Week 1 Introduction to Cognitive Psychology

Where Did Cognitive Psychology Come From?

• Wundt: Structuralism, introspective methods
• James: Functionalism, how do mental processes aid survival
• Freud: Psychoanalysis, the role of the unconscious
• Watson, Pavlov & Skinner: Behaviorism, all we can observe is behavior, we can't observe mental processes. Can't see inside the BLACK BOX

So are we just a black box? Things going on outside of Psychology

• Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Program computers to think like people. Implies that we can model mental processes.
• Linguistics, Chomsky's development of transformational grammar. Also implies the existence of internal mental processes

Peeking into the Black Box

• Constructs: A thing that you can't see, like stuff that goes on inside the mind, but that you think exists because it explains so much
  
• Take for instance intelligence. Some people think that there is a single thing called intelligence which is responsible for all skilled mental behavior. Others think there are really many different kinds of skills.
• You can't really see intelligence. You can't open up somebody's head take a flashlight and say, "Yup there it is". You can only infer the existence of intelligence from behavior.
• You can only study constructs indirectly by asking "What if" questions. Cognitive psychologists create models of the mind(constructs) and ask "What if" questions. "What if" my model were correct? What else would have to be true? Is it true or is my model wrong.
• So cognitive psychologists study things that they can't see by using things that they can see. The logic is that if a construct explains a large amount of observable behavior then it makes good sense to believe that they construct really exists observable or not.

The Cognitive Revolution

• George Miller: The Magic Number 7 +/- 2
• Newell and Simon: The General Problem Solver

A definition

• A definition: Cognitive psychology refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used--Neisser.

Representations and Processes

• Cognitive Psychology is about Mental Representations and the Mental Processes which operate on them.
  • In any representational system there is a target domain, a modelling domain, and a systematic correspondence between the target domain and the modelling domain.
  • For instance, the map of Germany represents the geography of the actual Germany.
    • The actual country Germany is the target domain
    • The map of Germany is the modelling domain
    • There is a systematic correspondence between the target and modelling domains. The distance and spatial relationships between certain markings on the map correponds to the spatial relationships and distance of actual cities in Germany.
  • The same target domain can be represented by more than one modelling domain. For instance, the distance between German cities is represented on the map by the distance between markings representing those cities. But the distance between cities could also be represented in a mileage chart.
  • The Processes used to solve problems with a representation depend on the nature of the representation. The way you figure out the distance between two cities using a map is to measure the distance on the map and then multiply by the scale of the map. The way you figure out distance with a mileage chart involves looking at the column for the one city and the row for the other city and then reading off the distance. Different representations require different processes.

Topics covered by Cognitive Psychologists

• Mental representation: --What do mental representations look like? --How are mental representations organized? --Does the way that knowledge is organized influence the way in which it is used?
• Categories and Concepts: --How to people decide on category membership? --How do people learn new categories? --What functions do categories serve? --What makes one category coherent and another category incoherent? --How do people choose what category applies when multiple categories can apply?
• Attention and automaticity: --How do people decide to allocate limited mental resources? --Why are there some things that people can do at the same time while other things require their full attention?
• Memory: --How is information in memory organized? --What determines the things we remember and the things we forget? --Is any information ever truly lost from memory? --How does our prior knowledge influence what we remember? --Are there different kinds of memories? --Is it possible to have a vivid memory for something that never happened?
• Language: --How do people understand spoken and written language? --How is language learned? --How do people produce language? --Does language influence thought?
• Thought: --Are people really rational animals? --If people don't always think rationally, then how do they think? --How do people solve novel problems? --How do people make use of previous problems in solving current problems?