PSYC 5140

Cognitive Psychology

Lecture 1:
Introduction to
Cognitive Psychology

2020
Teacher: Urs Maurer
 Course objective

To answer the question “what is the mind?” from

an information-processing/computational
perspective.
Consider some other ways of understanding the mind:

literature
philosophy
astrology

For each, consider:

- what are we trying to explain?
- how do we test whether something is true?
- how do practitioners arrive at consensus?
Cognitive Psychology:

What are we trying to explain?

- how people process information about their environment
- mechanisms involved in perceiving, acting, and thinking

How do we test whether something is true?

- controlled (laboratory) experiments
- modeling (simulation and statistical)

How do practitioners arrive at consensus?

- publications? replications? (often we don’t reach consensus…)
 Office Hours, Location, Contact

• Professor Urs Maurer

• Office: Room 325 Sino Building
• Email: umaurer@psy.cuhk.edu.hk
• Lecture (interactive discussion): Tuesday, 6:30 – 7:55 pm (Zoom)
• Tutorial: Tuesday, 8:00 – 9:50 pm (Zoom)
• Consultation: by appointment

• TA: Jason Lam

• Office: Room 332 Sino Building
• Email: jwhlam@psy.cuhk.edu.hk
• Consultation: Tuesday 3:30 – 5:30 pm online (or by appointment)
 Textbook

Goldstein. Cognitive Psychology:

Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday
Experience (5th Ed./Asian edition
available)

MindTap with CogLab Online Access (Can

be purchased as combo set with textbook)

Additionally recommended (although not

tested):
Eyesenck & Keane. Cognitive Psychology –
A Student’s Handbook (7th Ed.)
Structure
Course Schedule
 Grade Breakdown

Item Weight Date

Quiz 1: short questions (L1-6) 15% 20.10.20
Assignment 1: 2 short essays (L1-6) 20% TBA (around midterm)
Quiz 2: short questions (L7-12) 15% TBA (semester end)
Assignment 2: 2 short essays (L7-12) 20% TBA (semester end)

Group presentations 25% 6.10., 13.10., 27.10.,

3.11., 10.11., 17.11.
Tutorial participation 5%
 Quizzes

• (15%) Midterm Exam (Quiz 1). This exam covers lectures 1 – 6.

• (15%) Final Exam (Quiz 2). This exam covers lectures 7 – 12.

• Quiz 1 and Quiz 2 consist of short questions. They will be held

online. Questions will be published on Blackboard and online.
Students are obliged to submit the answers to VeriGuide by
the end of the exam. Students are allowed to use the learning
material during the exam, but contact with other students
during the quiz is not allowed (Academic Honesty statement).
 Short Essays

• (20%) Assignment 1. Two short essays cover lectures 1 – 6.

• (20%) Assignment 2. Two short essays cover lectures 7 – 12.

• The length of each of the essays is limited to 800 words.

Content and composition will be graded.
 CogLab

• Use the instructions to login

• Each student needs to lead one lab
– Presenter has to:
– Read the background notes and instructions on that lab
– Understand the hypothesis
– Understand the experiment setup
– Do the experiment several times before coming to class
– Act as an experimenter in class
– Discuss the results and its implications
– Other relevant research
– ~15-20mins (see tutorial for exact instructions)
CogLab is part of the MindTap resources:

(see instructions on Blackboard)

Login:
https://login.cengagebrain.com/course/MTPN-R60Q-3F11
Chapter 1
 Example: Non-responsive patients

• Some patients are unable to speak or move willfully

• Are diagnosed based on response to commands as:
– Vegetative state
– Minimally conscious state
• High misdiagnosis rate (43%)
• Neuroimaging may help
– Using executive function as an empirical window to quantify
consciousness
– Movie engages viewers in similar ways; shared conscious experience is
partly mediated by executive processes
– Alfred Hitchcock movie («Master of suspense»)
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5cbvtq
 Example: Non-responsive patients
Naci et al. (2017)

– Brain activation in patient 2 can be predicted based on model from healthy

participants
– Patient 2 engages similar sensory and executive brain functions suggesting
similar conscious experience
– Conclusion: Mind is hidden from view
 The Complexity of Cognition

• Cognitive Psychology
– The branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of
the mind

• What is the mind?

– “He was able to call to mind what he was doing on the day of the
accident”
– “If you put your mind to it, I’m sure you can solve that math
problem”
– “I haven’t made up my mind yet”
– “He is of sound mind and body”
– “He has a brilliant mind”
 The Complexity of Cognition

• Cognition involves
– Perception
– Paying attention
– Remembering
– Distinguishing items in a category
– Visualizing
– Understanding and production of language
– Problem solving
– Reasoning and decision-making
• All include “hidden” processes of which we may not be aware
 What is the mind?

1. The mind creates and controls mental processes such as

perception, attention, memory, emotions, language,
deciding, thinking and reasoning.

2. The mind creates representations of the world so that we

can act within it to achieve our goals.

Deep thought for later: Some theories challenge the distinction

between processes and representations.
 Studying the mind

Lot of philosophers have had things to say about

the mind:

Socrates had a distinct epistemology.

Lao Zi had lots of things to say about the

unreliability of perception.

In this course, we’re restricting our focus to the

study of the mind using quantifiable, repeatable
measurement.

More than the content of the questions, the

procedures for asking questions and establishing
consensus distinguish Cognitive Psychology from
other ways of studying the mind
 Four Main Approaches for Studying the Mind

• Cognitive Psychology:
– Trying to understand human cognition by using behavioral
evidence
• Cognitive Neuropsychology:
– Studying brain-damaged patients to understand normal human
cognition
• Cognitive Neuroscience:
– Using evidence from behavior and the brain to understand human
cognition
• Computational Cognitive Science:
– Developing computational models to further our understanding of
human cognition
 The First Cognitive Psychologists

• Franciscus Donders: Dutch physiologist

– In 1868 he did one of the first cognitive psych experiments
– He was interested in measuring how long it takes a person to
make a decision

– Reaction-time (RT) experiment

• Measures interval between stimulus presentation and person’s
response to stimulus
 The First Cognitive Psychologists

• Donders (1868)
– Simple RT task: participant pushes a button quickly after a light
appears
– Choice RT task: participant pushes one button if light is on right
side, another if light is on left side
 The First Cognitive Psychologists

Measuring
reaction time in
the late 19th
Century…
The First Cognitive Psychologists
 The First Cognitive Psychologists

RT (choice) – RT (simple)  how long it took to make the decision

Choice RT = 1/10th sec longer than Simple RT
 1/10th sec to make decision
 The First Cognitive Psychologists

• Donders (1868)
– One of the first cognitive psych experiments
– Mental responses cannot be measured directly but can be
inferred from the participants’ behavior
• He did not measure mental responses directly
• But inferred how long they took from the reaction times
• This holds for all research in cognitive psychology
• “subtraction” approach is still dominant in neuroimaging today
 The First Cognitive Psychologists

• Wilhelm Wundt (1897)

– Founded the first psychology laboratory
– University of Leipzig, Germany

• Approach: Structuralism
– experience is determined by combining elements of experience called sensations
• He wanted to create a “periodic table of the mind”
• would include all of the basic sensations involved in creating experience

• Method: Analytic introspection

• participants trained to describe experiences and thought processes in
response to stimuli
• Participants were trained to do their description using elementary mental
elements
• Introspection isn’t a great method from the perspective of making
quantifiable, repeatable measurements (see Watson, in a few slides...)
 The First Cognitive Psychologists

• Ebbinghaus (1885/1913)
– University of Berlin, Germany

• Investigated the time course of forgetting

– How rapidly information that is learned is lost over time

• Experiment:
– Used a quantitative method for measuring memory
– Read list of nonsense syllables aloud many times to determine number of
repetitions necessary to repeat list without errors
– After some time, he relearned the list
• Short intervals = fewer repetitions to relearn
– Learned many different lists at many different retention intervals
 The First Cognitive Psychologists

• Ebbinghaus
(1885/1913)
– Savings = (Original
time to learn the list) –
(Time to relearn the
list after a delay)

• Savings curve
shows savings
as a function of
retention
interval
 William James’ Principles of Psychology

• James was an early American

psychologist who taught the first
psychology course at Harvard
University

• Observations based on the functions

of his own mind, not experiments

• Considered many topics in cognition,

Shown here with brother, Henry
including thinking, consciousness, (left) who wrote psychological
attention, memory, perception, novels, mainly about heiresses. (His
imagination, and reasoning. work is also still widely discussed!)

• His work is still widely discussed

 The Rise of Behaviorism

• Many departments of psychology conducted research in the tradition

of Wundt’s laboratory
– Using analytic Introspection

• John Watson (1878-1958) noted two problems with this approach:

– Extremely variable results from person to person
– Results difficult to verify
• Because they are interpreted in terms of invisible inner mental processes

• John Watson proposed a new approach called behaviorism

– Eliminate the mind as a topic of study
– Instead, study directly observable behavior
• This would eliminate the study of unobservable processes
– e.g. reasoning, thinking, emotions,…
 Watson

“Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental

branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of
behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the
scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they
lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness.

What we need to do is to start work upon psychology, making behavior, not

consciousness, the objective point of our attack. Certainly there are enough
problems in the control of behavior to keep us all working many lifetimes
without ever allowing us time to think of consciousness an sich. Once
launched in the undertaking, we will find ourselves in a short time as far
divorced from an introspective psychology as the psychology of the present
time is divorced from faculty psychology.”
Watson (1913).
 Behaviorism

Watson’s goal: replace the mind as a topic of study, with direct

observable behavior

Moving from “What does behavior tell us about the mind” to

“What is the relation between stimuli in the environment and
behavior”
 The Rise of Behaviorism

• Watson and Rayner (1920) – “Little

Albert” experiment
– Classical conditioning of fear
– 9-month-old became frightened by a rat after
a loud noise was paired with every
presentation of the rat

• Examined how pairing one stimulus with

another affected behavior
Some original footage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
• Behavior can be analyzed without any v=FMnhyGozLyE

reference to the mind What happened to Albert?

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/
01/little-albert.aspx
 Classical Conditioning

• Watson’s inspiration for his experiment was Ivan Pavlov’s

research
• Pair a neutral event with an event that naturally produces
some outcome
• After many pairings, the “neutral” event now also
produces the outcome
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhqumfpxuzI
 The Rise of Behaviorism

• B.F. Skinner (1940s through 1960s)

– Interested in determining the relationship between stimuli and
response
– Operant conditioning
• Shape behavior by rewards or punishments
• Behavior that is rewarded is more likely to be repeated
• Behavior that is punished is less likely to be repeated
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-d6jypCsUw
The Rise of Behaviorism
 The Reemergence of the Mind in Psychology

• Although behaviorism dominated American psychology for decades, some

researchers where not strictly behaviorists.

• Tolman (1938) trained rats to find food in a four-armed maze

– Initially, the rat explored the maze, running up
and down each of the alleys
– Then, the rat was placed in A and food in B.
The rat learned quickly to turn right to get food

– However, when the rat was placed in C, the rat

turned left to get the food!
The Reemergence of the Mind in Psychology
 The Reemergence of the Mind in Psychology

• Two competing interpretations:

– Behaviorism predicts that the rats learned to “turn right to find food”
• Did not support behaviorism interpretation

– Tolman believed that the rats had created a cognitive map of the maze
and were navigating to a specific arm
• Even though the rat had previously been rewarded for turning right, its
mental map indicated that is should turn left to reach food
 The Decline of Behaviorism

• A controversy over language acquisition

• Skinner (1957) – Verbal Behavior
– Argued children learn language through operant
conditioning
• Children imitate speech they hear
• Correct speech is rewarded
 The Decline of Behaviorism

• Chomsky (1959)
– Argued children do not only learn language through imitation and
reinforcement
• Children say things they have never heard and can not be
imitating
• Children say things that are incorrect and have not been
rewarded for
– Language must be determined by inborn biological program
– Language is a product of the way the mind is constructed
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zobBTuX03D8
 The Cognitive Revolution

• 1950s is recognized as the beginning of the cognitive

revolution
– A shift from behaviorist’s stimulus-response relationships
– to an approach whose main thrust was to understand the
operations of the mind

• Explain behavior in terms of the mind

 The Cognitive Revolution

• In 1954 IBM introduced a computer that was available to the general

public
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZtdVUB007A

• Early computers (1950s)

– Processed information in stages

• Information-processing (IP) approach

– A way to study the mind created from insights associated with the digital
computer
• How much information can the mind absorb?
• Attend to just some of the incoming information?
 The Cognitive Revolution

• According to the IP approach:

– The operations of the mind can be described as occurring in a
number of stages

• One question to answer was William James’s claim: when we decide

to attend to one thing, we must withdraw from other things

• Cherry (1953): “Dichotic” listening

– Present message A in left ear
– Present message B in right ear
– To ensure attention, shadow one message
– Participants were able to focus only on the message they were
shadowing
 The Cognitive Revolution

• Broadbent (1958)
– Flow diagram representing what happens as a person directs attention to
one stimulus
– Unattended information does not pass through the filter

• A new way to
analyze the
operations of the
mind in terms of a
sequence of
processing stages
Sounds of both Lets through the Records the
attended and attended message, information that
unattended filters the goes through filter • This model could
message unattended easily be tested by
others
 Artificial Intelligence and Information Theory

• John McCarthy (1950s): would it be possible to program computers to

mimic the operation of the human mind?
– Organized a summer conference in 1956 titled: Summer Research Project on
Artificial Intelligence
• Artificial Intelligence
– “making a machine behave in ways that would be called
intelligent if a human were so behaving.” (McCarty et al., 1955)
 Artificial Intelligence and Information Theory

• Newell and Simon created the logic theorist program that could apply
rudimentary logic to creating mathematical theorems
• They demonstrated their program at the conference
– This was revolutionary
– It was a read “thinking machine”
– It did more than simply crunch numbers
– It used humanlike reasoning processes to solve problems
The Cognitive Revolution

Using term
«Cognitive
Psychology»
Birthday of Cognitive
Science
 Developments Since Early Cognitive Psychology

• Developments in Cognitive Psychology since Neisser’s first textbook

1) More higher mental processes

– Not much known about higher mental processes
– Models about higher mental processes could be refined in the meantime (next slide)

2) More physiology
– Neisser was not much interested in physiology
– Large gains in knowledge about nervous system (next lecture)
 Atkinson and Shiffrin’s Model of Memory

• Simple model by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968)

– with boxes representing specific processes
– arrows indicating connections between processes

• Model allowed to focus on one part

– e.g., LTM
• New subdivisions were found
– E.g., Episodic, Semantic, procedural LTM (Tulving, 1972)
 Modern Research in Cognitive Psychology

• How research progresses from question to question

1. Start with what is known
2. Ask questions
3. Design experiments
4. Obtain and interpret results
5. Go to 1

• The biggest challenge of research: picking the right questions!

– Question help us navigate the research trail
 Studying the Mind

• To understand complex cognitive behaviors:

– Measure observable behavior
– Make inferences about underlying cognitive activity
– Consider what this behavior says about how the mind works