Outline

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Outline

• The Science of the Mind
• Introspectionism
• Behaviorism
• Cognitive Psychology
• Models of the Mind
• Black box
• Jukebox
• The mind box
• Sternberg task

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Introspectionism

• Method
• ask your subjects
• Strength
• First-Person Privileged Access
• Shortcomings
• It provides access to products of thinking,
  rather than the processes that underlie it.
• It relies on conscious report Many interesting
  mental events are unconscious (e.g. memory
  retrieval, or visual processes that lead to
  perceptual illusions).

Edward Titchener (1867-1927)
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Behaviorism

• Method
• Study stimulus-response relations

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Example of Behaviorism Classical Conditioning
1. sight of food ? salivation 2. bell food
together ? salivation 3. bell alone ?
salivation STIMULUS ? RESPONSE
Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936)
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Behaviorism

• Emphasis on what can be directly observed.
• Stimuli ? Responses
• Reinforcements / Rewards
• Ignore the mind (unobservable).

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Behaviorism

• Strengths
• rigorous scientific observation
• controlled laboratory settings
• Applicable to certain areas (e.g., learning
  pairing of stimuli and responses)

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Behaviorism

• Shortcomings
• Limiting science to observable things is a bad
  idea. Theories are about unobservables
• Cant account for much of human behavior.

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Behaviorism

• Cannot explain
• Language
• Attention
• Spatial learning Cognitive Maps

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Behaviorism

• Cannot explain
• Language (Chomsky, 1959)
• Novel words, over-generalizations, no feedback
• mano (hand) -gt nano (meaningless)
• no mas (no more) -gt ma no
• Vs. Associative Learning (Baldwin, 1992)
• Referential looking

Noam Chomsky
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Behaviorism

• Cannot explain
• Attention
• Change blindness
• Two different stimulus -gt same perception
• Same stimulus -gt different perception

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Behaviorism

• Cannot explain
• Spatial learning Cognitive Maps

Edward C. Tolman (1886-1959)
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What do Tolmans Maps look like?
learning can occur without reinforcement Such
latent learning goes against standard
behavioristic principles, which claim that
learning comes only from outcomes
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Rats learn to follow this path
later they can deduce the shorter path.
X
this ability cannot be explained only by links
between stimuli and responses. A better
explanation is to pose the existence of an
internal spatial map
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Cognitive Maps in Bees, von Frisch 1967

• behavior of bees returning to hive after locating
  nectar
• Can use a symbolic form of communication
• Different patterns of dances represent different
  meanings
• Round dance source less than 100 yards from hive
• Figure 8 dance greater distances

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Behaviorism
Study stimulus-response relations, but do NOT
attempt to understand unobservable mental
processes
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Behaviorism
Study stimulus-response relations, but do NOT
attempt to understand unobservable mental
processes
Cognitive Psychology
Study stimulus-response relations to infer the
underlying mental processes. The contents of the
mind CAN be studied scientifically
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How to investigate Perception Cognition

• Ask your subjects (Introspectionism)
• Look at S-R patterns (Behaviorism)
• Infer mental processes (Cognitive Psychology)
• from S-R patterns (Reaction Time, Accuracy)
• from neural patterns (cognitive neuroscience)

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Next . How cognitive psychologists make
inferences about whats inside the black box...