Cognitive Psychology:

Processing Pyramid & Core Themes

Learning Goals

What is Cognitive Psychology?

  • Cognitive Psychology: The scientific study of how the mind works.
  • Key Question: How does the mind turn information into thoughts, feelings, and behaviors?
  • Most interested in shared/universal/common processes.

Cognitive vs. other psych classes

  • How does this class differ from your other core psych classes: developmental, personality, and social psychology?

Same behavior, different scientific lenses

Tosh spoke up in class today. Why?

  • Developmental psychology asks about age.
    • Does the tendency to speak up change from early childhood to adolescence to adulthood?
  • Social psychology asks about the situation.
    • What in this room, with these people, today, made speaking up likely?
  • Personality psychology asks about lasting differences between people.
    • Why has Tosh been contributing to class discussions since kindergarten, but Jaylen almost never speaks, and Grace is somewhere in the middle?
  • Cognitive psychology asks about the shared mental processes everyone uses to generate thoughts and actions.
    • How did perception, memory, and reasoning processes work together to produce the comment, as well as the rest of the class’s reaction to it?

Cognitive Processing Pyramid

The Brain: how it makes thinking possible

What we will learn: - Neuroscience and how we study the brain. - The brain cells that carry signals, and how information travels across them. - The major structures of the brain, and what each one does.

Perception: how we interpret new information from the world

What we will learn: - Sensation, and the difference between what reaches your senses and what you end up “seeing.” - Attention, and why you cannot process everything at once. - How we recognize an object in a fraction of a second. - The cases where perception is confidently wrong.

Memory: how we store what we process

What we will learn: - The short-term workspace where you hold information you’re currently thinking about. - How something gets into your long-term memory and how you retrieve it later. - What we are most likely to forget, and when forgetting is best. - How memories change every time you use them.

Knowledge: how we organize what we store

What we will learn: - How we use concepts and categories- what makes something a “dog” or a “sandwich.” - How words and grammar carry meaning. - Mental imagery, and whether picturing something is like seeing it. - How organized knowledge lets you answer questions you have never been asked.

Reasoning: how we use knowledge to decide

What we will learn: - Two major types of reasoning and when we use them. - The mental shortcuts that usually work but sometimes fail badly. - How framing a choice differently changes what we decide. - What separates a good decision from a good outcome. - How emotions influence our reasoning.

Our Core Themes

Themes = the big recurring ideas that we will see across our processing pyramid.

Theme 1: Mental Representation

  • Mental Representation: We don’t process the raw world directly; we construct mental representations of it.
  • The map is not the territory.
    • Eyewitnesses to the same crime have different accounts.
    • Is the dress blue or gold?

Theme 2: Bottom-Up and Top-Down Processing

  • Bottom-Up and Top-Down Processing: Cognitive processing is driven from the bottom up by incoming data and from the top down by our prior experiences.
    • You read a smudged word correctly because the sentence told you what to expect.
    • A radiologist sees a tumor on a scan where you see gray blur.
    • You hear your name across a loud room, even though you weren’t listening for it.

Theme 3: Limited Capacity

  • Limited Capacity: We have limited cognitive processing power.
    • How your brain compensates for lack of resources by taking shortcuts.
      • Why no one remembers the last DUO security code they entered.
      • Why studying while watching TV means you do both less well.

Theme 4: Automatic to Controlled Processing

  • Automatic to Controlled Processing: Cognitive processing ranges along a spectrum of effort, from automatic to controlled.
    • How your brain does all sorts of processing without your conscious awareness.
    • How and when our prior experiences can shift processing from controlled to automatic over time.
      • Why driving somewhere you’ve never been when it’s dark and raining takes more effort than driving home on a sunny afternoon.

In Sum: Our Processing Pyramid

We will look at how the mind works at five different levels. Each level is a collection of processes:

  • The Brain: How it makes thinking possible.
  • Perception: How we take in information from the world.
  • Memory: How we store the information we take in.
  • Knowledge: How we organize the information we store.
  • Reasoning: How we use the organized information to make decisions.

In Sum: Our Core Themes

Memorize these! We will return to them over and over, starting with Quiz 1 on Monday.