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Chapter 1
Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
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Distinguishes items in a category, when he thinks
about different possible forms of transportation—
rental car, roommate’s car, bus.
Visualizes the book on his desk the night before
Understands and produces language as he talks
to Susan
Works to solve a problem, as he thinks about
how to get places while his car is in the shop
Makes a decision, when he decides to postpone
going to the movies with Susan so he can study
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Perceives his
environment—seeing
people on campus and
hearing Susan talking on
the phone.
Pays attention to one
thing after another—the
person approaching on
his left, what Susan is
saying, how much time
he has to get to his class
Remembers something
from the past—that he
had told Susan he was
going to return her book
today
The Complexity of Cognition
• Cognition involves
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Perception
Attention
Memory
Representation of knowledge
Language
Problem-solving
Reasoning and decision-making
• All include “hidden” processes of which we may
not be aware
Some Questions to Consider
• How is cognitive psychology relevant to
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everyday experience?
Are there practical applications of cognitive
psychology?
How is it possible to study the inner workings
of the mind when we can’t really see the
mind directly?
What is the connection between computers
and the study of the mind?
The First Cognitive Psychologists
• Donders (1868)
– Mental chronometry
• Measuring how long a cognitive process
takes
– Reaction-time (RT) experiment
• Measures interval between stimulus
presentation and persons response to
stimulus
Caption: A modern version of Donders’ (1868) reaction-time
experiment: (a) the simple reaction-time task; and (b) the choice
reaction-time task.
Simple RT task: participant
pushes a button quickly after
a light appears
Choice RT task: participant
pushes one button if light is
on right side, another if light
is on left side
Donders reasoned that choice reaction time would be longer than simple
reaction time because of the additional time it takes to make the decision!
The First Cognitive Psychologists
• Donders (1868)
– Choice RT – Simple RT = Time to make a
decision
• Choice RT = 1/10th sec longer than
Simple RT
• 1/10th sec to make decision
The First Cognitive Psychologists
• Donders (1868)
– Mental responses cannot be measured
directly but can be inferred from the
participant’s behavior
• The main principle of CP: Mental responses
can’t be measured directly, but must be inferred from
observing behavior.
The First Cognitive Psychologists
• Ebbinghaus (1885)
was interested in determining the nature of
memory and forgetting.
– Read list of nonsense syllables (DAX,
QEH, LUH, and ZIF) aloud many times to
determine number of repetitions necessary
to repeat list without errors.
– He used nonsense syllables so that his
memory would not be influenced by the
meaning of a particular word.
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The First Cognitive Psychologists
The number of
Ebbinghaus (1885)
repetitions necessary to
learn the list
is noted.
Initial
viewing
Learning the list
delays ranging from almost immediately
after learning the list to 31 days.
The number of repetitions
needed to relearn the list is noted
The First Cognitive Psychologists
• Ebbinghaus (1885)
– After some time, he relearned the list
• Short intervals = fewer repetitions to
relearn
– Learned many different lists at many
different retention intervals
The First Cognitive Psychologists
• Ebbinghaus (1885)
– Savings =
by subtracting the number of trials needed to
learn the list after a delay from the number of
trials it took to learn the list the first time.
The curve indicates
that memory drops
rapidly for the first 2
days after the
initial learning.
Caption: Ebbinghaus’s retention curve, determined by the method of
savings. (Based on data from Ebbinghaus, 1885.)
The First Cognitive Psychologists
• Wilhelm Wundt (1879)
– First psychology laboratory
– University of Leipzig, Germany
– RT experiments
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The First Cognitive Psychologists
Wundt (1897)
– Approach
Structuralism: experience is determined by
combining elements of experience called
sensations. His goal was to explain behavior in
terms of sensations.
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– Method
Analytic introspection: participants trained to
describe experiences and thought processes in
response to stimuli. The aim is to reveal hidden
mental processes
(e.g. Participants describe their experience of hearing a five-note chord
played on the piano)
The First Cognitive Psychologists
• John Watson noted a problem with this.
– Results difficult to verify
• Invisible inner mental processes
• John Watson proposed a new approach
called behaviorism (The Rise of Behaviorism)
– Eliminate the mind as a topic of study
– rejects introspection as a method
– Instead, study directly observable behavior
The Rise of Behaviorism
• Watson (1920) – “Little Albert” experiment
– Classical conditioning of fear
– 9-month-old became frightened by a rat
after a loud noise was paired with every
presentation of the rat
– behavior can be analyzed without any
reference to the mind.
– Examined how pairing one stimulus with
another affected behavior
Classical Conditioning
• Pair a neutral event with an event that
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naturally produces some outcome
After many pairings, the “neutral” event
now also produces the outcome
The Rise of Behaviorism
• Skinner (1950s)
– Interested in determining the relationship
between stimuli and response
– Operant conditioning
• Shape behavior by rewards or
punishments
• Behavior that is rewarded is more likely
to be repeated
• Behavior that is punished is less likely to
be repeated
Caption: Timeline showing early experiments studying the mind in the
1800s and events associated with the rise of behaviorism in the 1900s
Studying stimulus-response relationships influenced an entire
generation of psychologists and dominated psychology in
the United States from the 1940s through the 1960s.
The Decline of Behaviorism
• A controversy over language acquisition
• Skinner (1957)
– Argued children learn language through
operant conditioning
• Children imitate speech they hear
• Correct speech is rewarded
The Decline of Behaviorism
• Chomsky (1959)
– Argued children do not only learn language
through imitation and reinforcement
• Children say things they have never
heard and can not be imitating
• Children say things that are incorrect and
have not been rewarded for
– Language must be determined by inborn
biological program
– Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device
The Decline of Behaviorism
• Tolman (1938) trained rats to find food in a
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four-armed maze
Two competing interpretations:
– Behaviorism predicts that the rats learned
to “turn right to find food”
– Tolman believed that the rats had created
a cognitive map of the maze and were
navigating to a specific arm
– Attempts to condition animal behavior did
not work
The Decline of Behaviorism
• Tolman (1938)
• What happens when the rats are placed in a
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different arm of the maze?
The rats navigated to the specific arm where
they previously found food
– Supported Tolman’s interpretation
– Did not support behaviorism interpretation
Caption: Maze used by Tolman. (a) Rat initially explores the maze; (b) then learns
to turn right to obtain food at B when it starts at A; (c) when placed at C, the rat turns
left to reach the food at B. In this experiment, precautions are taken to prevent the rat
from knowing where the food is based on cues such as smell.
Studying the Mind
• To understand complex cognitive behaviors:
– Measure observable behavior
– Make inferences about underlying
cognitive activity
– Consider what this behavior says about
how the mind works
The Cognitive Revolution
• Shift from behaviorist’s stimulus-response
relationships to an approach that attempts to
explain behavior in terms of the mind.
• Information-processing approach
– A way to study the mind created from
insights associated with the digital
computer
– An approach that traces the sequence of mental
operations involved in cognition.
some psychologists proposed the then-revolutionary idea that
the operation of the mind could also be described as
occurring in a number of stages on computers.
Caption: (a) Flow diagram for an early computer. (b) Flow
diagram for Broadbent’s filter model of attention.
The Cognitive Revolution
• Early computers (1950s)
– Processed information in stages
• How much information can the mind
absorb?
• Attend to just some of the incoming
information?
The Cognitive Revolution
• Cherry (1953)
• Dichotic listening
– Present message A in left ear
– Present message B in right ear
– were told to focus their attention on one of
the messages (called the attended
message) and to ignore the other one
(called the unattended message).
– they were aware of little of the message
being presented to the unattended ear.
The Cognitive Revolution
• Broadbent (1958)
– Flow diagram representing what happens
as a person directs attention to one
stimulus
– Unattended information does not pass
through the filter.
“detector” records the information that gets through the filter.
Researching the Mind
• Behavior approach measures relationship
between stimuli and behavior
• Physiological approach measures
relationship between physiology and behavior
• Both contribute to our understanding of
cognition
Researching the Mind – Memory
Consolidation
• Memory for recent events is fragile
• If processing is disrupted, recent memories
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can fail to be consolidated
New information can interfere with memory
consolidation.
Researching the Mind – Memory
Consolidation
• Behavior approach
• Muller and Pilzecker (1900) had participants
learn two lists of words
– Independent variable:
• One group learned the second list immediately
after the first list
• The other group experienced a six-minute
delay between learning the lists
– Dependent variable:
• Memory (recall) for the first list of words
immediately
presenting the
second list to the
immediate group
interrupted the
forming of a stable
memory for the first
list
Researching the Mind – Memory
Consolidation
• Behavior Approach
• Gais et al. (2007) the effect of sleep on
memory consolidation
– Independent variable:
• One group learned a list of words shortly before
going to sleep
• The other group, many hours before going to
sleep
– Dependent variable:
• Memory (forgetting) for the list of words
measured two days later
a list of 24 pairs of EnglishGerman vocabulary words
Caption: Results of the Gais et al. (2007) experiment in which
memory for word pairs was tested for two groups. The sleep
group went to sleep shortly after learning a list of word pairs.
The awake group stayed awake for quite a while after learning
the word pairs. Both groups did get to sleep before testing, so
they were equally rested before being tested, but the
performance of the sleep group was better.
Researching the Mind – Memory
Consolidation
• Physiological approach
Gais et al. (2007) the effect of sleep
on memory consolidation
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He measured brain activity first as participants were
learning the word pairs (encoding) and again as they
were tested two days later. (retrieval)
– Measured using brain imaging (fMRI)
Results
– Found differential brain activity between
the two groups
Cognitive Science
• Interdisciplinary study of the mind
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– Psychology
– Computer science
– Cognitive anthropology
– Linguistics
– Neuroscience
– Philosophy
Goal: finding ways to study and understand
the inner workings of the mind
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COGNITIVE/EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
MASTER PROGRAMMES IN TURKEY
Yeditepe Üniversitesi – Bilişsel Bilimler
ODTÜ – Bilişsel Bilimler
Boğaziçi Üniversitesi – Bilişsel Bilimler
Koç Üniversitesi – Bilişsel Psikoloji
Hacettepe Üniversitesi – Genel Psikoloji
(öğrenciler aldıkları derslerle ve tez konusu seçimleriyle Bilişsel
Psikoloji, Gelişim Psikolojisi, Sosyal Psikoloji ile Endüstri ve Örgüt
Psikolojisi olmak üzere dört uzmanlık alanına yönelir)
İstanbul Üniversitesi – Deneysel Psikoloji, Sinirbilim
Uludağ Üniversitesi – Deneysel Psikoloji
Ege Üniversitesi – Deneysel Psikoloji
Ege Üniversitesi Sağlık Bilimleri Enst – Sinirbilim
Bilkent Üniversitesi - Bilişsel Psikoloji
Ankara Üniversitesi - Sağlık Bilimleri Enst - Sinirbilim
Bahçeşehir Üniversitesi – Bilişsel Nöropsikoloji
Araş. Gör. Merve Denizci Nazlıgül, Nisan 2015