Name
Date
Period
IB Psychology
Cognitive Perspective Outline
Chapter 7: Thinking and Reasoning
I.
The Elements of Cognition (all the mental activities associated with
thinking, knowing, and remembering information)
a. Concept: a mental category that groups objects, relations, activities,
abstractions, or qualities having common properties (eg. Dog)
i. Basic concepts: concepts that have a moderate number of
instances and that are easier to acquire than those having
few or many instances (eg. working dog class)
ii. Prototypes: a representative example of a concept (ex.
Husky)
iii. Propositions: a unit of meaning that is made up of concepts
and expresses a single idea
iv. Mental images: a mental representation that mirrors or
represents a particular concept of aspect of the world
b. How Conscious is Thought?
i. Freud’s Model of Mental Structure (1933)
Conscious (Ego)
Preconscious/Subconscious
(Superego)
Unconscious (Id)
Nonconscious
1. Subconscious processes: outside of consciousness, but
is accessible when necessary
2. Nonconscious processes: occurs outside of
consciousness, and is not available to conscious
awareness
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II.
III.
Reasoning and Creativity (the drawing of conclusions or inferences
observations, facts, or assumptions)
a. Formal reasoning (algorithm: step-by-step procedure for solving a
problem; guarantees a solution)
i. Deductive reasoning: drawing conclusions from a set of
premises
ii. Inductive reasoning: the conclusion probably follows from
the premises but could conceivably be false
b. Informal reasoning (there may be no one correct solution)
i. Heuristic: a rule of thumb that guides problem solving, but
can be error-prone
ii. Dialectical reasoning: when opposing facts/ideas are
weighted and compared with a view to determine the best
solution or to resolve differences
c. Creative thinking
i. Mental set: a tendency to solve problems using procedures
that worked before on similar problems
ii. Convergent thinking: following a set of steps that will
converge on one correct solution
iii. Divergent thinking: exploring unconventional alternatives in
solving problems
1. Personality traits associated with creative thinking
(environment and personality traits interact to
increase creative thinking)
a. Nonconformity (not concerned about what
others think of them)
b. Curiosity (intrigued by what other people
would ignore)
c. Persistence (Thomas Edison: “Genius is 1/10
inspiration, 9/10 perspiration”)
The Development of Thought and Reasoning
a. How Children Think (Piaget, 1929/1960, 1952, 1984)
(Research: The Development of Object Concept….)
i. Key Concepts of Cognitive Development
STAGE
Sensorimotor
AGE RANGE
0-2 years
MAJOR
CHARACTERISTICS
1. All knowledge is
acquired through senses
and movement
2. Thinking is at the same
speed as physical
movement
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Preoperational
2-7 years
Concrete operations
7-11 years
Formal operations
11 and up
3. Object permanence
develops
1. Thinking separates
from movement and
increases greatly in speed
2. Ability to think in
symbols
3. Non-logical, “magical”
thinking
4. Animism: all objects
have thoughts and
feelings
5. Egocentric thinking
1. Logical thinking
develops
2. Conservation of liquid,
area, volume
3. Ability to infer what
others may be feeling or
thinking
1. Logical thinking
extends to hypothetical
and abstract concepts
2. Ability to reason using
metaphors and analogies
3. Ability to explore
values, beliefs,
philosophies
4. Ability to think about
past and future
5. Not everyone uses
formal operations to the
same degree, and some
not at all
ii. Challenges to Piaget’s Theory
1. Stage transitions are not clear-cut or as widespread as
implied
2. Children can understand more than credited for
3. Preschoolers are not as egocentric as Piaget implied
4. Theory of Mind: a system of beliefs about the way
your own mind and other people’s minds work, and
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IV.
of how people are affected by their beliefs and
feelings; it emerges at age 4 or 5
b. How Adults Think (King and Kitchner, 1990/94)
i. Stages of reflective thought and judgment
1. Prereflective stages (1-2)
(assume that a correct answer always exists and that it
can be obtained directly through the senses)
2. Quasi-reflective (3-5)
(people will recognize that some things cannot be
known with absolute certainty, but they are not sure
how to deal with these situations)
3. Reflective judgment (6-7)
(people who understand that although some things
may never be known with certainty, some judgments
are more valid than others because of their coherence,
their fit with the evidence, their usefulness, and so on)
Barriers to Reasoning Rationally
a. Hindsight bias: the tendency to overestimate one’s ability to have
predicted an event once the outcome is known; the “I knew it all
along” phenomenon)
i. Framing: the way an alternative is worded will have an
effect on your decision
b. Aversion to loss: people are biased to try to avoid or minimize risk
or losses when they make decisions
c. Belief bias (tendency for preexisting beliefs to distort logic, eg. buy
lottery tickets, disaster insurance)
i. Availability heuristic: the tendency to judge the probability
of a type of event by how easy it is to think if examples or
instances
ii. Representativeness heuristic: judging the likelihood of
things in terms of how well they seem to represent, or
match, particular prototypes; may lead one to ignore some
relevant information
d. Confirmation bias (the tendency to search for information that
confirms one’s preconceptions)
e. Need for cognitive consistency
i. Cognitive Dissonance Theory (Festinger, 1957) people will
resist or rationalize information that conflicts with their
existing ideas, eg. smoking
1. Situations motivating reduction of dissonance
a. Justifying a decision that was freely made
b. When actions violate self-concept
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V.
c. Justification of effort (the tendency of
individuals to increase their liking for
something that they have worked hard to
attain)
2. Limitations of cognitive dissonance theory
a. Some cultures do not have a strong need for
consistency
b. Security to own up to mistakes
c. Cognitive consistency can lead to self-defeating
decisions and actions
f. Overcoming Cognitive Biases
i. Societal implications (legal system, medicine, government)
ii. Expertise gives us a basis
iii. When we can understand a bias, we can work to eliminate it
Animal Minds
a. Animal intelligence
i. Cognitive ethology: the study of cognitive processes in
nonhuman animals
b. Animal language
i. Qualifications for a language (Hockett, 1960)
1. Combinations of sounds, gestures, and symbols that
are meaningful
2. Must permit displacement (communication about
objects and events that are not present here and now
but are displaced in time)
3. Must have grammar (syntax) that permits
productivity (the ability to produce and comprehend
an infinite number of new utterances)
ii. Animal communication
1. Gestures, body postures, facial expressions,
vocalizations and odors
2. Understanding human language
a. Kohler (Sultan): problem solving with thought
and insight
b. Savage-Rumbaugh (Kanzi): keyboard symbols
c. Gardner & Gardner (Washoe):
d. Patterson (Koko): GSL
3. Thinking about the thinking of animals
a. Anthropomorphism: the tendency to falsely
attribute human qualities to nonhuman beings
i. Clever Hans (Pfungst, 1911/1965
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VI.
b. Anthropocentrism: the tendency to think,
mistakenly, that human beings have nothing in
common with other animals
What makes us uniquely human?
a. We are the only species that tries to understand its own
misunderstandings
Chapter 8: Memory
I.
II.
III.
Approaches to the Study of Memory
a. Hermann Ebbinghaus (1879)
i. Reductionist approach
ii. Nonsense syllables
iii. Mathematical laws
b. James Bartlett (1932)
i. Memory for realistic stimuli (distortion of memory for
stories)
ii. Schemas
c. Cognitive psychology (more influenced by Bartlett’s approach)
i. Cognitive revolution in psychology
ii. Analogy between mind and computer
1. encoding
2. storage
3. retrieval
Memory: Our capacity to register, store, and recover information over
time
a. 5 concepts
i. attention
ii. motivation
iii. rehearsal
iv. state of consciousness
v. interference
Models of Memory
a. 3 premises
i. input is encoded
ii. information is stored for a period of time
iii. information is retrieved upon demand
b. Filter Theory (Donald Broadbent)
(unimportant information is dropped and relevant information is
encoded unto the next stage)
c. Levels of Processing Model (Craik and Lockhart)
(How well we remember depends on how we process the
information when it is being encoded)
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i. Shallow processing: we assign no relevance to the
information (waiting for a car to pass before crossing the
street)
1. Semantic encoding: emphasizes the importance of
verbal input
ii. Deep processing: when we attach meaning to information
1. Elaboration: we attach meaning to the information
when we create associations between new memory
and existing memory
2. Self-referent encoding: best way to facilitate later
recall, by relating new information to ourselves
d. Three-Stage Model of Memory (Atkinson-Shiffrin)
Sensory
Input
Sensory
Memory
Short-Term
Memory
Long-Term
Memory
e. Sensory memory (the information is present here just long enough
to be perceived)
i. Iconic memory (visual; lasts less than 1 second)
ii. Echoic memory (auditory; lasts 4 seconds)
f. The Nature of Attention
i. Selective attention: focusing of awareness on a specific
stimulus in sensory memory
ii. Automatic processing: unconscious encoding of information
about space, time, and frequency that occurs without
interfering with other things we are thinking about
iii. Parallel processing: natural mode of information processing
that involves several information streams simultaneously
iv. Effortful processing: encoding that requires our attention
and conscious effort
g. Short-Term Memory
i. Capacity: 7  2 bits of unrelated information (Miller, 1956)
1. Increasing capacity
a. Rehearsal (verbal, visual, spatial)
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b. Chunking (grouping bits of information
together into meaningful units (ss#, phne
number, acronyms)
ii. Working Memory Model (Baddeley)
(an active 3-part memory temporarily hold information)
1. Phonological loop
(stores information about linguistic sounds with an
acoustic code from sensory memory and a rehearsal
function that lets us repeat words in a loop
(conversation)
2. Visuospatial loop
(briefly stores visual and spatial information from
sensory memory)
3. Central executive
(actively integrates information from the phonological
loop and visuospatial working memory, and longterm memory as we associate old and new
information, solve problems, and perform other
cognitive tasks)
iii. Long-Term Memory (relatively permanent and unlimited
capacity memory system)
1. Organization of Long-Term Memory
Types of Long-Term
Memories
Explicit Memory
(with conscious recall)
Semantic Memory
(general knowledge)
Implicit Memory
(without conscious
recall)
Episodic Memory
(personal experiences)
Procedural Memory
Conditioning Effects
2. Heirarchical systems: in which concepts are arranged
from more general to more specific classes
a. Concepts: mental representations of related
things
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i. Superordinate concepts: clusters of
concepts
ii. Subordinate concepts: instances of basic
concepts
iii. Prototypes: typical examples of a
concept
3. Semantic networks: irregular distorted systems unlike
strict hierarchies, with multiple links from one
concept to another
a. Schema: preexisting mental frameworks for an
event
i. Script: a schema for an event
IV.
V.
Retrieval
a. Recognition: identification of something as familiar such as
multiple choice and matching questions on a test
b. Recall: retrieval of information from LTM in the absence of any
other information or cues such as for an essay question or fill-inthe-blank
c. Reconstruction: retrieval that can be distorted by adding, dropping,
or changing details to complete a picture from incomplete stored
information
d. Serial-position effect: better recall for information that comes at the
beginning (primacy) and at the end (recency) of a list of words.
e. Context-dependent memory: physical setting in which a person
learns information is encoded along with the information and
becomes part of the memory trace
f. Mood congruence: tendency to recall experiences that are
consistent with one’s current good or bad mood
g. State-dependent memory: tendency to recall information better
when in the same internal state as when the information was
encoded
Retrieval Cues (a stimulus that provides a trigger to get an item out of
memory)
a. Priming: activating specific associations in memory wither
consciously or unconsciously
b. Distributed practice: spreading out the learning of skills over
several sessions; typically produces better retrieval than massed
practice
c. Massed practice: cramming the learning of skills into one session
d. Mneumonic devices: memory tricks or strategies to make
information easier to remember (ROYGBIV, SOH CAH TOA,
PEMDAS, etc)
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VI.
VII.
VIII.
e. Method of Loci: uses visualization with familiar objects on a path to
recall information on a list
f. Peg-Word mneumonic: uses association of terms to be remembered
with a memorized scheme (one is bun, two is shoe…)
Retrieval Distortion
a. Reconstruction: retrieval that can be distorted by adding, dropping,
or changing details to complete a picture from incomplete stored
information
i. Case studies
1. The effects of leading questions on memory (Loftus)
2. Lost-in-the-mall study
b. Confabulation: process of combining and substituting memories
from events other than the ones you are trying to remember
c. Misinformation effect: incorporation of misleading information into
memories of a given event
Forgetting (the inability to retrieve previously stored information.
Forgetting results from failure to encode, decay of stored memories, or
inability to access stored information)
a. Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve
b. Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon: the temporary inability to access
information accompanied by the feeling that the information in in
LTM
c. Interference: learning some items prevents retrieving others,
especially when the information is similar
i. Proactive interference: old memories prevent the retrieval of
newer memories
1. A-B
A-C
A-B
ii. Retroactive interference: new memories prevent the retrieval
of older memories
1. A-B
A-C
A-C
Explanations for forgetting
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IX.
X.
a. Karl Lashley (memories physically deteriorate; memories do not
reside in a single spot)
i. Removal of rat cortex
b. Sigmund Freud
i. Repression: the tendency to forget unpleasant traumatic
memories; hidden in the unconscious mind
1. Hypnosis: access the unconscious to retrieve
repressed memories
c. Elizabeth Loftus (eyewitness memory; found that it was inaccurate,
fluid, malleable)
i. Confabulation: process of combining and substituting
memories from events other than the one you’re trying to
remember
ii. The power of suggestion
1. Eyewitness accounts (car crash)
2. Children’s testimony (Ceci)
iii. Misinformation effect: incorporation of misleading
information into memories of a given event
iv. Misattribution error (source amnesia): forgetting the source
if information of a given event
Memory and the Brain
a. Connectionism Theory (memory is stored throughout the brain in
connections between neurons, many of which work together to
process a single memory)
b. Brain Structures Involved in Memory
i. Thalamus: encoding of memory into STM
ii. Cortex: involved in our declarative memory in STM
iii. Hippocampus: our ability to transfer declarative memory
from STM to LTM
iv. Cortex: involved with declarative memory from past in LTM
v. Amygdala: our ability to associate memories with emotions
vi. Limbic system: involved in explicit LTM
vii. Cerebellum: involved in implicit memory of skills
Cognitive Disorders
a. Distinction between declarative and procedural memory
i. Retrograde amnesia: problems remembering events before
and incident
ii. Antereograde amnesia: problems remembering events after
the incident
1. Hippocampus/amygdale (Clive Wearing)
2. No memory for objects/puzzles, and yet improved
performance for puzzles (Squire)
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XI.
iii. Alzheimer’s disease: when the neural connections physically
deteriorate, resulting in irreversible loss in memory and
eventually all mental functioning
Artificial Intelligence
a. Parallel Processing Model: emphasizes the simultaneous processing
of information, which occurs automatically and without our
awareness, to create neural network based on neuron-like systems,
rather than artificially contrived computer codes; they can learn,
adapt, and deal with incomplete information
b. Role of Neuroscientists
i. Long-term potentiation: increasing the efficiency of a neural
network by sending across the synapses within neural
networks of long-term memories
ii. Flashbulb memories: a vivid memory of an emotionally
arousing event
Evaluating the Cognitive Perspective
I.
II.
Contributions of this perspective
a. Innovative methods for exploring the “Black box” of the mind
b. An understanding of how cognition affects behavior and emotion
c. Findings of tremendous social and legal relevance
d. Understanding and improving mental abilities from infancy to old
age
Misuses and Misinterpretations of this Perspective
a. Cognitive reductionism
b. Errors of cause and effect
c. Cognitive relativism
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