Lecture 1 – Introduction 1

First three topics:

1. What Cognition is about

2. Methods

3. History

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From Reed’s text (p. 3):

“Cognitive psychology refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used.”

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What Cognition is about:

Interaction with the world

(i) Input (stimulus energies)(ii) Analysis & recognition(iii) Storage for future reference(iv) Retrieval(v) Choice of response

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Think about the cognitive psychology of the couch potato. Doing so may:

1. Help you grasp what Cognitive Psychology is about.

2. Give you new respect for humans as a species.

• If our simplest activities are significant achievements, how are we to assess our most complex, demanding operations?

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B. The cognitive psychology of the couch potato

Eating potato chips

Guiding hand into bagControlling grip aperture and pressureRaising hand to mouth

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Watching television

Perception: people

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Recognizing people:

Are they young or old?

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Happy or sad?

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Male or female?

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Watching television

Perception: people

objects

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actions

Watching television

Perception: people objects

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Understanding utterances (inc. inferences)Remembering “histories” of charactersUnderstanding story, relationshipsSuspending disbelief

Watching television

Perception: people objects actions

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Methods

Cognitive psychology is an empirical discipline.

• Disagreements among practitioners are settled by appeal to objectively-obtained data.

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Three steps in empirical research:

1. Develop theories

2. Generate predictions about behaviour

• Based on theories

3. Test predictions

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Topic Word recognition

TheoryPeople have some sort of memory trace in their heads for each word they can recognize in writing.

IssueHow are all those traces organized?

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Theory A:

Traces are organized by frequency-of-use: in searching memory, you encounter common words first, rare words last.

Theory B:

Traces are organized by length: in searching memory, you encounter short words first, long words last.

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Predictions:

Theory A

Ave. response time to common words should be shorter than average response time to rare words

Theory B

Ave. response time to short words should be shorter than average response time to long words

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Results of such experiments:

In fact, when you do these studies, you observe that RTs to common words are faster than RTs to rare words. There is no similarly strong effect of length.

Conclusion: Theory A wins.

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Paradigms

Independent variables

Dependent variables

• RT• Accuracy/error rate

Task

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Mini-paper #1

In one or two sentences, please write down what the most important thing you learned in today’s class is.

Add your name to your paper and hand it in before you leave.

Thanks!