Chapter 1

Understanding Cognition: How You Think, See, Speak and Are!

In This Chapter

Defining cognitive psychology

Detailing the discipline's research methods

Looking at some limitations

How do you know that what you see is real? Would you notice if someone changed her identity in front of you? How can you be sure that when you remember what you saw, you're remembering it accurately? Plus, how can you be sure that when you tell someone something that the person understands it in the same way as you do? What's more fascinating than looking for answers to such questions, which lie at the heart of what it means to be . well . you!

Cognitive psychology is the study of all mental abilities and processes about knowing. Despite the huge area of concern that this description implies, the breadth of the subject's focus still sometimes surprises people. Here, we introduce you to cognitive psychology, suggesting that it's fundamentally a science. We show how cognitive psychologists view the subject from an information-processing account and how we use this view to structure this book.

We also describe the plethora of research methods that psychologists employ to study cognitive psychology. The rest of this book uses the philosophies and methods that we describe here, and so this chapter works as an introduction to the book as well.

Introducing Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychologists, like psychologists in general, consider themselves to be empirical scientists - which means that they use carefully designed experiments to investigate thinking and knowing. Cognitive psychologists (including us!) are interested in all the seemingly basic things that people take for granted every day: perceiving, attending to, remembering, reasoning, problem solving, decision-making, reading and speaking.

To help define cognitive psychology and demonstrate its 'scientificness', we need to define what we mean by a science and then look at the history of cognitive psychology within this context.

Hypothesising about science

Although many philosophers spend hours arguing about the definition of science, one thing that's central is a systematic understanding of something in order to make a reliable prediction. The scientific method commonly follows this fairly strict pattern:

1. Devise a testable hypothesis or theory that explains something.

   An example may be: how do people store information in their memory? Sometimes this is called a model (you encounter many models in this book).

2. Design an experiment or a method of observation to test the hypothesis.

   Create a situation to see whether the hypothesis is true: that is, manipulate something and see what it affects.

3. Compare the results obtained with what was predicted.
4. Correct or extend the theory.

Philosopher Karl Popper suggested that science progresses faster when people devise tests to prove hypotheses wrong: called falsification. After you prove all but one hypothesis wrong about something, you have the answer (the Sherlock Holmes approach - if you exclude the impossible, whatever remains must be true!). This is also called deductive reasoning (see Chapter 18 for the psychology of deduction).

The scientific method has some clear and obvious limitations (or strengths, depending on the way you look at it):

• You can hypothesise and test only observable things. For this reason, many cognitive psychologists don't see Sigmund Freud, Carl Rogers and others as scientists.
• You must conduct experiments to test a theory. You can't do research just to find out something new.

Cognitive psychology employs the scientific method vigorously. Everything we describe in this book comes from experiments that have been conducted following this method. Although this does sometimes limit the questions you can ask, it establishes standards that all research must follow.

Describing the rise of cognitive psychology

Before cognitive psychology, people used a variety of approaches (or paradigms) to study psychology, including behaviourism, psychophysics and psychodynamics. The year 1956, however, saw the start of a cognitive renaissance, which challenged, in particular, behaviourism. For more background on how cognitive psychology emerged from other scientific disciplines, chiefly behaviourism, check out the nearby sidebar '1956: The year cognitive psychology was born'.

We don't intend to minimise the importance of behaviourism: it ensured that the scientific method was applied to psychology and that experiments were conducted in a controlled way. Cognitive psychology took this strength and carried it into more ingenious scientific studies of cognition.

1956: The year cognitive psychology was born

The behaviourist approach dominated psychology until 1956, when enough people found that it was insufficient to understand human behaviour. Specifically, behaviourism couldn't explain cognition. Part of the issue was that virtually all behaviourist research was conducted on animals (usually rats and pigeons), and perhaps humans are different to animals. Interest in new areas also proved difficult for the behaviourist model to deal with. Imagery, short-term memory, attention and the organisation of knowledge can't be easily interpreted within the behaviourist model, because behaviourists are only interested in observable behaviour.

The attack on behaviourism became venomous, with American linguist Noam Chomsky leading the charge. He claimed that the behaviourist analysis for language learning was wrong (for reasons we discuss in the chapters in Part IV). His attack coincided with a series of other key papers that showed behaviourism was waning and cognitive science was the way forward: George Miller's paper on the magic number seven (see Chapter 8), Allen Newell and Herb Simon's problem-solving model (Chapter 17), and the birth of artificial intelligence. All this happened in 1956. This cognitive renaissance culminated in the first textbook on cognitive psychology in 1967 by Ulric Neisser, a German-American cognitive psychologist. He described this book as an attack on behaviourism.

Looking at the structure of cognition (and of this book)

Fittingly, we're writing this book to bring cognitive psychology to a wider audience around the 50th anniversary of the first published cognitive psychology textbook (in 1967).

Applications

In Part I, we review the applications of cognitive psychology and why studying it is important. Cognitive psychology has produced some incredibly exciting and interesting findings that have changed how people view psychology and themselves (as you can discover in Chapter 2). But also, people have learnt a great deal about how best to teach, learn and improve themselves from cognitive psychology, something we address in Chapter 3. The applications of cognitive psychology are so wide that studies are used in such disparate fields as computing, social work, education, media technology, human resources and much more besides.

Information-processing framework

In this book, we follow the information-processing model of human cognition. In many ways, this approach to cognition is based on the computer. The idea is that human cognition is based on a series of processing stages. In 1958, Donald Broadbent, a British psychologist, argued that the majority of cognition follows the processing stages we depict in Figure 1-1. The boxes represent stages of cognition and the arrows represent processes within it.

© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Figure 1-1: Basic processes in cognition according to information processing.

All cognition fits within this framework. Cognitive psychologists research each box (stage) and each arrow (process) in Figure 1-1 in many different domains. In other words, this framework provides a good structure for how to think about and learn about cognitive psychology (and oddly matches the framework of this book).

Your leg bone's connected to your knee bone

Cognitive psychology's favoured information-processing framework corresponds well with how the brain seems to process information. People have sensory organs that detect the world. These connect to parts of the brain devoted to perception (in the case of vision, the occipital lobe in the back of the head). The information then passes forward from the perception centres to the attention centres (the parietal cortex, just in front of the occipital lobe) and then to the memory centres (the temporal lobe, in the middle of the head). Higher-level reasoning and thinking are primarily processed in the frontal lobes at the front of the head. Although a gross oversimplification, this description is a nice fit with the information-processing account of cognition.

Information processing may not be as simple as Figure 1-1, progressing in perfect sequence from the sensory input to long-term storage. Existing knowledge and experience may cause some processing to be in reverse. These two patterns of processing are...