Introduction to applied cognitive psychology [Autosaved].pptx
- 1. Unit-1 • Introduction to applied cognitive psychology: • Philosophical antecedents, • Emergence of Cognitive psychology. • Approaches and key issues. • Metacognition: Metacognitive knowledge and Metacognitive regulation
- 2. COGINITIVE PSYCHOLOGY • Cognitive psychology is the study of how people perceive, learn, remember, and think about information. • A cognitive psychologist might study how people perceive various shapes, why they remember some facts but forget others, or how they learn language.
- 3. • The subject matter of cognitive psychology is the mental processes. • These include memory; perceptual processes, such as pattern recognition (e.g., recognition of objects,words, sounds, etc.), attention, and imagery; language, including comprehension and production, and related phenomena, such as conceptual knowledge; and the class of activities traditionally called thinking, or the “higher mental processes,” including problem solving and creativity, and logical reasoning and decision making.
- 4. • Cognitive psychology as a point of view, or a scientific philosophy, refers to a set of beliefs concerning how those topics are to be studied (e.g., Neisser, 1967). • According to the cognitive perspective, understanding behavior— such as remembering your mother’s birthday,solving a math problem, or reading words on a page—requires that we analyze the mental processes that underlie that behavior. • This perspective can be contrasted with behaviorism, which was based on the belief that behavior could be understood by determining the external stimulus conditions that brought it about, and not worrying about internal mental processes.
- 5. • Our species is called Homo sapiens, or “human, the wise.” This term reflects the general belief that our superior thought processes are what distinguishes us from other animals. Today we all know that the brain is the organ of the human mind, but the connection between the brain and the mind was not always known. • For instance, in a colossal mis association, the Greek philosopher Aristotle localized the mind in the heart.He thought the function of the brain was to cool the blood. Cognitive psychology is the science of how the mind is organized to produce intelligent thought and how it is realized in the brain. :
- 6. APPLIED COGINITIVE PSYCHOLOGY • Consequently, applied cognitive psychology may be defined • as the science of the cognitive processes involved in activities of daily living.
- 7. THE AIMS OF APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY • There are arguably two main reasons for studying applied cognitive psychology. • First, there is the hope that applied research can produce solutions to real problems, providing us with knowledge and insights that can actually be used in the real world. • A second benefit is that applied research can help to improve and inform theoretical approaches to cognition, offering a broader and more realistic basis for our understanding of cognitive processes. • Sometimes a phenomenon observed in real life can actually providethe inspiration for a new research initiative. For example, Colin Cherrywas intrigued by the way that we can somehow focus our attention onone particular voice or conversation even when we are in the middle ofa noisy party, surrounded by other equally loud conversations.
- 8. • Cognitive psychology is the study of how the brain processes information. In more everyday terms, it is about the mental processes involved in acquiring and making use of knowledge and experience gained from our senses. • The main processes involved in cognition are perception, learning, memory storage, retrieval and thinking, all of which are terms that are used in everyday speech and therefore already familiar to most people. Various types of information are subjected to cognitive processing, including visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory and olfactory information, depending on the sensory system detecting it. However, humans have also developed the use of symbolic language, which can represent any other form of information. • Thus language constitutes another important type of information that may be processed by the cognitive system
- 9. • All of these various aspects of cognition have been extensively studied in the laboratory, but in recent years there has been a growing interest in the application of cognitive psychology to situations in real life. • This approach is known as applied cognitive psychology, and it is concerned with the investigation of how cognitive processes affect our behaviour and performance in real-life settings. • It is this research which provides the subject matter of this book.
- 10. Psychological Antecedents of Cognitive Psychology • Cognitive psychology has roots in many different ideas and approaches. • The approaches that will be examined include early approaches such as structuralism and functionalism, followed by a discussion of associationism, behaviorism, and Gestalt psychology.
- 11. Understanding the Structure of the Mind: Structuralism • An early dialectic in the history of psychology is that between structuralism and functionalism (Leahey, 2003; Morawski, 2000). • Structuralism was the first major school of thought in psychology. Structuralism seeks to understand the structure (configuration of elements) of the mind and its perceptions by analyzing those perceptions into their constituent components (affection, attention, memory, sensation.
- 12. • Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) was a German psychologist whose ideas contributed to the development of structuralism. • Wundt is often viewed as the founder of structuralism in psychology (Structuralism, 2009).Wundt used a variety of methods in his research. • One of these methods was introspection. Introspection is a deliberate looking inward at pieces of information passing through consciousness. • The aim of introspection is to look at the elementary components of an object or process.
- 13. • The introduction of introspection as an experimental method was an important change in the field because the main emphasis in the study of the mind shifted from a rationalist approach to the empiricist approach of trying to observe behavior in order to draw conclusions about the subject of study. • The method of introspection has some challenges associated with it. First, people may not always be able to say exactly what goes through their mind or may not be able to put it into adequate words. Second, what they say may not be accurate. • Third, the fact that people are asked to pay attention to their thoughts or to speak out loud while they are working on a task may itself alter the processes that are going on.
- 14. Understanding the Processes of the Mind: Functionalism • An alternative that developed to counter structuralism, functionalism suggested that psychologists should focus on the processes of thought rather than on its contents. • Functionalism seeks to understand what people do and why they do it. This principal question about processes was in contrast to that of the structuralists, who had asked what the elementary contents (structures) of the human mind are. • Functionalists held that the key to understanding the human mind and behavior was to study the processes of how and why the mind works as it does, rather than to study the structural contents and elements of the mind. They were particularly interested in the practical applications of their research.
- 15. • Functionalists were unified by the kinds of question they asked but not necessarily by the answers they found orby the methods they used for finding those answers. • Because functionalists believed in using whichever methods best answered a given researcher’s questions, it seems natural for functionalism to have led to pragmatism. • Pragmatists believe that knowledge is validated by its usefulness: What can you do with it? • Pragmatists are concerned not only with knowing what people do; they also want to know what we can do with our knowledge of what people do. For example, pragmatists believe in the importance of the psychology of learning and memory. Why? Because it can help us improve the performance of children in school. It can also help us learn to remember the names of people we meet.
- 16. • A leader in guiding functionalism toward pragmatism was William James (1842–1910). His chief functional contribution to the field of psychology was a single book: his landmark Principles of Psychology (1890/1970). • Even today,cognitive psychologists frequently point to the writings ofJames in discussions of core topics in the field, such as attention, consciousness, and perception. • John Dewey (1859–1952)was another early pragmatist who profoundly influenced contemporary thinking in cognitive psychology. Dewey is remembered primarily for his pragmatic approach to thinking and schooling. • Although functionalists were interested in how people learn, they did not really specify a mechanism by which learning takes place. • This task was taken up by another group, Associationists.
- 17. An Integrative Synthesis: Associationism • Associationism, like functionalism, was more of an influential way of thinking than a rigid school of psychology. Associationism examines how elements of the mind, like events or ideas, can become associated with one another in the mind to result in a form of learning. For example, associations may result from: • contiguity (associating things that tend to occur together at about the same time); • • similarity (associating things with similar features or properties); or • • contrast (associating things that show polarities, such as hot/cold, light/dark, day/night).
- 18. • In the late 1800s, associationist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) was the first experimenter to apply associationist principles systematically. • Specifically,Ebbinghaus studied his own mental processes. He made up lists of nonsense syllables that consisted of a consonant and a vowel followed by another consonant (e.g., zax). He then took careful note of how long it took him to memorize those lists. He counted his errors and recorded his response times. Through his self- observations, Ebbinghaus studied how people learn and remember material through rehearsal, the conscious repetition of material to be learned (Figure 1.2).Among other things, he found that frequent repetition can fix mental associations more firmly in memory.
- 19. • Another influential associationist, Edward Lee Thorndike (1874–1949), held that the role of “satisfaction” is the key to forming associations. • Thorndike termed this principle the law of effect (1905): A stimulus will tend to produce a certain response over time if an organism is rewarded for that response. • Thorndike believed that an organism learns to respond in a given way (the effect) in a given situation if it is rewarded repeatedly for doing so (the satisfaction, which serves as a stimulus to future actions). • Thus, a child given treats for solving arithmetic problems learns to solve arithmetic problems accurately because the child forms associations between valid solutions and treats. These ideas were the predecessors of the development of behaviorism.
- 20. It’s Only What You Can See That Counts: From Associationism to Behaviorism • Behaviorism focuses only on the relation between observable behavior and environmental events or stimuli. • The idea was to make physical whatever others might have called “mental” (Lycan, 2003). • Some of these researchers, like Thorndike and other associationists, studied responses that were voluntary (although perhaps lacking any conscious thought, as in Thorndike’s work). • Other researchers studied responses that were involuntarily triggered in response to what appear to be unrelated external events.
- 21. • Behaviorism may be considered an extreme version of associationism. It focuses entirely on the association between the environment and an observable behavior. • According to strict, extreme (“radical”) behaviorists, any hypotheses about internal thoughts and ways of thinking are nothing more than speculation.
- 22. • The “father” of radical behaviorism is John Watson (1878–1958). Watson had no use for internal mental contents or mechanisms. He believed that psychologists should concentrate only on the study of observable behavior (Doyle, 2000). • Skinner conducted research primarily with nonhuman animals. He rejected mental mechanisms. He believed instead that operant conditioning— involving the strengthening or weakening of behavior, contingent on the presence or absence of reinforcement (rewards) or punishments—could explain all forms of human behavior. • Skinner applied his experimental analysis of behavior to many psychological phenomena, such as learning, language acquisition, and problem solving. Largely because of Skinner’s towering presence, behaviorism dominated the discipline of psychology for several decades.
- 23. • Behaviorism was challenged on many fronts like language acquisition, production, and comprehension. First, although it seemed to work well to account for certain kinds of learning, behaviorism did not account as well for complex mental activities such as language learning and problem solving. Second, more than understanding people’s behavior, some psychologists wanted to know what went on inside the head. Third, it often proved easier to use the techniques of behaviorism in studying on human animals than in studying human ones. Nonetheless, behaviorism con- tinues as a school of psychology, although not one that is particularly sympathetic to the cognitive approach, which involves metaphorically and sometimes literally peering inside people’s heads to understand how they learn, remember, think, and reason.
- 24. Behaviorists Daring to Peek into the Black Box Some psychologists rejected radical behaviorism. They were curious about the con-tents of the mysterious black box. Behaviorists regarded the mind as a black box that is best understood in terms of its input and output, but whose internal processes cannot be accurately described because they are not observable. For example, a critic,Edward Tolman (1886–1959), thought that understanding behavior required taking into account the purpose of, and the plan for, the behavior. Tolman (1932) believed that all behavior is directed toward a goal. For example, the goal of a rat in a maze may be to try to find food in that maze. Tolman is sometimes viewed as a forefatherof modern cognitive psychology.
- 25. The Whole Is More Than the Sum of Its Parts: Gestalt Psychology • Of the many critics of behaviorism, Gestalt psychologists may have been among the most avid. • Gestalt psychology states that we best understand psychological phenomena when we view them as organized, structured wholes. • According to this view, we cannot fully understand behavior when we only break phenomena down into smaller parts. • For example, behaviorists tended to study problem solving by looking for subvocal processing—they were looking for the observable behavior through which problem solving can be understood. • Gestaltists, in contrast, studied insight, seeking to understand the unobservable mental event by which someone goes from having no idea about how to solve a problem to understanding it fully in what seems a mere moment of time.
- 26. Factors Contributing to the Rise of Cognitive Psychology • Factors Contributing to the Rise of Cognitive Psychology. • The emerging popularity of the cognitive approach can be traced to psychologists’ disenchantment with behaviorism, as well as to new developments in linguistics, memory, and develop-mental psychology. • By the late 1960s, psychologists were becoming increasingly disappointed with the behaviorist outlook that had dominated U.S. psychology. • Complex human behavior could not readily be explained using only the concepts from traditional behaviorist theory, such as observable stimuli, responses, and reinforcement. • This approach tells us nothing about psychologically interesting processes, such as the thoughts and strategies people use when they try to solve a problem (Bechtel et al., 1998).
- 27. • New developments in linguistics also increased psychologists’ dissatisfaction with behaviorism (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000). • The most important contributions came from the linguist Noam Chomsky (1957), who emphasized that the structure of language was too complex to be explained in behaviorist terms (Pinker, 2002; Leahey,2003). Chomsky and other linguists argued that humans have an inborn ability to master all the complicated and varied aspects of language (Chomsky, 2004). This perspective clearly contradicted the behaviorist perspective that language acquisition can be entirely explained by learning principles.
- 28. • Research in human memory began to blossom at the end of the 1950s, further increasing the disenchantment with behaviorism. • Psychologists examined the organization of memory, and they proposed memory models. • They frequently found that material was altered during memory by people’s previous knowledge. • Behaviorist principles such as “reinforcement” could not explain these alterations (Bargh & Ferguson, 2000).
- 29. • Another influential force came from research on children’s thought processes.Jean Piaget (pronounced “Pea-ah-zhay”) was a Swiss theorist who lived from 1896 to 1980. • His perspectives continue to shape developmental psychology (Feist, 2006).According to Piaget, children actively explore their world in order to understand important concepts (Gregory, 2004b). • Furthermore, children’s cognitive strategies change as they mature. During infancy, for example, babies master object permanence, the knowledge that an object exists, even when it is temporarily out of sight. • In contrast, an adolescent often uses sophisticated strategies in order to conduct experiments about scientific principles. Piaget’s books began to attract the attention of U.S. psychologists and educators toward the end of the 1950s.
- 30. • We have seen that the growth of the cognitive approach was encouraged by research in linguistics, memory, and developmental psychology. • By the mid-1970s,the cognitive approach had replaced the behavioral approach as the dominant theory in psychological research (Robins et al., 1999). • Let’s now consider an additional factor contributing to that growth, which was the enthusiasm about the information-processing approach. • For many years, the information-processing approach was the most popular theory within the cognitive approach.
- 31. Emergence of Cognitive Psychology • In the early 1950s, a movement called the “cognitive revolution” took place in response to behaviorism. • Cognitivism is the belief that much of human behavior can be understood in terms of how people think. It rejects the notion that psychologists should avoid studying mental processes because they are unobservable. • Cognitivism is, in part, a synthesis of earlier forms of analysis, such as behaviorism and Gestaltism. Like behaviorism, it adopts precise quantitative analysis to study how people learn and think; like Gestaltism, it emphasizes internal mental processes.
- 32. • By the end of the 1950s, some psychologists were intrigued by the tantalizing notion that machines could be programmed to demonstrate the intelligent processing of information (Rychlak & Struckman, 2000). • Turing (1950) suggested that soon it would be hard to distinguish the communication of machines from that of humans. • He suggested a test, now called the “Turing test,” by which a computer program would be judged as successful to the extent that its output was indistinguishable, by humans, from the output of humans (Cummins & Cummins, 2000). • In other words, suppose you communicated with a computer and you could not tell that it was a computer. The computer then passed the Turing test (Schonbein & Bechtel, 2003).
- 33. • By 1956 a new phrase had entered our vocabulary. • Artificial intelligence (AI) is the attempt by humans to construct systems that show intelligence and, particularly, the intelligent processing of information (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 2003). • Chess-playing programs, which now can beat most humans, are examples of artificial intelligence. However, experts greatly underestimated how difficult it would be to develop a computer that can think like a human being. Even today, computers have trouble reading handwriting and understanding and responding to spoken language with the ease that humans do.
- 34. • Many of the early cognitive psychologists became interested in cognitive psychology through applied problems. For example, according to Berry (2002), Donald Broadbent (1926–1993) claimed to have developed an interest in cognitive. • Applied cognitive psychology also has had great use in advertising. John Watson, after he left Johns Hopkins University as a professor, became an extremely successful executive in an advertising firm and applied his knowledge of psychology to reach his success. • Indeed, much of advertising has directly used principles from cognitive psychology to attract customers to products (Benjamin & Baker,2004).
- 35. • Early cognitivists (e.g., Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960; Newell, Shaw, & Simon,1957b) argued that traditional behaviorist accounts of behavior were inadequate precisely because they said nothing about how people think. • One of the most famous early articles in cognitive psychology was, oddly enough, on “the magic number seven.” • George Miller (1956) noted that the number seven appeared in many different places in cognitive psychology, such as in the literature on perception and memory, and he wondered whether there was some hidden meaning in its frequent reappearance.
- 36. • Neisser defined cognitive psychology as the study of how people learn, structure, store, and use knowledge. • Subsequently, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon (1972) proposed detailed models of human thinking and problem solving from the most basic levels to the most complex. • By the 1970s cognitive psychology was recognized widely as a major field of psychological study with a distinctive set of research methods.
- 37. • COGINITIVE NEUROSCIENCE---As indicated earlier, cognitive neuroscience involves intensive study of the brain as well as behaviour. • COGNITIVE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY---Cognitive neuropsychology is concerned with the patterns of cognitive performance (intact and impaired) shown by brain-damaged patients.These patients have suffered lesions – structural alterations within the brain caused by injury or disease. • COMPUTATIONAL COGNITIVE SCIENCE---Computational modelling involves programming computers to model or mimic some aspectsof human cognitive functioning.
- 38. Philosophical Antecedents of Psychology: Rationalism versus Empiricism • Where and when did the study of cognitive psychology begin? Historians of psychology usually trace the earliest roots of psychology to two approaches to understanding the human mind: • Philosophy seeks to understand the general nature of many aspects of the world, in part through introspection, the examination of inner ideas and experiences(from intro-, “inward, within,” and -spect, “look”); • • Physiology seeks a scientific study of life-sustaining functions in living matter,primarily through empirical (observation-based) methods.
- 39. • Two Greek philosophers, Plato (ca. 428–348 B.C.) and his student Aristotle(384–322 B.C.), have profoundly affected modern thinking in psychology and many other fields. • Plato and Aristotle disagreed regarding how to investigate ideas. • Plato was a rationalist. A rationalist believes that the route to knowledge is through thinking and logical analysis. That is, a rationalist does not need any experiments to develop new knowledge. A rationalist who is interested in cognitive processes would appeal to reason as a source of knowledge or justification.
- 40. • In contrast, rationalism is important in theory development. Rationalist theories without any connection to observations gained through empiricist methods may not be valid; but mountains of observational data without an organizing theoretical framework may not be meaningful.
- 41. • In contrast, Aristotle (a naturalist and biologist as well as a philosopher) was an empiricist. • An empiricist believes that we acquire knowledge via empirical evidence— that is, we obtain evidence through experience and observation . • In order to explore how the human mind works, empiricists would design experiments and conduct studies in which they could observe the behavior and processes of interest to them. • Empiricism therefore leads directly to empirical investigations of psychology. • In contrast, rationalism is important in theory development.
- 42. • Rationalist theories without any connection to observations gained through empiricist methods may not be valid; but mountains of observational data without an organizing theoretical framework may not be meaningful. • We might see the rationalist view of the world as a thesis and the empirical view as an antithesis. • Most psychologists today seek a synthesis of the two. • They base empirical observations on theory in order to explain what they have observed in their experiments. In turn, they use these observations to revise their theories when they find that the theories cannot account for their real-world observations.
- 43. • The contrasting ideas of rationalism and empiricism became prominent with the French rationalist René Descartes (1596–1650) and the British empiricist John Locke (1632–1704). • Descartes viewed the introspective, reflective method as being superior to empirical methods for finding truth. The famous expression “cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am) stems from Descartes. • He maintained that the only proof of his existence is that he was thinking and doubting. Descartes felt that one could not rely on one’s senses because those very senses have often proven to be deceptive (think of optical illusions, for example).
- 44. • Locke, in contrast, had more enthusiasm for empirical observation (Leahey, 2003). • Locke believed that humans are born without knowledge and therefore must seek knowledge through empirical observation. Locke’s term for this view was tabula rasa (meaning “blank slate” inLatin). • The idea is that life and experience “write” knowledge on us. For Locke,then, the study of learning was the key to understanding the human mind. He believed that there are no innate ideas.