Study sheet: Cognition and Brain: Cognitive Approach

📋 Course Outline

1. Cognitive Psychology and Cognition
2. Mind and Mental Functions
3. Aristotle and Early Foundations
4. Structuralism and Early Experiments
5. Behaviorism and Conditioning
6. Gestalt and Cognitive Maps
7. The Cognitive Revolution
8. Information-Processing Models
9. Connectionism and Cognitive Neuroscience
10. Cognitive Science and Applications

📖 1. Cognitive Psychology and Cognition

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Cognitive psychology : The scientific study of mental processes that allow people to take in, interpret, store, retrieve, and use information to guide behavior.
• Cognition : The acquisition, storage, transformation, and use of knowledge.
• Metacognition : Thinking about one’s own thought processes.

📝 Essential Points

• Cognitive psychology studies:
  • perception
  • attention
  • memory
  • language
  • thinking

💡 Memory Hook

Input → interpretation → storage → retrieval → action

📖 2. Mind and Mental Functions

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Mind : Creates representations of the world and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, visualization, language, problem-solving, reasoning, and decision-making.

★ Must-know

📌 Cognition involves thinking and remembering, emotion involves affective states such as fear or joy, and motivation involves drives that direct behavior toward goals.

Further detail

• Cognitive processes work continuously, interact with one another, and provide the ability to recognize, interpret, and respond strategically to stimuli.

• Understanding cognition is relevant to clinical, educational, occupational, social, and health psychology because cognitive abilities influence everyday functioning and psychological symptoms.

📖 3. Aristotle and Early Foundations

★ Must-know

• Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) considered learning, memory, motivation, emotion, perception, and personality, although his proposals were not scientifically tested over time.

• The four laws of association are (Aristotle):

  • similarity
  • contrast
  • contiguity
  • frequency

Further detail

• The historical study of mental processes was difficult because mental processes cannot be directly observed in the way that physical reactions can be observed.

💡 Memory Hook

S-C-C-F: similarity, contrast, contiguity, frequency

📖 4. Structuralism and Early Experiments

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Structuralism : Explains conscious experience by analyzing it into basic elements such as sensations, images, and feelings.

★ Must-know

• Wilhelm Wundt established the first scientific psychology laboratory at the University of Leipzig in 1879 and developed structuralism.

• Hermann Ebbinghaus used nonsense syllables and the savings method to quantify forgetting by comparing original learning time with relearning time after a delay.

• Ebbinghaus found that forgetting occurs rapidly during the first 1 to 2 days after learning and more slowly thereafter.

• William James developed functionalism, which asked what adaptive purposes mental processes serve rather than what basic elements the mind contains.

Further detail

• Analytic introspection required trained participants to describe their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli.

💡 Memory Hook

Structuralism asks what the mind contains; functionalism asks what the mind does

📖 5. Behaviorism and Conditioning

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Behaviorism : An approach that studies observable and measurable behavior rather than unobservable mental processes.
• Classical conditioning : Occurs when a neutral event is repeatedly paired with an event that naturally produces an outcome until the neutral event produces that outcome by itself.
• Operant conditioning : B.F. Skinner — Shapes behavior through rewards and punishments, with rewarded behavior becoming more likely and punished behavior becoming less likely.

★ Must-know

• In Watson’s Little Albert experiment, a nine-month-old infant became frightened of a rat after the rat was repeatedly paired with a loud noise.

Further detail

• John B. Watson rejected analytic introspection because its results varied between people and were difficult to verify.

💡 Memory Hook

Pairing or consequences → learned behavior

📖 6. Gestalt and Cognitive Maps

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Gestalt approach : Emphasizes that people organize perceptual information and that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

📝 Essential Points

📌 Skinner argued that children learn language through imitation and reinforcement, whereas Chomsky argued that children produce novel and unreinforced sentences because an innate program supports language learning.

• The core Gestalt laws include:
  • proximity
  • similarity
  • closure
  • continuity
  • Prägnanz or simplicity
  • common fate
  • figure–ground organization

• Edward Tolman’s 1938 maze experiment suggested that rats form cognitive maps because they could navigate to a previously rewarded location from a different starting point.

💡 Memory Hook

Gestalt emphasizes organized wholes; behaviorism emphasizes observable responses

📖 7. The Cognitive Revolution

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Information-processing approach : Explains behavior by modeling the mind as a system that receives input, transforms information through internal stages, and produces output.

★ Must-know

• The cognitive revolution began in the 1950s as psychology shifted from behaviorism’s focus on stimulus–response relationships toward studying the operation of the mind.

• Ulric Neisser published the first cognitive psychology textbook, Cognitive Psychology, in 1967.

Further detail

• Thomas Kuhn described scientific revolutions as results of paradigm shifts in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).

💡 Memory Hook

Behaviorism → language challenge → information processing

📖 8. Information-Processing Models

📝 Essential Points

• Broadbent’s filter model proposes that unattended information is blocked by a filter before further processing and transfer to short-term memory.

• The three memory stages are:

  • sensory memory lasting less than 1 second
  • short-term memory lasting a few seconds with limited capacity
  • long-term memory with long duration and high capacity

• Tulving’s long-term memory components are (Endel Tulving, 1972):

  • episodic memory for life events
  • semantic memory for information
  • procedural memory for physical actions

💡 Memory Hook

The mind as a computer: input enters, internal stages transform it, and output emerges

📖 9. Connectionism and Cognitive Neuroscience

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Connectionist approach : Models cognition as simultaneous activation spreading across many interconnected processing units called nodes.
• Cognitive neuroscience : The interdisciplinary study of brain activity linked with mental activity such as perception, thinking, memory, and language.

★ Must-know

• In connectionist systems, knowledge is distributed across connection weights rather than stored as an explicit rule in one location, and learning occurs through gradual adjustment of those weights.

Further detail

• Connectionist models show graceful degradation, meaning that damage or noise usually produces gradual and partial performance decline rather than total failure.

• Neuropsychology studies people with brain damage, electrophysiology studies electrical responses of the nervous system, and brain imaging methods such as PET and fMRI identify active brain regions during cognition.

💡 Memory Hook

Stages and symbols versus parallel networks and brain evidence

📖 10. Cognitive Science and Applications

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Cognitive science : An interdisciplinary project that studies the mind through converging methods and perspectives from multiple fields.

★ Must-know

• Neuroscience contributes knowledge of neurons, brain structures, and neural circuits; linguistics contributes language structure; computer science and artificial intelligence contribute computational models; philosophy contributes foundational questions; and anthropology contributes a cross-cultural perspective.

• Applications of cognitive research include:

  • health care
  • driving
  • education
  • criminal justice

Further detail

• Virtual reality and augmented reality can simulate real-world environments in cognitive research, increasing the potential generalizability of findings beyond the laboratory.

📊 Synthesis Tables

Major Approaches to the Mind

Approach	Main focus	Typical method or model
Structuralism	Basic elements of conscious experience	Analytic introspection
Functionalism	Adaptive purposes of mental processes	Observations of mental functions
Behaviorism	Observable behavior and learning	Stimulus–response analysis and conditioning
Information processing	Sequential mental operations	Computer-inspired stage models
Connectionism	Distributed, parallel activity	Networks of interconnected nodes