PSYC 270 Quiz 1/PSYC 270
Performance Management and
Employee Development | Answers
Already Graded | Fall 2025/26
Updates | 100% Correct - Liberty
Cognitive science studies: - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>- What, why, and how
we think
- What influences thoughts, memory, perceptions, emotions
- How we acquire knowledge
Assumptions of cognitive science - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>materialism
reductionism
empiricism
Materialism - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>cognitive phenomenon's are caused
by processes emerging from the arrangement of matter and energy in
the brain
Reductionism - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>idea that complex systems are
nothing but the sum of its parts and can be reduced to its constituents to
be studied
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Empiricism - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>the view that the experience and
evidence is the basis for formation of ideas
Before cognition there was: - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>psychology and
philosophy
Aristotle - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>philosopher, believed the locus of the
mind is in the heart, insisted on empiricism and proposed the principles
of association
Principles of association (memory) - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>1. Similarity:
conceptually related
2. Contiguity: similar time and space
3. Contrast: opposites
Plato - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>believed the locus of the mind is in the brain,
proposed the wax tablet analogy of memory
William Wundt - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>-Conducted first psychology
experiments in first psych laboratory
- believed the study of psychology was of conscious process and
immediate experience
- Introspection
Structuralism - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>early school of thought promoted by
Titchener; used introspection to reveal the structure of the human mind
Functionalism - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>early school of thought promoted by
William James, aimed to study HOW the mind functioned
Psychoanalytic theory - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>early school of thought that
attempts to explain personality, motivation, and mental disorders by
focusing on unconscious determinants of behavior
- unconscious expressed in the form of dreams and slips of the tongue
Behaviourism - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>school of psychology promoted by
Watson and Skinner, studied observable behavior
- human behavior can be fully explained with an adequate understanding
of stimulus-response relationships
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Challenges to behaviorism - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>- Instinctive drift;
instinct overrides learned behavior in animals
- misbehavior of humans
Noam Chomsky - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>theorist who believed that
humans have an innate ability to develop language, not learned by
reinforcement
Areas of study in cognitive psychology - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>perception,
attention, memory, reasoning/decision-making, categorization, language
Assumptions of cognitive psychology - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>1. Mental
processes exist
2. Mental processes can be studied scientifically
3. Our minds are active information processors
Information processing approach - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>suggests
cognition is a coordinated operation of active mental processes within a
multi-component memory system, like a computer
Two key measures of information processes - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>-
Reaction time: time between a stimulus and person's response to the
stimulus
- Accuracy: how many errors the participant makes
Channel capacity/bandwidth analogy - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>humans are
limited-capacity information carriers, like a telephone wire which can
only carry so many messages at once and if capacity is exceeded it will
lose information
Computer analogy - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>human information processing
is similar to operations of a computer i.e. input, transformation of
information, storage, retrieval, output
Problems with the computer analogy - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>1. Capacity
issues - human memory storage is not fixed, automatization
2. Memory - perceptual reconstruction in humans
3. Intelligence - more than symbol manipulation in humans
The Standard Theory of Cognition - ✔✔ANSWER✔✔->>model of
memory that consists of 3 components: