Transcription
Today we're going to talk about the basic principles of cognitive psychology. But before we dive in, what is cognition exactly? Well, cognition is a term that describes the processes and complexes of knowledge itself. Cognitive psychology, in short terms, is the study of the mind and the perception, attention, memory, and procedures that are involved when we receive, collect, and retrieve information.
Cognitive psychologists, in ROI, are the opposing parties to behaviorists, who believe that nothing intervened between stimuli and response in terms of mental processes. These cognitive psychologists abided behind two basic principles that favored them in regards to their opposers. They primarily believe that mental processes can and should be studied scientifically. This was because their study would provide the opportunity to formulate theories that later on could be tested using scientific methods. Making models about the unobservable allowed scientists to reach conclusions and subjects that behaviorists never could. And in addition, the use of cognitive, sociocultural, and biologic levels of analysis provided the use of triangulation in certain studies that led scientists reach a whole new level of depth.
One model that was created thanks to the help of cognitive psychologists proposed the information processing approach to memory. This was the multi-tier model, or MSM. It is composed of three primary stores of memory: the sensory, then short, and finally long-term stores. These three vary in duration, capacity, coding, and advance through varying methods. First, our sensors will pick up on stimuli. Visual information can be referred to as iconic memory, or as addition, echoic memory. Attention is responsible for memory traveling from sensory to short-term stores, which unlike sensory and long-term, has a quite small capacity. Through rehearsal, information will then go to the long-term and can later be retrieved, bringing it back to the short-term store again.
There have been several studies made to research memory phenomena. A well-known one being that of Glanzer and Cunitz in 1966. This study was taken about by showing subjects a list of 15 words with the instruction to memorize them. Half of them recalled the words immediately, while the other had a 30-second delay where they will were told to count backwards in threes from a three-digit number in order to avoid rehearsal. As expected, with subjects that recalled immediately, researchers received results with primacy and recency effects. These being when one recalls smallest the first and the last words that you read. With subjects that recalled after a delay, recency effects were no longer visible, given that short-term memory was lost after the 30 seconds. But primacy effects still affected the curve of recall. This went along with the MSM, seeing as primacy effects showed how the first words are commonly the most rehearsed, showing to be the most recalled in both trials. While the recency effect went on to prove that recall, while the recency effect came on to prove that we recall best the things that remain in short-term memory, even though they remain there for a short time period. This therefore shows that mental processes can can and should be tested scientifically.
Secondly, cognitive psychologists stood behind the idea that mental representation guided behavior. They thought that reality was always interpreted through cognitive mediators that hindered the process of input to output. This went along with the schema theory, a cognitive structure that provided an idea as to how information was organized and clustered. According to this model, we divide knowledge into three categories: scripts, self, and social schemas. These effects allow for information processing efficiency, as well as regulating behavior and her responses. Yet, they can also lead to distortions when the wrong scheme has become activated.
A famous study that pinpointed this idea was that of Loftus and Palmer in 1974. Scientists here aimed to find interactions between language usage and memory by changing the phrasing of a question in order to see its influence on the judgment of speed. They tested subjects in a laboratory experiment, which gave the study high-level self-control, yet low ecological validity. 45 students were shown the same seven short, second-long films of traffic accidents, though with varying orders. By the end of each video, they received a questionnaire asking them to give an account of the accident they had witnessed and then answer a series of short questions. Most of these were irrelevant, except the one critical question that would determine the outcome of the study. The answer to this would be the dependent variable. This critical question asked participants to state the speed the cars were going when they hit each other. However, the twist that made this question be the independent variable was the verb. Other words instead of the word "hit" were smashed, collided, bumped, and contacted. Groups of nine were shown different words, and their estimate of speed would determine the lab outcome. In the end, results found that there were was an interaction between these factors, seeing as more violent verbs received a higher mean speed. The results were the following: smashed received 40 points a mph mean, collided received 39.3 mph mean, bumped received 38.1 mph mean, hit received 34.0 mph mean, and then contacted received received 31.8 mph mean, showing a significant effect between wording and eyewitness answers.
There are a few reasons why this may have occurred. One being demand characteristics that may have caused faulty collection like response bias or the Hawthorne effect, where uncertain participants would have used the verb to bias their response. And the other one being the distortion of memory occurring due to the activation of different schemas. The verb would make the participants see either a more or less severe accident in their mind.
In order to further support their experiment and rule out the possibility of data-changing effects, Loftus and Palmer conducted a follow-up lab where they showed 150 participants a 1-minute film that contained a multiple car accident. The sample of subjects was divided into three groups. One group was asked a questionnaire including a critical question that asked the speed that the cars hit each other. The other, a questionnaire and then a critical question that was phrased with the word "smashed" instead. And then there was a final control group that got asked no questions at all. After one week's times, participants were asked to recall the clip and answer whether or not they saw any broken glass, even though the film showed none. Results showed the following: the group that received the verb "smashed" claimed 32% to have seen broken glass, whereas "hit" 14%, and the control group 12%. This showed how the schema distorted their memory by creating an expectation of probability that glass was broken due to the intensiveness of the verb.