Lecture notes on:
1. intro to applied cognitive psych
2. perception and attention
3. performance limitations and working memory
4. memory improvement
5. everyday memory
6. drugs and cognition
Cognitive psychology – study of the mental operations that support people’s acquisition
and use of knowledge.
(i.e., pattern recognition, attention, memory [retrieving, encoding and recall], visual
imagery, language, problem solving, decision making and action)
Early cognitive psychologists focused on:
1. Methodologies
2. Basic cognitive processes (pure research)
3. Theory building (for e.g., executive functioning or theories of perception)
Applied cognitive psychology
- Young field
- Relies on methods, findings and theory from cognitive science
- Aims to understand cognitive processes as they occur in real world of human
experience
- Attempts to solve practical/ real life problems (i.e., relate it to injuries, road markings
and how we can improve, reflecting clothing on parts of the body that move as we
know we are attracted to biological movement)
Other applications:
- Improving attention skills of shift workers or drivers (shifts disrupt cycles therefore
how can we improve this while remembering that)
- Improving eye- witness recall (how can interventions be put in place to improve
accuracy as it has been shown to not be as accurate as people think)
- Using memory strategies (how to improve encoding as this will improve storage and
therefore over all memory)
- Clinical diagnosis and rehabilitation (e.g., in Alzheimer’s patience when they are
admitted taking items of their own knowing that things that belong to an individual
are more easily remembered than those belonging to a friend or stranger)
- Improving sports performance
Contributors:
Wilhelm Wundt (1874) [father of psychology]
- Wanted to study the structure of the human mind (via thoughts, images and
feelings)
- Assessed this via perception and attention through introspection
- Measure reaction times to simple and two choice stimuli (iq testing)
- Work showed that psychology can be a valid experimental science
Galton (1883)
- Investigated mental imagery
- Used a questionnaire to investigate the strengths and nature of mental imagery
- Therefore, he was able to get a profile of what grabs different peoples attention
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