Memory & Cognition Chapter 1 History, Methods, and Paradigms Cognitive psychology how people acquire, store, transform, use, and communicate information; what goes on when we perceive, attend, remember, think, categorize, reason, decide, etc. Cognitive processes: 1. Attention mentally focusing on a stimulus 2. Perception interpreting sensory information to yield meaningful information 3. Pattern Recognition classifying stimulus into a known category 4. Memory storage facilities and retrieval processes 5. Recognition registering stimulus as familiar 6. Recall extracting previous information on stimulus from memory 7. Reasoning 8. Problem Solving 9. Knowledge Presentation mental organization of the knowledge accumulated throughout life 10. Language verbal communication 11. Decision Making determine how to react in a situation Cognitive processes occur rapidly, with little effort, without our realization, and occur simultaneously or very closely in time. Influences on the study of cognition Plato: storing something in memory is like writing on a wax tablet; the mind is an aviary filled with birds, memory retrieval is catching a specific birds: sometimes you can, but other times you can grab only a nearby bird. Empiricism Knowledge comes from an individuals own experience; the environment plays an important role. There are individual differences in genetics, but human nature has malleablechangeable aspects People are idiosyncratic due through previous learning, an example of which is the mental association of two ideas (two distinct ideas or experiences, having no relations previously, could become joined in the mind simply because they occurred at the same time Locke) Nativism Emphasis on innate ability, differences due to ones biologicalgenetic endowment o Some cognitive, Hardwired, functions come built in as part of human legacy (evolutionist), eg. Short term memory is attributed to structures of the human mind that are present in rudimentary form at birth, not learnedcreated as a result of experience www.notesolution.com
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