Summary - book "Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind Research and Everyday Experience" (ch: 1-12 except 8)

Chapter 1 — Introduction to Cognitive Psychology - Cognitive psychology — branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind Cognitive Psychology: Studying the Mind - What is the mind? • Mind creates and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning. - Memory, problem-solver, make decision & consider probabilities - Cognition — mental processes, such as perception, attention, and memory, that are what the mind does • Mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals. - Associated with normal functioning - How mind operates (creates representations) and its functions (enables us to act & achieve goals) - Studying the Mind: Early work in Cognitive Psychology: • Franciscus Donders — Cognitive Psychology Experiment: How long it takes for a person to make a decision? - Measuring reaction time — how long it takes to respond to presentation of a stimulus • Simple reaction time — asking subjects to push a button as rapidly as possible when they saw a light goes on • Choice reaction time — using two lights and ask subjects to push the left button when they saw the left light go on and right button when they saw right light go on - Presenting stimulus (light)  Mental response (perceiving light)  Behavioural response (push button) - Reaction time = time between presenting stimulus and behavioural response - Difference between simple and choice reaction time indicate how long it took to make the decision for correct button — Donders concluded tat the decision-making process took one-tenth of a second - Important experiment: 1) First cognitive psychology experiment; 2) Mental responses must be inferred from behaviour (cannot be measured directly) 1 2 • Wilhelm Wundt’s Psychology Laboratory: Structuralism and Analytic introspection - Structuralism — our overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience the structuralists called sensations. — “Periodic table of the mind” - Analytic introspection — trained subjects described their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli (describe in terms of elementary mental elements) - e.g Experience hearing a five-note chord played on piano (Whether subjects were able to hear each of the individual notes that mad up the chord) • Ebbinghaus’s memory experiment: What is the time course of forgetting? - How rapidly information that is learned is lost over time? - Quantitative method for measuring memory: • Repeated lists of 13 nonsense syllables: DAX, QEH, LUH, ZIF one at a time at constant rate • Determine how long it took to learn a list for the first time, then wait for a period of time (delay), then determine how long it took to relearn the list - Savings — determine how much was forgotten after a particular delay: • Savings = (Original time to learn the list) - (Time to relearn the list after the delay) • Longer delays  smaller savings • Smaller savings  more forgetting - Savings curve (forgetting curve) — memory drops rapidly for the first 2 days after initial learning  levels off - Memory could be quantified & able to describe property of mind (e.g ability to retain information) • William James’s Principles of Psychology - Observed that paying attention to one thing involves withdrawing from other things