Chapter 1: Introduction to Cognitive

Psychology

Notes
What is the Mind?
The mind creates and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory,
emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning.
This definition reflects the mind’s central role in determining our various mental abilities
indicates different types of cognition (mental processes such as perception, attention, and
memory, which is what the mind creates.
 The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to
achieve our goals.
This definition focuses on how the mind operates
This definition reflects the mind’s importance for functioning and survival, and also
provides the beginnings of a description of how the mind achieves these ends.
The second definition indicates something about how the mind operates (it creates
representations) and its function (it enables us to act and to achieve goals).

Cognitive Psychology
is the study of mental processes, which includes determining the characteristics and properties
of the mind and how it operates.
the term cognitive psychology was not coined until 1967
Franciscus Donders: Pioneering Experiment
Dutch physiologist
did one of the first experiments that today would be called a cognitive psychology experiment
in 1868
experimented how long does it take to make a decision
reaction time - how long does it take to respond to presentation of a stimulus.
simple reaction time -  pushing a button as rapidly when participants saw a light go on
choice reaction time - using two lights and pushing the button that corresponds to the
light

Wilhelm Wundt: Structuralism and Analytic Introspection

founded the first laboratory of scientific psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany on
1879
structuralism
our overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience called
sensations
Wundt created a "periodic table of the mind" which would include all of the basic
sensations involved in creating experience
was not a fruitful approach and and so was abandoned in the early 1900s
analytic introspection
a technique in which trained participants described their experiences and thought
processes in response to stimuli
require extensive training because the participants’ goal was to describe their experience in
terms of elementary mental elements

Hermann Ebbinghaus: Memory Experiment

was interested in determining the nature of memory and forgetting—specifically, how rapidly
information that is learned is lost over time
 used a quantitative method for measuring memory
savings
savings = (original time to learn the list) - (time to relearn the list after the delay)
the result represents original learning and relearning
According to Ebbinghaus, this reduction in savings provided a measure of forgetting,
with smaller savings meaning more forgetting.
savings curve
shows that memory drops rapidly for the first 2 days after the initial learning and then
levels of
this curve was important because it demonstrated that memory could be quantified
William James: Principles of Psychology
taught Harvard's first psychology course and made significant observations about the mind in
his textbook Principles of Psychology
James’s observations were based not on the results of experiments but on observations about
the operation of his own mind
One of the best known of James’s observations is the following, on the nature of attention:
Millions of items . . . are present to my senses which never properly enter my experience. Why? Because they have no interest
for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. . . . Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the

mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. . . . It
implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.

ABANDONING THE STUDY OF THE MIND

Watson Founds Behaviorism
unsatisfied with analytic introspection because:
1. it produced extremely variable results from person to person,
2. these results were difficult to verify because they were interpreted in terms of invisible inner
mental processes.
 In response to what he perceived to be deficiencies in analytic introspection, he proposed a
new approach called behaviorism:
1. Watson rejects introspection as a method, and
2. observable behavior, not consciousness (which would involve unobservable processes such
as thinking, emotions, and reasoning), is the main topic of study.
Watson eliminated the mind as a topic for investigation by proclaiming that “psychology . . .
need no longer delude itself into thinking that it is making mental states the object of
observation”
his goal was to replace the mind as a topic of study in psychology with the study of directly
observable behavior.
“What does behavior tell us about the mind?” to “What is the relation between stimuli in
the environment and behavior?”
most famous experiment was the Little Albert experiment
subjected Albert, a 9-month-old-boy, to a loud noise every time a rat (which Albert had originally liked)
came close to the child. After a few pairings of the noise with the rat, Albert reacted to the rat by
crawling away as rapidly as possible.
Watson's ideas is associated with classical conditioning
how pairing one stimulus (such as the loud noise presented to Albert) with another, previously neutral
stimulus (such as the rat) causes changes in the response to the neutral stimulus
used classical conditioning to argue that behavior can be analyzed without any reference to
the mind.
B.F. Skinner's Operant Conditioning
operant conditioning
focused on how behavior is strengthened by the presentation of positive reinforcers, such
as food or social approval (or withdrawal of negative reinforcers, such as a shock or social
rejection)
Skinner showed that reinforcing a rat with food for pressing a bar maintained or increased the rat’s
rate of bar pressing.
Skinner was not interested in what was happening in the mind, but focused solely on
determining how behavior was controlled by stimuli
Setting the Stage for the Reemergence of the Mind in Psychology
Edward Chase Tolman
called himself a behaviorist because his focus was on measuring behavior but in reality, he was
one of the early cognitive psychologists, because he used behavior to infer mental processes

cognitive map
a conception within the rat’s mind of the maze’s layout
this is what threw him off behaviorism

THE REBIRTH OF THE STUDY OF THE MIND

the decade of the 1950s is generally recognized as the beginning of the cognitive revolution
a shift in psychology from the behaviorist’s focus on stimulus–response relationships to an
approach whose main thrust was to understand the operation of the mind.

Paradigms and Paradigm Shifts

scientific revolution
shift from one paradigm to another, where a paradigm is a system of ideas that dominate
science at a particular time
A scientific revolution, therefore, involves a paradigm shift
the paradigm shift from behaviorism to the cognitive approach provided a new way to look at
behavior
the behaviorist paradigm did not allow any consideration of the mind’s role in creating
behavior, so in the 1950s the new cognitive paradigm began to emerge
there is an introduction of a new technology that suggested a new way of describing the
operation of the mind and that new technology was the digital computer
Introduction of the Digital Computer
first digital computers were developed in the late 1940s and were huge machines
in 1954 IBM introduced a computer that was available to the general public

Flow Diagrams for Computers

 One of the characteristics of computers that captured the attention of psychologists in the
1950s was that they processed information in stage
information-processing approach to studying the mind
an approach that traces sequences of mental operations involved in cognition
the operation of the mind can be described as occurring in a number of stages
One of the first experiments influenced by this new way of thinking about the mind involved
studying how well people are able to focus their attention on some information when other
information is being presented at the same time
Flow Diagrams for the Mind
a number of researchers became interested in describing how well the mind can deal with
incoming information
One question they were interested in answering followed from William James’s idea that
when we decide to attend to one thing, we must withdraw from other things
British psychologist Colin Cherry (1953) presented participants with two auditory messages, one to
the left ear and one to the right ear, and told them to focus their attention on one of the messages
(the attended message) and to ignore the other one (the unattended message).
Results showed that when people focused on the attended message, they could hear the sounds of
the unattended message but were unaware of the contents of that message.
This result led another British psychologist, Donald Broadbent (1958), to propose the first
flow diagram of the mind
Broadbent’s flow diagram provided a way to analyze the operation of the mind in
terms of a sequence of processing stages and proposed a model that could be tested
by further experiments

Conferences on Artificial Intelligence and Information Theory

 In the early 1950s, John McCarthy, a young professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College, had an idea.
Would it be possible, McCarthy wondered, to program computers to mimic the operation of the human
mind? Rather than simply asking the question, McCarthy decided to organize a conference at Dartmouth in
the summer of 1956 to provide a forum for researchers to discuss ways that computers could be
programmed to carry out intelligent behavior
The title of the conference, Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, was the first use of
the term artificial intelligence
"making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving"
Herb Simon and Alan Newell were busy back in Pittsburgh trying to create the artificial
intelligence machine that McCarthy had envisioned.
goal was to create a computer program that could create proofs for problems in logic
succeeded in creating the program, which they called the logic theorist
the logic theorist program was able to create proofs of mathematical theorems that
involve principles of logic
Shortly after the Dartmouth conference, in September of the same year, another pivotal
conference was held, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Symposium on Information
Theory. This conference provided another opportunity for Newell and Simon to demonstrate
their logic theorist program, and the attendees also heard George Miller, a Harvard
psychologist, present a version of a paper “The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two,”
which had just been published
there are limits to a human’s ability to process information—that the capacity of the human
mind is limited to about seven items

The Cognitive "Revolution" Took a While

THE EVOLUTION OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
One way to appreciate how cognitive psychology has evolved from the 1950s and 1960s until
today is to look at the contents of Neisser’s (1967) book.

What Neisser Wrote

The purpose of this book, as Neisser states in Chapter 1, is “to provide a useful and current
assessment of the existing state of the art
Most of the book is devoted to vision and hearing
Most of the discussion is about the intake of information and holding information in the mind
for brief periods of time
it isn’t until page 279 of the 305-page book that Neisser considers “higher mental processes”
such as thinking, problem solving, and long-term remembering.
The reason Neisser gives for this scant treatment is that in 1967, we just didn’t know much
about higher mental processes.
Neisser says that “I do not doubt that human behavior and consciousness depends entirely on
the activity of the brain and related processes” (p. 5), but then he goes on to argue that he is
interested in how the mind operates, but not in the physiological mechanisms behind this
operation.
These two gaps in Neisser’s book highlight what are central topics in present-day cognitive
psychology. One of these topics is the study of higher mental processes, and the other is the
study of the physiology of mental processes.

Studying Higher Mental Processes

A big step toward the study of higher mental processes was Richard Atkinson and Richard
Shiffrin’s (1968) model of memory, which was introduced a year after the publication of
Neisser’s book.
 Sensory memory holds incoming information for a fraction of a second and then passes most of this information to short-

term memory, which has limited capacity and holds information for seconds (like an address you are trying to remember
until you can write it down). The curved arrow represents the process of rehearsal, which occurs when we repeat
something, like a phone number, to keep from forgetting it. The blue arrow indicates that some information in short-term
memory can be transferred to long-term memory, a high-capacity system that can hold information for long periods of

time (like your memory of what you did last weekend, or the capitals of states). The green arrow indicates that some of the
information in long-term memory can be returned to short-term memory. The green arrow, which represents what
happens when we remember something that was stored in long-term memory, is based on the idea that remembering

something involves bringing it back into short-term memory.

Endel Tulving (1972, 1985), one of the most prominent early memory researchers, proposed
that long-term memory is subdivided into three components

Episodic memory is memory for events in your life (like what you did last weekend). Semantic memory is memory for facts
(such as the capitals of the states). Procedural memory is memory for physical actions (such as how to ride a bike or play
the piano). Subdividing the long-term memory box into types of long-term memory added detail to the model that
provided the basis for research into how each of these components operates.

Studying the Physiology of Cognition

Two physiological techniques dominated early physiological research on the mind.
neuropsychology
the study of the behavior of people with brain damage, had been providing insights
into the functioning of different parts of the brain since the 1800s.
electrophysiology
measuring electrical responses of the nervous system, made it possible to listen to the
activity of single neurons. Most electrophysiology research was done on animals
brain imaging
positron emission tomography (PET), which was introduced in 1976, made it possible to see
which areas of the human brain are activated during cognitive activity
A disadvantage of this technique was that it was expensive and involved injecting
radioactive tracers into a person’s bloodstream
PET was therefore replaced by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which didn’t
involve radioactive tracers and which was capable of higher resolution
New Perspectives in Behavior
researchers began taking research out of the laboratory
Modern cognitive psychology therefore features an increasing amount of research on cognition
in “real-world” situations.
Researchers also realized that humans are not “blank slates” that just accept and store
information, so they began doing experiments that demonstrated the importance of knowledge
for cognition