Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
1
, Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
• What is Cognition?
o ‘Cognition’ comes from the Latin for ‘understanding’, ‘recognizing’.
o Cognition includes a whole set of processes and abilities that can be
used to gain understanding of the world: Memory, perception, attention,
language, reasoning, awareness, decision making
o In a broader sense, cognition is those internal processes taking place
in the human brain that link input to output.
• In the early days of psychology in the 1950s, cognitive psychologists tended
to think about the brain and mind as a ‘super-computer” - usually referred to
as the Information-Processing Approach. That is, a specific cognitive function
could be thought of as a series of stages starting from input and finishing with
the output. Embedded in this was the notion that these stages are serial (i.e.,
are completed one after the other). However, this concept is problematic in a
number of ways:
o It is strictly serial and does not allow for parallel or cascaded
processing (e.g. carrying out several steps at once); as you will learn in
later lectures, many automated processes (e.g. driving a car) can
involve a high degree of parallel processing.
o It assumes strict bottom-up (stimulus-to-response) processing, and
ignores the influences that ‘the top’ (e.g. goals, prior knowledge,
expectations) can have even on very low stages of processing. In the
examples given in the lecture, we read the same number/letter
differently depending on our current “mind-set”. We expect strawberries
to be red, and so we see the colour red, even if it isn’t there.
How is the world represented in our brains?
• If you can have a thought about it, then ‘it’ must exist in your neurons because
all of your thoughts happen in your brain…
• We call this a neural representation. E.g. A Snapchat is represented on your
phone’s microprocessors as zeros and ones, despite the fact that it looks like
something meaningful to you. So too, that Snapchat image is represented in
your head by the activity of a large number of neurons, despite the fact that it
looks and feels like something meaningful to you.
• Mental representations are our own simulations and interpretations of the
world. They can be driven by external stimuli, but also purely by thought.
• Neural representations are the patterns of brain activity that represent the
outside world.
• It is not a trivial question to link these two levels of representations! This is the
endeavour of cognitive neuroscience.
• How can the responses of single neurons code information if an action
potential always looks the same? (You will have learned about action
potentials in your Psychobiology module. Useful revision video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2hHt_PXe5o)
2
1
, Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
• What is Cognition?
o ‘Cognition’ comes from the Latin for ‘understanding’, ‘recognizing’.
o Cognition includes a whole set of processes and abilities that can be
used to gain understanding of the world: Memory, perception, attention,
language, reasoning, awareness, decision making
o In a broader sense, cognition is those internal processes taking place
in the human brain that link input to output.
• In the early days of psychology in the 1950s, cognitive psychologists tended
to think about the brain and mind as a ‘super-computer” - usually referred to
as the Information-Processing Approach. That is, a specific cognitive function
could be thought of as a series of stages starting from input and finishing with
the output. Embedded in this was the notion that these stages are serial (i.e.,
are completed one after the other). However, this concept is problematic in a
number of ways:
o It is strictly serial and does not allow for parallel or cascaded
processing (e.g. carrying out several steps at once); as you will learn in
later lectures, many automated processes (e.g. driving a car) can
involve a high degree of parallel processing.
o It assumes strict bottom-up (stimulus-to-response) processing, and
ignores the influences that ‘the top’ (e.g. goals, prior knowledge,
expectations) can have even on very low stages of processing. In the
examples given in the lecture, we read the same number/letter
differently depending on our current “mind-set”. We expect strawberries
to be red, and so we see the colour red, even if it isn’t there.
How is the world represented in our brains?
• If you can have a thought about it, then ‘it’ must exist in your neurons because
all of your thoughts happen in your brain…
• We call this a neural representation. E.g. A Snapchat is represented on your
phone’s microprocessors as zeros and ones, despite the fact that it looks like
something meaningful to you. So too, that Snapchat image is represented in
your head by the activity of a large number of neurons, despite the fact that it
looks and feels like something meaningful to you.
• Mental representations are our own simulations and interpretations of the
world. They can be driven by external stimuli, but also purely by thought.
• Neural representations are the patterns of brain activity that represent the
outside world.
• It is not a trivial question to link these two levels of representations! This is the
endeavour of cognitive neuroscience.
• How can the responses of single neurons code information if an action
potential always looks the same? (You will have learned about action
potentials in your Psychobiology module. Useful revision video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2hHt_PXe5o)
2
