0908 A history and the beginning Cognition: - Cognition is the act of thinking (the mind) and how it affects our behaviors. - Cognition is rooted in the brain and changes as a function of the environment. Philosophical foundations of cognitive psychology Some foundational ideas that are still present today. 1. Ancient Greek philosophers thought about the locus of the mind, sensations, memory, and basis of human personality. 2. Many took an analytical approach to understanding the human mind by breaking it down into parts of studies. Epistemology is the philosophical study of human knowledge 1. Socrates - The socratic method involves questioning everything to arrive at a truth - Including clarification, questioning assumption, and seeking alternatives. - Basis of cognitive psychology as well as cognitive behavioral therapy - We must question our actions because of uncertainty. - There are basically a lot of uncertainties in our lives. 2. Plato - He is the student of Socrates - Knowledge involves both experience and reason, prior knowledge, deductive reasoning - The world is a reflection of reality - External. Bottom-up and internal, top down, processing interact. - His view is associated with rationalism and emphasizes the importance of a priori knowledge - There is an innate aspect to our mental processes and reasoning - Observation does not always lead to certainty. Rationalism: reason is the chief of knowledge and testing knowledge. Experience from external world+ how we reason our external information using prior knowledge which comes from top-down. Deductive reasoning is from general to specific. 3. Aristotle - Thought observation is the center of human knowledge. - Empiricism is all knowledge comes from experience and observation - He emphasized empiricism, inductive observational reasoning or learn
from what your see, which is different from rationalism. - Developed theories that emphasized associations in knowledge - Thought arise from forming associations among observations - The mind is nothing before forming associations - A foundational idea and shows the importance of observation, but led to some errors Early days of experimental psychology - 1800s. - Structuralism focuses on 1. Identifying the basic elements of thought 2. How are they combine to form complex thoughts? - Practiced introspection: people reported their thoughts or observations. Wilhelm Wundt - German - Began and practice structuralism. - Frame psychology as a new science that could associate with others. - Tried to identify the simplest units of the mind that he thought followed certain laws to create complex thoughts. - Used empirical introspection: psychophysics. - Psychophysics examines basic cognitive phenomenon by linking sensory experiences, mental processes, to physical changes. - Examples include measuring the threshold for feeling the touch from a feather and measuring the smallest amount of change in pigment to notice a difference between two colors. Wundt's empirical introspection - Experimental self-observation - Often used mental chronometry - Estimating time for a participant to perceive something - He created the thought meter: it will ring when reach the end of a side, and he let participants to show