Cognitive Psychology Chapter 1 Q & A

Analytic introspection - A procedure used by early psychologists in which trained participants described their experiences and thought processes elicited by stimuli presented under controlled conditions. Behavioral approach to the study of the mind - When the mind is studied by measuring a person's behavior and by explaining this behavior in behavioral terms. Behaviorism - The approach to psychology, founded by John B. Watson, which stated that observable behavior is the only valid data for psychology. A consequence of this idea is that consciousness and unobservable mental processes were considered not worthy of study by psychologists. Choice reaction time - Reacting to one of two or more stimuli. For example, in Donders' experiment (see Chapter 1), participants had to make one response to one stimulus, and a different response to another stimulus. Cognition - The mental processes involved in perception, attention, memory, language, problem solving, reasoning, and making decisions. Cognitive psychology - The branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mental processes involved in perception, attention, memory, language, problem solving, reasoning, and decision making. In short, cognitive psychology is concerned with the scientific study of the mind and mental processes. Cognitive revolution - A shift in psychology, that began in the 1950's, from the behaviorist approach to an approach in which the main thrust was to explain behavior in terms of the mind. One of the outcomes of the cognitive revolution was the introduction of the information-processing approach to studying the mind. Cognitive science - The interdisciplinary approach to the study of the mind. Cognitive science includes a wide net of disciplines including computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and psychology. Information-processing approach - The approach to psychology, developed beginning in the 1950s, in which the mind was seen as processing information through a sequence of stages. Long-term memory - A memory mechanism that can hold large amounts of information for long periods of time. Long-term memory is one of the stages in the modal model of memory. Mental chronometry - Measuring the time-course of mental processes. Mental rotation - Rotating an image of an object in the mind. Shepard and Metzler's experiment provided evidence that people use this method when asked to determine whether two depictions are of the same object viewed from different angles or are two different objects. Modal model of memory - The model proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin describing memory as a mechanism that involves processing information through a series of stages, which include short term memory and long-term memory. It is called the modal model because of the great influence it has had on memory research.