Cognitive Cognitive PsychologyPsychology

What is Cognitive Psychology?What is Cognitive Psychology?

• The cognitive approach helps us understand how mental mental processes processes shape our behaviour

• Cognition means knowingknowing: how we come to know the world around us

Cognitive psychologyIt is about the way people deal with information. We can receive sensory information, change it, store it, use it and process it in different ways. We can use existing knowledge to help us to interpret new information.

Cognition includes a range of different mental

activities: • attention• perception• memory• decision-making• language.

How do we take in sensory information?How do we take in sensory information?

3 The cognitive approach

How we take in sensory information

Cognitive Psychology - Sensation vs. Perception

• Our senses encodeencode information accurately (sensation)

• Then our mind interpretsinterprets it according to what makes most sense (perception)

• Cognitive processors actively organise and manipulate information that we receive – humans do not merely passively respond to their environment

The human mind is compared with a computercomputer – we are information information

processorsprocessors

How do we perceive the world ?How do we perceive the world ?

• Can we believe the evidence of our own eyes?

• Do we all ‘see’ the same thing?

• Is seeing innate? Or is it learnt?

Visual Cliff• http://computervisionblog.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/cats-and-vision-is-

vision-acquired-or-innate/ (click link to Learn about the kitten experiments)

• http://www.echalk.co.uk/amusements/OpticalIllusions/silhouette/silhouette.html

• http://www.echalk.co.uk/amusements/OpticalIllusions/hollowMask/hollowface.html

• http://www.echalk.co.uk/amusements/OpticalIllusions/colourPerception/colourPerception.html

In this illustration, the stairs should turn upside down during a steady gaze. The wall with the floating glass sphere will shift from the foreground to the background (or vice-versa)

• Stare at the picture (on the left) for about 45 seconds. Then, stare at the white section of this image (the right section). You should see the Queen again. Keep your concentration, and for those 45 seconds, don't take your eyes off the picture.

Ghostly black patches appear at the white intersections. The illusion was noted by Hermann (1870) while reading a book on sound by Tyndall (1869).

By looking at exceptions we learn more about memory

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmkiMlvLKto

If you are fascinated by these concepts….

• Check out this film

http://www.echalk.co.uk/amusements/OpticalIllusions/pinwheel/pinwheel.html

Just for fun

You will be learning about 2 different theories of memory

I am going to tell you a story…………