PSY 200: Cognitive Psychology
Teaching assistant
Instructor
Alyssa Randez: Wed 12:30-2:00PM
Prof. Sébastien Hélie
Th 11:45AM -1:15PM
Email: shelie@purdue.edu
Phone: (765) 496-2692
OFFICE: PRCE 365B
Office: PRCE 359
CONTACT: psy200@purdue.edu
Lectures: Tu & Th, 1:30-2:45 AM, UC 114
PSY 200: Cognitive Psychology
• Objectives
The main goals in this class are to (1) increase your knowledge in cognitive
psychology and (2) show you how the scientific method can be used to
study psychological processes.
• Course format
The information in this course is presented by lectures. Each week,
you will also be assigned recommended reading assignments in
the optional textbook that complements the lectures. Lectures will
not be recorded.
PSY 200: Cognitive Psychology
• Optional textbook
Goldstein, E. B. (2018). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting
Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. Fifth Edition.
Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.
PSY 200: Cognitive Psychology
• I will not take attendance but I expect you to be here;
Contacting us (psy200@purdue.edu):
1. *** READ THE SYLLABUS ***
2. Try contacting the teaching assistant:
• Come to office hours;
• Send an email;
• Make an appointment.
3. DO NOT:
• Show up at one of our offices outside of office hours
without an appointment;
• Send us questions the last day before a quiz.
PSY 200: Cognitive Psychology
• Exam and grading:
1. 4 quizzes (18% each = 72% of your total grade)
• Multiple choices
• Covers material since the previous quiz
2. 8 homework (12% of your grade)
• About 1/2 page summary, 1.5% each
3. 10 possible CogLab online experiments (16% of your
grade + BONUS):
• Each Coglab experiment is worth 2%, so you need to
do 8
PSY 200: Cognitive Psychology
PSY 200: Cognitive Psychology
• Exam and grading:
1. 4 quizzes (18% each = 72% of your total grade)
• Multiple choices
• Covers material since the previous quiz
2. 8 homework (12% of your grade)
• About 1/2 page summary, 1.5% each
3. 10 possible CogLab online experiments (16% of your
grade + BONUS):
• Each Coglab experiment is worth 2%, so you need to
do 8
• The deadline for each coglab is at 11:59 PM Eastern
on the posted date.
PSY 200: Cognitive Psychology
• Class etiquette:
–
–
–
Arrive on time;
Turn-off noise-making technology;
Do not chit chat.
• Purdue honor pledge:
“As a boilermaker pursuing academic excellence, I pledge to be
honest and true in all that I do. Accountable together – we are
Purdue.”
• There will be no make-up Quiz but replacement work for the
points can be made available IF YOU CONTACT THE
INSTRUCTOR AHEAD OF TIME AND HAVE A
SATISFACTORY DOCUMENTED EXCUSE.
QUESTIONS??
Topic 1
History of Cognitive
Psychology
The Complexity of Cognition
• Cognitive psychology is the study of mental
processes (or cognition) using the scientific
method;
• Cognition involves
– Perception
– Attention
– Memory
– Knowledge representation
– Problem-solving
– Reasoning and decision-making
• All these may include “hidden” processes of which we
may not be aware.
Scientific method
1. Characterization: Observing or measuring a
phenomenon;
2. Hypotheses: Theoretical explanation of the
observations;
3. Predictions: Reasoning based on the hypotheses;
4. Experiments:
1. Independent variables (factors): What is being
manipulated by the experimenter;
2. Dependent variables: What is being measured.
A or B?
Rule-based categorization
B
Orientation
Orientation
A
Bar Width
Information-integration
categorization
Reading a graph
Independent
variables
Dependent
variables
Reading a graph
Dependent
variables
Questions??
The First Cognitive Psychologists
• Donders’ (1868) substractive method
– Mental chronometry
• Measuring how long a cognitive process
takes
– Reaction time (RT) experiment
• Measures interval between stimulus
presentation and the participant’s
response to a stimulus
The First Cognitive Psychologists
• Donders (1868)
– Simple RT task: participant pushes a
button quickly after a light appears
– Choice RT task: participant pushes one
button if light is on right side, another if
light is on left side
Caption: A modern version of Donders’ (1868) reaction-time
experiment: (a) the simple reaction-time task; and (b) the choice
reaction-time task.
The First Cognitive Psychologists
• Donders (1868)
– Choice RT – Simple RT = Time to make a
decision
• Choice RT = 100 msecs longer than
Simple RT
• 100 msecs to make decision
– Mental responses cannot be measured
directly but can be inferred from the
participant’s behavior
How to measure RTs in 1860?
Phonautograph
Tuning fork
Donder's experiment
●
●
●
•
●
Make a sound at the beginning of the trial;
Make a sound when the stimulus is detected or a decision is
made.
Mark the beginning and end sounds;
Align the markings with a sound wave produced by the tuning
fork (261 Hz);
Count the number of cycles between the beginning and end
signal (261 Hz ~ 4 msec accuracy).
The First Cognitive Psychologists
• Ebbinghaus (1885)
– Read list of nonsense syllables aloud many
times to determine number of repetitions
necessary to repeat list without errors
– After some time, he relearned the list
• Short intervals = fewer repetitions to
relearn
– Learned many different lists at many
different retention intervals
The First Cognitive Psychologists
• Ebbinghaus (1885)
– Savings =
(initial repetitions) – (relearning repetitions)
– Forgetting curve shows savings as a function
of retention interval
– Forgetting is not directly observable but can
be inferred
Caption: Ebbinghaus’s retention curve, determined by the method of
savings. (Based on data from Ebbinghaus, 1885.)
The First Cognitive Psychologists
• Wundt (1879)
– First psychology laboratory
– University of Leipzig, Germany
The First Cognitive Psychologists
• Wundt (1879)
– Approach
Structuralism: experience is determined
by combining elements of experience
called “sensations”
– Method
Analytic introspection: participants
trained to describe experiences and
thought processes in response to stimuli
The First Cognitive Psychologists
• William James taught the first psychology
course at Harvard University:
– Wrote “Principles of Psychology” (1890)
• Made important and insightful
observations about the mind
• However, James did not run
experiments
• All observations were based on his own
introspection.
The First Cognitive Psychologists
• John Watson (Columbia University) noted two
problems with introspective approaches:
– Extremely variable results from person to
person
– Results difficult to verify
• Invisible inner mental processes
The Rise of Behaviorism
The Rise of Behaviorism
• John Watson proposed a new approach called
behaviorism
– Eliminate the mind as a topic of study
– Instead, study directly observable behavior
The Rise of Behaviorism
• Watson (1920) – “Little Albert” experiment
– Classical conditioning of fear
– 9-month-old became frightened by a rat
after a loud noise was paired with every
presentation of the rat
Classical Conditioning
• Pair a neutral event with an event that
naturally produces some outcome
• After many pairings, the “neutral” event
now also produces the outcome
Pavlov’s Discovery: Classical Conditioning
Caption: Pavlov’s famous experiment paired ringing a bell with presentation of
food. Initially, only presentation of the food caused the dog to salivate, but after a
number of pairings of bell and food, the bell alone caused salivation. This principle
of learning by pairing, which came to be called classical conditioning, was the basis
of Watson’s “Little Albert” experiment.
The Rise of Behaviorism
• Watson (1920) – “Little Albert” experiment
– Behavior can be analyzed without any
reference to the mind
– Examined how pairing one stimulus with
another affected behavior
Questions??
The Rise of Behaviorism
• Skinner (1950s)
– Interested in determining the relationship
between stimuli and responses
– Operant conditioning
• Shape behavior by rewards or
punishments
• Behavior that is rewarded is more likely
to be repeated
• Behavior that is punished is less likely to
be repeated
Skinner box
Ping-pong pigeons
Play
Skinner crib (1945)
Caption: Timeline showing early experiments studying the mind in the
1800s and events associated with the rise of behaviorism in the 1900s
The Decline of Behaviorism
• A controversy over language acquisition
• Skinner (1957)
– Argued that children learn language
through operant conditioning
• Children imitate speech they hear
• Correct speech is rewarded
The Decline of Behaviorism
• Chomsky (1959)
– Argued children do not only learn language
through imitation and reinforcement
• Children say things they have never
heard and cannot be imitating
• Children say things that are incorrect and
have not been rewarded for
– Language must be determined by innate
biological programs
The Decline of Behaviorism
• The Misbehavior of Organisms (Breland &
Breland, 1961)
– Attempts to condition animal behavior did
not work
– Animals’ built-in instincts prevailed
We have termed this phenomenon "instinctive drift." The general
principle seems to be that wherever an animal has strong instinctive
behaviors in the area of the conditioned response, after continued
running the organism will drift toward the instinctive behavior to the
detriment of the conditioned behavior and even to the delay or
preclusion of the reinforcement. In a very boiled-down, simplified
form, it might be stated as "learned behavior drifts toward instinctive
behavior.”
The Decline of Behaviorism
• Tolman (1938) trained rats to find food in a
four-armed maze
The Decline of Behaviorism
• Tolman (1938) trained rats to find food in a
four-armed maze
• Two competing interpretations:
– Behaviorism predicts that the rats learned
to “turn right to find food”
– Tolman believed that the rats had created a
cognitive map of the maze and were
navigating to a specific arm
The Decline of Behaviorism
Tolman (1938)
–What happens when the rats are placed in a
different arm of the maze?
–The rats navigated to the specific arm where
they previously found food
•Supported Tolman’s interpretation
•Did not support behaviorism interpretation
Questions??
Studying the Mind
• To understand complex cognitive behaviors:
– Measure observable behavior
– Make inferences about underlying
cognitive activity
– Consider what this behavior says about
how the mind works
The Cognitive Revolution
• Shift from behaviorist’s stimulus-response
relationships to an approach that attempts to
explain behavior in terms of the mind
• But do not rely solely on introspection!
Bottom-up learning
The serial reaction time task
1 – 2 – 3 – 2 – 4 – 3…
Curran, T. & Keele, S.W. (1993). Attentional and
nonattentional forms of sequence learning. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition, 19, 189-202.
Insight
http://www.dushkin.com/connectext/psy/ch08/twostring.mhtml
Example: Choking under pressure
• Fact: Many people do not perform as well when under
pressure:
• Missing a putt in a critical game
• Failing in an exam after studying a lot
• Bad decision during the Superbowl
• Hypothesis: Pressure uses working memory resources
• Experiment:
• Is there a remainder:
• (32 - 8) / 4?
• (32 – 6) / 4?
• Results: Participants did worse if they thought that they were
videotaped (pressure condition).
Example: Choking under pressure
• New question: Is everyone equally affected by pressure?
• New experiment:
Example: Choking under pressure
• New results:
• Verbal reports suggest that low
and high WM participants do not
use the same strategy to achieve
the task.
• Interpretation: Participants with
HWM use a more complex strategy
when there is low pressure than
participants with LWM. However,
pressure uses WM resources and
HWM need to use a simpler strategy
in high pressure situations.
Questions??
Week summary (1)
• Cognitive psychology is concerned with the scientific study of
•
•
•
•
the mind;
Example topics include attention, memory, reasoning, etc.;
Research aimed at making inference about cognitive
processes by observing behavior started in the 19th century
(e.g., Donders, Ebbinghaus);
This lead to Wundt founding the first psychology laboratory
using analytic introspection;
Analytic introspection was criticized by Watson in the early
20th century as being unscientific;
Week summary (2)
• Psychologists abandoned cognitive research in favor of
•
•
•
Behaviorism for ~ 50 years;
In the 1950s, Skinner tried to apply Behaviorism to language
learning;
Chomsky reviewed Skinner’s work and proposed the poverty
of stimulus argument;
The 1960s were marked by a cognitive revolution and a
renewal of interest in the scientific study of the mind;
• Modern cognitive psychology attempts to explain behavior in
terms of the mind without relying solely on participants’
cognitive insight.
Example question
Behaviorists believe that the presentation of_______
increases the frequency of behavior.
a) reward
b) punishment
c) the color blue
d) neurotransmitters