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Book summary CH1-4: Cognitive Psychology - Goldstein and Van Hooff (2nd ed., 2021)
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Book summary: Cognitive Psychology - Goldstein and Van Hooff (2nd ed., 2021)Chapter 1: Introduction Cognitive Psychology
1.1
The mind, like many other concepts in psychology, such as intelligence or emotion, can be
thought of in a number of different ways. Examples of how the word “mind” is used in everyday
conversation:
1. “He was able to call to mind what he was doing on the day of the accident.” (The mind as
involved in memory.)
2. “If you put your mind to it, I’m sure you can solve that maths problem.” (The mind as a
problem-solver.)
3. “I haven’t made up my mind yet” or “I’m in two minds about this.” (The mind as used to
make decisions or consider possibilities.)
4. “He is of sound mind and body,” or “When he talks about his encounter with aliens, it
sounds like he is out of his mind.” (A healthy mind being associated with normal
functioning, a non-functioning mind with abnormal functioning.)
5. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” (The mind as valuable, something that should be
used.)
6. “He has a brilliant mind.” (Used to describe people who are particularly intelligent or
creative.)
Statements 1, 2 and 3 highlight the mind’s role in memory, problem solving and making
decisions, are related to the following definition of the mind: The mind creates and controls
mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking
and reasoning. This definition reflects the mind’s central role in determining our various mental
abilities. It is important to realize that cognition does not only reflect our higher “thinking”
functions and that many of the processes involved (the basic as well as the more complex ones)
operate outside conscious control. Another definition, which focuses on how the mind operates,
is: The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to
achieve our goals. This definition reflects the mind’s importance for functioning and survival, and
also provides the beginnings of a description of how the mind achieves these ends.
These two definitions of the mind are not incompatible. The first one indicates different types of
cognition—the mental processes, such as perception, attention and memory, that are what the
mind does. The second definition indicates something about how the mind operates (it creates
representations) and its function (it enables us to act and to achieve goals). It is no coincidence
that all of the cognitions in the first definition play important roles in acting to achieve goals.
Statements 4, 5 and 6 emphasize the mind’s importance for normal functioning, and the
amazing abilities of the mind. The mind is incredible in all its facets and forms, and not just in
whiz kids and masterminds. Even the most “routine” things—like recognizing a person or having
a conversation, involve many sophisticated qualities and complex operations of the mind. What
exactly are the properties of the mind? What are its characteristics? How does it operate and
how is it related to brain processes? Stating that the mind creates cognition and is important for
functioning and survival tells us what the mind does, but not how it achieves what it does. The
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,Book summary: Cognitive Psychology - Goldstein and Van Hooff (2nd ed., 2021)
question of how the mind achieves what it does is what cognitive psychology is about. The
goals in the rest of this chapter are to describe how the field of cognitive psychology evolved
from its early beginnings to where it is today, and to begin describing how cognitive
psychologists approach the scientific study of the mind.
In the 1800s, ideas about the mind were dominated by the belief that it is not possible to study
the mind. One reason given was that it is not possible for the mind to study itself, but there were
other reasons as well, including the idea that the properties of the mind simply cannot be
measured. Nonetheless, some researchers defied the common wisdom and decided to study
the mind anyway. One of these people was the Dutch physiologist, Franciscus Donders, who in
1868, 11 years before the founding of the first laboratory of scientific psychology, did one of the
first experiments that today would be called a cognitive psychology experiment. (It is important
to note that the term “cognitive psychology” was not coined until 1967, but the early experiments
we are going to describe next, would today qualify as cognitive psychology experiments.)
1868: Donders’ Pioneering Experiment: How Long Does It Take to Make a Decision?
Donders was interested in determining how long it
takes for a person to make a decision. He determined
this by measuring reaction time—how long it takes to
respond to the presentation of a stimulus (a stimulus
is a sound, a light, a touch, a smell, etc). He used two
measures of reaction time. First, he measured simple
reaction time by asking his participants to push a
button as rapidly as possible when they saw a light go
on. In addition, he measured choice reaction time by
using two lights and asking his participants to push
the left button when they saw the left light go on, and
the right button when they saw the right light go on.
The steps that occur in the simple reaction time task are shown in Figure a. Presenting the
stimulus (the light) causes a mental response (perceiving the light), which leads to a behavioural
response (pushing the button). The reaction time (dashed line) is the time between the
presentation of the stimulus and the behavioural response. The steps that occur in the choice
reaction time task are indicated in Figure b. In this task, an extra step (or mental response) is
required, asking participants to determine whether the left or right light was illuminated and then
to decide which button to push. As expected, reaction times in this choice task were longer than
those in the simple task. Donders reasoned that the difference in reaction time between these
tasks would indicate how long it took participants to make the decision that led to pushing the
correct button. Because in this example the choice reaction time took around 100 milliseconds
(ms) longer than the simple reaction time, it could therefore be concluded that the
decision-making process took around 100 ms.
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,Book summary: Cognitive Psychology - Goldstein and Van Hooff (2nd ed., 2021)
Donders’ experiment is important, both because it was one of the first cognitive psychology
experiments and because it illustrates something extremely significant about studying the mind:
Mental responses (perceiving the light and deciding which button to push, in this example)
cannot be measured directly, but must be inferred from behaviour. We can appreciate this by
recognizing that the dashed lines in the figure before indicate that the measured reaction times
represent the relationship between the presentation of the stimulus (the light flashes) and the
participant’s response (button presses). He did not measure mental responses directly, but
inferred how long they took from the reaction times. The fact that mental responses cannot be
measured directly, but must be inferred from observing behaviour, is a principle that holds not
only for Donders’ experiment but for all research in cognitive psychology.
1879: Wundt’s Psychology Laboratory: Structuralism and Analytic Introspection
Eleven years after Donders’ reaction time experiment, Wilhelm Wundt founded the first
laboratory of scientific psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany. Wundt’s approach,
which dominated psychology in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was called structuralism.
According to structuralism, our overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of
experience which were called sensations. Thus, just as chemistry developed a periodic table of
the elements, which combine to form molecules, Wundt wanted to create a “periodic table of the
mind,” which would include all of the basic sensations involved in creating complex experiences.
Wundt thought he could achieve this scientific description of the components of experience by
using analytic introspection, a technique in which trained participants described their sensations,
feelings and thought processes in response to stimuli. Analytic introspection (intro = inside,
spectare = to look) required extensive training because it is difficult to describe an experience in
terms of basic, fundamental elements, such as the sensations of “redness,” “sweetness” and
“crispiness” when viewing an apple. In one experiment, Wundt asked participants to describe
their experience of hearing a five-note chord played on the piano. One of the questions he then
hoped to answer was whether his participants were able to hear each of the individual notes
that made up the chord. As we will see when we consider perception in Chapter 3, structuralism
was not a fruitful approach and was therefore abandoned in the early 1900s. Nonetheless,
Wundt made a substantial contribution to psychology by his commitment to studying behaviour
and the mind under controlled conditions. Indeed, Wundt is seen by many as leading the shift in
the study of the mind from the rationalist approach to the empiricist approach, emphasizing the
pivotal role of experiments in gaining knowledge about the human mind. In addition, he trained
many doctoral students who later established psychology departments at other universities in
Europe and the United States. To see for yourself how experiments were carried out in Wundt’s
time, you can still visit his laboratory in Leipzig.
1885: Ebbinghaus’ Memory Experiment: What Is the Time Course of Forgetting?
Meanwhile, 120 miles from Leipzig, at the University of Berlin, German psychologist Hermann
Ebbinghaus (1885/1913) was using another approach to measuring the properties of the mind.
Ebbinghaus was interested in determining the nature of memory and forgetting—specifically,
how rapidly information that is learned is lost over time. Rather than using Wundt’s method of
analytic introspection, Ebbinghaus used a quantitative method for measuring memory.
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, Book summary: Cognitive Psychology - Goldstein and Van Hooff (2nd ed., 2021)
Using himself as the participant, he repeated lists of 13 nonsense syllables such as DAX, QEH,
LUH and ZIF to himself one at a time at a constant rate. He used nonsense syllables so that his
memory would not be influenced by the meaning of a particular word.Ebbinghaus determined
how long it took him to learn a list for the first time (i.e., recall correctly). He then waited for a
specific amount of time (the delay) and then determined how long it took him to re-learn the list
for the second time. Because forgetting had occurred during the delay, Ebbinghaus did not
perform perfectly in his first attempt after the delay, but he was able to achieve correct recall
quicker and with fewer attempts than before. In other words, he re-learned the list more rapidly
than when he had learned it for the first time. Thus, something from the original learning period
must have been saved in memory to achieve this quicker learning.
To determine how much information was retained after a particular delay, Ebbinghaus proposed
a measure called savings, calculated as follows:
Savings = (Original time to learn the list) − (Time to re-learn the list after the delay).
Thus, if it took 1,000 seconds to learn the list the first
time and 400 seconds to re-learn the list after the delay,
the savings would be 1,000 − 400 = 600 seconds. The
figure on the right, which represents original learning and
re-learning after three different delays, shows that longer
delays result in smaller savings.
According to Ebbinghaus, this reduction in savings
provided a measure of forgetting, with smaller savings meaning
more forgetting. Thus, the plot of per cent savings versus time,
called a savings curve, shows that memory drops rapidly for the first
two days after the initial learning and then levels off. This curve was
important because it demonstrated that memory could be quantified
and that functions like the savings curve could be used to describe
a property of the mind—in this case, the ability to retain information.
Interestingly, this 130-year-old experiment was recently replicated
and an almost exactly similar forgetting curve was found (Murre &
Dros, 2015). Notice that although Ebbinghaus’ savings method was
very different from Donders’ reaction time method, both measured
behaviour to determine a property of the mind.
1890: William James’ Principles of Psychology
William James, one of the early American psychologists, described significant observations
about the mind in his famous textbook, Principles of Psychology (1890). James’ observations
were based not on the results of experiments but on observations about the operation of his
own mind. One of the best known of James’ observations is the following, on the nature of
attention:
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