cognitive_psych_hip

=Cognitive Psychology & H.I.P.= toc

Cognitive Psych.
Cognition itself refers to the mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge - which is just a way of saying that cognition involves thinking or the actual conscious experience. During the 1950's and 1960's, Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, began to focus on he study of children's cognitive development. At the same time, Herbert Simon began work on problem solving that eventually went on to win him the Nobel Prize in 1978. Since this surge in interest, cognitive theorists believe and argue that psychology must study internal mental events to fully understand behaviour. Psychologists explore decision making processes, reasoning abilities and problem solving capabilities to assess behavioural patterns. Cognitive psychology is the examination of aspects of human's everyday lives and pays attention to our general perception concerning reasoning, memory, language and attention. It is from studying the functions associated with these that information technology specialists have modeled the information processing paradigm that is very closely linked to the way computer systems funcion.

18th Century > 19th Century: Psychology was differentiated from Philosophy Early 20 Century > Re-emergance of Cognitive Psychology: Modern research in the field of Cognitive Psychology focuses on human performance, attention, computer science, Artifical Intelligence and Linguistics (History of Cognitive Psycology) > Here is an interesting video I found on the work on Jean Piaget: [|[[media type="custom" key="12813"]]]
 * George Berkley : Wrote an influential essay titled, 'A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge'.
 * David Hume (1711- 1776): Published 'Treatise of human nature'. Also differentiated between two mental concepts, Impressions and Ideas.
 * James Mill (1773- 1886): His most important contribution is his book, 'Analysis of the Phenomana of the Human Mind' (1829). He believed that the mind worked in response to outer stimuli, and that it needed to be broken down into its elementary components.
 * John Stuart Mill (1805- 1873): Was concerned with Associationism, and developed the field of mental chemistry. He was in opposition to his father and influenced by the works of James, Gestalt and Wundt.
 * Wilhem Wundt (1832- 1920): He is regarded as the 'founder of psychology as a formal academic discipline and the first person in history to be designated a psychologist.' (History of Cognitive Physchology) He used methods like introspection to perform inquiry and observe psychological experiences through emitted behavior.
 * Hermann Helmholtz (1821- 1894): He was an advocate of the natural sciences. He developed the Young Helmholtz theory of color vision.
 * Herman Ebbinghaus (1850 - 1909): Performed experiments to study Memory (using nonsense variables) and forgetfulness.
 * Sir Francis Galton (1822- 1911): He is the founder of eugenics. This 'science' claimed to categorize people as 'Genius type' or 'Criminal type' to compare individuals. Although this practice was denounced later as racist and illogical, Galton introduced a number of important methods that are used today.
 * Edward Titchener (1967- 1927): Believed that all conciousness was reducible to three states, 'perception', 'images' and affection
 * William James (1842- 1910): Wrote the first psychology textbook, 'Principles of Psychology' which he felt was a 'natural science'. He also collaborated to develop the James- Lange theory. (This theory proposes that action preceeds emotion, that is, we feel scared because we run.
 * Edward Tolman: He demonstrated that animals had expectations as well as internal represenations. By experimental analysis he proved that rats made use of cognitive maps instead of memorization to navigate a maze.
 * Wolfgang Kohler: He concluded that 'insight' was a property of problem solving that helped animals charecterize and solve problems.
 * Sir Fredrick Barlett: He was an important pioneer of the study of memory. He rejected experimental studies on the lack of ecological validity and believed in observation of behavior in natural settings to try and understand the workings of the mind.
 * Skinner, B.F. (1904- 1905): He is a very important contributor in the branch of Psychology known as 'Behaviorism'. He is known for his thory of 'Operant Conditioning'. He believed that "behavioral changes resulted from responses of the individual to environmental stimuli" [|(History of Cognitive Psychology)] He demonstrated this through his experiment where he used animals (rats) and created the 'Skinner Box'. His two most important works are 'The Behavior of Organisms' (1938) and Verbal Behavior (1957).
 * Naom Chomsky (1928): Chaomsky reviewed and pointed out flaws in Skinner's theory (his book on language- Verbal Behavior). He stipulated that emmitted behavior could not holistically account for the complexities that exist in language articulations. His model on language contained two structures: surface structures and deep structures.
 * David Rumelhart and James McClelland: They are concerned with Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP). The model proposes that information processing is a simultaneous rather than a serially structured process. It is believed that the mind works like an orchestra, with many different parts working together (as well as in isolation) to create a sonically pleasing sound.
 * George Miller: He has foussed his studies on Short Term Memory and chunking of information. He believes that people remember 7+ - 2 bits of information
 * Allen Newell: He applied Cognitive Psychology to the design of computer systems and Artifical Intelligence at the Carnegie Mellon University. (History of Cognitive Psychology)

Working Memory
A short term memory store that is capable of holding material for up to 30 seconds, this is the memory we use when we are trying to remember a phone number, or a lottery ticket number. There can be approximately 3 to 4 chunks of information - chunks being small inputs of basic, non-complex material that are grouped into more meaningful units. To get this into the working memory, the method of rehearsal is undertaken. Rehearsal is when you constantly refresh the information in your head by constantly repeating it over and over again. If this is not done, then the information decays and fades away, and is eventually lost. These chunks are constantly replaced by new chunks constantly. The best way to think of it is a conveyor belt with an inspector along the line. As the chunks move along the line, the inspector stops to inspect a few. When the chunks are ok'd, the inspector moves them along down the line to make way for new chunks to be inspected. Working memory has the ability to store a small amount of visual information (visio-spatial sketchpad) as well as a small amount of spoken, or verbal, information.

Long-Term Memory
The capacity of our long-term memory is unlimited because it is impossible to ever run out of storage space. Simple memories last for a few fleeting moments or they can burrow themselves into your brain and last a lifetime. It has been suggested that LTM is actually permanent. According to this view, forgetting occurs only because people cannot fully retrieve the required info from storage.

Recall and Recognition
These two mechanisms are incredibly important to LTM. Recall is the process by which individuals scan what is stored in their memories to pull out a certain piece of information. Recognition involves scanning your memory and then selecting which piece of information you have stored properly matches what you have in your memory. This latter process is easier and quicker than the first, and a good way to remember this is to think of machinces vs. humans - machines are better at recall than humans, and humans are better at recognition than machines.

Memory appears to be a multi-modal thing - wew remember many different things all at once, such as the colour, shape, sound, feel and smell of something, and all of this information that gets stored away is able to be retrieved at any time.