Cognitive Psychology For Dummies

Peter J. Hills, Michael Pake

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119953913
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Demystify the core concepts of cognitive psychology

Written specifically for psychology students – and not other academics - Cognitive Psychology For Dummies is an accessible and entertaining introduction to the field. Unlike the dense and jargon-laden content found in most psychology textbooks, this practical guide provides readers with easy-to-understand explanations of the fundamental elements of cognitive psychology so that they are able obtain a firm grasp of the material.

Cognitive Psychology For Dummies follows the structure of a typical university course, which makes it the perfect supplement for students in need of a clear and enjoyable overview of the topic. The complexities of a field that explores internal mental processes – including the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak, and solve problems – can be overwhelming for first-year psychology students. This practical resource cuts through the academic-speak to provide a clear understanding of the most important elements of cognitive psychology.

• Obtain a practical understanding of the core concepts of cognitive psychology
• Supplement required course reading with clear and easy-to-understand overviews
• Gain confidence in your ability to apply your knowledge of cognitive psychology
• Prepare for upcoming exams or topic discussions

Cognitive Psychology For Dummies is the perfect resource for psychology students who need a clear and readable overview of the core concepts of cognitive psychology.

Part I

Getting Started with Cognitive Psychology

Go to www.dummies.com for bonus information about cognitive psychology and almost any other topic that interests you.

In this part …

Understand what cognitive psychology is and why it’s so darn important.

Realise how cognitive psychology influences every aspect of the human experience that involves thinking.

Find useful tips on how cognitive psychology can improve your cognitive skills in school, college, university and almost all walks of life.

Chapter 1

Understanding Cognition: How You Think, See, Speak and Are!

In This Chapter

Defining cognitive psychology

Detailing the discipline’s research methods

Looking at some limitations

How do you know that what you see is real? Would you notice if someone changed her identity in front of you? How can you be sure that when you remember what you saw, you’re remembering it accurately? Plus, how can you be sure that when you tell someone something that the person understands it in the same way as you do? What’s more fascinating than looking for answers to such questions, which lie at the heart of what it means to be … well … you!

Cognitive psychology is the study of all mental abilities and processes about knowing. Despite the huge area of concern that this description implies, the breadth of the subject’s focus still sometimes surprises people. Here, we introduce you to cognitive psychology, suggesting that it’s fundamentally a science. We show how cognitive psychologists view the subject from an information-processing account and how we use this view to structure this book.

We also describe the plethora of research methods that psychologists employ to study cognitive psychology. The rest of this book uses the philosophies and methods that we describe here, and so this chapter works as an introduction to the book as well.

Introducing Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychologists, like psychologists in general, consider themselves to be empirical scientists – which means that they use carefully designed experiments to investigate thinking and knowing. Cognitive psychologists (including us!) are interested in all the seemingly basic things that people take for granted every day: perceiving, attending to, remembering, reasoning, problem solving, decision-making, reading and speaking.

To help define cognitive psychology and demonstrate its ‘scientificness’, we need to define what we mean by a science and then look at the history of cognitive psychology within this context.

Hypothesising about science

Although many philosophers spend hours arguing about the definition of science, one thing that’s central is a systematic understanding of something in order to make a reliable prediction. The scientific method commonly follows this fairly strict pattern:

1. Devise a testable hypothesis or theory that explains something.
   An example may be: how do people store information in their memory? Sometimes this is called a model (you encounter many models in this book).
2. Design an experiment or a method of observation to test the hypothesis.
   Create a situation to see whether the hypothesis is true: that is, manipulate something and see what it affects.
3. Compare the results obtained with what was predicted.
4. Correct or extend the theory.

Philosopher Karl Popper suggested that science progresses faster when people devise tests to prove hypotheses wrong: called falsification. After you prove all but one hypothesis wrong about something, you have the answer (the Sherlock Holmes approach – if you exclude the impossible, whatever remains must be true!). This is also called deductive reasoning (see Chapter 18 for the psychology of deduction).

The scientific method has some clear and obvious limitations (or strengths, depending on the way you look at it):

• You can hypothesise and test only observable things. For this reason, many cognitive psychologists don’t see Sigmund Freud, Carl Rogers and others as scientists.
• You must conduct experiments to test a theory. You can’t do research just to find out something new.

Cognitive psychology employs the scientific method vigorously. Everything we describe in this book comes from experiments that have been conducted following this method. Although this does sometimes limit the questions you can ask, it establishes standards that all research must follow.

Describing the rise of cognitive psychology

Before cognitive psychology, people used a variety of approaches (or paradigms) to study psychology, including behaviourism, psychophysics and psychodynamics. The year 1956, however, saw the start of a cognitive renaissance, which challenged, in particular, behaviourism. For more background on how cognitive psychology emerged from other scientific disciplines, chiefly behaviourism, check out the nearby sidebar ‘1956: The year cognitive psychology was born’.

We don’t intend to minimise the importance of behaviourism: it ensured that the scientific method was applied to psychology and that experiments were conducted in a controlled way. Cognitive psychology took this strength and carried it into more ingenious scientific studies of cognition.

1956: The year cognitive psychology was born

The behaviourist approach dominated psychology until 1956, when enough people found that it was insufficient to understand human behaviour. Specifically, behaviourism couldn’t explain cognition. Part of the issue was that virtually all behaviourist research was conducted on animals (usually rats and pigeons), and perhaps humans are different to animals. Interest in new areas also proved difficult for the behaviourist model to deal with. Imagery, short-term memory, attention and the organisation of knowledge can’t be easily interpreted within the behaviourist model, because behaviourists are only interested in observable behaviour.

The attack on behaviourism became venomous, with American linguist Noam Chomsky leading the charge. He claimed that the behaviourist analysis for language learning was wrong (for reasons we discuss in the chapters in Part IV). His attack coincided with a series of other key papers that showed behaviourism was waning and cognitive science was the way forward: George Miller’s paper on the magic number seven (see Chapter 8), Allen Newell and Herb Simon’s problem-solving model (Chapter 17), and the birth of artificial intelligence. All this happened in 1956. This cognitive renaissance culminated in the first textbook on cognitive psychology in 1967 ...