COGNITIVE/EDUC PSYCHOLOGY
WEEK 1 – COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
• How people perceive, learn, remember, and think about info.
• A cognitive psychologist might study how people perceive various shapes,
why they remember some facts but forget others, or how they learn
language.
- The progression of ideas often involves a dialectic
- A dialectic is a developmental process where ideas evolve over time
through a pattern of transformation.
TWO APPROACHES FROM WHICH TRACES THE EARLIEST ROOTS TO
UNDERSTAND HUMAN MIND
1. PHILOSOPHY – seeks to understand the general nature of many aspects
of the world, in part through introspection, the examination of inner ideas &
experiences.
2. PHYSIOLOGY – seeks a scientific study of life-sustaining functions in
living matter, primarily through empirical (observation-based) methods.
ARISTOTLE – EMPIRICISM
• Nature of reality
- Reality lies only in the concrete world of objects that our bodies sense
• How to investigate reality
- The route to knowledge is through empirical evidence, obtained
through experience & observation
- Observations of the external world are the only means to arrive at truth
JOHN LOCKE (1632-1704) – EMPIRICISM
• Tabula rasa “blank slate”
- Believed that humans are born without knowledge and therefore must
seek knowledge through empirical observation.
- The study of learning was the key to understand the human mind.
RENE DESCARTES (1596-1650) – RATIONALISM
• “Cogito ergo sum” – I think therefore I am
- He maintained that the only proof of his existence is that he was
thinking & doubting.
• Innate ideas
- Felt that one could not rely on one’s senses because those very
senses of the perceptive.
IMMANUEL KANT (GERMAN PHILOSOPHER)
• Dialectically synthesized the views of Descartes & Locke arguing that both
rationalism & empiricism have their place.
• Both must work together in the quest for truth. Most psychologists today
accept Kant’s synthesis.
STRUCTURALISM
• Goal of psychology: to understand the structure of the mind and its
perceptions by analyzing those perceptions into their constituent
components.
• Method
- Introspection: looking inward at pieces of info passing through
consciousness.
- Proponents: Wilhelm Wundt, Edward Titchener
FUNCTIONALISM
• Goal of psychology: study the processes of mind rather than its contents
• Method
- Pragmatist: believed that knowledge is validated by its usefulness.
- Various methods: introspection, observation, experiment
- Proponents: William James, John Dewey
BEHAVIORISM
• Goal of psychology: to study observable behavior focuses only on the
relation between observable behavior and environmental events or stimuli.
The idea was to make physical whatever others might have called “Mental”
• Method: animal experiments, conditioning experiment
• Proponents: Ivan Pavlov, John B. Warson, B.F Skinner
GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY
• Goal of psychology: to understand psychological phenomena as
organized, structured wholes the whole differs from the sum of its parts
• Methods: experiment, observation
• Proponents: Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler
1. COGNITIVISM
- Human behavior can be understood in how people think. It rejects the
notion that psychologists should avoid studying mental processes because
they’re unobservable.
- A synthesis of earlier forms of analysis, such as behaviorism and
Gestaltism. Like behaviorism, it adopts precise quantitative analysis to
study how people learn and think; Gestaltism, it emphasizes internal
mental processes.
KARL LASHLEY (1890-1958)
- Considered the brain to be an active, dynamic organizer of behavior. None
of these activities were, in his view, readily explicable in terms of simple
conditioning.
DONALD HEBB (1949)
- Proposed the concept of cell assemblies as the basis for learning in the
brain. Cell assemblies are coordinated neural structures that develop
through frequent stimulation.
NORM CHOMSKY
- Linguistic arguments against behaviorism. Arguments from language
acquisition
- Behaviorists can’t explain how children can produce novel sentences they
never heard
- Infinite number of sentences we can produce can’t be learned by
reinforcement there must be a cognitive algorithmic structure in our mind
underlying language.
ALAN TURING
- Development of first computers
- His ‘colossus’ computer helped break the German “enigma” codes during
the world war 2
- It has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by 2 yrs.
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