Introduction to

Cognitive
Psychology
Contents
1 Cognitive Psychology: Studying the Mind

2 Abandoning the Study of the Mind

3 The Rebirth of the Study of the Mind

4 The Evolution of Cognitive

Psychology
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY:
STUDYING THE MIND
What Is the Mind?
consider how “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 a memory

2. “If you put your mind to it, I’m sure you can solve that math problem.”

The mindas problem-solver

3. “I haven’t made up my mind yet” or “I’m of two minds about this.”

The mind as used to make decisions or consider possibilities

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY:
STUDYING THE MIND
What Is the Mind?
consider how “mind” is used in everyday conversation.

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 nonfunctioning 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)
having that in mind, the mind is a..

cognition system
=that creates representations of the world
the mental processes, such as
-so that we can act within it to achieve our
perception, attention, and
goals
memory,
which is what the mind creates the mind operates and its function

mind’s importance for normal functioning, and

reflects the mind’s central role in the amazing abilities of the mind.
01 02
determining our various mental
abilities, The mind is something to be used, and the
products of some people’s minds are considered
extraordinary
Early work in Cognitive Psychology
• In the 1800s, ideas about the mind were dominated by the belief that it is not
possible to study the mind.

• One reason given for this belief 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
01 02

• Dutch physiologist Franciscus Donders (1868) did one of the first experiments
that today would be called a cognitive psychology experiment.

• term cognitive psychology was not coined until 1967

 Donder’s Pionneering Experiment:
How Long Does It Takes to Make a Decision?
• goal was to determine how long it takes to make a
decision.
• developed a method called mental chronometry, where he
measured reaction times to infer the time required for
cognitive processes.

The Experiment:

Simple Reaction Time Task: Participants were asked to

press a button
01 as quickly as possible when they
02 saw a light
appear.

Choice Reaction Time Task: Participants were presented

with two lights, one on the left and one on the right, and had to
press a corresponding button based on the light’s location.
 Donder’s Pionneering Experiment:
How Long Does It Takes to Make a Decision?
Key Findings
• The simple reaction time task measures the time it takes to respond to a stimulus.
• The choice reaction time task includes not just reacting but also making a decision about which button
to press.
• By subtracting the simple reaction time from the choice reaction time, Donders estimated the time it
takes to make a decision (around 1/10th of a second).

Significance:
• Donders’s
01
experiment was groundbreaking
02
because it introduced a method to quantify unseen mental
processes, laying the foundation for cognitive psychology and reaction time studies.
• This experiment demonstrated that mental rsponses like perceiving & decision-making, may not be
measured directly, can be measured through observing behavior.
 Wundt’s Psychology Laboratory: Structuralism
and Analytic Introspection

• 1879 founded first laboratory of scientific psychology at the

University of Leipzig
• structuralism- our overall experience is determined by combining
basic elements of experience the structuralists called sensations
• analytic introspection, a technique in which trained participants
described their experiences and thought processes in response to
stimuli ( required extensive training)
• structuralism was not a fruitful approach and so was abandoned in
01 02
the early 1900s.
 Ebbinghaus’s Memory Experiment:
What Is the Time Course of Forgetting?
• University of Berlin, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885/1913) interested in
determining the nature of memory and forgetting—specifically, how rapidly information that is
learned is lost over time.
• sought to quantify memory retention and forgetting, marking the beginning of experimental
research on memory.

The Experiment:

• used 13 nonsense syllables (such as DAX, QEH, LUH, and ZIF —meaningless three-letter
01 02
combinations—so that his memory would not be influenced by the meaning of a particular word.
• He memorized lists of these syllables and tested his ability to recall them after varying time intervals
(ranging from minutes to days).
 Ebbinghaus’s Memory Experiment:
What Is the Time Course of Forgetting?

Key Findings:

• Forgetting Curve: Ebbinghaus found that forgetting occurs rapidly at first and then slows
down over time. This curve shows that most forgetting happens soon after learning, with a
significant drop in recall within the first hour, but the rate of forgetting decreases thereafter.

• Savings Method: He introduced the "savings" concept, which refers to how much less time it
took to relearn the syllables compared to the initial learning. This revealed that even when
something 01 seems forgotten, traces of
02it remain in memory, making relearning faster.

***Savings = (Original time to learn the list) -(Time to relearn the list after the delay).
William James’s Principles of Psychology
• one of the early American psychologists
• taught Harvard’s first psychology course
• Principles of Psychology (1890), his textbook which had his
significant observations about the mind
• no experiment rather observations abou tthe operation of his
own mind

“Millions of items . . . are present to my senses which never properly

enter my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me.
My experience is what I agree to attend to. . . . Everyone knows what
attention is.
01 It is the taking possession by the02 mind, in clear and vivid

form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects

or trains of thought. . . . It implies withdrawal from some things in
order to deal effectively with others.”
William James’s Principles of Psychology
• one of the early American psychologists
• taught Harvard’s first psychology course
• Principles of Psychology (1890), his textbook which had his
significant observations about the mind
• no experiment rather observations abou tthe operation of his
own mind

“Millions of items . . . are present to my senses which never properly

enter my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me.
My experience is what I agree to attend to. . . . Everyone knows what
attention is.
01 It is the taking possession by the02 mind, in clear and vivid

form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects

or trains of thought. . . . It implies withdrawal from some things in
order to deal effectively with others.”
01 02
Abandoning the Study of the Mind
Watson Founds Behaviorism

• in 1904 Watson recieved his PhD from the University of Chicago

• dissatisfied with the method of analytic introspection
• His problems with this method were
(1) it produced extremely variable results from person to person,
(2) these results were difficult to verify because they were interpreted in terms of
invisible inner mental processes.(observable behavior, not consciousness)
• wanted to restrict psychology to behavioral data, such as Donders’s
01 ( 02
reaction times, and rejected the idea of going beyond those data to draw
conclusions about unobservable mental events.
 Abandoning the Study of the Mind
Watson Founds Behaviorism

• As behaviorism became the dominant force in American psychology,

psychologists’ attention shifted from asking
What does behavior tell us about the mind?” to
What is the relation between stimuli inthe environment and behavior?”

01 02
Abandoning the Study of the Mind
Watson Founds Behaviorism

• “Little Albert” experiment - Watson and Rosalie Rayner (1920) subjected Albert,
a 9-month-old-boy, to a loud noise every time a rat (which Albert had originally
liked) came close to the child. After a few pairings of the noise with the rat,
Albert reacted to the rat by crawling away as rapidly as possible

• classical conditioning —how pairing one stimulus with another, previously neutral
stimulus causes changes in the response to the neutral stimulus.

• Watson’s inspiration for his experiment was Ivan Pavlov’s research, begun in
the 1890s
01 02
• Pavlov’s pairing of food (which made the dog salivate) with a bell (the initially
neutral stimulus) caused the dog to salivate to the sound of the bell
Abandoning the Study of the Mind
Skinner ’s Operant Conditioning

• American psychologist B. F. Skinner received his PhD from Harvard in 1931

• operant conditioning - focused on how behavior is strengthened by the

presentation of positive reinforcers, such as food or social approval (or
withdrawal of negative reinforcers, such as a shock or social rejection).

• For example, Skinner showed that reinforcing a rat with food for pressing a bar
maintained or increased the rat’s rate of bar pressing

• Like Watson, Skinner was not interested in what was happening in the mind, but
01 solely on determining how
focused 02 behavior was controlled by stimuli

• from the 1940s through the 1960s - Psychologists applied the techniques of
classical and operant conditioning to classroom teaching, treating psychological
disorders, and testing the effects of drugs on animals
Setting the Stage for the Reemergence of the
Mind in Psychology
Edward Chace Tolman - 1918 to 1954 was at the University of California at
Berkeley, called himself a behaviorist because his focus was on measuring
behavior. But in reality, he was one of the early cognitive psychologists, because
he used behavior to infer mental processes .

01 02
Setting the Stage for the Reemergence of the
Mind in Psychology

• result was that when the rat initially experienced the maze it was developing a cognitive map a
conception within the rat’s mind of the maze’s layout (Tolman, 1948).
• Thus, even though the rat had previously been rewarded for turning right, its mental map indicated
that when starting from the new location it needed to turn left to reach the food.
• Tolman’s use of the word cognitive, and the idea that something other than stimulus–response
connections might be occurring in the rat’s mind, placed Tolman outside of mainstream behaviorism.

• but for most American psychologists in the 1940s, the use of the term cognitive was difficult to
accept because
01 it violated the behaviorists’
02 idea that internal processes, such as thinking or maps in
the head, were not acceptable topics to study.
Setting the Stage for the Reemergence of the Mind in
Psychology
• Ironically, one developments was the publication, in 1957, of a book by B. F. Skinner titled Verbal
Behavior - Skinner argued that children learn language through operant conditioning.
• Children imitate speech that they hear, and repeat correct speech because it is rewarded.

• But in 1959, Noam Chomsky, a linguist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a
scathing review of Skinner’s book, in which he pointed out that children say many sentences that
have never been rewarded by parents or never have been reinforce
• (eg.“I hate you, Mommy,” use incorrect grammar, such as “the boy hitted the ball,”
• Chomsky - inborn biological program that holds across cultures ( not by imitation or reinforcement)
01 02
psychologists began to realize that to understand complex cognitive behaviors, it is necessary
not only to measure observable behavior but also to consider what this behavior tells us
about how the mind works

.
The Rebirth of the Study of the Mind

The decade of the 1950s is generally recognized as the beginning of the cognitive
revolution—a shift in psychology from the behaviorist’s focus on stimulus–response
relationships to an approach whose main thrust was to understand the operation of the
mind.

Paradigms and Paradigm Shifts

• scientific revolution - a shift from one paradigm to another, where a paradigm is a system of ideas
that dominate science at a particular time (Dyson, 2012).
01
• A scientific (
revolution, therefore, 02
involves a paradigm shift.
The Rebirth of the Study of the Mind
Paradigms and Paradigm Shifts

• During the reign of behaviorism, behavior was considered an end in itself. Psychology was
dominated by experiments studying how behavior is affected by rewards and punishments.

• Some valuable discoveries resulted from his research, including psychological therapies called
“behavioral therapies,”

• But the behaviorist paradigm did not allow any consideration of the mind’s role in creating
behavior,
01
so in the 1950s the new cognitive
02
paradigm began to emerge.

• The introduction of a new technology that suggested a new way of describing the operation of the
mind. That new technology was the digital computer
The Rebirth of the Study of the Mind
Introduction of the Digital Computer

• The first digital computers, developed in the late 1940s, were huge machines
that took up entire buildings

• In 1954 IBM introduced a computer that was available to the general public.

• These computers were still extremely large compared to the laptops of today,
but they found their way into university research laboratories, where they were
used both to analyze data and, most important for our purposes, to suggest a
01 02
new way of thinking about the mind.
The Rebirth of the Study of the Mind
Introduction of the Digital Computer

• 1950s - computers processed information in stages

• information-processing approach -approach that

traces sequences of mental operations involved in
cognition

• Applying this stage approach to the mind led

psychologists to ask new questions and to frame their
answers to these questions in new ways.
01 02

• One of the first experiments influenced by this new way of

thinking about the mind involved studying how well
people are able to focus their attention on some
information when other information is being presented at
the same time.
The Rebirth of the Study of the Mind
Introduction of the Digital Computer

• British psychologist Colin Cherry (1953) presented participants with two auditory
messages, one to the left ear and one to the right ear, and told them to focus their attention
on one of the messages (the attended message) and to ignore the other one (the unattended
message).
• Result - when people focused on the attended message, they could hear the sounds of the
unattended message but were unaware of the contents of that message

• British psychologist, Donald Broadbent (1958), to propose the first flow diagram of the mind
01
• believed 02
happens in a person’s mind when directing attention to one stimulus in the
environment
• Broadbent’s flow diagram provided a way to analyze the operation of the mind in terms of
a sequence of processing stages and proposed a model that could be tested by further
experiments
The Rebirth of the Study of the Mind
Conferences on Artificial Intelligence and Information Theory

• John McCarthy, a young professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College (1950s)- organize

a conference “Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence”
• artificial intelligence - approach as “making a machine behave in ways that would be called
intelligent if a human were so behaving (first use of the term AI)
• spanned for 10 weeks attended by various professionals
• Herb Simon and Alan Newell from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (barely there)
• logic theorist- create proofs of mathematical theorems that involve principles of logic.
- thinking machine” because it did more than simply process numbers—it used humanlike
01 ( 02
reasoning processes to solve problems.
The Rebirth of the Study of the Mind
Conferences on Artificial Intelligence and Information Theory
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology Symposium on Information Theory
• conference held September of the same year
• George Miller, a Harvard psychologist, present a version of a paper “The Magical Number
Seven Plus or Minus Two,”
• there are limits to a human’s ability to process information—that the capacity of the human
mind is limited to about seven items (for example, the length of a telephone number).

01 02
The Rebirth of the Study of the Mind

01 ( 02
The Rebirth of the Study of the Mind

• Although we have called this shift the cognitive revolution, it is worth noting that the shift from
Skinner’s behaviorism to the cognitive approach, which was indeed revolutionary, occurred over a
period of time.
• The scientists attending the conferences in 1956 had no idea that these conferences would, years
later, be seen as historic events in the birth of a new way of thinking about the mind or that scientific
historians
• would someday call 1956 “the birthday of cognitive science
• it wasn’t until 1967 that Ulrich Neisser published a textbook with the title Cognitive Psychology
• coined the 01 term cognitive psychology 02 and emphasized the information-processing approach to
studying the mind
The Evolution of Cognitive Psychology
Ulrich Neisser’s (1967) Cognitive Psychology
• to provide a “useful and current assessment of he existing state of the art”
• Most of the book is devoted to vision and hearing. There are descriptions of how information
is taken in by vision and held in memory for short periods of time, and how people search for
visual information and use visual information to see simple patterns.
- intake of information and holding information in he mind for brief periods of time, such as
how long people can remember sounds like strings of numbers.

But it isn’t until page 279 of the 305-page book that Neisser considers
• “higher mental processes” such as thinking, problem solving, and long-term remembering.
01 02
• The reason Neisser gives for this scant treatment is that in 1967, we just didn’t know much
about higher mental processes.
• Another gap in coverage is the almost complete absence of physiology
The Evolution of Cognitive Psychology
Studying Higher Mental Processes

Sensory memory holds incoming information for a fraction of a second

and then passes most of this information to

short-term memory, which has limited capacity and holds information

for seconds (eg. address you are trying to remember until you can write
it down)

The curved arrow represents the process of rehearsal, which occurs

when we repeat something, like a phone number, to keep from
Richard Atkinson and Richard
forgetting it. The blue arrow indicates hat some information in short-term Shiffrin’s (1968) model of memory
01 02
memory can be transferred to
The Evolution of Cognitive Psychology
Studying Higher Mental Processes

Richard Atkinson and Richard

Shiffrin’s (1968) model of memory

long-term memory, a high-capacity system that can hold information for long periods of time (e.g what you did last
weekend, or the capitals of states).

The green arrow indicates that some of the information in long-term memory can be returned to short-term memory. The
green arrow, which represents what happens when we remember something that was stored in long-term memory, is based
on the idea that remembering something involves bringing it back into short-term memory.
The Evolution of Cognitive Psychology
Studying Higher Mental
Processes
Endel Tulving (1972, 1985), proposed that long-term
memory is subdivided into three components

• . Episodic memory is memory for events in your life

(pregnancy, birthdays, firsts).

• Semantic memory is memory for facts (such as the

capitals of the country).
01 ( 02
• Procedural memory is memory for physical actions
(such as how to drive / recipes / cooking)
The Evolution of Cognitive Psychology
Studying the Physiology of Cognition

• Neuropsychology- the study of the behavior of people with brain damage, had been
providing insights into the functioning of different parts of the brain since the 1800s

• Electrophysiology, measuring electrical responses of the nervous system, made it possible

to listen to the activity of single neurons. Most electrophysiology research was done on animals

• positron emission tomography (PET) - brain imaging procedure introduced in 1976, made it
possible to see which areas of the human brain are activated during cognitive activity
01 ( 02
*** expensive and involved injecting radioactive tracers into a person’s bloodstream

• functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), replaced ( PET)which didn’t

involveradioactive tracers and capable of higher resolution
The Evolution of Cognitive Psychology
Studying the Physiology of Cognition

• the shift in thinking: a shift in how people do science (Dyson, 2012; Galison, 1997).
• This shift, which depends on new developments in technology, is what happened with the
introduction of the fMRI.
• Neuroimage, a journal devoted solely to reporting neuroimaging research, was founded in 1992
(Toga, 1992),
• Human Brain Mapping in 1993 (Fox, 1993).

• From01its starting point in the early 1990s,

02 the number of fMRI papers published in all journals
has steadily increased.
The Evolution of Cognitive Psychology
New Perspectives on Behavior

• 1967, researchers began taking research out of the laboratory

• it became clear that to fully understand the mind, we have to also study what happens when a
person is moving through the environment and acting on it.
• Researchers also realized that humans are not “blank slates” that just accept and store
information, so they began doing experiments that demonstrated the importance of knowledge
for cognition.
• Stephen Palmer (1975) to illustrate how our knowledge about the environment can influence our
01 02
perception
• In this case, the participants' knowledge of typical kitchen items influenced how easily they
recognized the target objects.
References
Goldstein, E.B. (2020). Cognitive Psychology:
Connecting the Mind, Research, and Everyday
Experiences. New York: Cengage Publishing.