Unveiling Cognitive Psychology: Understanding Thought Processes

1. Miss Minaker Assumptions of the Cognitive approach

2. The cognitive approach • The cognitive approach is concerned with how thinking shapes our behaviour. • Compare this to the behaviourist approach...

3. The cognitive approach • Cognitive psychologists explain all behaviour in terms of thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and study how these direct our behaviour. Cognitive psychologists are looking at the internal processes of the mind.

4. Internal mental processes • Humans are basically seen as information processers. The main concern of cognitive psychology is how information received from our senses is processed by the brain and how this processing directs how we behave. • The cognitive approach also looks at how various cognitive functions work together to help us make sense of the world.

5. Mental processes studied by cognitive psychologists • Mental processes studied by cognitive psychologists • Perception • Attention • Memory • Language • Thinking • Define these terms • How would they work together to identify a dog?

6. Schemata • Part of the mental processes identified by the cognitive approach are schemata (singular: schema). • These are mental structures that represent an aspect of the world, such as an object or event. • Schemata help us to make sense of the world, by providing short cuts to identifying things that we come across.

7. Schemata • For example, • It has a large metal door • Buttons and knobs • Gets hot inside • Has hot metal rings on top • It’s probably a cooker. You don’t need to have seen this particular cooker before to identify it. Your schema for “cooker” allows you to be able to identify all cookers so long as they don’t veer too far from your mental schema.

8. Schema for “psychology lesson” • On the post it notes, write down what you think would be part of your schema for a psychology lesson. Stick here

9. The computer analogy • Cognitive psychologists often compare the human mind to a computer. • It compares how we take information (input) store it or change it (process) and then recall it when necessary (output). PROCESS INPUT OUTPUT

10. The computer analogy • In this analogy, hardware would be ________and software would be the __________________ the brain cognitive processes

11. Example of the computer analogy • The Multistore Memory Model (Atkinson and Shriffrin 1968)

12. Psychology is a science • Cognitive psychologists have a very scientific approach towards studying behaviour. • Although they are concerned with the inner workings of the mind (which cannot be directly observed) scientific and controlled experiments allow psychologists to infer what is happening.

13. Psychology is a science • Cognitive psychologists mainly use laboratory experiments to test human behaviour. • For example, memory could be tested by getting participants to learn and recall a series of numbers under controlled conditions. • What people say and do can be taken as valid measures of their thought processes. • We can then make an assumption about memory from the responses that the participants give.

14. Laboratory experiment • We are going to have a go at scientifically testing memory. • In pairs, write down 15 words on the sheet. These can be any words you want. • You have 30 seconds to remember as many words as you can.

15. Laboratory experiment • How many words could you remember? • What can we infer about the mind from the result of our study? • How would we check to see if our results were real?