COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
WHAT IS COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
Cognitive Psychology as defined by Rutgers University:
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mind and mental function, including learning, memory, attention, perception, reasoning, language, conceptual development, and decision making.
Language
Language the basis thought of language is that children simply imitate what they hear, this is only partially true, it is much more complicated than that. Many psychologists have studied on the theory of imitation.
Edward Thorndike, he said that trial and error is an important part of the learning process. He studied cats trying to escape a box, their outcome was affected by their reward or punishment. He believed these connections got stronger each time they tried to escape. This is called connectionism.
He also thought that the law of recency, it states that latest response will determine next occurrence.
Emergentism, teaches that learning and using language come from some basic principles that are not language specific. Language seems to be a gift that is human specific. No other creature on the planet has the capability. This does not however mean that they cannot communicate.
Intelligence
Intelligence gives us the ability to perform different mental tasks such as problem solving, reasoning, learn from experience, and untangle difficult ideas. Or if you prefer a more simpler way to define it, it’s the ability to take in and understand information. Intelligence is most commonly observed in humans, but has been studied on different species of animals.
Attention
Attention is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether deemed subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information.
Our brains can only focus on a few select things at a time, we choose what to pay attention to, whether it be what the teacher is wearing instead of what they’re saying. Or our cell phone rather than where we’re walking. Our brains are pretty amazing though, although our main focus is on one specific thing we can pick up on other things that’s around us.
So we may remember some parts of that lecture the teacher with the funny shirt was giving or we can stop before running into something while looking at our cell phone (this has to do with peripheral vision)
Something important about attention is that it is limited like previously stated we can only focus on so many things at a given time, it is still unsure the exact limits on what all we can focus our attention to and actually be able to retain what we observed.
Perception
Perception is defined as our recognition and interpretation of sensory information. Perception also includes how we respond to this information. Think of perception as how we as take in information from our surroundings and use that to interact with our environment. Perception lets us take information from the world around us and turn it into something useful. A good way to think about it is a word for example. A word is made up of many letters, if we could not perceive things all we would see or hear is a bunch of letters.
Memory
Memory is the process which we use to acquire, store and later on retrieve information that we take in from our surroundings. The three stages of memory are encoding, storage and retrieval. Encoding is basically taking the data from our sensory organs and turning it into a form which can be stored in the brain. After that is must be stored for later use. Retrieval allows us to bring those old memories into our conscious mind. There are two kinds of memory, short term and long term. Short term only lasts 30 seconds after you obtain the information. Long Term memory is stored outside our conscience ( which means we don't think about it) and can be stored for long periods of time. The more notable the event is in life the longer it will be remembered for example your first day of high school.
Decision Making
Throughout your day you might come across some decisions that need to be made and you might just feel like flipping a coin and let the coin decide your fate.
Truth be told, there are a few different ways.
The single feature model - say you are buying cereal at the store and you buy the cheapest one there just because its the cheapest there, disregarding the ingredients company reputation and only look at one feature. Or there is the additive feature model, in which you would look at all the aspects of the decision instead of just one.
Important Cognitive Psychology Vocabulary Terms
Syllogistic Reasoning - Determining whether a conclusion follows from two statements that are assumed to be true.
Theoretical Reasoning - Reasoning directed toward arriving at a belief.
Practical Reasoning - Figuring out what to do, or reasoning directed toward action.
Reasoning - A mental activity that consists of organizing information or beliefs into a series of steps to reach conclusions.
Analogical problem solving - Solving a problem by finding a similar problem with a known solution and applying that solution to the current problem.
For AP Psychology Course (Advanced Placement (AP) Psychology (also known as AP Psych)).
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