• Memory and cognition encompass mental events and knowledge used for recognizing objects, remembering names, understanding sentences, and problem-solving.
• Cognitive psychology delves into various subjects from perception to decision-making, from simple acts like recognizing letters to complex ones like conversing.
• Key questions include understanding how we read for meaning, memorize facts, forget, and recognize gaps in knowledge.
• The central theme revolves around the fundamental question: How do people think?
• Cognitive psychology adopts a scientific approach with an emphasis on objective, empirical investigation.
• The discipline heavily relies on experimental methods to explore human memory and thought.
• While presenting research studies, efforts are made to connect them with everyday experiences for relevance.
• There’s been a surge of interest in cognition, both within and beyond psychology, leading to significant progress.
• Cognitive science, an interdisciplinary approach, integrates contributions from linguistics, computer science, and neuroscience.
• The text aims to convey discoveries about human memory and cognition, offering insights into human thought processes.
• Human memory is portrayed as sophisticated, flexible, and efficient, surpassing the abilities of electronic computers.
• Understanding how our minds work is crucial for understanding ourselves.
• Another aim is to elucidate how cognitive psychology conducts research and acquires new knowledge.
• Mastery of cognitive psychology enhances understanding of psychology as a whole, given its pervasive influence.
• Cognitive psychology’s impact extends beyond psychology, influencing fields like education, medicine, law, and business.
• The multidisciplinary nature of cognitive science allows for the fusion of ideas from various domains, enhancing research and practice.
• Fields outside of psychology benefit from cognitive psychology’s insights, as human activities invariably involve thought processes.

THINKING ABOUT THINKING

• The question about Aristotle’s hands triggers a sequence of thoughts:
  • Initial dismissal of the question as obvious.
  • Momentary doubt due to the possibility of a trick question or sarcasm.
  • Retrieval of general knowledge about Aristotle as a historical figure.
  • Assumption based on common knowledge that Aristotle likely had two hands.
  • Reflection on the reasonableness of the question.
  • Consideration of lack-of-knowledge reasoning, concluding that it was indeed an obvious question.
  • Some students make connections to related knowledge, such as Beethoven’s deafness.
• Different cognitive processes are at play simultaneously: perception, attention, memory, language comprehension, and reasoning.
• The complexity and interaction of these cognitive processes highlight the complexity of cognition.
• The question involving arithmetic, 723 divided by 6, engages automatic mental processes:
  • Recognition of digits and arithmetic symbols.
  • Retrieval of knowledge about arithmetic procedures, such as long division.
  • Automatic execution of steps in long division.
• Cognitive psychology is interested in understanding mental processing of arithmetic problems and acquired knowledge from schooling.
• The question about whether a robin has wings typically elicits a quick, almost automatic response:
  • Assertion of knowing the answer without conscious thought.
  • Implicit mental processes involved in reading, accessing memory, checking relevant facts, and making a decision.
• The speed of answering such questions provides insight into automatic processing.
• Automatic processes are of particular interest in cognitive psychology due to their pervasive nature and minimal conscious involvement.

MEMORY AND COGNITION DEFINED

• Memory:
  • Involves acquiring and retaining information for later retrieval.
  • Represents the mental storage system enabling these processes.
  • Demonstrated when retention and retrieval influence behavior or performance.
  • Includes acquisition (learning or encoding), retention, and retrieval.
  • Spans various timeframes, from brief spans to longer durations.
  • Three kinds of mental activities: acquisition, retention, and retrieval.
• Cognition:
  • Encompasses sensory input transformation, reduction, elaboration, storage, recovery, and utilization.
  • Includes sensation, perception, imagery, retention, recall, problem-solving, and thinking.
  • Collection of mental processes and activities used in perception, remembering, thinking, understanding, and using those processes.
• Cognitive psychology:
  • Primarily concerned with everyday mental processes.
  • Focuses on sense modalities like vision and hearing, and heavily on language.
  • Utilizes experimental techniques to investigate cognitive processes.
  • Criticized for potentially lacking ecological validity, but reductionism is justified in early stages of investigation.
  • Reductionism involves breaking down complex events into components for understanding.
  • Eventually, scientists integrate components to comprehend the larger event as a whole.

AN INTRODUCTORY HISTORY OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

• Interest in memory and cognition traces back to ancient times, with figures like Aristotle contemplating memory principles.
• Philosophers throughout history, including Plato and Descartes, pondered the nature of thought and consciousness.
• Descartes’ famous statement, “Cogito ergo sum,” highlights the significance of thought in defining human existence.
• Wilhelm Wundt’s establishment of the first psychological laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, in 1879 marked the formal beginning of psychology as a distinct discipline.
• Wundt’s laboratory focused on experimental psychology, separating it from philosophy and physiology.
• Earlier psychological research, such as psychophysics by Weber and Fechner, neural studies by Helmholtz, and linguistic brain regions identification by Broca and Wernicke, laid the groundwork for Wundt’s work.
• William James also established a psychological laboratory in America in 1875, albeit primarily for classroom demonstrations.

Anticipations of Psychology

• Aristotle advocated for an empirically based, natural science approach, emphasizing observation as the basis for all science.
• He articulated empiricism, the position that knowledge comes from sensory experience.
• Aristotle’s inquiry into the nature of thought led to objective explanations of learning and memory processes, including principles of association.
• He proposed the concept of the mind as a “blank slate” at birth, where experience writes onto it, known as tabula rasa.
• St. Augustine’s Confessions also presented modern accounts of memory, showing early interest in psychological concepts.
• The study of memory experienced fits and starts over time, with developments emerging during the Renaissance and later periods.
• By the mid-1800s, more observational and empirical methods were adopted, aligning with the general trend in scientific inquiry.
• The progress in scientific fields like physics, biology, and medicine by the mid-1800s paved the way for the emergence of psychology as a science of the mind.

Early Psychology

• Wilhelm Wundt:
  • Pioneered experimental psychology.
  • Directed over 200 doctoral theses on psychological topics.
  • Founded the first psychology journal, Philosophical Studies.
  • Focused on conscious processes, immediate experience, sensation, perception, and attention.
  • Utilized introspection (Selbst-Beobachtung) as a method for self-observation.
• Edward Titchener:
  • Emphasized introspection and structuralism, studying the structure of the conscious mind.
  • Insisted on rigorous training for introspectors to avoid stimulus errors.
  • Made himself the final authority on introspection reports, leading to difficulties and decline.
• Hermann von Ebbinghaus:
  • Studied memory and forgetting using objective methods.
  • Worked independently outside established academic circles.
  • Developed methods to study memory in a “pure” form, using nonsense syllables.
  • Introduced the concept of savings score to measure learning.
  • His work was acclaimed widely and had a significant impact on verbal learning and cognitive psychology.
• William James:
  • Introduced functionalism, focusing on the functions of consciousness rather than its structure.
  • Influenced by Darwin’s ideas on adaptation and function.
  • Suggested memory consists of immediately available memory and a larger repository for past experience.
  • His ideas were influential despite limited research output, particularly through his book “Principles of Psychology.”
  • Delayed influence on psychology of memory and cognition due to the rise of behaviorism, led by John B. Watson.

Behaviorism and Neobehaviorism

• Behaviorism’s Dominance:
  • John B. Watson’s 1913 manifesto redefined psychology as the scientific study of observable behavior.
  • Behaviorism rejected the study of unobservable mental processes like thought, mind, and consciousness.
  • Behaviorism gained broad appeal due to its focus on observable behaviors and its scientific approach, influenced by the success of sciences like physics.
  • Pavlov’s work on conditioning and learning provided a scientific approach that appealed to psychologists seeking progress beyond the debates of structuralism.
  • Behaviorism emphasized methodological rigor and observables, fostering traditions of scientific inquiry still practiced today.
• Limitations of Behaviorism:
  • During the behaviorist era, few psychologists pursued cognitive topics, with most focusing on observable, learned behaviors, especially in animals.
  • Tolman’s cognitive approach, while significant, still aligned closely with behaviorist principles, emphasizing learning of new behaviors and observable stimuli.
  • Gestalt psychology, though interested in human perception and thought, had limited impact on American experimental psychology.
• B.F. Skinner and Extremism:
  • B.F. Skinner emerged in the 1940s as a vocal advocate of behaviorism, echoing Watson’s views on the exclusion of mental events from scientific psychology.
  • Skinner argued that mental events like thinking are unobservable and unnecessary for explaining behavior, further solidifying behaviorism’s dominance.

Emerging Cognition: The Winds of Change

• Cognitive Revolution:
  • The mid- to late 1950s marked a period of rapid reform in experimental psychology, often referred to as the cognitive revolution.
  • Some historians consider it a definitive break from behaviorism, while others see it as rapid evolutionary change.
• Impact of World War II:
  • During World War II, psychologists faced practical problems that challenged behaviorist views.
  • Psychologists working on wartime problems like pilot performance realized that behaviorism’s focus on animal learning was inadequate for understanding complex human behaviors.
  • Concepts like attention, vigilance, and decision-making became crucial for understanding human performance.
• Verbal Learning Tradition:
  • Verbal learning, rooted in behaviorism, focused on human learning of verbal material.
  • Early research emphasized objective methods and the role of learning in forming associations.
  • Over time, researchers recognized the limitations of behaviorism and began investigating mental processes like rehearsal, organization, storage, and retrieval.
• Chomsky’s Challenge:
  • Noam Chomsky’s 1959 critique of B.F. Skinner’s behaviorist account of language marked a turning point.
  • Chomsky argued that Skinner’s behaviorist approach failed to explain complex human behaviors like language adequately.
  • Chomsky’s critique highlighted the limitations of behaviorism and underscored the need for a new approach to psychology.
• Impact and Transition:
  • Chomsky’s critique, combined with wartime experiences and developments in verbal learning, contributed to the shift away from behaviorism.
  • These developments signaled a broader dissatisfaction with behaviorism and paved the way for the emergence of cognitive psychology.

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY AND INFORMATION PROCESSING

• Chomsky’s 1959 review challenged behaviorism by emphasizing the importance of mental processes and cognition in understanding language.
• Researchers in verbal learning also emphasized the role of memory and mental processes in organizing and reorganizing information.
• Attention research in the 1950s, particularly from British researchers like Colin Cherry and Donald Broadbent, highlighted the existence and importance of mental processes.
• Sperling’s 1960 monograph on visual sensory memory further demonstrated the interest in studying mental processes.
• The development of the modern digital computer in the 1950s led psychologists to realize its relevance to understanding human cognition.
• Computers behaved like people in some ways, taking in information, processing it internally, and producing observable outputs.
• The analogy between computer operations and human mental processes, proposed by Allen Newell and Herb Simon, was influential.
• Newell and Simon’s conference in 1958, which presented the analogy between information processing in computers and humans, had a significant impact.
• This analogy laid the groundwork for understanding human cognition as a symbol-manipulating system.
• Miller, Galanter, and Pribram’s 1960 book “Plans and the Structure of Behavior” suggested that human problem-solving could be understood as a form of planning guided by mental strategies or plans.
• These mentalistic concepts were not merely hypothetical but could be specified in computer programs, further emphasizing the relevance of computer analogy to understanding human cognition.

MEASURING INFORMATION PROCESSES

• Cognitive psychology aims to understand mental processes by “reverse engineering” the brain, similar to how engineers reverse engineer devices.
• Key questions include understanding what happens in the mind during perception, memory, reasoning, and problem-solving.
• Methods in cognitive psychology aim to peer into the mind and obtain scientific evidence on mental processes.
• Concepts from communications engineering, such as channel capacity, were adopted to understand human limitations in processing information.
• Humans are viewed as limited-capacity channels, analogous to how communication channels have limited bandwidth.
• Psychologists study questions like how many sources of information humans can attend to simultaneously and what happens when the system is overloaded.
• The computer analogy from computer science suggests that human information processing is similar to the operations in a computer program.
• By understanding how computers perform tasks, insights into human information processing can be gained.

Time and Accuracy Measures

• Response time (RT) measures the time elapsed between a stimulus and the response, providing insights into the speed of mental processes.
• Individual differences can be revealed through RT measures, indicating variations in the speed of mental processing.
• RT studies help understand cognitive processes by analyzing how long it takes to complete tasks, such as solving arithmetic problems.
• Longer RTs can suggest more complex mental processes or difficulties in problem-solving.
• RT studies indicate a “problem size effect,” where larger arithmetic problems take longer to solve than smaller ones.
• Memory advantages or computational differences may contribute to variations in RTs for different types of problems.
• RT measures are used to address questions about mental processing and cognitive efficiency.
• Accuracy measures, pioneered by Ebbinghaus, assess the correctness of cognitive performance.
• Accuracy measures include recall accuracy, such as recalling items from a list, and may vary based on factors like item position and retention interval.
• Accuracy studies reveal complex patterns of memory functioning, such as the influence of item position and interference from other activities.
• Modern variations of accuracy measures include examining intrusions and errors in reasoning to understand cognitive processes better.
• In complex tasks, accuracy is evaluated based on the preservation of meaning rather than verbatim recall, reflecting memory’s strength in preserving gist over exact details.

INFORMATION PROCESSING AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE

Here we present a standard theory of human cognition along with major outlines that are widely accepted. 

The Standard Theory

• The standard theory of memory, known as the modal model, was proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin in 1968 and 1971.
• It consists of three main components: sensory memory, short-term memory (STM), and long-term memory (LTM).
• Environmental stimuli enter the system and are initially processed in sensory memory, which holds sensory information briefly.
• Selected information from sensory memory is forwarded to STM, a temporary working memory system where information is held and manipulated.
• STM can retrieve information from LTM and is responsible for response output, such as communicating with the outside world.
• The multiplication example illustrates the flow of processing through the modal model: stimuli are encoded into sensory memory, then transferred to STM for processing.
• A control process in STM initiates a search in LTM for the answer, and once retrieved, the answer is sent back to STM for final response preparation and output.
• Each step in this processing sequence consumes time, and differences in response times can provide insights into the underlying mental processes.
• For example, differences in response times between solving simpler and more complex arithmetic problems may reflect variations in the ease of accessing information from LTM.

A Process Model

• Process models in cognitive psychology outline the specific mental steps involved in a task and make testable predictions about performance.
• The lexical decision task, a common research task, involves deciding whether letter strings are English words or nonwords based on rapid and accurate responses.
• In the lexical decision process model, the sequence of events includes encoding the letter string, searching through long-term memory to assess word status, making a decision, and executing a response.
• Word frequency influences response times in lexical decision tasks, with lower-frequency words taking longer to process.
• The process model suggests that word encoding and decision stages are relatively constant across word frequencies.
• The search stage is likely influenced by word frequency, with higher-frequency words leading to shorter search times due to stronger memory representation.
• Differences in word frequency affect the search stage, with longer search times for lower-frequency words compared to higher-frequency ones.

Revealing Assumptions

• Assumption of sequential stages of processing:
  • Assumes a fixed sequence of stages or processes in mental processing.
  • Borrowed from the computer analogy but may not reflect the reality of human cognition.
  • Implies one stage at a time, ignoring potential parallel processing in humans.
• Assumption of independent and non overlapping stages:
  • Each stage assumed to complete before the next begins.
  • Duration of one stage thought to have no impact on others.
  • Total time interpreted as the sum of individual stage durations.
  • Later challenged by evidence supporting parallel processing in cognition.
• Parallel processing:
  • Evidence suggests multiple mental processes can operate simultaneously.
  • Contrasts with the earlier assumption of serial, non overlapping stages.
  • Example: typing involves encoding, parsing, translation, and execution stages working concurrently.
  • Older adults increase “look ahead” span, suggesting parallel processing adaptation.
• Influence of neuroscience:
  • Brain studies demonstrate various cognitive processes operating simultaneously.
  • Different brain regions specialize in different tasks, like encoding, responding, and memory retrieval.
  • Supports the shift from the simplistic computer analogy to a more nuanced understanding of cognition.
• Context effects:
  • Challenge to sequential stages and non overlapping processes.
  • Examples include speedup in decision-making due to recent exposure and lexical ambiguity effects.
  • Priming effects indicate the need for meaning-based components in cognitive models.
• Top-down processing:
  • Existing context or knowledge influences earlier mental processes.
  • Example: Skimming through text based on understanding rather than detailed processing.
  • Demonstrated by the “missing letter effect” and similar phenomena.
• Other issues:
  • Some mental processes are slower and more complex than simple reaction time tasks.
  • Accuracy-based investigations and verbal protocols offer additional insights into cognition.
  • Verbal protocols allow individuals to verbalize their thoughts during problem-solving.

Cognitive Science

• Cognitive science:
  • Multidisciplinary approach to the study of mind.
  • Draws from fields like computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, law, and anthropology.
  • Aims to explore cognition using scientific techniques and relevant disciplines.
• Interdisciplinary nature:
  • Integrates findings and methodologies from diverse fields.
  • Provides a comprehensive understanding of cognitive processes.
  • Illustrates the broad scope of studying the mind.
• Neurological bases of thought:
  • Significant contribution to cognitive science.
  • Focuses on understanding brain mechanisms underlying cognition.
  • Explores neural processes involved in various cognitive functions.
  • Chapter 2 dedicated to discussing neurological issues in depth.