PSY304 Lecture 1 Notes (Intro to Cognitive Psychology)

*visual memory and language will not be covered in this course

*cny week Thursday will be off! Remember to watch recorded lecture and do quiz!
*to always look at the lecture review at every slides to know what to study

Psychologists:
1.

Applied Cognitive Psychology :

If we are able to catch people’s attention we will be able to accurately create stimuli that makes people
remember what it is

Structuralism :
• How basic elements can add hop together and create a complex phenomena
• Introspection: trained observers were presented with many stimuli and then were told to describe what
were the experiences
• But there may be self bias (introspection illusion) as the results are determined by oneself and not by
other observers

Functionalism :
• why the work the way it does
• He thinks it is more ideal to look at real life experiences than doing tests in the lab (structuralism)

Behaviourism :
• how we behave is a representation of how we think
• Although not being able to measure mental at the point of time but bf skinner said it should not be
ignored

Gestalt Psychology :
• ‘Gestalt’ = shape / configuration
• Perceiving something as a whole and not to differentiate it as an individual pattern
Individual Differences :
• inheritance can be explained through genetic of environment

Cognitive Neuropsychology :
• modularity: independent of each other in the brain / specialised in processing - abstract of what the
brain has
• Anatomical modularity: visual processing system (facial recognition) - location of the parts of the
brain
• Uniformity across people: it is hard to look for people who has brain damage
• Subtractivity: deleting one of the function of the brain due to brain damage (brain damage individuals
should not need to acquire new skills to add up the skills in the brain) - should not wait for too long to
study brain damage individuals as the brain may compensate throughout the years and ‘fix’ itself
(young children brain are more likely to change as they are still developing compared to adult brain
damage)
• e.g : although visual infos of the brain are damaged however, one is still able to show and know if one
thing is dangerous and/or can still know what it sounds like but does not know what it is
• Might have a separate system even though the main system is damaged

Research Methods :
1. Experimental:
• able to measure the indicators (time, recalling, detection)
• Lack of ecological validity: whether studies can be generalise in real life
2. Observation
• naturalistic observation: observing at a side and taking notes
• Hard to hide while observing participants
3. Controlled observation
• manipulating the task to the participants and observe how they react to the situation to note down
• It is for us researchers to record down what is important thus may accidentally missed out other
important events
4. Brain imaging
• MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) / PET (positron emission tomography
• Participants may be claustrophobic
• Expensive to use
Information Processing Approach :
• activating neurones aids to process the information

Connectionism :

Evolutionary Approach :
• Understand how our cognitive system is developed due to evolution
• How it is indicated forward in time (technology and automated devices)

Ecological Approach :
• Individual difference through culture and context
• Need to have a touch to reality
• Linking between our body (sensory information) and mind (I am feeling ………) how we see one thing
can differ on how we feel about a thing or person

Cognitive Neuroscience :
• Understand the brain-based evidence
• Long term memory, specific part of the brain to store our long term memory
• To look for evidences of people with brain impairments in order to