...December 3rd 2011 Evolution of Cognitive Psychology as a Discipline Cognition Cognition is typically referred to as the procedure of obtaining, retaining, using and applying information or knowledge. It can sometimes be defined as the science of knowing. Cognition “refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used” (Neisser, 1967). When defined broadly, cognition includes the processing of emotions; however, if defined narrowly, it excludes emotion processing. Cognition includes all the mental processes. For example, attaining knowledge and understanding, thinking, remembering, assuming, perceiving, judging and even analytical problem-solving are all part of cognition. Given such a comprehensive definition, it is evident that cognition is concerned in everything a human being might probably do; every psychological experience is a cognitive experience. However, although cognitive psychology is related to all human activity rather than a few segments of it, the apprehension is that it is from a specific point of view yet other viewpoints are evenly justifiable and essential. The Interdisciplinary Perspective & Emergence of Cognitive Psychology As well as being part of psychology as a whole, cognitive psychology is also part of the more general interdisciplinary subject of cognitive science. Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of psyche and intellect. It embraces a number of fields...
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...Cognitive Psychology Psych 560 May 20, 2013 Prof. Pitt Cognitive Psychology The brain is one of the major faculties that provide sense to human life. The numerous and various abilities of the human brain are truly amazing. However, although it is a common thought that man may think extraordinarily, human emotions have great influence to how human beings think, and use his brains. It is the reason why any activity facilitated or performed by the brain is called a mental processes or cognition. Cognition refers to the process that involves mental or cognitive ability such as in learning, comprehension, judging, thinking, problem-solving, remembering and recalling (Kendra, 2011). Neisser (2009) defined cognition as the “act of knowing, and cognitive psychology is the study of all human activities related to knowledge”. (Page 1) Cognitive psychology is a part of the larger field of cognitive science and is related to various disciplines in psychology such as neuroscience, linguistics, and philosophy. The main thrust of cognitive psychology is how the people acquire, store and process information. Compared with other dominant approaches in psychology for example, the behaviorism approach which is concerned with the observable behaviors, the cognitive approach focuses on internal mental states. Unlike psychoanalysis which is focused on subjective perceptions, the cognitive psychology...
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...Cognitive Psychology Definition Cognitive Psychology Definition (Scholarpedia, 2007) states “Cognitive psychology is the scientific investigation of human cognition, that is, all our mental abilities – perceiving, learning, remembering, thinking, reasoning, and understanding. It is closely related to the highly interdisciplinary cognitive science and influenced by artificial intelligence, computer science, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, biology, physics, and neuroscience” (Dosher, Lin-Lu, 2007, p. 2769). Cognitive psychology uses experiments and the scientific method to establish how humans transform sensory input into one’s own thoughts, which in turn becomes the individual’s actions through the intricate series of one’s cognition (Willingham, 2007). In the beginnings of the 20th Century cognitive psychology declined, because of the rise in behaviorism. In the mid- 1950’s the cognitive revolution developed because of the lack of behaviorism ideas and understanding “between memory and performance, and complex learning” (Dosher, Lin-Lu, 2007, p. 2769). Cognitive psychology began to come into play with the support of brand new technology, concepts that were abstract, and neuroscience (Willingham, 2007). Milestones in the Development of Cognitive Psychology As mentioned earlier behaviorism begin to accumulate problems around the mid- 1950s. One of the considerable problems was...
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...Theoretical models of decision-making, and their neuroscientific underpinnings Introduction In this essay I would like to focus the theoretical models of decision making that have come from psychology, cognitive and ecological alike, and review relevant literature from cognitive neuroscience that may or may not provide neural foundation for the claims that they have formulated. The reason for which I find it interesting to contrast these two approaches is there different outlook on the concept of “bias”. Traditional – closed systems - approaches to decision-making The investigation of decision-making is a multidisciplinary endeavor with researchers approaching the area from different fields and applying numerous different models (Hastie, 2001). The normative model of decision-making originates from mathematics and economics and the most prominent normative model is perhaps Subjectively Expected Utility (SEU; Savage, 1954). This model of rational behavior implies that people act as if they are calculating the "expected utility" of each option, choosing the one that they believe has the highest value. It has been criticized however, as some researchers doubted whether humans actually perform the mental multiplications and additions suggested by SEU. Simon (1955) was the first to challenge the assumptions of optimizing decision theories (such as SEU) making strong arguments concerning the limited capacity of the decision maker, for which he introduced the term “bounded rationality”...
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...The Brain and Cognitive Functions Centuries of philosophy and science have been dedicated to unraveling the mystery behind how cognition occurs, how it maps to areas of the brain, and to what degree cognition is dependant upon these various areas in which cognitive activities are located. Modern neuroscience has helped tremendously to provide some answers as have tests on brain trama patients such as Phineas Gage which revealed startling changes in individual behavior that can be linked to damage in specific areas of the brain. Even though studies continue to discover new information, there is strong evidence to support the premise that specific areas of the brain are dedicated to certain cognitive functions. Phineas Gage was an upstanding citizen that lived Cavendish, Vermont in the mid-1800's. Phineas worked as a railroad crew foreman and was considered by his employer to be a highly reliable, responsible man with morals, and a true model citizen. However, an accident that occurred in 1848 drove an iron pole called a tamping iron, through Phineas left cheek and out the top of his skull. According to reports, Phineas was able to get help from a physician, John Martyn Harlow, with whom Phineas carried on a discussion even during the initial treatments. John Martyn Harlow continued to treat Phineas for months after the accident and recorded the substantial changes in Phineas behavior that occurred during that time. It was a significant discovery in modern medicine and some...
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...From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 19.1 (1999): 158-76. Copyright © 1999, The Cervantes Society of America FORUM Against Dualisms: A Response to Henry Sullivan* HOWARD MANCING n a recent essay entitled “Don Quixote de la Mancha: Analyzable or Unanalyzable?” published in this journal, Henry W. Sullivan makes the case for the psychoanalysis of literary characters. While there is much to ponder in Sullivan's essay, there are two points, both involving dualisms, that I would like to discuss. In the first case, Sullivan argues insightfully and convincingly against an absolute distinction between how we know and think about fictional characters and how we know and think about real people. In the second case, however, Sullivan insists on an absolute (Cartesian) mind-body dualism as a cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory. I would like to repeat and extend Sullivan's argument in the first case, but refute it and deny its validity in the second. First dualism: Fact/Fiction Sullivan cites as representative of a certain widely-shared approach Maud Ellmann's insistence that there is an important distinction between a “human being made of flesh and character made of words” (5), a distinction that allows us to make one kind statement about the former but not the latter. Ellmann is not alone in making the real-life/fictional distinction a fundamental matter of ontology. We are all familiar with arguments like hers, having heard * For a response to this...
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...Development of the social brain during adolescence Sarah-Jayne Blakemore Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK Adolescence is usually defined as the period of psychological and social transition between childhood and adulthood. The beginning of adolescence, around the onset of puberty, is characterized by large hormonal and physical changes. The transition from childhood to adulthood is also characterized by psychological changes in terms of identity, self-consciousness, and cognitive flexibility. In the past decade, it has been demonstrated that various regions of the human brain undergo development during adolescence and beyond. Some of the brain regions that undergo particularly protracted development are involved in social cognitive function in adults. In the first section of this paper, I briefly describe evidence for a circumscribed network of brain regions involved in understanding other people. Next, I describe evidence that some of these brain regions undergo structural development during adolescence. Finally, I discuss recent studies that have investigated social cognitive development during adolescence. The first time Uta Frith made an impression on me was when I was 15. That year I was given a copy of her book Autism: Explaining the Enigma (U. Frith, 1989), which had recently been published. I knew nothing about autism and found Uta’s book captivating. It inspired me to write to its author and ask if I could...
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...[Most of the articles for the group labeled, “Foundations,”] state or beg the question, “Can machines think?” Another way of asking this question is, “Is cognition distinctly a human phenomenon?” Turing may have been one of the first to promote intelligent capabilities in machines. As technology increases, it seems that Turing may have been right. Today, it is unclear that intelligence and cognition are strictly human. Some of the most heated arguments against science, particularly psychology and biology, seem to center around a perceived threat against humanity. For example, evolution was and still is challenged, in large part, because to believe in evolution means accepting natural selection and similarity among evolved species. Evolution threatens the uniqueness and even the superiority of humankind, according to many opponents. Similarly, the possibility of language in primates is refuted by many, I believe, in large part because this cognitive ability has been believed to be reserved only for humans. John Searle seems to be making a similar argument against what he refers to as “strong” artificial intelligence. Searle argues that “instantiating a program” (422) cannot lead to understanding as a human, or even an animal understands. Searle argues that machines or programs lack “intentionality”, and are meaningless. I sympathize with Searle that it is difficult to accept a machine that shares cognitive capabilities with a human. Such a hypothesis seems to challenge the...
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...Contributions from Donald O. Hebb and Robert C. Bolles Specialized research in the brain sciences has increased dramatically in recent years. Many psychologists have contributed important foundations and findings in the brain sciences. There have been many important discoveries that offer links between brain science and learning. Donald O. Hebb and Robert C. Bolles have made significant contributions to the field of learning and cognition. Donald Olding Hebb was a prominent Canadian psychologist. Hebb's work has been highly influential in the area of neuropsychology. His contributions included connections in cell assemblies, phase sequences, effects of environments on learning, and work dealing with the effects of short term and long term memory (Olson & Hergenhahn, 2013). He sought to understand how the function of neurons contributed to psychological processes such as learning. Hebb was instrumental in defining psychology as a biological science by identifying thought as the integrated activity of the brain (Brown, 2003). His views on learning described behavior and thought in terms of brain function, explaining cognitive processes in terms of connections between neuron assemblies. These ideas played a large part in his views on education and learning. His greatest achievement was to persuade psychologist that in order to understand the behavior of living organisms you must study the neural machinery responsible for that behavior (Pinel, 2009). Hebb proposed that...
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...Cognitive Psychology emerged as a reaction to Behaviourism. Discuss Cognitive psychology is the school of psychology that studies mental processes including how people think, perceive, remember and learn. As part of the larger field of cognitive science, this branch of psychology is related to other disciplines including neuroscience, philosophy and linguistics. Whereas Behaviorism suggests that all behavior can be explained by environmental causes rather than by internal forces. Behaviorism is focused on observable behavior. Theories of learning including classical conditioning and operant conditioning were the focus of a great deal of research. Cognitive psychology began to emerge during the 1950s, partly as a response to behaviorism. According to Anderson (1996), cognitive psychology first emerged in the two decades between 1950 and 1970. The modern development of cognitive psychology was due to the WWII focus on research on human performance and attention, developments in computer science, especially those in artificial intelligence, and the renewal of interest in the field of linguistics. Critics of behaviorism noted that it failed to account for how internal processes impacted behavior. This period of time is sometimes referred to as the "cognitive revolution" as a wealth of research on topics such as information processing, language, memory and perception began to emerge. One of the most influential theories from this school of thought was the stages of cognitive development...
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...Motor Resonance Humans are adapted to living in social groups with complex patterns of social interactions. Understanding the meaning of other people’s behavior is an essential aspect of human communication, and a large amount of our daily life is spent watching and interpreting the actions of others (Barresi & Moore, 1996). The neural mechanism underlying our ability to represent others’ goals by the mere observation of their motor actions has been the target of considerable research. Behavioral experiments had suggested that the system for generating and representing actions is also used in the perception of actions (Knoblich & Prinz, 2001). This approach was strengthened by the discovery of “mirror” neurons in the macaque monkey brain, a class of neurons found in the parietal and the premotor cortex. They were seen to discharge not only when the monkey performed an action but also when the monkey was observing an experimenter or another monkey performing the same action (di Pellegrino, Fadiga, Fogassi, Gallese, & Rizzolatti, 1992). Similarly, neuroimaging studies in humans have revealed parietal (PAR) and premotor (PM) activations both during execution and action observation, suggesting that action observation automatically triggers action representations (Grèzes, Armony, Rowe, & Passingham, 2003). The superior temporal sulcus (STS), involved in the perception of...
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... Sweden, & MPI for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands CIESAS, México DF, Mexico Thora Tenbrink (tenbrink@uni-bremen.de) SFB/TR8 Spatial Cognition, Bremen University, Germany Lisa Hüther (lisa.huether@psychologie.uni-freiburg.de) Department of Psychology, Freiburg University, Germany Space is a fundamental domain for cognition, and research on spatial perception, orientation, referencing, and reasoning addresses core questions in most of the disciplines that make up the cognitive sciences. Consequently, space represents one of those domains for which various disciplinary interests overlap to a substantial extent. For instance, the question of whether and how spatial cognition and language interact has been one of the core questions since early on (e.g., Clark, 1973; Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976), and yet, consensus between psychologists and linguists is difficult to achieve (e.g., Li & Gleitman, 2002, vs. Levinson et al., 2002). Perhaps most controversial in this dispute is the extent to which spatial cognition is culturally variable (for linguistic variability, see also Evans & Levinson, 2009, and comments there-in). Expanding the space of cognitive science research to ‘nonstandard’ cultures (Henrich et al., 2010; Medin et al., 2010) is thus crucial for the advancement of cognitive science. For this very reason, cross-disciplinary...
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...protruding from left cheek and part of the brain and hanging out from his skull (Twomey, 2010). He had everyone one of his co-workers looking at him in amazement since he never loss consciousness. The Doctor that examined Gage was amazed as well and cleaned and bandages his wounds. Phineas Gage was a well mannered person, who enjoyed working before the accident, but afterwards a vicious viral infection had done the toll and recovery was long and hard. Gage was recovering well physically, but the infection had robbed him of sight in his left eye and decreased sensation on his left face. Gage did return to laying down tracks for the railroad but everyone who knew him saw he was a changed man (Wagar, 2004). Cognition Functions with Phineas Gage Antonio Damaiso showed research based on somatic-marker hypothesis in Phineas Gage that allowed people to understand that patients with frontal lobe damage was evidence that brain’s regions for making decisions are strongly connected to emotional centers (Barnes & Thagard). Somatic markers can help pinpoint where the cognition in decision rolls can be biased from looking at characteristics that lead to predictions and responses. Gage had to understand that it would get better but for now it was what it was. Helping the somatic markers to be able to pass emotional responses was due to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus, the Amygdala. All these regions of the brains are connected...
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...Cognitive Psychologists’ Approach to Research 1 Why Make Assumptions? How Did Philosophers and Early Psychologists Study the Mind? ■ ■ ■ ■ Philosophical Underpinnings The Beginnings of Modern Psychology The Response: Behaviorism Behaviorism’s Success How Do Cognitive Psychologists Study the Mind? ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ What Behaviorism Couldn’t Do Failures of Behaviorism to Account for Human Behavior The Computer Metaphor and Information Processing The Behaviorist Response Abstract Constructs in Other Fields So What, Finally, Is the Cognitive Perspective? ISBN: 0-536-25527-X Cognition: The Thinking Animal, Third Edition, by Daniel T. Willingham. Published by Pearson Prentice Hall. Copyright © 2007 by Pearson Education, Inc. 2 Chapter 1 Have you ever wondered how we see or how we remember things? Have you ever contemplated the strange nature of attention? I didn’t think so. Most of the people I know do contemplate how the mind works, but only when their mind lets them down. They contemplate memory (“Why can’t I find my keys?”), attention (“I want to find my keys, so why can’t I concentrate?”), and vision (“How could I not see my keys when they were right in front of me the whole time?”). Questions such as “How does vision work?” seem somewhat interesting, but no more interesting than thousands of other questions. It’s like someone asking you whether you want to know about the history of guitar making. “I don’t know; maybe. Is it interesting?” Truthfully, “How...
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...Learning and Cognition Mellissa Trevino PSY/390 February 12, 2013 Laura Mueller, Psy.D. Learning and Cognition People acquire knowledge, skills and behaviors through learning and process information acquired via the methodology of cognition; mental functions and processes. Cognition helps process information acquired using different parts of the brain (Snowling & Humle, 2009). This makes it easy for the learner to understand what he has learned and demonstrate it by displaying various behaviors. For example, students learn how to perform scientific experiments through observation (Snowling & Humle, 2009). Cognitive views of learning tend to see the learner as socially interactive, and influenced by mediating influences such as perceptions, expectations, motives, and feelings. The learner is intrinsically motivated to make sense of their environment and views the world qualitatively and quantitatively differently at each stage of cognitive development. For example, a teenager may learn how to balance a checkbook by watching her parents but will not practice that behavior until she gets her own checking account. Learning is a term associated with behaviorism whereas cognition emphasis on the nature of the mental representation and the mental encoding and retrieval processes involved. Humans have the capacity to learn whereas learning is the process for cognition. Most human behavior is learned; therefore, understanding the main reasons as to how we learn may give...
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