Psychology 2070A/B Lecture 10: summary-book-cognitive-psychology-connecting-mind-research-and-everyday-experience-ch-1-12-except-8
29 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Summary - book "Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind
Research and Everyday Experience" - ch: 1-12 except 8
Introduction to Cognitive Psychology (University Of Toronto)
Summary - book "Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind
Research and Everyday Experience" - ch: 1-12 except 8
Introduction to Cognitive Psychology (University Of Toronto)
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Chapter 1 — Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
-Cognitive psychology — branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind
Cognitive Psychology: Studying the Mind
-What is the mind?
•Mind creates and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language,
deciding, thinking, and reasoning.
-Memory, problem-solver, make decision & consider probabilities
-Cognition — mental processes, such as perception, attention, and memory, that are what the mind
does
•Mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our
goals.
-Associated with normal functioning
-How mind operates (creates representations) and its functions (enables us to act & achieve goals)
-Studying the Mind: Early work in Cognitive Psychology:
•Franciscus Donders — Cognitive Psychology Experiment: How long it takes for a person to make a
decision?
-Measuring reaction time — how long it takes to respond to presentation of a stimulus
•Simple reaction time — asking subjects to push a button as rapidly as possible when they saw a
light goes on
•Choice reaction time — using two lights and ask subjects to push the left button when they saw the
left light go on and right button when they saw right light go on
-Presenting stimulus (light) → Mental response (perceiving light) → Behavioural response (push
button)
-Reaction time = time between presenting stimulus and behavioural response
-Difference between simple and choice reaction time indicate how long it took to make the decision
for correct button — Donders concluded tat the decision-making process took one-tenth of a second
-Important experiment: 1) First cognitive psychology experiment; 2) Mental responses must be
inferred from behaviour (cannot be measured directly)
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•Wilhelm Wundt’s Psychology Laboratory: Structuralism and Analytic introspection
-Structuralism — our overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience the
structuralists called sensations. — “Periodic table of the mind”
-Analytic introspection — trained subjects described their experiences and thought processes in
response to stimuli (describe in terms of elementary mental elements)
-e.g Experience hearing a five-note chord played on piano (Whether subjects were able to hear each of
the individual notes that mad up the chord)
•Ebbinghaus’s memory experiment: What is the time course of forgetting?
-How rapidly information that is learned is lost over time?
-Quantitative method for measuring memory:
•Repeated lists of 13 nonsense syllables: DAX, QEH, LUH, ZIF one at a time at constant rate
•Determine how long it took to learn a list for the first time, then wait for a period of time (delay),
then determine how long it took to relearn the list
-Savings — determine how much was forgotten after a particular delay:
•Savings = (Original time to learn the list) - (Time to relearn the list after the delay)
•Longer delays → smaller savings
•Smaller savings → more forgetting
-Savings curve (forgetting curve) — memory drops rapidly for the first 2 days after initial learning →
levels off
-Memory could be quantified & able to describe property of mind (e.g ability to retain information)
•William James’s Principles of Psychology
-Observed that paying attention to one thing involves withdrawing from other things
Person
Procedure
Results & Conclusions
Contribution
Donders
(1868)
Simple reaction time Vs.
Choice reaction time
Choice reaction time takes 1/10
sec longer; therefore it takes
1/10 sec to make a decision
First cognitive psychology
experiment; mental responses can
be inferred from behaviour
Wundt (1879)
Analytic introspection
No reliable results
Established the first laboratory of
scientific psychology
Ebbinghaus
(1885)
Savings method to
measure forgetting
Forgetting occurs rapidly in the
first 1 ~ 2 days after original
learning
Quantitative measurement of mental
processes
James (1890)
No experiments;
reported observations
Descriptions of a wide range of
experiences
First psychology textbook
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