PSYCH 1F03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Hermann Ebbinghaus, Frederic Bartlett, Cognitive Model
20 Mar 2017
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Document Summary
Cognitive psychologists are interested in exploring the world of thoughts, representations and mental processes. People use metaphors like filing cabinet, computer and video camera to describe memory. History suggests memory is subject to interpretation and reconstruction. Its amazing when you consider how effortlessly you can navigate through vast array of memories to access specific moment instantly. One memory acts as a cue to trigger another memory (ex. conversation) Early focus of memory research is concerned with how cues interact with encoding and retrieval mechanisms of memory. Psychologists rely on cognitive models to understand a complex/abstract process like memory. Models describe and organize data and make specific, testable hypotheses that can be studied in controlled experiments in the lab. Basic memory task involves two phases: encoding phase: subjects learns list of items, words or pictures, retrieval phase: subjects tested for their memory of the items presented in encoding phase.
