...INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY (McLeod, 2015) Psychodynamic approach includes human functioning that drives within the unconscious and between different structures of personality. The understanding of human behaviour is called ‘psychoanalysis’. (Freud, 1939), the father of psychology, assumed that mental illnesses wasn’t something to be treated medically but by what has come to be known as psychodynamic therapy. He advocated that the unconscious mind could influence the mental illness whilst recovering (Cardwell, 1996). This approach to psychoanalysis is demonstrated in his treatment of Anna O. Freud assumed that mental illnesses wasn’t something to be treated medically but by therapy. He implicated that unconscious mind could influence the mental illness whilst recovering (Cardwell, 1996). He diagnosed her illness as hysteria and developed a form of therapy to treat her symptoms (Webster, 2015). (Cardwell, 2004) Freud compared the mind to an iceberg with the water above being the conscious and the water beneath the unconscious part of the mind. The id - the primary part of personality follows pleasure and gratification, and dominates the unconscious part of the mind. Ego - driven by reality principles and penalties of an action dominates the conscious mind. Superego contains conscience and guilt, and also dwells mostly in the conscious mind. The superego develops as we become aware of societal rules. (Cardwell, 1996) According to Freud we have two drives which are sex and...
Words: 3310 - Pages: 14
...systems. Informatics studies the representation, processing, and communication of information in natural and engineered systems. It has computational, cognitive and social aspects. The central notion is the transformation of information whether by computation or communication, whether by organisms or artifacts. Understanding informational phenomena - such as computation, cognition, and communication - enables technological advances. In turn, technological progress prompts scientific enquiry. The science of information and the engineering of information systems develop hand-in-hand. Informatics is the emerging discipline that combines the two. In natural and artificial systems, information is carried at many levels, ranging, for example, from biological molecules and electronic devices through nervous systems and computers and on to societies and large-scale distributed systems. It is characteristic that information carried at higher levels is represented by informational processes at lower levels. Each of these levels is the proper object of study for some discipline of science or engineering. Informatics aims to develop and apply firm theoretical and mathematical foundations for the features that are common to all computational systems. THE SCOPE OF INFORMATICS In its attempts to account for phenomena, science progresses by defining, developing, criticising and refining new concepts. Informatics is developing its own fundamental concepts of communication, knowledge...
Words: 678 - Pages: 3
...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...
Words: 1607 - Pages: 7
...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...
Words: 1201 - Pages: 5
...Cognitive psychology is the study of the mind. To be more specific, it is the study of how one thinks, remembers, learns, and perceives; the mental processes. It shows us how a group of people can view the same object and yet form different conclusions on what the object is. Cognitive is one of the newer fields of psychology. It is only 50 years old (Willingham, 2007). It was finalized as its own branch in response to the lack of information provided from previous branches psychology. No other branch truly dealt with how and why a person thought or was able to learn and remember. Two keys components of the workings of the human mind. Granted these two key components helped open the door for cognitive psychology, several key milestones helped get cognitive psychology’s feet through the door. These key milestones include the missteps of behaviorism, information processing and the computer metaphor, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience. The Missteps of Behaviorism Behaviorism came into the world of psychology and appeared to the solution for it all. The key was to study the actions of a person. The mind was of no consequence. For quite a few years, there were not any doubts about behaviorism. Behaviorism had a good run but it could not answer questions about a human’s mind. After all, to behaviorists the mind was not important. Behaviorists believed that everything they learned from experiments on animals, applied to humans. Questions were now being asked about how humans...
Words: 985 - Pages: 4
...Language Essay Ryan Butler Psychology 360 August 29, 2011 Professor Newlin LANGUAGE Have you ever wondered how we speak? How about why our communication is considered a language and other animal’s communication is not considered language? A wide range of beliefs exist on what defines language. Thus, by exploring the definition of language and lexicon, evaluating language’s key features, the four levels of language structure and processing, and the role of language in Cognitive Psychology, an understanding of what language is becomes clear. Let us begin by defining language and a term named lexicon. LANGUAGE AND LEXICON DEFINITION One big question, when the subject of language comes up, is exactly what language is. What constitutes something as a language? By explaining one definition of a language, and a term associated with language, called a lexicon, a definition of language transpires. Thus, the Willingham (2007) text mentions four certain characteristics communication must possess to, officially, be considered a language. One of these characteristics is that language must be communicative, and thus be communication between individuals in some form or another. Secondly, the symbols standing for words must be arbitrary, and thus have no reason for representing a word. Third, a language must be structured, and not arbitrary. For example, if I say a dog was walking on a sidewalk I cannot say a sidewalk was walking on a dog. etc. Fourth, a language must be...
Words: 1420 - Pages: 6
...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...
Words: 408 - Pages: 2
...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...
Words: 952 - Pages: 4
...(CL) is a discipline between linguistics and computer science which is concerned with the computational aspects of the human language faculty. It belongs to the cognitive sciences and overlaps with the field of artificial intelligence (AI), a branch of computer science aiming at computational models of human cognition. Computational linguistics has applied and theoretical components. Theoretical CL takes up issues in theoretical linguistics and cognitive science. It deals with formal theories about the linguistic knowledge that a human needs for generating and understanding language. Today these theories have reached a degree of complexity that can only be managed by employing computers. Computational linguists develop formal models simulating aspects of the human language faculty and implement them as computer programmes. These programmes constitute the basis for the evaluation and further development of the theories. In addition to linguistic theories, findings from cognitive psychology play a major role in simulating linguistic competence. Within psychology, it is mainly the area of psycholinguistics that examines the cognitive processes constituting human language use. The relevance of computational modelling for psycholinguistic research is reflected in the emergence of a new subdiscipline: computational psycholinguistics. Applied CL focusses on the practical outcome of modelling human language use. The methods, techniques, tools and applications in this area are often...
Words: 880 - Pages: 4
...Cognitive psychology was introduced when there were flaws found in the areas of behaviorism (Galotti, 2014). The field of behaviorism began moving their concerns towards observable behaviors instead of focusing on the mind (Galotti, 2014). Since this was occurring cognitive psychology was born. This aspect of psychology began emphasizing on how the mind thinks and functions (Galotti, 2014). For instance, cognitive psychology encompasses areas of learning, memory, attention, perception, reasoning, language, conceptual development, and decision making (Galotti, 2014). It is defined as the scientific study of mental processing (Galotti, 2014). Cognitive psychology concentrates on how an individual stores, processes, acquires, and interprets the world around them. And it also tries to classify certain behaviors that are presented through different characteristics (Willingham, 2007). Once this area of psychology was introduced it brought back the importance of studying the mind. In the next following sections they will cover the key milestones in the development of cognitive psychology and the importance of behavioral observation in this field. Key milestones in the development of cognitive psychology There were four key milestones that had a hand in developing cognitive psychology. The milestones were: neuroscience, information processing model, artificial intelligence, and the criticism of behaviorism (Carley, 2012). The criticism that behaviorism received was...
Words: 1037 - Pages: 5
...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”...
Words: 4800 - Pages: 20
...Artificial Intelligence The computer revolution has influenced everyday matters from the way letters are written to the methods in which our banks, governments, and credit card agencies keep track of our finances. The development of artificial intelligence is just a small percentage of the computer revolution and how society deals with, learns, and incorporates artificial intelligence. It will only be the beginning of the huge impact and achievements of the computer revolution. A standard definition of artificial intelligence, or AI, is that computers simply mimic behaviors of humans that would be regarded as intelligent if a human being did them. However, within this definition, several issues and views still conflict because of ways of interpreting the results of AI programs by scientists and critics. The most common and natural approach to AI research is to ask of any program, what can it do? What are the actual results in comparison to human intelligence? For example, what matters about a chess-playing program is how good it is. Can it possibly beat chess grand masters? There is also a more structured approach in assessing artificial intelligence, which began opening the door of the artificial intelligence contribution into the science world. According to this theoretical approach, what matters is not the input-output relations of the computer, but also what the program can tell us about actual human cognition (Ptack, 1994). From this point of view, artificial...
Words: 1106 - Pages: 5
...Defining Cognitive Psychology: Merriam Webmaster dictionary defines Cognitive Psychology as “a branch of psychology concerned with mental processes (as perception, thinking, learning, and memory) especially with respect to the internal events occurring between sensory stimulation and the overt expression of behaviour.” Simply put, cognitive psychology is the scientific study of the mind and it revolves around the notion that if we want to know what makes people tick then we need to understand the internal processes of their mind. The need to study cognitive psychology: Cognitive psychology assumes that behaviour is the result of information processing. By describing thinking as information processing, cognitive psychologists are making a comparison between minds and computers (i.e. they are adopting a computer metaphor for the mind). This is useful because minds and computers have some attractive similarities: both have inputs, outputs, memory stores and a limited capacity for how much information they can process at any one time. Just as a computer’s behaviour is determined by what information it is given and how it has been programmed, so a person’s behaviour is determined by (1) the information available in their environment; (2) the ways they have learned to manipulate (process) information; and (3) the capacities for information processing inherent in the types of brain people have. In short, it is important to study cognitive psychology to gain an...
Words: 1412 - Pages: 6
...The cognitive approach in psychology focuses on the internal mental processes of an individual. The word cognition refers to the process by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used; this definition was from Ulric Neisser. This approach was very dominated in the 1950âs onwards. This was because of the modern research on human performance and attention during the 2nd world war, developments in computer science, artificial intelligence and the growing interest in linguistics. This approach is different from other approached in different ways. On way is that the approach adopts the use of scientific, experimental methods to measure mental processes rejecting the psychodynamic use of introspection. Another difference is that the approach advocates the importance of mental processes such as beliefs, desires and motivation in determining behaviour unlike the behaviourist approach. Cognitive psychologists focus mainly on the internal mental processes like memory. Interest is taken in how individuals can learn to solve problem and the mental processes that exist between stimulus and response. A certain model of this is the information processing approach. The information processing approach can be compared to a computer in terms of the mind the software and the brain being the hardware, this is just like a computer. As individuals we encode information, store or transform information also like a computer. Information-processing...
Words: 294 - Pages: 2
...computer revolution and more improvements are likely to be seen in the near future.The computer revolution has influenced everyday matters from the way letters are written to the methods in which our banks, governments, and credit card agencies keep track of our finances. The development of artificial intelligence is just a small percentage of the computer revolution and how society deals with, learns, and incorporatesartificial intelligence. It will only be the beginning of the huge impact and achievements of the computer revolution. A standard definition of artificial intelligence, or AI, is that computers simply mimic behaviors of humans that would be regarded as intelligent if a human being did them. However, within this definition, several issues and views still conflict because of ways of interpreting the results of AI programs by scientists and critics. The most commn and natural approach to AI research is to ask of any program, what can it do? What are the actual results in comparison to human intelligence? For example, what matters about a chess-playing program is how good it is. Can it possibly beat chess grand masters? There is also a more structured approach in assessing artificial intelligence, which began opening the door of the artificial intelligence contribution into the science world. According to this theoretical approach, what matters is not the input-output relations of the computer, but also what the program can tell us about actual human cognition (Ptack...
Words: 910 - Pages: 4
