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Sixth Edition
COGNITION
Scott Sinnett | Daniel Smilek | Alan Kingstone
Published in Canada by
Oxford University Press
8 Sampson Mews, Suite 204,
Don Mills, Ontario M3C 0H5 Canada
www.oupcanada.com
Every effort has been made to determine and contact copyright holders.
In the case of any omissions, the publisher will be pleased to make
suitable acknowledgement in future editions.
BF311.S65 2016 153 C2016-900328-0
1 2 3 4 — 19 18 17 16
2 Cognitive Neuroscience 23
3 Perception 51
7 Imagery 201
8 Concepts 239
9 Language 263
10 Problem-Solving 305
13 Consciousness 405
1 Introduction 3
Case Study: What Is Cognition? 4
Cognitive Psychology and Information Processing 5
Information Theory 6
Models of Information Processing 9
Ecological Validity 13
Metacognition and Cognitive Psychology 15
The Range of Cognitive Psychology 17
2 Cognitive Neuroscience 23
Case Study: Head Office 24
The Brain as the Organ of the Mind 26
The Relationship between Mind and Brain 28
Methods in Cognitive Neuroscience 30
3 Perception 51
Case Study: An Unusual Perceptual Experience 52
The Physiology of Visual Perception 53
The Ventral Pathway and Object Recognition 56
Context and Feedback Effects in Perception 61
The Dorsal Pathway and the Relation between Perception and Action 70
Interactions Between the Ventral and Dorsal Pathways 76
Multimodal Perception 79
7 Imagery 201
Case Study: Time–Space Synesthesia and Number Forms 202
Memory and Imagery 203
Synesthesia and Eidetic Imagery 210
Mental Rotation 217
Egocentric Perspective Transformations 227
Controversy over the Nature of Mental Imagery 228
Cognitive Maps and Mental Models 229
Auditory Imagery 232
8 Concepts 239
Case Study: Grasping a New Concept 240
The Classical Approach 240
Learning Complex Rules 244
Wittgenstein’s Analysis of Concepts 246
Rosch and Prototypicality 247
Embodied Cognition 251
Conceptual Modules 257
9 Language 263
Case Study: Reading in the “Olden Days” 264
The Structure of Language 266
Transformational Grammar 269
10 Problem-Solving 305
Case Study: Vaccinating in the Wake of Wakefield 306
Insight Problems and the Gestalt Theory of Thinking 307
Current Approaches to Insight Problems 315
Functional Fixedness and the Design of Tools 320
The Flexibility–Rigidity Dimension 321
Artificial Intelligence Approaches to Problem-Solving 324
Thinking Aloud as a Method for Studying Human Problem-Solving 329
Can Computer Programs Experience Insight? 330
Solving Problems in Science 331
13 Consciousness 405
Case Study: Blindsight 406
Distinguishing among Different Levels of Consciousness 407
Unconscious Perception 409
Consciousness and the Grand Illusion 415
Meta-consciousness 419
Consciousness and the Brain 423
Deficits of Consciousness 429
Phantom Limbs and Consciousness 432
Glossary 438
References 450
Photo Credits 491
Index 492
W hat do we know, and how do we know it? What is the relation between the mind and
the brain? How does memory work? What is intelligence? How do we learn language,
acquire concepts, and solve problems?
These are just a few of the fundamental questions that frame the sixth edition of
Cognition, the essential text for introductory courses in cognitive psychology. Building
on the strengths of previous editions, the sixth edition maintains its clear, straightfor-
ward style and continues to provide fascinating research examples; in addition, it offers
a student-friendly reorganization of key material and a new chapter on consciousness.
Accompanied by a robust suite of ancillaries, Cognition is a well-rounded, current, and
comprehensive text that is both accessible to students and a pleasure to teach from.
13
A new chapter on
Consciousness
consciousness focuses on Chapter Contents
• Case Study: Blindsight 406
consciousness.
• To understand and be able to distinguish different levels of con-
sciousness.
• To look at unconscious perception.
• To explore meta-consciousness, as illustrated by mind-wandering
and lucid dreaming, and how it relates to consciousness.
• To discuss the relationship between consciousness and the brain.
3 | Perception 53
In this chapter we are going to focus primarily on visual perception (multimodal percep-
The outer tissue of the eye
and the first layer that light
the chapters on memory (chapters 5 and 6),
tion will be discussed at the end of the chapter), and so it is worthwhile to begin with a brief
overview of the physiology of the visual system. This overview will help us understand the
passes through on its way
to the back of the eye. a revised approach to explaining memory
perception deficits described in the Case Study, and it will also provide a useful foundation
for understanding some of the findings described later in this chapter.
pupil
The space through which
systems (in Chapter 5), and an enhanced
Visual perception involves the processing of information conveyed by light energy that
enters the eye. As such, it seems reasonable to begin with a brief look at how the eye works.
light passes on its way
to the back of the eye;
adjusted in size by the iris;
discussion of the physiology of visual
A simplified schematic of the eye is shown in Figure 3.1. to an observer the pupil
appears black.
perception (in Chapter 3).
Light energy enters the eye through the cornea, which is the outer transparent tissue of
the eye against which contact lenses are placed. After passing through the cornea, the light iris
makes its way through a small opening called the pupil. The size of the pupil is controlled The tissue that surrounds
by the iris, the coloured tissue that surrounds it and makes the eye look blue, hazel, brown,
the pupil and is responsible 112 Cognition
for the distinct colour of
etc. Next, light is refracted through the lens, which focuses the light on the tissue at the the eye.
back of the eye known as the retina. The retina contains light receptors called photorecep- lens
tors, which are most densely packed in the small region of the retina known as the fovea. The transparent tissue in occurs when you “look” at something “from the corner of your eye.” To experience this,
These photoreceptors capture light energy and through a chemical process transduce it the eye that refracts light just look straight ahead and, without moving your eyes, try to see what a person in the per
into a neural signal that is transmitted by neurons through the optic nerve to the brain. and focuses it on the back
iphery of your vision is doing. In this case, overt attention is focused straight ahead and
of the eye.
The neurons that carry signals from the eyes connect to several regions of the brain covert attention is focused to the side of your line of sight. You will probably find that this
(see Weiskrantz, 1996). One of those regions is the primary visual cortex, located in the retina is hard to keep up; after a few minutes, it’s likely to take you some effort to maintain the
back of the brain. This region is responsible for the early processing of the visual signal and The tissue at the back of
dissociation between your covert and overt attention. Even if the eyes and covert attention
the eye that contains light
is also involved in visual consciousness. Because visual information falling on adjacent receptors. can operate separately, then, this is more the exception than the rule.
areas of the retina is processed in adjacent areas of the primary visual cortex, this region is Findlay and Gilchrist (2003) maintain that overt and covert attention in most cases
photoreceptors
said to be retinotopic. If a part of the primary visual cortex is damaged, the result is blind- move together, and that researchers should focus on studying overt attention because of its
Cells that transduce light
ness in the corresponding area of the visual field. energy into a neural signal. critical role in everyday attending. They argue that the importance of overt attention is re
Early on, the visual cortex was believed to be responsible for all visual processing: lated to the physical constraints of the eye. As we saw in Chapter 3, a highresolution image
fovea
of the world is available only for the small amount of information that falls on the foveal
The region of the retina
The view was trenchantly held that the visual image on the retina, encoding the where photoreceptors are region of the retina. This means that if you want to see something clearly, you have to move
many attributes of the visual scene, was transmitted to, and passively analyzed most densely packed. your eyes so that information falls on that specific location at the back of your eye. In what
primary visual cortex
follows, we will discuss how overt attention shifts (i.e., how the eyes move) during several
Iris The area at the back of everyday tasks such as reading and viewing objects and scenes.
Retina
the brain that is primarily
responsible for the basic
processing of visual Overt Attention During Reading
information.
Cornea
Are your eyes moving smoothly from letter to letter as you read this text? To accurately
retinotopic
Fovea measure the behaviour of the eyes, researchers use complicated eyetracking technology.
A principle of organization
of the primary visual An example of a modern eyetracking device is shown in Figure 4.13. This device works by
cortex, whereby aiming a camera and a small infrared light at the eye and then locating (a) a reflection of
information falling on
this light off the cornea and (b) the location of the pupil, which is the point where the most
Optic adjacent areas of the retina
nerve is processed in adjacent
Lens areas of the cortex.
6 Cognition
every time we count our change we rely on our knowledge of how to add and subtract.
To many people, these everyday activities—attending, comprehending, remembering,
manipulating numerical information—fall under the general heading of “thinking.” To
psychologists, they are aspects of information processing—the subject matter of cogni-
tive psychology.
Information Theory
Basic to the concept of information processing is the idea that information reduces uncer-
tainty in the mind of the receiver. The amount of information provided by a given message
is proportional to the probability that that particular message will occur. If you greet a
friend with the query “How are you?” and receive the reply “Absolutely awful—I must have
picked up a flu bug” rather than a standard “Fine, thanks,” the former reply is much more
informative than the latter because it is much less probable. The idea underlying information-
processing theory is that the information provided by a particular message is not deter- An outstanding art
mined solely by its content, but rather by the whole array of possible messages of which this
program—featuring over
200 photos, figures, and
tables as well as a lively
four-colour design—invites
students to engage with
the text and helps them
visualize key concepts and
theories.
Engaging Pedagogy
Themed boxes draw attention to important points and encourage students to reflect act
ively on what they are learning. 252 Cognition
Have you ever tried to learn a difficult skill such as shoot- For example, imagine that you are looking at a frying
ing a puck or serving a tennis ball? If you have, you most pan with the handle facing to the right. If you were asked
likely had a friend, parent, or coach who gave you a visual to press a key in response to some feature of the pan (e.g.,
demonstration of what you were supposed to do. Seeing its colour or size), you would be faster if you delivered
a motor action performed correctly seems to have an your response with your right hand than with your left,
effect on how well you perform it yourself. Indeed, many presumably because the handle was facing to the right
amateur athletes consciously try to emulate professional and activated a right-hand grasping response; this would
players or Olympic champions. This is a clever strategy, be the case even if you were left-handed (Tucker & Ellis,
as a growing body of evidence suggests that action and 1998). It’s important to note that the direction of the han-
perception are intimately linked. It seems that perceiv- dle has nothing to do with a task involving colour or size.
ing a particular motor action, or even just an object that Nevertheless, response times are faster with the hand that
could be acted upon, such as a puck or a ball, leads to the handle is pointing towards. This type of embodiment
activation in premotor areas of the brain, as if you were has been observed across a variety of experimental para-
somehow preparing to perform a related action. digms, stimuli, and even species: non-human animals also
“Cognition in Action” boxes show embodiment effects (see, for example, Bach & Tip-
per, 2006; Beilock & Holt, 2007; Dipelligrino et al., 1992).
showcase the real-life You might wonder how the link between perception
significance of key concepts and action plays out with experts in different types of
motor skills (e.g., highly skilled athletes or dancers). Do
discussed in the text. they have a stronger embodiment response to motor
actions in their expert repertoire than to actions they
are less familiar with? Do people who become experts
in a particular domain of motor skills have a greater
ability to embody the action involved in that domain?
To address this question, Calvo-Merino and colleagues
(2005, 2006) explored how expert ballet and capoe-
ira dancers responded to dancers performing skilled
moves that they either would perform themselves or
would only see performed by other dancers (e.g., a
capoeira dancer watching a ballet dancer or a female
dancer watching a male-specific move). Measurement
of the viewers’ brain activity, using fMRI, revealed more
activity in response to motor actions that the experts
had been trained to perform than to actions that they
did not perform themselves. These results suggest that
motor expertise can modulate how we perceive action.
Watching professional sports will not make you a
professional athlete. Even so, aspiring athletes should
FIGURE 8.4 | Capoeira
probably watch the experts as closely as they can.
434 Cognition
In the disorders of consciousness discussed so far— neuroimaging techniques discussed in Chapter 2 to solve
spatial neglect, split-brain, phantom limb—conscious- this problem. Owen reasoned that if a measurable brain
ness has been equated with our ability to communicate response could be used as a proxy for a motor response,
that we are self-aware through a behavioural response. then locked-in patients would have the opportunity to
But what if the ability to speak, mouth a word, smile, communicate to others that they were conscious. In his
move a hand, or just blink one’s eyes was absent? If you original paper, published in Science (Owen et al., 2006),
were conscious but unable to communicate this fact to he studied a 23-year-old woman, Sharleen, who had suf-
others, then by definition you would not be considered fered a severe brain injury in a traffic accident. Because
conscious. In short, if the opportunity to self-report she was unresponsive to outside stimulation and did not
awareness is lost, it is impossible to determine if con- exhibit any spontaneous intentional behaviours, Sharleen
sciousness exists. Until now, patients with “locked-in was diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. Using fMRI,
syndrome” following acute brain injury or disease have however, Owen and his team asked Sharleen to engage
been considered to be in a vegetative state in that they in two mental imagery tasks: (1) walking around rooms
show “no evidence of awareness of environment or in her home, and (2) playing tennis. Each task produced
FIGURE 13.15 | Brain imaging results demonstrated similar activity patterns between Sharleen and con-
scious controls when instructed to imagine walking around the house or playing tennis
From Owen, A. M., Coleman, M.R., Boly, M., Davis, M.H., Laurey, S., & Pickard, J.D. (2006), Detecting awareness in the vegetative state, Science, 313, 1402.
901970_13_ch13.indd 434
“Think Twice” boxes THINK T WICE
22/02/16 7:02 PM
Do You Make Errors?
BOX 4 .3
invite students to engage
personally with ideas and Have you ever started walking
down the street and noticed
Reason (1979; 1984) described a series of diary stud-
ies in which participants were asked to keep a record of
issues raised in the chapter. that you still had your slippers
on? Or absent-mindedly tried
every silly (and not so silly) error they made. Interestingly,
Reason found that these errors are often attention- and
to fit a plastic coffee lid on memory-related, and that they tend to occur more at
your porcelain mug? Or put the certain times of the day than at
cereal box in the fridge and the others. To keep track of your action slips
milk in the cupboard? Accord- own everyday mistakes, use a The kind of behavioural
ing to James Reason (1979; diary or your smart phone to errors that often occur in
everyday life.
1984; see also Norman, 1981) record the error, the circum-
these action slips are quite stances surrounding it, and the parallel mental
activity
common, especially when we time of day. After doing this for
Thinking about something
FIGURE 4.10 | An are engaged in some “parallel several weeks, look to see if other than the task at hand.
action slip: putting mental activity” (Reason, 1979, there are any patterns.
a plastic coffee lid p. 76)—a fancy term for “mind
CASE STUDY on a porcelain mug
wandering.”
CASE STUDY
Case Study Wrap-Up
Kim Ung-Yong, the child prodigy who was the subject think just because I chose not to become the expected
of the case study that opened this chapter, was esti- it gives anyone a right to call anyone’s life a failure.”
mated by the Stanford–Binet test to have an IQ of 210. Fortunately, Kim now says he is happy. Although
How Kim would score on the Raven test of g (general his exceptional intelligence has helped him in life, he
intelligence) we don’t know, but according to Spearman’s feels that too much importance is attached to a high
Case study wrap-ups at the two-factor theory of intelligence (Figure 12.2) he would
probably have a very high g. We can likely make the
IQ: “If there is a long spectrum of categories with
many different talents, I would only be a part of the
end of each chapter revisit same assumption with respect to Sternberg’s concept spectrum. I’m just good in concentrating on one
of analytical intelligence, since it has been argued that thing, and there are many others who have different
and expand on chapter- g and analytical intelligence are largely the same. talents.” Thus by his own assessment it seems likely
opening case studies in Where Kim would score on Spearman’s variable s (spe-
cific ability: the variable ability within an individual for
that Kim would have a relatively high g, but varying
specific abilities.
the light of the chapter different abilities) or Sternberg’s practical intelligence As you have probably noticed, one of the messages
is not clear. However, we may find a partial answer in of this chapter is that there are many kinds of intelli-
discussion. Kim’s own reflections on his life. gence. Kim’s story may lend credence to Gardner’s
As we saw, Kim completed his PhD in the US at the theory of multiple intelligences. But a high g does not
age of 15 and then went to work for NASA. But by 1978 necessarily mean that someone will be intelligent
the loneliness of his life there led him to move back to across all domains, or act in the most intelligent man-
Korea. Although he eventually established a successful ner in all situations. There could be many supposed
career in business planning, the choice to return at- geniuses who don’t have a creative bone in their bodies.
tracted considerable attention, and some media critics In any event, Kim’s modest appraisal of his own abili-
judged him a failure. In 2010 Kim told the Korea Herald ties may give hope to the rest of us. Even if you aren’t
that “People expected me to become a high-ranking an expert in calculus, as he was, there are likely some
official in the government or a big company, but I don’t other types of intelligence in which you excel.
336 Cognition
Gick, M., & Lockhart, R.S. (1995). Cognitive and affective components of insight. In R.J. Stern-
berg & J.E. Davidson (Eds.), The nature of insight (pp. 197–228). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Heidegger, M. (1968). What is called thinking? (J. Glen Gray, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row.
Neisser, U. (1964). The multiplicity of thought. British Journal of Psychology, 54, 1–14.
Netz, R. (1999). The shaping of deduction in Greek mathematics: A study in cognitive history.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Simon, H.A. (1967). Motivational and emotional controls of cognition. Psychological Review,
74, 29–39.
Simon, H.A. (1995). The information-processing theory of mind. American Psychologist, 50,
507–508.
glossary, help students fully understand bined, as long as each combination follows certain rules. While languages obviously
vary widely, there are components that all of them share. One example is the phoneme.
represent (in the mind)
language.
important discussions and build their Phonemes are the smallest units in language, and can be combined with other pho
nemes to form morphemes. Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of language.
phoneme
The smallest unit in
discipline-specific vocabularies. For instance, the phonemes /d/, /o/, and /g/ can be combined to form the morpheme
language. Phonemes
are combined to form
/dog/, which also happens to be a word. Note that not all morphemes are words: some morphemes.
are word elements that do not necessarily form words on their own. For example, /s/ by
morpheme
itself is a phoneme, but it becomes a morpheme (i.e., a unit carrying meaning) when it is The smallest unit in
combined with /dog/ to form the plural /dogs/. language that carries
Different languages are composed of different numbers of phonemes. For ex meaning.
ample, whereas English has approximately 44 phonemes (24 consonant and 20 vowel),
Spanish has only 24 (19 consonant and 5 vowel). It’s important to note that new
born infants have the capacity to learn all the phonemes in all the languages of the
world, although babies lose this ability after about a year, as they begin to focus on
the phonemes of the language(s) spoken around them. This explains why learning
CASE STUDIES
Chapter 5 What Was That Movie . . . ? 126 Chapter 11 The (In)famous Hockey Stick 340
CONSIDER THIS
1.2 William James (1842–1910) 12 7.3 Mental Images and Real Pictures 225
2.1 “Mind Reading” 38 8.1 The Downside of Categories 249
3.2 Perceiving Causes in Object Movement 68 9.1 The Evolution of Language 276
3.3 Gibson’s Views on the Perception of 10.3 Self-Control and Problem-Solving 323
Surfaces 76 11.1 Paradoxes, Reasoning, and Recursion 350
3.4 Identifying Objects by Common 11.2 Conditional Reasoning 354
Movement 78
12.2 An Ancient Parallel to Sternberg’s Theory
4.2 Are You Resistant to Dual-Task of Intelligence 387
Interference? 103
13.3 Beyond Human Consciousness 424
5.1 The Battle of the Species 130
13.5 Brain Imaging Reveals Consciousness in
5.4 Memory and the Internet 151 a Patient Diagnosed as Being in a Vegetative
6.4 Implanting False Memories 182 State 434
THINK T WICE
COGNITION IN AC TION
4.4 Eye Movements In Sports: The Quiet 9.4 Lovely Keys and Sturdy Bridges 298
Eye 119 10.2 Problem-solving with Red Green! 315
5.2 Can Amnesiacs Learn? 137 11.3 Is There a Hot Hand in Basketball? 359
6.2 An Exceptional Memory 176 11.4 What a Pain! 361
6.3 Context-Dependent Learning 180 12.1 Can Colour Help Us Solve
6.5 Sleep, Memory, and False Problems? 385
Memory 182 13.1 Backward Masking and the Brain 410
5.2 Some of the many memory 6.5 Flashbulb memories: Terrorist attacks
systems that memory researchers on the World Trade Center, New York
investigate 128 City 170
5.3 Participants in Sperling’s (1960) 6.6 Properties of flashbulb
sensory memory experiment were memories 171
briefly flashed a matrix of nine 6.7 Professor A.C. Aitken 176
letters 129
6.8 Results of Loftus and Palmer’s
5.4 Typical results from Sperling’s experiment 177
experiment 129
6.9 One-week follow-up of Loftus and
5.5 Tesuro Matsuzawa and Ayuma, one Palmer’s experiment 177
of the participants in this intriguing 6.10 Percentage of autobiographical
sensory memory experiment 130 memories in different decades 185
5.6 Working memory model 133 6.11 Depth of processing 188
5.7 The dorsolateral prefrontal 6.12 Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve 191
cortex 134
6.13 The rate at which knowledge of
5.8 Percentage of personal memories Spanish is lost 193
for different time periods 136
7.1 An example of a time space 202
5.9 Henry Gustav Molaison (HM, 7.2 An example of a number form 202
1926–2008) 137
7.3 Paivio’s dual-coding theory 203
5.10 A hippocampus looks like a sea
7.4 Recall performance of the four
horse 137
groups in Paivio’s (1965) study 205
5.11 Patient KC/NN 138
7.5 The results of an experiment
5.12 Fame judgment task (full versus on synesthesia: congruent and
divided attention) 140 incongruent number–colour
5.13 Inclusion versus exclusion task (full matching and memory 211
versus divided attention) 140 7.6 The effects of hypnotically induced
5.14 Meyer, Schvaneveldt, and Ruddy’s synesthesia 213
priming procedure 145 7.7 The sequence of displays in the
5.15 Fragment of a semantic study reported by Cui et al. (2007)
network 146 and the relationships between colour
word identification and vividness of
5.16 Some properties of gang imagery 217
members 148
7.8 Which pairs are drawing the same
5.17 A connectionist model of the object? 218
information in Figure 5.16 149
7.9 Time taken to mentally rotate an
5.18 Google search engine 151 object as a function of angular
5.19 Young and old meeting 152 rotation 219
5.20 Korsakoff’s syndrome, or Wernicke- 7.10 The map of the island used
Korsakoff encephalopathy 153 in a mental image scanning
experiment 221
5.21 Alzheimer’s disease 155
7.11 Results from the mental image
6.1 Jennifer Thompson and Ronald scanning experiment of Kosslyn
Cotton 164 et al. 221
6.2 The mystic writing pad 165 7.12 The museum floor plan used in
6.3 Brown and Kulik’s model of flashbulb the 2004 experiment of Rinck and
memories 167 Denis 222
6.4 Flashbulb memories: The Challenger 7.13 Grid used in the Podgorny and
explosion 168 Shepard experiment 222
8.5 Biological concepts and the brain: 10.7 Maier’s two-string problem 313
results from the Farah & Rabinowitz 10.8 Feeling-of-warmth ratings as a
(2003) experiment involving a brain- function of time spent solving the
damaged individual 259 problem 314
9.1 A page from McGuffey’s Second 10.9 Red Green 315
Eclectic Reader 264 10.10 Insight with and without sleep:
9.2 Reading Lesson IV from McGuffey’s results of an experiment by Wagner
Second Eclectic Reader 264 et al. 319
9.3 A lesson on intonation from 10.11 Effect of pre-utilization on
McGuffey’s Sixth Eclectic functional fixedness as a function of
Reader 265 age 320
9.4 Native speakers of Chamicuro 266 10.12 A portion of the Go-Moku playing
9.5 Widely spoken languages of the surface 326
world 267 10.13 A maze in which you must get from
9.6 A tree diagram of the relationship the start (S) to the goal (G) 327
between two elements experienced 10.14 Solution for the three-ring version of
while listening to music 268 the Tower of Hanoi problem 328
9.7 A finite state grammar 269 11.1 Northern hemisphere temperatures
9.8 Derivation of a sentence using a tree (°C) from 1400 to 1995 as
diagram 270 reconstructed by Mann et al. 340
Acknowledgements
We are supremely grateful to Oxford University Press in general, and to our developmental
editor, Tamara Capar, and editor, Sally Livingston, in particular. We would also like to thank
the reviewers whose thoughtful comments and suggestions helped to shape this edition.
Finally, and most importantly, we thank our wives, Cindy Sinnett, Shelley Smilek, and
Erica Levy, for their incredible support and encouragement. Without their efforts, this
book would not have been possible, and without their patience, we might all now be single.
We dedicate this book to them and to our children.
Chapter Objectives
• To identify the concepts associated with the field of cognition,
beginning with information processing.
• To outline the essentials of information theory.
• To distinguish among different models of the information-
processing approach to cognition.
• To explain the advantages and limitations of the information-
processing approach.
• To review experimental evidence for the information-processing
approach.
• To identify different research methods in cognitive psychology.
For example, The New Oxford American Dictionary underscores a key point: that cognition is the mental
defines cognition as “the mental action or process of action of knowing. How we come to know is the do-
acquiring knowledge and understanding through main of cognition and the focus of this textbook.
thought, experience, and the senses.” This definition
Cognitive Psychology
and Information Processing
The study of human cognition has advanced in three stages (Van Kleeck & Kosslyn, 1991).
The first stage, from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, was one of rapid progression pro-
pelled by the methods of traditional psychophysics (the scientific investigation of the rela-
tionship between sensation and stimulus) and experimental psychology. The second stage, stimulus
under way by the mid-1970s, was fuelled by computational analysis and marked the arrival An entity in the external
environment that can be
of cognitive science. The third phase, which began in the mid-1980s, has incorporated evi- perceived by an observer.
dence from neuropsychology and animal neurophysiology, and most recently an ever-
increasing array of imaging techniques that allow us to observe the brain in action.
Foundational to all of cognitive psychology is the idea that the world contains informa-
tion that is available for humans to process. The importance of this idea cannot be overstated.
Cognitive psychology sees humans not as passive receivers and transformers of signal
information, but as active selectors of information from the environment. Only some of the
information is selected for processing because our nervous systems are able to handle only so
much information at any one time, and only some of the information is responded to because
our head, eyes, hands, feet, etc., cannot be in two places at the same time. Because informa-
tion theory plays a central role in cognitive psychology, it’s essential to have a firm grounding
in it. We’ll begin with an introduction to the basic concept and the classic models.
The amount of information provided by a given event can be quantified in terms of
bits (short for “binary digits”). Imagine a situation in which one of two equally likely events bit
is about to occur: a coin toss, for instance. You are uncertain of the outcome until the coin Short for “binary digit”;
the most basic unit of
falls, but when it does it gives you one bit of information: either heads or tails. Every time information. Every event
the number of equally likely outcomes doubles, the number of information bits you receive that occurs in a situation
increases by one. A common illustration of this process is the old guessing game in which with two equally likely
outcomes provides one
I think of a number and you try to guess it by asking me questions (Garner, 1962, p. 5). The “bit” of information.
number of information bits in play corresponds to the number of questions you need to
ask. Your best strategy is to reduce the number of possibilities by half with each question.
For example, if the number I’m thinking of is between 1 and 8, you need to ask at most three
questions. First, ask if it’s above 4. If the answer is “yes,” then ask if it’s above 6. If the answer
is “yes” again, then ask if it’s above 7. If the answer is “yes,” then the number is 8; if it’s “no,”
then the number is 7.
Every day we take in and act on information in countless ways. As we drive down
the street we take in information about location, direction, the traffic, the weather, the
people on the sidewalk. When we’re learning a new computer system we try to under-
stand and remember the procedures and commands that we’ll need to use later. And
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