PSY 001 Lecture 22: Psych - Cognition
12 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Psych – Cognition
Cognition
- Cognitive psychology is the study of how people perceive, learn, remember and think about info.
- Recap:
Edwin Tolman
- Move towards cognition in the field of learning that was mainly based on observations of behavior
- Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men-maze studies.
o Do they remember things? How do they know where to turn?
o Changed the entrance of the maze every time to see the affect on rats
- Developed Stimulus – Organism - Response theory
o Stimulus enters your body and you process it, perceive it and interpret it (it gets
influenced by the organism in the brain) and then the response comes out.
o Memory is part of cognition and how you store things. Cognition is a step further → what
steps do we use to remember things and recall things faster.
Knowledge
- Tend to remember the gist, not the details
- It is organized into a propositional network
- The network is modifiable over time and can have individuation
o You have files: freshman year, sophomore year, etc. Under each file you have the
semesters, in the semester you have classes
- Experience plays a role in organization of content
o If you say pet, someone may say fish or dog or cat → what we store is based on our own
experience
o Can have the same memory and knowledge, but what comes quicker to your memory is
ased o hat ou’e ee eposed to preiousl
- Schemas and scripts can help organize knowledge, but can hurt memory later
o The way our brain organizes knowledge is into certain concepts, so you think of
thanksgiving and eating, you a ot reeer the super speifis of hat ou did’t
have because you just remember the event related to other events
o If you expect a certain sequence of events to happen when you go somewhere but if that
does’t happe that hurts ou ore.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Problem Solving
- Well-defined problems-problem with clear specifications of the start state, goal state and the
processes for reaching the goal state
o Something very clear: hungry and want to go eat, then drive to food
- Ill-defined problem-problem lacking clear specification of either the start state, goal state and the
processes for reaching the goal state.
o Are you going to grad school right after undergrad? Taking a break? What state, what
country?
- Two-steps to problem solving:
o 1. Interpreting the problem
▪ Fixation-the inability to create a new interpretation of a problem
• “tuk o this oe idea ad a’t see that there a e uderlig reasos
for the problem
▪ Functional fixedness-inability to see that an object can have a function other than
its typical one in solving a problem
• Will see how things are useful in other situations. A hair pin may pin hair
or pick a lock. Hard to see this sometimes.
o 2. Trying to solve the problem
▪ Use previously successful problem-solving strategies without considering others
that are more appropriate for the current problem
▪ Oe ou’e uderstood the prole, the ou tr to sole it
o 3. Insight - a new way to interpret a problem that immediately yields the solution
Attention
- Broadbent theory: attention works as a filter
o Dichotic Listening Task: Two things going on in each headphone and focus on what is
being said in one ear and then try to recite it. Saw this as evidence that you can filter out
other thigs that are’t as iportat. We a aoid rigig thigs ito our brains.
▪ Proved wrong because people were still primed a certain way to understand
certain things but attention focused on the more important things
- Treisman: attention is more of a modulator
- Spotlight effect
o Attention focuses you in one thing so that you collect info on that one things, and process
that info more than other things
- Stimuli detection
- Inattention blindness: You are directing your attention to stimuli and so you ignore other stimuli
o Supposed to count people moving, but you may not see a group of people dancing by in
the background. You focused on what you thought was important
- Change blindness: Inability to pick up on details, even if you are not going on an effortful task.
o You do’t otie hages he
- Attentional blink: You are paying attetio ut oe ou fid a target, there’s a oetar lapse
in attention and then it comes back
o A big bang sound plays, what happens after, you may not realize until a few minutes after
the sound, then your attention comes back a little bit after
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
