This is a very extensive summary of the lectures given in the course Cognitive Psychology, there are also clarifications from the book on difficult subjects included in the summary. Additionally, there are pictures to clarify some concepts to make them easier to understand. I passed the course with...
Cognitive psychology 7/9/2020 les 1 Van Rijn
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Cognitie – een belangrijk en zeer ruim begrip, waartoe de mentale processen gerekend worden die
optreden wanneer mensen waarnemen, informatie verwerken, leren, denken en problemen oplossen.
Deze mentale processen worden cognitieve processen genoemd.
Cognitive psychology is concerned with how people remember, pay attention and think. The
importance of all these issues arises partly from the fact that most of what we do, say, and feel is
guided by things we already know.
Cognitive psychology studies humans cognition. Cognition is always defined as a whole set of
examples. Cognitive psychology is the scientific investigation of human cognition, that is, all our
mental abilities – perceiving, learning, remembering, thinking, reasoning and understanding.
Cognition is not a very clearly defined concept. It is about anything that is associated with knowing
stuff. The term ‘cognition’ stems from the Latin word ‘cognoscere’ or ‘to know’. Cognitive psychology
is the scientific study of knowledge. It focuses on how knowledge is acquired (learning), retained
(memory) and used.
How is knowledge (acquisition of, usage of, etc.) based on mental processes such as attention,
memory perception, language, learning?
Because of these three points (acquisition, retaining, using), it also becomes important to study
vision. Vision determines how we perceive the world, how we perceive the world determines how
we gain new knowledge. It is about attention because a lot of stuff can happen around you but if you
don’t pay attention, you won’t pick up anything. It is about language because only due to us humans
having developed language, we are able to be so successful as a species. All these components are
essential to cognition, to the study of knowledge.
The broad role for memory. Example of ‘knowledge’: “Betsy wanted to bring Jacob some cheese. She
shook the refrigerator. It made no sound. She went to look for her mother”. This doesn’t make sense.
In principle, every sentence on itself makes sense. What you automatically do when you read
something like this is apply your own knowledge to see if it makes sense.
The example that does make sense: “Betsy wanted to bring Jacob a present. She shook her piggy
bank. It made no sound. She went to look for her mother”. Suddenly, you automatically built a whole
story out of this. You get an idea when you read this, you do this automatically without thinking
about it. To understand this, you are using you knowledge based on your memory to fill in
information that was absent in the text. There are other options for the fact that the piggy bank
made no sound (only bills of 100 euros), but this is odd. So, not only do you automatically infer what
is happening, you also automatically rule out other options. Our comprehension of a simple story
turns out to be heavily influenced by the knowledge we supply.
Cognitive psychology is interested in the mental processes, the stuff that happens in the mind.
Mental processes – the fundamental interplay between bottom up (the text you read) and top-down
knowledge (inferences based on your memory). Cognitive psychology focuses on the stuff that
happens in the mind. How can this interplay, e.g. between knowledge and memory, be studied?
Cognition can also be studied by means of patient studies. E.g. you can use it from the cognitive
perspective to figure out what happens when you do a certain experimental manipulation. Brain-
behavior relations inform about mind-related concepts when linked to the use of knowledge for
cognitive processes (e.g., ability to use knowledge to understand a story, storing new events in
,memory, learning new motor skills). Studies with amnesic patients can inform us about the link
between physiology and mind-related concepts, such as memory, but are the object of study of
neuropsychology (e.g. patient H.M.).
Cognitive psychology is closely related to two other domains: cognitive neuropsychology and
cognitive neuroscience. They have different levels of description/investigation that can provide
converging evidence.
Cognitive psychology has formed a productive partnership with the field of cognitive neuroscience
and clinical neuropsychology.
Clinical neuropsychology: studies the effect of brain dysfunction on observed performance.
Cognitive neuroscience: studies biological processes that underlie cognition.
Cognitive psychology: studies mental processes by identifying, modeling and testing individual
components in these processes.
Cognitive psychology boarders with and informs other disciplines and it originates strongly from
philosophy. Philosophy is the founding discipline of cognitive science. Within philosophy, people
wondered what the physical implementation is and what the mind and knowledge is. This is known
as the mind-body problem. You have dualism (body and mind are two different entities. The body is
material and can be studied scientifically, but the mind is non-physical), dual-aspect Monism (brain
and mind are different manifestations of the same substance, both sides need to be studied) and
reductionism (contemporary view that cognitive mind-based concepts will eventually be explained by
and replaced by biological events (e.g. transmitter release)). Reductionism is what we now believe.
In the mind we encode our knowledge. How can we know how our mind works? introspection.
We can only know how our mind works by thinking very clearly about how our mind works. This
means that we can’t study how our mind works directly, we need to think about it. Introspection:
mental world (thoughts, feelings, perceptions, recollections) cannot be studied directly. It is the
process of ‘looking within’ oneself and observing one’s own mental life. Perceiving one’s own
conscious mental life was the main idea of the initial psychologists. The problem is that thoughts
can’t be directly observed, or objectively tested, hence data lacks objectivity (it is completely
subjective). Besides this, some thoughts are unconscious, which means that introspection was
limited as a research tool.
Because of this, introspection doesn’t work. So, they went from one extreme, introspection (not look
at behavior at all, only at what happens in the mind), to another extreme, behaviourism.
Behaviourism states that psychology needs to be based on objectively observable data – behavior.
They said that you shouldn’t study the mind, but only the input and the output of the mind.
Behaviourism: you see a stimulus, you generate a response and that leads to measurable, physical
events (that is studied). The problem with this is that mental entities, i.e. goals, beliefs, intentions,
memory are left out. You don’t always act in the same way to a certain stimulus, it depends on the
context.
Book summary introspection: cognitive psychology emerged as a separate discipline in the late
1950s, and its powerful impact on the wider field of psychology has led many academics to speak of
this emergence as the cognitive revolution. One predecessor of cognitive psychology was the 19 th
century movement that emphasized introspection as the main research tool for psychology. But
psychologists soon became disenchanted with this movement for several reasons: introspection can’t
inform us about unconscious mental events; and even with conscious events, claims rooted in
introspection are often untestable because there is no way for an independent observer to check the
accuracy or completeness of an introspective report.
,Behaviourism uncovered principles of behavior change in response to stimuli, such as rewards or
punishment. However:
- Different stimuli can evoke the same behavior (“pass me the salt”, “salt”)
- The same stimulus (e.g., “all she gets to say is (e.g. in a play): pass me the salt”) can evoke
different response depending on the interpretation of the meaning of the stimulus. In
behaviourism, the logical consequence of hearing this would be that you pass the salt but in
this scenario the context is completely different.
This clearly shows that behaviourism is limited. You can’t just take the input and explain what
happens. Behaviourism was good in showing many aspects of learning (how we get from one thing to
the other thing).
What the book says about behaviourism: the behaviourist movement rejected introspection as a
method, insisting instead that psychology speak only of mechanisms and processes that are objective
and out in the open for all to observe. However, evidence suggests that our thinking, behavior, and
feelings are often shaped by our perception or understanding of the events we experience. This is
problematic for the behaviourists: perception and understanding are exactly the sorts of mental
processes that the behaviourists regarded as subjective and not open to scientific study.
Right now, the idea is that mental processes that underlie the cause of behavior need to be
understood.
Roots of cognitive revolution
Interference to the best explanation, based on Immanuel Kant’s transcendental method:
- Work backwards from observation (e.g. response time, delays, errors, etc.)
- Develop hypotheses about mental events that cause behaviour
- Test the hypotheses in experiments.
In order to study mental events, psychologists have turned to a method in which one focuses on
observable events but then asks what (invisible) events must have taken place in order to make these
(visible) effects possible.
The path to cognitive psychology, Barlett (1932) emphasized the ways in which each of us shapes and
organizes our experience. He claimed that people spontaneously fit their experiences into a mental
framework, or ‘schema’, and rely on this schema both to interpret the experience as it happens and
to aid memory later on.
active reconstruction of past events
memory is constructed by individual’s schemata, which reflects their culture and experience world
role of the perceiver in organizing their experiences
Tolman (1948) studied mazes. With a maze, the problem is that if you are a rat in a maze, you have
all those halls that look the same. This means, in the very simple behaviourist view, you can’t know
whether you should go left or right because all the halls look the same. They then might have said,
what you should take into account is not only the current decision but also the stimulus path up to
the point where you are now. So, you have all the input, and this leads then to the successful
decision. Tolman also showed that the rats had a sense of spatial orientation. This means that it is
not just input that leads to output, there is a lot of knowledge involved.
Gerard Heymans – Psychologism: whether behaviour is intelligent behaviour depends on the
character of the internal information processing that produces it.
, Summary of the book: many factors contributed to the emergence of cognitive psychology in the
1950s and 1960s. Tolman’s research demonstrated that even in rats, learning involved the
acquisition of new knowledge and not just a change in behavior. Chomsky argued powerfully that a
behaviourist analysis was inadequate as an explanation for language learning and language use.
Gestalt psychologists emphasized the role of the perceiver in organizing his or her experience.
Barlett’s research showed that people spontaneously fit their experiences into mental frameworks,
or schema.
Computers and the cognitive revolution. In the 1950s a new approach to psychological explanation
became available. This new approach was suggested by the rapid developments in electronic
information processing, including developments in computer technology. Computer technology
opened the field of artificial intelligence. Psychologists compared processes in the human mind and
in computers, they were intrigued by the technology and soon psychological data was explained in
terms borrowed from computer technology.
Cognitive revolution – it is all about information processing
The need to study mental processes, left out in behaviourist approaches, and to the lack of
introspection to provide objective data, an intellectual movement formed in 1950 and formed the
foundation of cognitive psychology. What developed were multidisciplinary approaches to study the
mind that share a method.
Research in cognitive psychology
Experiments allow to study mental events indirectly by inferring causes of behavior and specifically
testing hypotheses, which narrow down possible explanations.
Multiple lines of evidence must be used when hypothesizing mechanisms behind observable data.
Often a single piece of data can be explained by a variety of hypothesis. Repeated/refining
experiments allow cognitive psychologists to understand internal complex mechanisms in a simpler,
more constrained manner. A single experiment does not provide sufficient evidence, replication and
converging evidence is needed.
One method is examining the response time (RT) – that is, how long someone needs to make a
particular response - we can often gain important insights into what is going on in the mind.
Leaving from the idea that mental events are accessible only through introspection, over the strict
association of a response to a stimulus, walking towards the reductionist idea, in which cognition can
be explained in its smallest units, i.e. biological processes. Where is cognitive psychology now?
Predictive coding: cognition is the brain’s capacity to generate and update internal probalistic models
about upcoming sensory events with the goal to minimize prediction error.
Enactivism: cognition arises through the interaction between the active organism and environment.
Mental representations are not based on passive use of information but are constructed through
action.
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