Straightline LIFESPAN Development PSY120 CH8 Questions and complete answers.

PSY120 CH8 cognition ANSWER Cognition can be thought of as the mental processes used in receiving, manipulating, and communicating information. There are many areas that are of interest to cognitive psychologists. Some of these, such as how we recognize, store, and retrieve information have been covered in previous chapters. language ANSWER to express language through speaking and writing thinking ANSWER thinking is an almost hopelessly broad term and could include many, many things. We will limit our discussion of thinking to two areas that have received a lot of attention in cognitive psychology, problem solving and decision making. cognitive psychology William James, Hermann Ebbinghaus, and Franciscus Donders ANSWER As early as the 1800s, William James had laid some of the initial groundwork for a highly influential class of cognitive models referred to as connectionist models; some of the earliest empirical work on memory and forgetting was done by Hermann Ebbinghaus; and the first methods of how to use reaction time to study cognition were laid out by Franciscus Donders. behaviorists ANSWER behaviorists are interested in stimulus-response relations. What happens between the stimulus and response could not be studied scientifically according to behaviorists and was referred to as a black box (Figure 8.1). Well, that was a problem for those interested in cognition because cognition is what happens between stimulus and response. Cognition is inside the black box, and if it cannot be opened, then cognition cannot be a topic of study. It is worth mentioning that behaviorism was in many ways confined to research in the United States and never really caught on in other countries. During behaviorism's heyday, researchers in Europe were studying the topics of problem solving, memory, schemas, and cognitive development. Nevertheless, it would take some time before researchers in the United States joined in the fun. Scientific Attitude toward cognition- the shift ANSWER In the United States, the scientific attitude toward cognition started to shift during the 1950s. During this time, many psychologists became dissatisfied with behaviorism and started to argue that if we want to understand humans, we need to open the black box. We need to understand what the mind is and emphasize that any account of human functioning that does not include the mind is incomplete. Fortunately, there were many researchers interested in studying the mind, and they started getting together to discuss their research at conferences. It was at an MIT conference in September of 1956 that many place the birth of cognitive psychology. At this conference, the black box was officially opened, never to be closed again. During this conference, there were a number of seminal talks