Assignment: cognitive psychology history

Assignment: cognitive psychology history

Assignment: cognitive psychology history

History of cognitive psychology lecture

Mary Oliver

Psych 640

Ms. Paulette pitt

March 9, 2015

Week I Individual Assignment

Introduction

History of cognitive psychology

Psychometric studies

Benefits of psychometric research

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Uric Neisser is known as the father of cognitive psychology as well as an advocate for cognitive research. During his career he published Cognitive Psychology (1967) in which he brought research together pertaining yo perception, pattern recognition, attention, problem solving, and remembering (APS, 2012). Cognitive psychology is the broad name give to the field of psychology that examines attention, consciousness, information processing, and memory. Researchers in cognitive psychology and sensation perception are sometimes call experimental psychologist. This presentation will describe the history of cognitive psychology. It will explain how and why psychometric studies are used to study cognitive psychology. Finally this presentation will discuss the benefits of research in psychometrics.

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Cognitive Psychology History

Cognitive Psychology makeup

Cognitive psychology focuses on a higher mental processes, including thinking, memory, reasoning, problem solving, judging, decision making and language. It focuses on the study of higher mental processes. Cognitive psychology centers on three major topics: thinking and reasoning, problem solving and creativity, and language. In the 1950s, researchers speculated that some mental operations might be modeled by computers, and they believed that  such modeling might shed light on how the human mind work (Marcus, 2001). Cognitive psychologists often use the computer as an analogy to help explain the relationship between cognition of the brain.  They explain the physical brain as the computer’s hardware, and cognition as its software. The human brain also has an incredible ability to learn new rules, relationships, concepts, and patterns that it can generate to novel situations. The term cognitive psychology became a label for approaches that sought to explain observable behavior by investigating mental processes and structures that we cannot directly observe (Ashcraft & Radvansky, 2009).

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Major Topics

Thinking/Reasoning

Problem Solving

Decision Making

The brain’s processing is the silent operation of thinking. Psychologist define thinking as the manipulation of mental representations of information. The representation may take the form of a word, a visual image, a sound or data in any other sensory modality stored in memory. Thinking transform a particular representation of information into new and different forms, allowing one to answer questions, solve problems, or reach goals. Thinking also involves manipulating information mentally by forming concepts, solving problems, making decisions, and reflecting in a critical or creative manner. In the past Philosophers have considered the foundations of reasoning for some time, it is only recently that cognitive psychologist have begin to investigate how people reason and make decisions. There work has contributed to our understanding of formal reasoning processes as well as shortcuts often used. Reasoning is the mental activity of transforming information to reach conclusions. Reasoning is involved in problem solving and decision making. It is also a skill closely related to critical thinking. It can also be inductive or deductive. Inductive reasoning involves reasoning from specific observations to make generalizations (Tenenbaum, Griffiths, & Kemp, 2006). Deductive reasoning is reasoning from a general case that one know to be true to a specific instance (Demeure, Bonnefon, & Raufaste, 2009). Some psychologist have found that problem solving typically involves three steps: preparing to create solutions, producing solutions, and evaluating the solution that have been generated. When approaching a problem most people begin by trying to understand the problem thoroughly. If the problem is a novel one, they may pay closer attention to any restrictions placed on coming up with a solution. If by chance, the problem is a familiar one, they are apt to spend considerably less time in it preparation stage. Problems vary from well defined to ill defined. Despite obstacles to problem solving people are very skilled at discovering creative solutions to the problems. Reasoning is the mental activity of transforming information to reach conclusions. Decision making involves evaluating alternatives and choosing among them. Reasoning uses establishes rules to draw conclusion, decision making these rules are not established, and one may not know the consequences of the decisions. Assignment: cognitive psychology history