite Plato - Memory is like a wax block - remember an idea as long as imprint remains, what is rubbed off/doesn't leave a mark is not remembered - STATIC VIEW of memory - contents in memory seen as stable over time Donders (1868) - measuring how long it takes a person to make a decision - subtracted simple reaction time from choice reaction time Ebbinghaus (1885) - First scientific investigations of memory and forgetting - showed that processes are QUANTIFIABLE - Savings: calculate how much forgetting occurred after different delays - led to the forgetting curve (rapid forgetting of information followed by slowing of forgetting) - savings decreased as time between learning episodes increased Savings (Ebbinghaus) - amount of forgetting that occurs - calculated by subtracting the time it took to relearn a list from the time it took to originally learn the list Wundt and Introspection - Highly trained individuals report their mental events with minimal interpretation, also founded Structuralism (goal to uncover the most basic mental elements of cognition) Wundt's Two Types of Introspection - 1. Self observation - reflection, unscientific bc subjective 2. Internal perception - observe perceptions with experimental method and lab conditions for simple processes (sensation/perception of size, duration, intensity Apperception - (Wundt) the process by which mental elements are organized, and individual experiences become a unified whole (ex. beats of metronome may be perceived as different intensities as we experience as unified whole) Titchener's Introspection - Applied introspection to memory, thoughts and feelings with the focus on OBSERVATION of mental processes Downfall of introspection - Acknowledged that some thoughts are conscious, and many steps of memory take place outside of awareness - introspection also subjective so no way for independent observer to check the accuracy of observations James - founded Functionalism - goal to relate mental properties to their functions, and emphasis on the relationship between psychological phenomena and evolutionary adaptation - also proposed a distinction between primary (short-term) and secondary (long-term) memory Watson - founded Behaviorism - mental processes can't be investigated objectively, only thing that is observable and objective is behaviour - goal to discover learning principles that determine how behaviour changes in response to stimuli Tolman - Behaviorism, discovered LATENT L

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