PSY504 Cognitive Psychology

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 PSY504  Cognitive Psychology 

 https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kc42KLVUvCvoqODVaH-DF1qEejYXON5u?usp=sharing

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology deals with cognition. Cognition can be understood as “thinking” or “knowing.” We can say, in other words, that cognitive psychology deals with the processes involved in thinking, gaining and storage of knowledge. For this purpose it adopts an information processing approach.

Historical Background

Plato, the great Greek philosopher, the founder of all modern sciences was the first person to present a clear theory of how knowledge is acquired and retained.

His main ideas of contribution

·         Ideas are innate (thinking capacity of humans )

·         Visible world is an illusion (shadow of reality which is in our mind )

·         Perception is an internal process (the things we are seeing are in our mind. insight is an internal process and we can learn everything by looking inwards.)

When psychology was first taught in European universities, it was subsumed under the title of mental philosophy. The idea totally opposite to Plato is of positivism

Positivism

It states that the only authentic knowledge is knowledge of science and that such knowledge can only come from positive affirmation of theories through strict scientific method (there is outside reality things exists as we see them )

Epistemology

Epistemology and theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature and scope of knowledge

Ontology

It is the study of being and existence

Materialism

The only thing that exist is matter and all things are composed of material

Experimental Psychology (psychophysics)

More recently, in 1875 Wilhelm Wundt set up the first psychological laboratory. The study was named as psychophysics because that was most concerned about the relationship between psychology and the physical world

Introspection

The process of observing one’s own mind with the view of discovering the laws that govern the mind A lot of the perceptual experiments and studies conducted were included in the field he called psychophysics. An example of psychophysics is the relationship of sensation and intensity of the stimulus.

A major problem with most psychological studies of this time was over-reliance on introspective reports. In these reports, information was acquired by asking subjects what they felt, thought or saw, heard etc. and these reports were then used for deriving psychological principles

 Cognitive psychology rejects introspection and gave importance to scientific methods

A lot of the perceptual experiments and studies conducted were included in the field he called psychophysics. An example of psychophysics is the relationship of sensation and intensity of the stimulus.

 

Behaviorists relied only on things that could see and rejected phenomena such as memory and imagery as unscientific just because they couldn’t think of a way of observing and measuring them.

During the 2nd world war, human factors research and information theory combined to generate the information processing approach. This approach along with several other factors led to the creation of a new field called cognitive psychology. Among these factors was Noam Chomsky’s critique of Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior. Chomsky in his groundbreaking paper “On verbal behavior” shattered the simple minded behaviorist model of language designed by Skinner. He argued that language was far too complex to be explained by stimulus response alone. Around the same time, computers had emerged as thinking machines, where a lot of similarities with human information processing were coming to the fore.  The field of artificial intelligence had


emerged which sought to make computers that thought like humans and solved problems and

Learned new things.

Donald Broadbent was working at the same time on attention and visual perception. A lot of experimental work during that time along with Bartlett’s classic experiments on memory combined to create what Ulric Neisser called Cognitive Psychology in a book entitled “Cognitive

Psychology.

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