Chapter 15: Cognitive
Psychology
A History of Psychology
(3rd Edition)
John G. Benjafield
The Concept of ‘Information’
• Computing machine as informationprocessing system
• Information is the opposite of uncertainty
– Any event that reduces or eliminates
uncertainty provides us with information
• Information theory supplied the vocabulary
for a new model of the process of
communication
Noam Chomsky (1928–)
• Reviewed Skinner’s Verbal Behavior
• Argued that behaviourist principles could
not explain any significant aspects of
language
• Any theory of language must explain the
fact that natural language is inherently
creative
Syntactic Structures
• Surface structure: the level made up by
the particular words that make a sentence
– Spoken one word at a time
– Each successive word does not act as a
stimulus for the next word in the sentence
• Deep structure: grammatical
transformations from which surface
structure is derived
Cartesian Linguistics
• Chomsky considered his theory to be
descended from that of Descartes
• Descartes: human behaviour cannot be
understood in a completely mechanical
manner
• Descartes: our most human capacities are
innate
George A. Miller (1920–)
• 1950s: Harvard
• 1956:
– Symposium on information theory held at MIT
• Chomsky, Allen Newell, Herbert Simon
– Jerome Bruner: A Study of Thinking
The Magical Number Seven
• Channel capacity: how much information can
be accurately transmitted through the
participant
• Span of immediate memory: amount of
information we can hold in the mind at one
time
– Seven items, plus or minus two
Plans and the Structure of Behavior
• One of the first attempts to give cognitive
psychology a coherent theoretical framework
• Drew on information theory, Chomskyian
psycholinguistics, cybernetics
• Feedback loop: process in which the output
of one part of a system affects another part
of the system, which in turn affects the first
part
• TOTE mechanisms: basic unit of behavioural
control (test-operate-test-exit)
Subjective Behaviourism
• Thinking aloud: technique used by
psychologists interested in studying
thinking
• What people say when asked to think
aloud is different from what they say when
asked to introspect
• Subjective behaviourism
Giving Psychology Away
• Miller’s APA presidential address
– Cautioned psychologists against using their
expertise to act as agents of social control
– Better goals: understanding and prediction
– Suggested psychology be given away in order
to accomplish these goals
Jerome S. Bruner (1915–)
• Conducted seminal research on
everything from perception and thinking to
child development
• Believes there is a consistent functionalist
orientation across all his investiagtions
The New Look in Perception
• 1940s–1950s: ‘New Look’
– Research program in perception
– Focused on the effects of need, interest, and
past experience on the manner of organization
of the perceptual field
• Minimax axiom: people organize the
perceptual field in such a way as to
maximize percepts relevant to current
needs and expectations
– Central axiom
The New Look in Perception
• Events that do not fit our expectancies strike
us an incongruous
• Perceptual readiness: the degree to which
one is prepared to perceive what is in the
environment
• Criticisms:
– Inadequate controls
– Too much emphasis on internal, personal
determinants of perception
A Study of Thinking
• Concept attainment: the process by which
categories develop
• Any time we do not regard an event as
unique but as belonging to a particular
category, we are making use of concepts
• Criticism:
– Concepts studied somewhat artificial
Sir Frederic Bartlett (1886–1969)
• Method of serial reproduction:
– Giving an experimental participant something
to learn and remember
– What the first participant remembers is then
given to a second participant to learn and
remember
– What the second participant remembers is
given to a third participant to learn and
remember, and so on
Sir Frederic Bartlett
• Ex. ‘The War of the Ghosts’
• Believed that the kinds of transformations
observed using the method of serial
reproduction were precisely the same
transformations that happen to an
individual’s memory over time
• Schema: an active organization of past
reactions that provided a setting within
which individual events were understood
and remembered
Ulric Neisser (1928–)
• Undergraduate degree at Harvard
– Worked with George Miller
• Master’s degree at Swarthmore
– Home to Gestalt psychologists
• PhD at Harvard
• 1957: position at Brandeis University
– Influenced by Abraham Maslow
Cognitive Psychology
• Became the bible of the new psychology
• Neisser’s view of the relationship between
cognitive processes and computer
programs became standard for most
cognitive psychologists
Cognitive Psychology
• Traced flow of information through the
organism
– Icon → Iconic storage → Pattern recognition →
Attention
• Reappearance hypothesis: notion that
information is retrieved from memory in the
form in which it is stored
• Utilization hypothesis: we store traces of
earlier cognitive acts, not the products of
those acts
Influence of Cognitive Psychology
• Many psychologists treated the experimental
study of cognitive processes as if they
existed in isolation from other psychological
processes
• Atkinson and Shiffrin model of memory
– Sensory register
– Short-term store (Working memory)
– Long-term store
James J. Gibson (1904–1979)
• Distinctive approach to perception
– Ecological approach
• Two meanings of information:
1. Information about the external world received
in the form of signals that we must encode in
order to process the information contained in
them
2. Information about the world can be picked up
directly
Cognition and Reality
• Ecological validity: something to say about
what people do in real, culturally
significant situations
Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001)
• 1978: Nobel prize for economics
• PhD in political science
• Important contributions to cognitive
psychology
Spurious Correlation and the
Nature of Causality
• Spurious correlation: occurs whenever the
correlation between two variables is due to
a common cause
– Concept implies the existence of a true
correlation
– Problem: how are these distinguished?
Computer Simulation
• Turing’s Test
– Alan Turing
– ‘Can computers really think?’
– Concrete situation = imitation game
• Artificial intelligence
– Series of computer simulations of human
thinking written by Allen Newell and Herbert
Simon
• Ex. program to play chess
Criticisms of Computer Simulation
• What they appear to leave out
– Ex. Emotions
• Computer programs do not show the kind
of insightful behaviour that Gestalt
psychologists believed to be characteristic
of problem solving
• Computer tells us nothing of how the
nervous system works, therefore
inadequate explanation of human
behaviour
Amos Tversky (1937–1996) and
Daniel Kahneman (1934–)
• Collaborative research program
• Focus: judgment and choice
– Good judgment is a prerequisite for being able to
make good decisions
• Kahneman
– Won Nobel prize for economics in 2002
– Dual process theory in which judgment is the
outcome of two distinct systems
• System 1: intuition
• System 2: reason
Heuristics and Biases
• Heuristics: rules of thumb
• Biases: ways in which we are predisposed
to make judgments
• Tversky and Kahneman
– Uncovered several biases associated with
particular heuristics
Intuitive Statistics
• Law of large numbers
• Law of averages
• Gambler’s fallacy
Representativeness and the
Belief in the Law of Small Numbers
• Law of small numbers
• Belief in law of small numbers leads to use
of the representativeness heuristic
Adjustment and Anchoring
• When people make judgments of the
magnitude of something, the initial value to
which they are exposed will bias their
judgment
Availability
• Availability plays a central role in the way
we recall previous experiences
– There may be experiences we have had that
do not come readily to mind
Do statistics courses help?
• Virtually all psychology majors take
courses in research methods and statistics
• Undergraduate training in research
methods may not automatically lead
students to successfully apply what they
have been taught