COG Exam I Questions and Answers Already Passed
What is cognition? - Answers An empirical investigation of mental processes and activities used in
perceiving, remembering, and thinking, and also the act of using these processes
What are the four components of cognition? - Answers Acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of
knowledge
Acquisition - Answers How organisms acquire info, get new info from surroundings into the brain and
then use later
- Attention (selective)
- Sensory aspects
- Perception (interpretation)
Storage - Answers How information is stored for later use
How is the brain coding the information?
How long is that information stored?
- Encoding (schemas, visual/auditory/both representations)
- Location (where in the brain)
Retrieval - Answers Pulling material back out
Allows us to go back to storage
Constantly attempting to remember info
- Unconscious (priming, automaticity, associations)
,- Start conscious and end unconscious
- Successes and failures
Use of knowledge - Answers Mental processes that allow us to make use of info
Integrating knowledge and info and using it collectively to problem solve, reason, creativity, hypothetical
situations, comprehend and produce language
Integrating info with stored knowledge
- Language
- Decision making
What is the cognitive approach? - Answers Researcher's believe that human behavior is based on mental
structures and processes
These cognitive processes influence their behavior
Hidden concepts with the cognitive approach - Answers Because cognition is not something that you can
directly see, it has to be studied in indirect ways
Experiments have to come up with a way to test these concepts
Hidden concepts language example - Answers The concept is thought that children have built-in
constraints (mutual exclusivity) that they use when learning language.
Place familiar objects with a novel object. Then ask, "where is the tome?"
If they reach for the novel object, they are using mutual exclusivity to figure that out. They know the
names of all of the other objects, so the new one must be the tome.
Structuralism - Answers Wilhelm Wundt (1879)
,- Opened the lab in Germany
- Conscious experience via introspection
- Understanding the structure of consciousness by observing conscious experience
Introspection - Answers Reflecting about one's own thoughts/experience
- Sensations
- Images
- Feelings
Extremely subjective and low generalizability
Functionalism - Answers William James
- How consciousness functions to help people adapt to changing environment
- Stream of consciousness
- How do cognitive processes work?
Behaviorism - Answers John Watson
- Only studied observable behavior because you can't scientifically study consciousness
- S-R connections
Why is behaviorism incomplete? - Answers Yes, you can observe behaviors, but those behaviors are not
just dependent on environmental stimuli
There are other mental processes that contribute to behavior and how you then respond to a stimuli
Cognitive revolution - Answers 1950s and 1960s
- Methodological changes of how to study the "black box"
- The study of consciousness was now recognized as being necessary
Information-processing approach - Answers - Computer model for studying cognition
, - Serial processing of info where each part is measured
- Encoding, storing, retrieving, and manipulating info
- The serial aspect suggests that each part takes time to engage in, and we can therefore study each
process independently
Connectionism approach - Answers - Cognitive processes result from networking of individual units
- Replaced the IPM
- There are nodes that are activated, which then activate other linked nodes (parallel activation) [stream
of consciousness]
Ecological validity - Answers The ability to generalize findings from research in lab settings to real word
settings
- Eyewitness testimony research
- Eyewitness suggestibility research
Cognitive psychology - Answers The scientific study of mental processes
Cognitive science - Answers An interdisciplinary effort to understand the mind
Law of association - Answers Explain why the activation of some concepts seems to automatically lead to
the activation of others
Psychophysics - Answers The study of the relationship between the physical properties of a stimulus and
the properties taken on when the stimulus is filtered through subjective experience
Fechner - Quantification of the relationship between incoming stimuli and corresponding perceptions
Hermann Ebbinghaus - Answers Memorized a list of nonsense syllables and recorded the number of
trials it took to learn the list to perfection
What is cognition? - Answers An empirical investigation of mental processes and activities used in
perceiving, remembering, and thinking, and also the act of using these processes
What are the four components of cognition? - Answers Acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of
knowledge
Acquisition - Answers How organisms acquire info, get new info from surroundings into the brain and
then use later
- Attention (selective)
- Sensory aspects
- Perception (interpretation)
Storage - Answers How information is stored for later use
How is the brain coding the information?
How long is that information stored?
- Encoding (schemas, visual/auditory/both representations)
- Location (where in the brain)
Retrieval - Answers Pulling material back out
Allows us to go back to storage
Constantly attempting to remember info
- Unconscious (priming, automaticity, associations)
,- Start conscious and end unconscious
- Successes and failures
Use of knowledge - Answers Mental processes that allow us to make use of info
Integrating knowledge and info and using it collectively to problem solve, reason, creativity, hypothetical
situations, comprehend and produce language
Integrating info with stored knowledge
- Language
- Decision making
What is the cognitive approach? - Answers Researcher's believe that human behavior is based on mental
structures and processes
These cognitive processes influence their behavior
Hidden concepts with the cognitive approach - Answers Because cognition is not something that you can
directly see, it has to be studied in indirect ways
Experiments have to come up with a way to test these concepts
Hidden concepts language example - Answers The concept is thought that children have built-in
constraints (mutual exclusivity) that they use when learning language.
Place familiar objects with a novel object. Then ask, "where is the tome?"
If they reach for the novel object, they are using mutual exclusivity to figure that out. They know the
names of all of the other objects, so the new one must be the tome.
Structuralism - Answers Wilhelm Wundt (1879)
,- Opened the lab in Germany
- Conscious experience via introspection
- Understanding the structure of consciousness by observing conscious experience
Introspection - Answers Reflecting about one's own thoughts/experience
- Sensations
- Images
- Feelings
Extremely subjective and low generalizability
Functionalism - Answers William James
- How consciousness functions to help people adapt to changing environment
- Stream of consciousness
- How do cognitive processes work?
Behaviorism - Answers John Watson
- Only studied observable behavior because you can't scientifically study consciousness
- S-R connections
Why is behaviorism incomplete? - Answers Yes, you can observe behaviors, but those behaviors are not
just dependent on environmental stimuli
There are other mental processes that contribute to behavior and how you then respond to a stimuli
Cognitive revolution - Answers 1950s and 1960s
- Methodological changes of how to study the "black box"
- The study of consciousness was now recognized as being necessary
Information-processing approach - Answers - Computer model for studying cognition
, - Serial processing of info where each part is measured
- Encoding, storing, retrieving, and manipulating info
- The serial aspect suggests that each part takes time to engage in, and we can therefore study each
process independently
Connectionism approach - Answers - Cognitive processes result from networking of individual units
- Replaced the IPM
- There are nodes that are activated, which then activate other linked nodes (parallel activation) [stream
of consciousness]
Ecological validity - Answers The ability to generalize findings from research in lab settings to real word
settings
- Eyewitness testimony research
- Eyewitness suggestibility research
Cognitive psychology - Answers The scientific study of mental processes
Cognitive science - Answers An interdisciplinary effort to understand the mind
Law of association - Answers Explain why the activation of some concepts seems to automatically lead to
the activation of others
Psychophysics - Answers The study of the relationship between the physical properties of a stimulus and
the properties taken on when the stimulus is filtered through subjective experience
Fechner - Quantification of the relationship between incoming stimuli and corresponding perceptions
Hermann Ebbinghaus - Answers Memorized a list of nonsense syllables and recorded the number of
trials it took to learn the list to perfection
