• Raphael perceives his environment, including seeing people on campus and hearing Susan on the phone.
• He pays attention to various stimuli, such as the person approaching him and Susan’s conversation.
• Raphael recalls past events, remembering that he left Susan’s book at home.
• He categorizes different transportation options, considering renting a car, relying on his roommate’s car, or taking the bus.
• Raphael visualizes the book on his desk, demonstrating visual imagery.
• He understands and produces language during his conversation with Susan.
• Raphael engages in problem-solving, contemplating solutions to his transportation problem.
• He makes a decision to prioritize studying over going to the movies with Susan.

Cognitive Psychology: Studying the Mind

WHAT IS THE MIND?

• Everyday examples of “mind” usage:
  • Involvement in memory recall.
  • Problem-solving capability.
  • Decision-making process.
  • Association with normal or abnormal functioning.
  • Value and importance placed on the mind.
  • Recognition of exceptional mental abilities.
• Two main definitions of the mind:
  • Mind creates and controls mental functions like perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning.
  • Mind is a system that creates representations of the world to enable goal-directed actions.
• Complementary nature of the definitions: cognition types (mental processes) and operation/function (creating representations).
• Emphasis on the importance and beauty of the mind, regardless of perceived extraordinariness.
• All activities, even routine ones, become remarkable when considering the mind’s properties enabling them.
• Questions regarding the mind: its properties, characteristics, and operational mechanisms.
• Cognitive psychology aims to determine these properties and mechanisms through scientific study.

STUDYING THE MIND: EARLY WORK IN COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

• Historical context: In the 1800s, prevailing belief doubted the study of the mind’s feasibility due to self-reference challenges and perceived immeasurability of mental properties.
• Franciscus Donders’ pioneering experiment (1868):
  • Aimed to measure decision-making time via reaction time experiments.
  • Simple reaction time task: Participants pressed a button upon light presentation.
  • Choice reaction time task: Participants distinguished between left and right lights, pressing corresponding buttons.
  • Inferred decision-making time from the difference in reaction times between tasks.
• Significance of Donders’ experiment:
  • One of the earliest cognitive psychology experiments.
  • Highlighted the necessity of inferring mental processes from behavior due to the inability to directly measure mental responses.
• Hermann Ebbinghaus’ memory experiment (1885/1913):
  • Investigated memory and forgetting using nonsense syllables presented sequentially.
  • Developed the savings method to measure memory retention over time.
  • Demonstrated memory’s quantifiability and the existence of the forgetting curve.
• Wundt’s psychology laboratory (1879):
  • Established the first laboratory of scientific psychology at the University of Leipzig.
  • Focused on structuralism, aiming to analyze experience by breaking it down into basic sensations.
  • Utilized analytic introspection, where participants described their experiences and thought processes.
  • Impact: Although Wundt’s goals were not fully achieved, his work significantly influenced psychology, particularly in training future psychologists and establishing psychology departments.
• William James’ contributions:
  • Not a student of Wundt but made significant contributions to psychology.
  • Taught Harvard’s first psychology course and authored “Principles of Psychology” (1890).
  • Based observations on introspection of his own mind, covering various cognitive topics.
• Despite promising beginnings in the study of the mind by figures like Donders, Ebbinghaus, Wundt, and James, psychology’s focus shifted away from mental processes in the early 20th century.
• Shift away from mental processes partly due to negative reactions to analytic introspection as a technique.

Abandoning the Study of the Mind

WATSON FOUNDS BEHAVIORISM

• John Watson, dissatisfied with analytic introspection, founded behaviorism as an alternative approach to psychology during his time as a graduate student at the University of Chicago.
• Watson’s criticisms of analytic introspection:
  • Produces highly variable results among individuals.
  • Results are difficult to verify due to interpretation in terms of invisible inner mental processes.
• Watson’s goals for behaviorism:
  • Behaviorism is described as a purely objective, experimental branch of natural science.
  • Theoretical goal: Prediction and control of behavior.
  • Rejects introspection as a method and emphasizes observable behavior over consciousness.
• Shift in psychology’s focus:
  • Behaviorism becomes dominant, shifting attention from studying the mind to studying observable behavior.
• Little Albert experiment:
  • Conducted by Watson and Rosalie Rayner in 1920.
  • Involved conditioning a 9-month-old boy, Albert, to fear a rat by pairing it with a loud noise.
  • Demonstrated classical conditioning, where pairing one stimulus (the noise) with another (the rat) altered the response to the neutral stimulus.
• Watson’s inspiration:
  • Drawn from Ivan Pavlov’s experiments on classical conditioning in dogs, conducted in the 1890s.
  • Pavlov’s research demonstrated how pairing food with a bell caused dogs to salivate to the sound of the bell.
• Watson’s perspective:
  • Focuses on observable behavior, disregarding internal physiological or mental processes.
  • Emphasizes the impact of environmental stimuli on behavior rather than mental states.

SKINNER’S OPERANT CONDITIONING

• B. F. Skinner, a young graduate student at Harvard, introduced operant conditioning during the dominance of behaviorism in American psychology.
• Operant conditioning focuses on how behavior is strengthened by the presentation of positive reinforcers (such as food or social approval) or the withdrawal of negative reinforcers (such as shock or social rejection).
• Skinner’s research demonstrated that reinforcing behavior, such as pressing a bar in a rat, with positive reinforcers maintained or increased the rate of that behavior.
• Similar to Watson, Skinner disregarded internal mental processes and focused solely on the relationship between stimuli and responses.
• The concept of studying stimulus-response relationships influenced an entire generation of psychologists and dominated American psychology from the 1940s through the 1960s.
• Psychologists applied classical and operant conditioning techniques to various areas such as classroom teaching, psychological disorder treatment, and drug testing on animals.
• Timeline: Initial studies of the mind –> Rise of behaviorism.
• The dominance of behaviorism led to changes in psychology, setting the stage for a decline in its influence in the 1950s.

SETTING THE STAGE FOR THE REEMERGENCE OF THE MIND IN PSYCHOLOGY

• Edward Chance Tolman, though identifying as a behaviorist, was actually one of the early cognitive psychologists because he used behavior to infer mental processes.
• In one experiment, Tolman placed a rat in a maze and observed its behavior. Initially, the rat explored the maze freely. When food was consistently placed at one end of the maze, the rat learned to turn right to obtain the food.
• Interestingly, when placed at a different starting point in the maze, the rat turned left at an intersection to reach the food, suggesting the use of a cognitive map.
• Tolman’s concept of a cognitive map, which implied mental processes beyond simple stimulus-response connections, challenged mainstream behaviorism.
• Despite awareness of Tolman’s work, most American psychologists in the 1940s found it difficult to accept the term “cognitive” due to behaviorists’ rejection of internal processes as acceptable study topics.
• A decade after Tolman’s introduction of cognitive maps, developments occurred that led to a resurgence of interest in the mind in psychology.
• B. F. Skinner’s 1957 book “Verbal Behavior,” proposing that children learn language through operant conditioning, was challenged by linguist Noam Chomsky in 1959.
• Chomsky argued that language development is determined by an inborn biological program rather than imitation or reinforcement, leading psychologists to reconsider the role of internal mental processes in complex behaviors like language acquisition, problem-solving, and reasoning.

The Rebirth of the Study of the Mind

INTRODUCTION OF THE DIGITAL COMPUTER

• The 1950s marked the beginning of the cognitive revolution in psychology, shifting focus from behaviorist stimulus-response relationships to understanding the operation of the mind.
• Chomsky’s critique of Skinner’s book “Verbal Behavior” was one event among many that reintroduced the study of the mind.
• The introduction of digital computers in the late 1940s and early 1950s played a crucial role in inspiring the information-processing approach to studying the mind.
• Computers processed information in stages, leading psychologists to propose that mental operations also occur in sequential stages.
• The stage approach to studying the mind led to new research questions and methodologies.
• Researchers became interested in studying how well the mind can handle incoming information, particularly in situations with multiple stimuli.
• Colin Cherry’s experiment in 1953, involving presenting two messages simultaneously to different ears, demonstrated selective attention.
• Donald Broadbent, in 1958, proposed the first flow diagram of the mind, depicting information processing in stages.
• Broadbent’s flow diagram suggested that the mind operates similarly to a computer, with stages of input, filtering, and detection, providing a model for further experimentation and analysis.

CONFERENCES ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND INFORMATION THEORY

• In the early 1950s, John McCarthy, a mathematics professor at Dartmouth College, organized a conference in 1956 known as the Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.
• The conference aimed to explore the possibility of programming computers to exhibit intelligent behavior, defining artificial intelligence as making a machine behave in ways considered intelligent if a human were to do so.
• Participants from various disciplines attended the conference, including psychologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, linguists, and experts in information theory.
• Herb Simon and Alan Newell from Carnegie Institute of Technology were key participants focused on creating an artificial intelligence machine capable of solving logical problems.
• Simon and Newell developed the Logic Theorist program, which could generate proofs for complex mathematical theorems using human-like reasoning processes.
• Another significant conference in September of the same year was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Symposium on Information Theory, where Newell and Simon demonstrated the Logic Theorist program.
• George Miller, a Harvard psychologist, presented his paper “The Magical Number 7 Plus or Minus 2” at the MIT Symposium, proposing limits to human information processing.
• These events, along with Broadbent’s filter model and the conferences in 1956, marked the beginning of a shift in psychology from behaviorism to the study of the mind, known as the cognitive revolution.
• The cognitive revolution was not an immediate shift but gradually gained recognition, with Ulrich Neisser’s textbook “Cognitive Psychology,” published in 1967, playing a significant role in establishing cognitive psychology as a dominant approach in psychology.
• Since then, cognitive psychology and the information-processing approach to studying the mind have become prominent in psychological research and practice.

Researching the Mind

MEMORY CONSOLIDATION FROM A BEHAVIORAL PERSPECTIVE

• Memory consolidation refers to the process through which information transitions from a fragile state to a more stable and resistant state, making it less susceptible to interference.
• Early research on memory consolidation dates back to the work of German psychologists Georg Muller and Alfons Pilzecker in 1900, who investigated the phenomenon using lists of nonsense syllables.
• Muller and Pilzecker’s experiment involved two groups of participants: the “immediate” group, who immediately learned a second list after the first, and the “delay” group, who learned the second list after a 6-minute delay. The delay group recalled a higher percentage of syllables from the first list compared to the immediate group, indicating that immediate presentation of a second list disrupted memory consolidation.
• Contemporary research on memory consolidation continues to explore questions such as the effect of sleep on consolidation.
• Steffan Gais and colleagues (2006) conducted an experiment with high school students to investigate the impact of sleep on memory consolidation. Participants learned a list of vocabulary words and were divided into “sleep” and “awake” groups based on their post-learning activities. The sleep group went to sleep within 3 hours after learning, while the awake group remained awake for 10 hours before sleeping. Both groups were tested within 24 to 36 hours after studying the vocabulary lists. The results showed that the sleep group retained more material compared to the awake group, suggesting that sleep facilitates memory consolidation.
• Further research is underway to understand the specific mechanisms underlying the relationship between sleep and memory consolidation, including whether sleep serves to avoid interference or if it involves unique processes that strengthen memory.

MEMORY CONSOLIDATION FROM A PHYSIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

• Memory consolidation involves brain processes that were initially difficult to determine without modern physiological measurement techniques.
• Louis Flexner and colleagues (1963) conducted an experiment showing that inhibiting protein synthesis in rats prevents memory formation, suggesting that interference may disrupt chemical reactions necessary for consolidation.
• Cognitive psychologists use brain scanning techniques, such as fMRI, to identify brain structures involved in consolidation.
• Steffan Gais and colleagues (2007) conducted an experiment where participants learned word pairs and were tested two days later. Brain imaging revealed increased activity in the hypothalamus, a structure implicated in memory storage, for the sleep group compared to the awake group during memory recall.
• The examples of behavioral and physiological experiments illustrate the interdisciplinary approach of cognitive psychology, which integrates behavioral and physiological measurements to understand cognition fully.
• Practical applications of research findings, such as the benefits of sleep for memory consolidation, demonstrate how cognitive psychology can inform real-life situations, such as studying for exams.

MODELS OF THE MIND

• Models in cognitive psychology represent how information is processed by the mind, often in the form of flow diagrams.
• Broadbent’s flow diagram, for example, illustrates how a person selectively attends to one message among many.
• Models simplify complex systems, making them easier to understand, and serve as starting points for further investigation.
• Models prompt researchers to ask questions and design experiments to explore the mechanisms underlying cognitive processes.
• For instance, Broadbent’s model of selective attention raises questions about the operation of the filter when unexpected stimuli, like hearing one’s name, bypass the filter.
• The results of experiments inspired by models often lead to the refinement or development of updated models.
• While some models may correspond to specific brain areas, most represent distributed brain activity across multiple regions.
• The operation of the mind involves distributed activity across various brain structures, even though models may depict processes with single boxes.

Something to Consider

• Cognitive psychology is the study of the mind and encompasses various techniques and methods to understand cognitive processes.
• The book aims to help readers get the most out of their study by applying cognitive psychology principles.
• Understanding terms like encoding (learning) and retrieval (remembering) can enhance studying efficiency.
• The book is constructed in a way that presents basic ideas or theories followed by supporting examples or experiments.
• Information is presented in a series of “mini-stories” to make it more memorable and meaningful.
• Recognizing the interconnectedness of topics in cognitive psychology helps in understanding the larger story of cognition.
• Themes such as perception, attention, and memory share common properties and contribute to the larger narrative of cognitive psychology.