PSYC 3466 Lecture 1: cognition 1/9/18
27 Jan 2019
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Document Summary
A system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals. Creates and controls perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning. Cognitive science: interdisciplinary study of the nature of the human mind. Cognition: the mental process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through the senses, experiences, and thought. Brain as the seat of mental processes. Introspection: the systematic investigation of one"s own thoughts. How long it takes to make a decision. Ex: his two experiments simple reaction time. Tell people to pull lever whenever they saw a red light. Found the time to how people reacted to a simple stimulus choice reaction time. Participant has to choose whether to pull the right or the left lever. Thought that people took longer to make a choice, but people were following instructions. Reaction time can be used as an outcome measure. Can infer processes from something observable reaction time.
