1. Chapter 1: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology

2. What is Cognitive Psychology?
Better Question: “What isn’t cognitive psychology?”
Cognition (Official Definition): The mental processes that are involved in perception, attention, memory, language, problem solving, reasoning, and decision making.
Cognition (Gallagher Definition): How the brain gathers, stores, and uses information.

3. Cognition vs. Consciousness
Consciousness: a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience (feeling), sapience (knowledge), and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment.
- Cognition and Consciousness are related, but the latter is much more difficult to study.

4. Relevance Perception - Gathering Information
Requires an understanding of how the brain codes information

5. Relevance
Attention - Determining what gets processed - you can’t do it all!

6. Relevance Memory - Recovering stored information
Eyewitness testimony, Alzheimer’s Disease

7. Relevance Language - How are thoughts assembled and put into words?
Broca’s Aphasia
Dyslexia

8. Relevance Reasoning, problem-solving, decision-making
What really governs our choices?
Is it ever possible to be unbiased?

9. Add these numbers up
1000 40 30 20 10

10. Answer?

11. Cognitive Psychology is actually Meta-Cognition
Meta Cognition: Thinking about how you think
Studying cognitive psychology can be an investigation of the self
You have much to gain by understanding how you (and others) think?
What if someone understands your thought processes better than you do?

13. Thought is Instantaneous!
It sure feels that way
I see a bird!
I have the answer!
I’m late for class!
Thought feels instantaneous because we don’t (or can’t) pay attention to what goes into it.

14. First Cognitive Psychologists
Franciscus Donders ( )
Dutch Physician
Conducted experiments in mental chronometry
Measuring the time course of cognitive processes

15. First Cognitive Psychologists
Donders (1868) reaction time experiment first well-documented cognitive experiment
Simple RT and Choice RT
Inference: decision took 0.1 second
More this afternoon…

16. “The mind is a tabula rasa (blank slate).” - John Locke
This statement has at least Two implications:
Once something is “written” on it, that information remains unaltered
The mind passively accepts information as it is presented (It doesn’t enhance, or otherwise alter the incoming information).

17. What do you see?

18. Unconscious Inference von Helmholtz (1821-1894)
Your mind makes assumptions about what is going on and “decides” to complete the upper object and make it a rectangle. You can’t help it!

19. First Cognitive Psychologists
Hermann von Helmholtz ( )
Physics and physiology professor
Franciscus Donders ( )
Physiologist, Ophthalmologist and inventor
They didn’t consider themselves psychologists, per se. They were interested in vision and always thought of it as a function of the mind

20. Lab Exercise 1
We’ll conduct a demonstration of Donders’ classic experiments
Thought is not instantaneous
Reaction time is positively correlated with the complexity of a task

21. First Psychologists Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) Leipzig, Germany
First Psychology Lab
Introspective methods

22. Wundt’s Work
Structuralism (that’s what Americans called it) was all about looking for the elements of consciousness/thought.
His subjects tried to study their own minds while they were thinking
His lab gained attention and spurred psychology by giving people theories to oppose!
i.e. “We cannot study memory.”

23. Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909)
Studied memory using nonsense syllables
Worked alone

24. Behaviorism John B. Watson (1878-1958) Problems with introspection
1913 paper threw the “mind” out of psychology
Behaviorism: Measure externals not internals
Successful for about 50 years
Pavlov
B. F. Skinner

25. Behaviorism’s Success
WWI devastates Germany
German theories become unpopular regardless of their scientific merit
Behaviorism gave clear reproducible results (Pavlov, Skinner)
The US becomes an economic and academic superpower and it’s message fit the American philosophy: We are all equal and anyone can be anything with the right training

26. Behaviorism overdid it
Methods and results are valid and useful, but they don’t explain it all…
Berland & Beland’s Misbehavior of Organisms (1961)
Many studies showed how the mind can be studied indirectly
E. C. Tolman (1948) cognitive maps
Gestalt psychology and perceptual organization (1911)
Skinner’s 1957 “Verbal Behavior” and Noam Chomsky’s critique (1959)

27. Rise of Cognitive Psychology
Cherry (1953) – dichotic listening task
Simon & Newell (1956) – logic theorists computer program – F 1.7, p. 13
Broadbent’s (1958) – filter theory and attention processes
Lashley – location of memory – engram
Hebb – cell assemblies
Uric Neisser’s book – cognitive psychology – 1967
Information processing – the computer metaphor
Abstract constructs – a theoretical set of processes and representations that are useful in explaining data

28. Figure 1.7 (p. 13) (a) flow diagram for an early computer; (b) flow diagram for an early computer program.

29. Figure 1.8 (p. 13) Broadbent’s diagram

30. Modern Approaches to Cognitive Psychology
Behavioral and physiological approaches
Davachi, Mitchell, & Wagner (2003) study
Day 1 – 200 “place” words and 200 “read” words – presented an adjective – with the “read” words Ps were to form an image of the adjective backwards
Day 2 – after 20 hours, 400 old words and 400 new words – recognize – F 1.11, p. 17 data
Later fMRI of brain activity – perirhinal cortex
More activity for place during learning
More activity for recognized than forgotten
Inference?
Cognitive Science – interdisciplinary approach

31. Check the Assignments!
Assign 1 is posted!