1/12/2025
● Syllabus review
○ Discussion posts have prompts but don’t need to be based off of prompt
○ Engage with the material
○ Can summarize notes
○ Exam review - a question you hope will be on the exam and an answer for it
○ On time!
○ 8 out of 11 - don't do them late
1/15/2025
● Video clip - downtown abbey
○ What did you experience:
■ Lots of movement: camera, people, items, perspective, focus
■ Different kinds of light: trying to make out figures is dark lighting or bright
lighting on specific people
■ Suspense: sees something eventful happened and it builds without yet revealing
what it is
■ Words and visuals moving at the same time in the intro - overlapping
○ What kinds of processes
● Cognition includes
○ Perception - what you saw, heard in that clip
○ Linguistic representations - how you made sense of the words that were being said
○ Knowledge - how you interpreted the scenes based on your background knowledge
○ Attention - what you noticed
○ Memory - what you recalled in order to write your list
● Cognition = all of our mental activity
○ Acquisition storage, transformation and use of knowledge
○ Bottom up - take in what you see
○ Top down - use what you know to make sense of things
○ Metacognition - when we think about our own cognition
○ 2 ways to describe
■ Described as mental activity - a synonym for cognition
■ Cognitive approach - theoretical orientation emphasizes thought processes and
knowledge
● While orientation is different, cognitive approach is analogous to other
approaches
○ Social cognition
■ Cultural variation in basic psych processes
■ The way we pay attention, remember and think is shaped by what we know about
people and the world
○ Why study cognition?
■ Cognition occupies a major portion of human psychology
■ Help you appreciate many other areas of psychology (as well as outside of it)
● Also used to explain things such as decision making, eyewitness
testimony, etc
■ Owners manual for your mind
● Strengths and weaknesses
● Improve your own performance
○ Cognitive approach in other subfields
■ Clinical psych
● Depressed patients responded with more general (vs specific) memories overgeneral retrieval
● Based on research from Richard Moore - case study
● Hae difficult giving an example of particular instance, or details
■ Education psych
● Focus on metacognition in learning, memory in reading comprehension
■ Social psych
● Taps into cognitive mechanisms like schemas to examine attitudes and
behaviors
● Historical perspective
○ Aristotle (382-322 BCE) - a student of plato, but plato thought senses were unreliable
and reason was the source of knowledge
■ First psychologist/cognitive psychologist
■ Examined perception, memory, and mental imagery
■ Interested in how acquire knowledge through experience and observation
■ Stressed the use of empirical evidence
■ Scientific evidence obtained by careful observation and experimentation
○ Wilhelm Wundt (1832 - 1920)
■ Founds of experimental psych
■ First to call psychologist
■ Thought mental process should be systematically studied
■ Introspection
● Proposed as best way of studying mental process
● Systematically analyzing own sensations and report them as objectively
as possible
● Focus on reaction time and sensory processes and attention
● Pt exposed to stimulus and asked to report sensations
■ Set up the first psych lab
○ Early memory researchers
■ Ebbinghaus (1850-1909)
● Ebbinghaus curve
● Trained as a philosopher
● One of first people to really study human memory
● How you hold onto something that you learn
● Factors that influence memory - amount of time
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How much of memory persists after varying amounts of time
Meaningless letter combos - quiz at intervals
Figured out the rate that memory declines - memory declines rapidly
Learning curve
○ You relearn material more quickly than when
● Memory decays rapidly
■ Calkins (1863-1930)
● Recency effect - recall more accurate for final items in a series
○ Also a priming affect
● Focus on real world applications (like for teaching)
● First woman pres of APA
William james (1842 - 1910)
■ Rejected Wundts and Ebbinguas
■ Intrested in everyday psych experiences, applied, things he observed in the world
■ Tip of the tounge phenomenon
Gestalt psych
■ Started in europe
■ Emphasizes that we organize what wevsee; the whole is greater than the sumvof
its parts
■ Whole is greater than the sum of its parts
■ Importance of insight; problem solving
■ Max Wertheimer
■ Kaniza triangle
● Closure - brain fills in gaps
● Illusory contours - mind perceives edges and shapes
Barlett (1886-1969)
■ Telephone story - serial reproduction
■ People make sysematic errors when trying to recall stories
■ Memory is an active process and we transform what we encounter, its
recontrstctive (using schemas)
■ Search for meaning in the act of recall
■ Recinstrct based on own experience, knowledge, beelifs
■ British; early 20 th century; wrote Remembering: An Experimental
■ and Social Study
■ ○ People make systematic errors when trying to recall stories
■ ○ Made important discoveries relating to memory
■ ■ Memory is an active process and we transform what we
■ encounter; it’s reconstructive (using schemas)
■ ○ Search for meaning in the act of recall
■ ○ Try to integrate new information such that it is consistent with
■ personal experiences
Behaviorists
■ Shift from the idea of studying inner thoughts (introspection) to studying external
behavior
■ Watson
● Influenced by Pavlov and thought if we can get an animal to respond to
sa timulus, we should be able to do the same with a human, and in one of
the most famous studies
● Classical conditioning
● Observed behavior, measurable
○ Bubble burst
■ Noam chomsky famously disagreed with BF Skinner
■ Published a rebuttal
■ Behaviorists went to far
■ All about stimulus control Noam Chomsky famously disagreed with B.F.
■ Skinner. He published a rebuttal which argued that Skinner’s
reinforcement-based model was fundamentally inadequate to explain the
complexity of human language.
■ This response article was influential in changing thinking away from behaviorism
■ If we look at a red chair and say red,
■ the response is under the control of
■ the stimulus redness; if we say chair,
■ it is under the control of the
■ collection of properties chairness.
■ The device is as simple as it is
■ empty.”
■ ○ Put another way, we simply do not
■ know what stimulus any person is
■ responding to
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