An overview of cognitive psychology and the study of cognition.

1. Psychology 102: Cognitive processes Dr James Neill Centre for Applied Psychology University of Canberra 2009

2. Reading Gerrig et al. (Chapter 8): Cognitive processes

3. The Brain: 1.5 kg of wet tissue

4. Cognitive Scenarios: A mysterious note At midnight, there's a knock on your door. When you answer, there is no one there, but you see an envelope on the floor. Inside the envelope is a handwritten message: “The cat is on the mat.” What do you make of this? Gerrig et al. (2008), p. 248

5. Cognitive Scenarios: Attention, Problem Solving, Memory... Kris is sitting at a desk reading some interesting papers to help with an assignment. Without removing her eyes from the paper she is reading, she reaches for a bag of sweets, unties a wrapper and pops a sweet into her mouth. Suddenly she stops and wonders: “What is happening here?” Gerrig et al. (2008), p. 248

7. Language use

8. Concepts & their organisation

9. Problem solving & reasoning Overview

11. Cognitive psychology

12. Cognition

13. Processes of attention

16. Cognitive Science

17. Cognitive Psychology

19. Remembering

21. Memories Cognition

23. Knowing

24. Remembering

25. Communicating Cognition

30. Audience design

31. Speech execution & errors

32. Language understanding

33. Language & evolution

34. Linguistic relativity

35. Visual representations

40. Linguistic co presence

41. Physical co presence Audience design

44. Representations Speech execution & speech errors

47. Propositions Language understanding

54. One-word stage : ~1 year old.

55. Telegraphic speech : Before 2nd birthday, “want juice”

56. Complete sentences : 2+ years

58. Between 1 and 18, we learn on ~10 words/day or 3,500 per year.

59. Vocab of ~60,000 by end of high school Time Life Pictures/ Getty Images

61. Inborn Universal Grammar (Chomsky) - the rate of language acquisition is so fast that it cannot be explained through learning principles, so most of it is inborn.

63. bat, has three phonemes b · a · t

64. chat, has three phonemes ch · a · t

66. Pre

67. Un

71. They are hunting dogs.

72. They are hunting dogs .

74. Linguistic relativity proposes that the structure of language has an impact on the way in which an individual and culture perceives, thinks, and acts in the world e.g., temporality (past, present, future), gender, taxonomies; i.e., language precedes and shapes thought Linguistic relativity (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis)

75. Visual representations Perception Imagery Frontal cortex Temporal cortex Parietal Cortex Occipital cortex Perception-Imagery

76. Spatial Mental Model Combining verbal & visual representations

77. 5 minute break – have a stretch

79. Categories & hierarchies

80. Prototypes

81. Category boundary members

83. Concept of “chair”:

86. Closer something is to the prototype of a category, the easier it is to recognise as being in the category

89. Can your neighbour guess the category you are thinking of?

91. Obstacles to problem solving

95. Moves from initial state to a goal Problem solving

96. Problem solving

98. Goal state

100. Ill-defined problem Problem solving

102. Can be inefficient – and no guarantee it will work, but some element of trial and error persistence is often key to solving problems.

104. Follow a series of pre-defined steps guaranteed to work

106. Shortcuts to solving complex inferential tasks

107. May or may not provide the right solution

109. Representative heuristic : Assigns an object to a category on the basis of a few characteristics

110. Anchoring heuristic : Insufficient adjustment up or down from an original starting value when judging the probable value of an outcome Problem solving: Heuristics

114. Fixation – inability to see a problem from a different perspective

116. Mental set – use the mindset that has worked before

121. Lecturers are not students

123. Students are not lecturers

124. Students do not like to study

126. e.g., All parties I ever been to are boring, therefore Jim's upcoming party will be boring too. Inductive reasoning

128. Judgment : Forming opinions, reaching conclusions, and making critical evaluations

129. Decision making : Choosing between alternatives Judging & deciding

131. Availability heuristic – we base our judgements on how available the information is to us mentally.

133. e.g., on the stock market, both the seller and the buyer may be confident about their decisions on a stock.

135. The 9/11 attacks saw a decline in air travel due to fear AP/ Wide World Photos

138. 75% lean

140. If you see that a country is hostile, you are likely to interpret their ambiguous actions as a sign of hostility (Jervis, 1985).

141. Review questions

142. What is cognition? The process and content of “knowing”, including thinking, remembering, and communicating.

151. Jervis, R. (1985, April 2). Quoted in D. Goleman, Political forces come under new scrutiny of psychology. The New York Times , pp. C1, C4. (p. 396)

152. Lieberman, P. (2007). The evolution of human speech: Its anatomical and neural bases. Current Anthropology , 48 (1), 39-66. References