Cognitive Psychology Reviewer Compared memory to making impressions

in wax, sometimes referred to as the

Cognitive Psychology “storehouse metaphor”
 Cognition involves thinking and other Memory = making impressions in wax
mental processes. (storehouse metaphor) –a way of thinking
 Our perception of the world around us about memory that compares it to a physical
through our senses and how we storage space
interpret the sensations brought in by
our senses.  It is an early metaphor for the mind
 The attentional processes that allow us to explain how memory processes
to focus on a particular stimulus in our work. He proposed that our
environment. memory could be envisioned as a
 How our memory operates allows us wax tablet with memories formed
to remember episodes, information, and in the tablet like molds in hot wax.
intentions when we attempt to retrieve
Wilhelm Wundt
them.
 Our language processes that help us  One of the first psychologists to
communicate our thoughts and ideas study conscious experience through
with others introspective methods that
 The processes that contribute to our involved systematic self-reports of a
decision-making, both helpful and person’s thoughts.
hindering.  In this way, some early psychologists
 The brain activity that controls all of studied how people perceived
the processes described so far. sounds, colors, and other sensory
 The science of how the mind is experiences.
organized to produce intelligent  Others (such as Fechner &
thought and how the mind is realized in Helmholtz) studied perception using
the brain. psychophysical methods with a goal
of developing laws of perception.
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Cognitive psychology is broad and overlaps
with many other fields (e.g. social German psychologist; one of the first to
psychology, biological psychology, scientifically study forgetting.
philosophy), both inside and outside of
psychology.  In experiments where he used
himself as the subject, he tested
his memory using three-letter
nonsense syllables. His results,
Development of Cognitive Psychology
plotted in what is known as the
Aristotle’s early attempts to understand Ebbinghaus forgetting curve,
memory. revealed a relationship between
forgetting and time.
Human mind is a blank slate and that all  The forgetting curve also showed
humans are born free of any knowledge and that forgetting does not continue
are merely the sum of their experiences. to decline until all of the
information is lost. At a certain
point, the amount of forgetting
 levels off. Which indicates that Thus, language abilities result from
information stored in long-term cognitive processes inherent in humans.
memory is surprisingly stable.
From Chomsky’s argument, psychologists
Mid-20th century began to realize that the study of cognitive
processes behind overt behaviors would
The rise in popularity of the behaviorists,
advance our understanding of the mind and
the study of cognition fell out of favor in
behavior in important ways.
psychology.
Behaviorists
Computers presented an information-
Behaviorist – one who adheres to the
processing model.
perspective in psychology that focuses on
observable behavior. The brain could be thought of as a
biological computer, capable of restoring
 Behaviorists argued that
large amounts of information and acting to
introspective methods, such as the
alter that information as learning takes
methods used by Wundt, were
place.
biased by the perspective of the
subject. Cognitive processes were the “software”
 How did the researcher know that that processed the information (with brain
the mental processes of the mind as the “hardware”).
were consciously accessible and
could be verbally reported in an
accurate way? Ulric Neisser
 Behaviorists focused on behaviors
they could directly observe, with His book: Milestone in the Development of
the thought processes behind the Cognitive Psychology (1967) integrated
behaviors of less interest. topics such as memory, perception,
attention, and language as a unified field.
Father of Cognitive Psychology Coined the
Mid-20th century. With the development of term cognitive psychology
information-processing approaches to
studying the mind and behavior, cognitive ➢ played an important role on the
psychology has become the driving force in development of cognitive science and the
psychology. shift from behaviorist to cognitive models in
psychology.
Noam Chomsky
He described cognitive psychology as:
Opposed Skinner’s position that language involved in everything we do and in
learning occurs through conditioning general, all the mental processes from
processes or that language development sensory input, processing, recall through
occurs through imitation. behavior.
He believed that children have the mental
capacity to learn the rules of the
language(s) spoken around them without
explicit feedback on the language they
produce.
The field exploded after this investigating
how the brain perceives, processes,
encodes, stores, retrieves, understands,
and communicates information as well as
the relationship between emotions and
thought.
According to Ulric Neisser:
The term “Cognition” refers to all processes
by which the sensory input is transformed,
reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and
used.
It is concerned with these processes even
when they operate in the absence of
relevant stimulation, as in images and
hallucinations.
Such terms as sensation, perception,
imagery, retention, recall, problem-solving,
and thinking among others. Refer to
hypothetical stages or aspects of cognition.