Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology:
Definition and domains
Kathleen M Galotti
 • Cognitive Science is a broad field that
contains three disciplines
1. Cognitive Psychology
2. Neuroscience
3. Artificial Intelligence
Cognitive
science
Scholars from fields such as cognitive psychology,
computer science, philosophy, linguistics,
neuroscience and anthropology, recognizing their
mutual interests, came together to found an
interdisciplinary field known as cognitive science.
What is cognition
• Cognition, or mental activity, describes the acquisition, storage,
transformation, and use of knowledge. If cognition operates every
time you acquire some information, place it in storage, transform that
information, and use it . . . then cognition definitely includes a wide
range of mental processes such as perception, memory, imagery,
language, problem solving, reasoning, and decision making.
Definition

• Cognitive Psychology is the science of how the

mind is organized to produce intelligent
thought and how it is realized in the brain.

• “Cognitive Psychology is the study of thinking”

• Cognitive Psychology is the scientific

investigation of human cognition, that is, all
our mental abilities – perceiving, learning,
remembering, thinking, reasoning, and
understanding. The term “cognition” stems
from the Latin word “ cognoscere” or "to
know". Fundamentally, cognitive psychology
studies how people acquire and apply
knowledge or information.
 • How does cognitive psychology apply in the field of Politics
and Clinical Psychology.
• Why should you study Cognitive Psychology?
• Your mind is an impressively sophisticated piece of
equipment, and you use this equipment every minute of
THINK! the day. If you purchase a cell phone, you typically receive
a brochure that describes its functions. However, no one
issued a brochure for your mind when you were born.
• Cognitive Psychology is a subject which explains the
workings of the mind.
History
• Lohn Jocke - Tabula Rasa
• Immanuel Kant - Kant argued that space and time are mere
"forms of intuition" which structure all experience, and
therefore that while “things-in-themselves" exist and
contribute to experience, they are nonetheless distinct
from the objects of experience. From this it follows that the
objects of experience are mere "appearances", and that the
nature of things as they are in themselves is consequently
unknowable to us.
 Wundt proposed that Psychology should study mental
processes, using a technique called introspection.

Wilhem Introspection, in this case, meant that carefully

trained observers would systematically analyze their

Wundt own sensations and report them as objectively as

possible, For example, observers might be asked to
objectively report their reactions to a specific musical
chord, without relying on their previous knowledge
about music.

What is the pitfall of this method?

 • Wundt and his students carried out hundreds of studies,
many involving a technique of investigation called
introspection.

Introspectio • It consisted of presenting highly trained observers (usually

graduate students) with various stimuli and asking them to
n method describe their conscious experiences. Wundt assumed that
the raw materials of consciousness were sensory and thus
by Wundt “below” the level of meaning. In particular, Wundt thought
any conscious thought or idea resulted from a combination
of sensations that could be defined in four properties:
mode (for example, visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory),
quality (such as colour, shape, texture), intensity, and
duration.
 • A student of Wundt, Edward B. Titchener,
applied the term structuralism to his own
endeavours as well as to Wundt’s (Hillner,
1984). The term was meant to convey
Wundt’s focus on what the elemental
Structuralism components of the mind are rather than
on the question of why the mind works as
it does.
 • Another important German psychologist,
named Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–
1909), focused on factors that influence
human memory. He constructed more
than 2,000 nonsense syllables (for
instance, DAK) and tested his own ability
Hermann to learn these stimuli. Ebbinghaus
Ebinghaus examined a variety of factors that might
influence performance, such as the
amount of time between list
presentations. He specifically chose
nonsense syllables—rather than actual
words—to reduce the influence of
previous experience with the material
 • Another crucial figure in the history of cognitive psychology
was an American named William James (1842–1910).
James was not impressed with Wundt’s introspection
technique or Ebbinghaus’s research with nonsense
syllables. Instead, James preferred to theorize about our
everyday psychological experiences
• He is best known for his textbook Principles of Psychology,
published in 1890.
William • Principles of Psychology provides detailed descriptions
James about people’s everyday experience. It also emphasizes
that the human mind is active and inquiring. The book
foreshadows numerous topics that fascinate twenty-first-
century cognitive psychologists, such as perception,
attention, memory, reasoning, and the tip-of-the-tongue
phenomenon.
• James’s tip-of-the-tongue experience- Experience of
students?
 • James regarded psychology’s mission to be the explanation
of our experience. Like Wundt, James was interested in
conscious experience.
• Unlike Wundt, however, James was not interested in the
elementary units of consciousness. Instead, he asked why
Functionalis the mind works the way it does.
• He assumed that the way the mind works has a great deal
m to do with its function—the purposes of its various
operations. Hence the term functionalism was applied to
his approach. John Dewey and Edward L. Thorndike were
fellow functionalists.
 • An alternative that developed to counter structuralism,
functionalism suggested that psychologists should focus on
the processes of thought rather than on its contents.
• Functionalism seeks to understand what people do and
why they do it. This principal question about processes was
Functionalis in contrast to that of the structuralists, who had asked
what the elementary contents (structures) of the human
m mind are.
• Functionalists held that the key to understanding the
human mind and behavior was to study the processes of
how and why the mind works as it does, rather than to
study the structural contents and elements of the mind.
They were particularly interested in the practical
applications of their research.
 Difference
between
Functionalis • Structuralists and functionalists differed in their methods
as well as their focus. The structuralists were convinced the
m and proper setting for experimental psychology was the
laboratory, where experimental stimuli could be stripped of
structuralis their everyday meanings to determine the true nature of
mind.
m • Functionalists disagreed sharply with this approach,
attempting instead to study mental phenomena in real-life
situations. Their basic belief was that psychologists should
study whole organisms in whole, real-life tasks.
 • During the first half of the twentieth century, behaviorism
was the most prominent theoretical perspective in the
United States. According to the behaviorist approach,
psychology must focus on objective, observable reactions
to stimuli in the environment. The most prominent early
Behaviouris behaviorist was the U.S. psychologist John B. Watson , who
lived from 1878–1958.
m • Because Watson and other behaviorists emphasized
observable behavior, they completely rejected Wundt’s
introspection approach. They also avoided terms that
referred to mental events, such as image, idea, or thought.
• Behaviorists argued that researchers could
not objectively study mental processes.
Although they did not conduct research in
cognitive psychology, they did contribute
significantly to contemporary research
methods.
• For example, behaviorists emphasized the
importance of the operational definition,
a precise definition that specifies exactly
how a concept is to be measured.
Similarly, cognitive psychologists in the
twenty-first-century need to specify
exactly how memory, perception, and
other cognitive processes will be measured
in an experiment. Behaviorists also valued
carefully controlled research, a tradition
that is maintained in current cognitive
research
 GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY

• Gestalt psychologists valued the unity of psychological phenomena, they strongly objected
to Wundt’s introspective technique of analyzing experiences into separate components.
They also criticized the behaviorists’ emphasis on breaking behavior into individual
stimulus-response units and ignoring the context of behaviour. Gestalt psychologists
constructed a number of laws that explain why certain components of a pattern seem to
belong together.
 • The school of Gestalt psychology began in
1911 in Frankfurt, Germany, at a meeting of
three psychologists: Max Wertheimer, Kurt
Koffka, and Wolfgang Köhler. As the name
Gestalt (a German word that loosely
translates to “configuration” or “shape”)
OUR BRAINS suggests, these psychologists’ central
assumption was that psychological
CREATE phenomena could not be reduced to simple
STRUCTURE elements but rather had to be analyzed and
studied in their entirety.
BY DEFAULT • Gestalt psychologists, who studied mainly
perception and problem solving, believed an
observer did not construct a coherent
perception from simple, elementary sensory
aspects of an experience but instead
apprehended the total structure of an
experience as a whole.
 • New developments in linguistics also increased
psychologists’ dissatisfaction with behaviorism. The most
important contributions came from the linguist Noam
In come Chomsky (1957), who emphasized that the structure of
language was too complex to be explained in behaviorist
the terms. Chomsky and other linguists argued that humans
have an inborn ability to master all the complicated and
linguists varied aspects of language (Chomsky, 2004). This
perspective clearly contradicted the behaviorist
perspective that language acquisition can be entirely
explained by learning principles.
 • Another influential force came from research on children’s thought
processes by Jean Piaget who was a Swiss theorist. His perspectives
continue to shape developmental psychology. According to Piaget,
children actively explore their world in order to understand important
concepts.
• Jean Piaget, a Genevan scientist known as a naturalist, philosopher,
logician, educator, and developmental psychologist (Flavell, 1963),
conducted studies of the cognitive development of infants, children, and
adolescents that have also helped to shape modern cognitive psychology.

Jean Piaget Piaget’s work was largely sympathetic to the Gestalt idea that the
relationship between parts and wholes is complex. Piaget sought to
describe the intellectual structures underlying cognitive experience at
different developmental points through an approach he called genetic
epistemology.
 • By the late 1960s, psychologists were becoming
increasingly dis- appointed with the behaviorist outlook
The birth of that had dominated U.S. psychology. Complex human
behavior could not readily be explained using only the
Cognitive concepts from traditional behaviorist theory, such as
observable stimuli, responses, and reinforcement. This
Psychology approach tells us nothing about psychologically interesting
processes, such as the thoughts and strategies people use
when they try to solve a problem.
 Ulric • Another important turning point was the publication of
Ulric Neisser’s (1967) book Cognitive Psychology .
Neisser • In fact, the growing support for the cognitive approach has
sometimes been called the “cognitive revolution”
• Cognitive Psychology refers to all the processes by which
the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated
stored, recovered and used
 • Perception
• Attention
• Learning
• Memory
Domains of • Concept formation
• Reasoning
Cognitive • Judgement
Psychology • Decision making
• Problem solving
• Language Processing

Social and cultural factors, emotion, consciousness,

animal cognition, evolutionary approaches have also become
part of cognitive psychology.
 • Sensation refers to the initial detection of
energy from the physical world. The study
of sensation generally deals with the
structure and processes of the sensory
mechanism and the stimuli that affect
Sensation those mechanisms.

and
• Perception, on the other hand, involves
Perception higher-order cognition in the
interpretation of the sensory information.
Basically, sensation refers to the initial
detection of stimuli; perception to an
interpretation of the things we sense.
 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. Focalization,
concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies
withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with
others.
Attention
William James
 One of the important influences on the
development of cognitive psychology during the
1960s was the work of linguist Noam Chomsky.
Prior to Chomsky’s influence on psycholinguistics
(the psychological study of language), psychologists
had explored the possibility that people could learn
a language by learning the associations between
adjacent words in a sentence. According to this
Language view, we learn to speak correctly through paired-
associates learning— each word in a sentence
serves as a stimulus for the word that follows it. In
the sentence “The boy hit the ball,” the word the is
a stimulus for the word boy, and the word boy is a
stimulus for the word hit. The speaker of a
language would therefore have to learn which
words could follow any other word in a sentence.
 • You use problem solving when you want to reach
a certain goal, but the solution is not immediately
obvious because important information is
missing, and obstacles are blocking your path.
• In general, our problem-solving ability is specific
Problem to a particular domain. Clinical psychologists
must develop problem-solving strategies that can
Solving help their clients solve their real-life problems.
• Leaders of different ethnic groups—on the brink
of a civil war—can participate in problem-solving
workshops, developing problem-solving
strategies for reaching common groups
Intelligence
• We shall consider human intelligence to be the ability to acquire, recall,
and use knowledge to understand concrete and abstract concepts and
the relationships among objects and ideas, and to use knowledge in a
meaningful way.

• the ability to classify patterns.

• the ability to modify behavior adaptively—to learn.
• the ability to reason deductively.
• the ability to reason inductively—to generalize
• the ability to develop and use conceptual models.
• the ability to understand.
Creativity
• It is ironic that no dominant theory has emerged during the past twenty years that might unify
the disparate and sometimes conflicting studies of creativity. The absence of a unified theory
points out both the inherent difficulty of the topic and the lack of widespread scientific
attention. Nevertheless, creativity is widely heralded as an important part of everyday life and
education.
• A long time ago in the history of cognitive psychology, Wallas (1926) described the creative
process as having four sequential stages:

• Preparation. Formulating the problem and making initial attempts to solve it.
• Incubation. Leaving the problem while considering other things.
• Illumination. Achieving insight to the problem.
• Verification. Testing and/or carrying out the solution.
Cognitive
Neuroscienc
e
Methods
• Cognitive neuroscience combines the research techniques of
cognitive psychology with various methods for assessing the structure
and function of the brain. In the last few years, researchers have
discovered which structures in the brain are activated when people
perform a variety of cognitive tasks.

• Furthermore, psychologists now use neuroscience techniques to

explore the kind of cognitive processes that we use in our interactions
with other people; this new discipline is called social cognitive
neuroscience. For example, researchers have identified a variety of
brain structures that are active when people look at a photograph of a
face and judge whether the person is trustworthy
• Cognitive neuroscience is the brain-based approach to cognitive
psychology.
• The territory that the cognitive neuroscientists have set their sights
on discovering and exploring is the complex world of the brain.
• This exploration of the world of the brain has been aided
tremendously by imaging technology that allows us to see through
the solid wall of the skull.
Brain imaging
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI8J9jv-kDI
• Electroencephalography (EEG) records electrical signals from neural
activity in the brain, using a series of non-invasive electrodes placed
on the scalp. The electrical signals recorded by the electrodes are sent
to instruments that display the signals. Early EEGs were hooked up to
pens that traced the signals onto constantly moving graph paper,
however, these have been replaced by computer displays. EEGs can
show us how long it takes to process stimuli, but they cannot show us
structures, anatomy, or the functional regions of the brain.
EEG
• An EEG can determine changes in brain activity that might be useful in
diagnosing brain disorders, especially epilepsy or another seizure disorder.
An EEG might also be helpful for diagnosing or treating the following
disorders:
• Brain tumor
• Brain damage from head injury
• Brain dysfunction that can have a variety of causes (encephalopathy)
• Inflammation of the brain (encephalitis)
• Stroke
• Sleep disorders
• An EEG might also be used to confirm brain death in someone in a persistent
coma. A continuous EEG is used to help find the right level of anesthesia for
someone in a medically induced coma.
• Magnetoencephalography (MEG) uses a machine that measures
brain activity from the outside of the head by detecting the faint
magnetic fields that brain activity produces. MEG produces an activity
map or functional image of the brain. Of all the brain scanning
methods, MEG provides the most accurate resolution of nerve cell
activity (to the millisecond).
MEG reading and machine
• It is important to understand the differences between
neurophysiological tools we know from a novel neurophysiological
tool we are trying to learn about. The first obvious difference is that
EEG records the electrical activity and MEG records magnetic activity
of the brain.

• In EEG the electrodes are placed on the scalp. MEG is performed

using a dewar that contains multiple sensor coils, which do not touch
the patient's head. MEG primarily detects the magnetic fields induced
by intracellular currents, whereas scalp EEG is sensitive to electrical
fields generated by extracellular currents.
• Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is used in
conjunction with EEG or MEG to evaluate the
effects of changes in brain electrical activity on
perceiving and thinking. A magnetic charge is
directed via a wand placed on the head and
pointed to a specific location in the brain for a very
short period of time. This charge alters the neural
functioning; these effects on brain functioning can
be seen in the output of the EEG or MEG, as well as
in terms of the person’s responses to the cognitive
and perceptuaal tasks he or she is engaged in at
the time.
Structural neuro-imaging
• Computerized Axial Tomography/ CT or CAT scan
• Series of X-ray images of head
• Images used to construct overall image of the brain
• The clarity and resolution of the CT scan however is not very sharp
• However, is can clearly show structural images of brain abnormality
like tumors
Micro CT
• A new CT imaging technique is called x-ray microtomography. This
technology uses CT to scan via a microscope which allow for 3D
images of very small structures (a 5mm fossilized fish eyeball, the tine
structures of the inner ear, and the root structure of a human molar
tooth (Uzon, Curthoys, & Jones, 2006). The full utility of this
technology is yet to be determined.
Structural Neuro Imaging
• Magnetic resonance imaging
• Hydrogen atoms respond to the magnetic fields and radio frequency
pulses by emitting energy
• The machine uses energy to construct image from the brain
• High spatial resolution compared to CT scan.
fMRI
• It is now possible using fMRI to apply high-performance image
acquisition techniques to capture an image in as little as 30
milliseconds, which is brief enough to record fast-paced cognitive
functions. fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) detects
increased blood flow to activated areas of the brain, thus displaying
function and structure.
PET
• A positron emission tomography (PET) scan is an imaging test that
helps reveal how your tissues and organs are functioning. A PET
scan uses a radioactive drug (tracer) to show this activity.
This scan can sometimes detect disease before it shows up on
other imaging tests.
1. What does Electroencephalography (EEG)
record?
A. Magnetic fields
B. Neural activity
C. Blood flow
D. Structural images
Correct Answer: B
2. How are the electrical signals recorded in early
EEGs?
A. Traced by pens onto graph paper
B. Displayed on computer screens
C. Transmitted to the patient's head
D. Recorded on magnetic tapes
Correct Answer: A
3. What is the primary limitation of EEG in terms of
brain visualization?
A. It cannot show structures
B. It cannot detect magnetic fields
C. It provides detailed anatomical images
D. It displays functional regions
Correct Answer: A
• 4. What does Magnetoencephalography (MEG)
primarily detect?
• A. Electrical fields
• B. Blood flow
• C. Magnetic fields
• D. Structural abnormalities
• Correct Answer: C
• 5. In MEG, how is brain activity measured?
• A. Using electrodes on the scalp
• B. Through a dewar with sensor coils
• C. By a series of X-ray images
• D. With a radioactive drug
• Correct Answer: B
• 6. What is Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
(TMS) used for in conjunction with EEG or MEG?
• A. To enhance memory
• B. To induce sleep
• C. To evaluate the effects of changes in brain electrical
activity
• D. To measure blood flow
• Correct Answer: C
• 7. What does Computerized Axial Tomography (CT
or CAT scan) primarily show?
• A. Blood flow
• B. Magnetic fields
• C. Structural images
• D. Neural activity
• Correct Answer: C
• 8. How does Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
achieve high spatial resolution?
• A. By emitting energy from hydrogen atoms
• B. By using radioactive tracers
• C. By measuring blood flow
• D. By capturing magnetic fields
• Correct Answer: A
• 9. What is the primary function of a Positron
Emission Tomography (PET) scan?
• A. Record neural activity
• B. Display structural images
• C. Measure blood flow
• D. Reveal tissue and organ functioning
• Correct Answer: D
• 10. How does fMRI (functional Magnetic
Resonance Imaging) display function and
structure of the brain?
• A. By measuring electrical fields
• B. By detecting magnetic fields
• C. By capturing increased blood flow
• D. By emitting radioactive energy
• Correct Answer: C