An Introduction to Cognitive Psychology

History

Cognitive psychology is a relatively new discipline of broader psychology; it studies internal mental processes. The term itself was only coined as recently as 1965 by Ulric Neisser, a German-born, American psychologist. Cognitive psychology was also the tile of Neisser’s 1965 book, “Cognitive Psychology.” For Neisser’s purposes, cognitive psychology is defined as looking at human beings as systems that process information and whose mental functions ought to be understood in computational contexts.

Cognitive psychology came into being as a separate area of study only after the 1950s movement known as the cognitive revolution was underway. Cognitive thinking itself had been around as a concept as far back as the 17th century when the French philosopher, Rene Descartes, dabbled in it. Since 1958 and the publishing of Donald Broadbent’s book, “Perception and Communication,” the most important area in this discipline has been the model of cognition that involved information processing. This model entails looking at thoughts as mere software, which is running on the brain, or the computer.

• History of Cognitive Psychology: An overview of the history of cognitive psychology that covers all its most influential contributors throughout the centuries.
• Indiana University – Cognitive Psychology: A brief primer on cognitive psychology’s history from Indiana University.
• DocStoc: History of cognitive psychology presented in short, easy-to-understand bullet points.

Areas of Focus

Perception

• Psychophysics: Here is a walk-through of the three, classic methods for researching psychophysics. This includes the Method of Adjustment, the Method of Limits, and the Method of Constant Stimuli.
• Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Sensor Machines: Pattern Recognition is defined as the assigning of an event or an object to a pre-determined category. The overall point of pattern recognition is to offer a rational answer for all potential input values and to also match those input values.
• Attention: Attention is best defined as the capability to center mental effort on a definite stimulus while ignoring all other forms of stimulus. Another way of thinking of attention is that it is a way of allocating the processing of resources.

Categorization

• Category Induction and Acquisition: Category Induction and Acquisition can also be called simply concept learning. Mostly based on the works of Jerome Bruner, a cognitive psychologist, it is defined as the mental categories which aid in classifying objects, objects which have common features between them.
• Similarity (psychology): In psychology, similarity is the close proximity of two, mental representations. Research in the field breaks down to four, fundamental approaches: transformational approaches, social psychological approaches, structural approaches, and featural approaches.
• Categorical Judgment and Classification: Categorical judgment is governed by a law. This law declares that the variation between the scale value of a stimulus and a category boundary is simply a variable that forms a normal distribution from its density function.

Memory

• Autobiographical Memory: Autobiographical memory is a system of memory that features episodes saved from the life of any given person. It is founded on a mixture of semantic as well as episodic memory.
• Constructive Memory: Constructive memory can also be called confabulation, and it is the recitation of events that in fact never occurred. It is characterized by false perceptions that usually stem from either psychological or neurological dysfunction.
• Flashbulb Memory: Flashbulb memory is distinguished by concrete, precise and vivid memories of a personal situation involving an individual’s discovery of startling events. This type of memory is also long-lasting.

Knowledge Representation

• Mental Image: A mental image is basically an experience in which a person seems to perceive some event or object, but, in fact, the event or object is not observable by the senses. These types of experience have long been the object of study by researchers.
• Dual-coding Theory: This theory suggests that verbal and visual information are dealt with differently and along separate channels within the mind. What results is distinct representations of the information in each channel.
• Media Psychology: The utmost concern of media psychology is to study how humans observe and use the media-heavy world around them. By doing this, media psychologists are better able to spot the benefits and problems of involving the media.

Language

• Grammar: Grammar is defined as the structural laws that govern words, sentences and phrases in any language. Grammar can also pertain to the study of the laws of grammar.
• Phonetics: A branch of linguistics, phonetics is the studying of the sounds produced in human speech. It cares only about the physical aspects of speech sound, their acoustic aspects, their physiological creation, their neurophysiological relationship, and their auditory observation.
• Language Acquisition: The procedure through which people obtain the capability of producing, perceiving and using words to communicate is called language acquisition. This entails vocabulary, syntax, and phonetics.

Thinking

• Concept Formation: Concept formation is a tactic by which a person compares groups and categories, said groups and categories containing either relevant or irrelevant concept features.
• Decision Making: Decision making is the mental procedure that results in the choosing of a particular course of action out of several competing choices. Each decision making procedure results in one final outcome.
• Problem Solving: Problem solving can be looked at as a mental process which includes problem shaping as well as problem finding concepts.

Famous Cognitive Psychologists

• Ulric Neisser: Ulric Neisser is famous for coining the term “Cognitive Psychology” in the first place. He did this in the 1960s when he published his seminal book, appropriately titled “Cognitive Psychology.”
• Donald Broadbent: Donald Broadbent is a now-deceased, influential figure in the annals of cognitive psychology. His work connected the gap between the pre-World War II research of Frederick Bartlett and applied psychology, and then what would emerge as cognitive psychology in the late 1960s.
• George Armitage Miller: George Armitage Miller is a cognitive psychologist who wrote one of the most frequently referenced papers in psychology. It was entitled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” and it theorized that the number seven epitomized the average person’s memory performance on random lists.
• Elizabeth Bates: A now-deceased, former psychology professor at the University of California, San Diego, Elizabeth Bates was a known critic of the theory that people are born with a language module. She died in 2003 from pancreatic cancer.
• Michael Gazzaniga: Michael Gazzaniga is a psychology professor who is currently researching at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is known for heading the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind.

Studies and Experiments

• Cognition Laboratory Experiments: A group of experiments that a professor designed for his cognitive psychology class.
• Cognitive Psychology Lab – Main Menu: The University of South Dakota gallery of experiments done in cognitive psychology.
• Psych 475 Syllabus: Description of the syllabus of a class that includes a sizable cognitive psychology experiment as a big part of the course.
• DePaul University: Link to DePaul University student’s experiment in cognitive psychology.
• Faculty Innovations in Teaching with Technology: Description of Hunter College’s methods in how they apply cognitive psychology experiments to students.
• Cognitive Daily: Website that publishes articles on a daily basis about cognitive psychology, which have been peer-reviewed.
• National Undergraduate Research Clearinghouse: Paper detailing an in-depth study of flashbulb memory.
• Theoretical Systems Neuroscience Laboratory: Description of what is involved at the Baylor College of Medicine laboratory when they perform experiments regarding psychophysics.
• Caltech Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering: A combined study that involved both psychophysics as well as fMRI imaging.
• Digital Media Library Repository: Brief description of experiment involving psychophysics in evaluating spatial image quality and color.
• Linguistics Beyond the Classroom: Information for Linguistics Researchers: Suggestions for conducting a phonetics experiment on students acting as human subjects.
• Speech/Drum Perception Experiment (http://vesicle.nsi.edu/tablaexp/): An experiment from the Neurosciences Institute that seeks to test subjects who listen to spoken syllables and then drum sounds.