Cognitive Psychology

The psychological discipline of Cognitive Psychology was conceived as an improvement on Behaviourist theory.

What is Behaviourism?

Using a Behaviourist perspective, how would you explain the maze behaviour of rats, as researched by Tolman?

What was the importance of such a study?

How did Skinner attempt to explain verbal language using S-R associations?

Computers are very useful machines that process, transfer and manipulate information. Cognitive processes in our brain also function in a similar way.

Propose a model that outlines the flow of information in cognition.

What research method is used to determine the duration, speed and sequencing of mental processing operations? How does it work?

In what ways can information be processed?

Studying the nature of mental process operations is done in an indirect manner. This is because processing is easily manipulated by cognitive biases.

Name the cognitive biases.

All stimulus input of a given event is registered by an individual, yet only a particular portion is selected for higher cognitive thinking.

How does the brain select information to attend to, and what not to attend to?

In what ways can we control

What is inattentional blindness?

What is change blindness?

Name an example.

What does Kahneman propose in his Resource Model of Attention?

Define the terms STM and LTM, and distinguish between the two.

What is iconic and echoic memory?

Explain the Working Memory Model and its components.

How is memory organised?

Declarative or explicit memory is made up of the episodic and the semantic memory systems.

Distinguish between the two.

What is the hierarchical network model?

Distinguish between schemas and scripts.

What is nondeclarative memory or procedural learning?

Distinguish between explicit and implicit memory tasks.

What is a false memory and how is it fabricated?

What is a flashbulb memory?

What is confabulation?

Why might they occur?

Infantile amnesia is the lack of recall of almost all memories that occurred in the first three years of our life.

How does Freud explain infantile amnesia?

What is the reminiscence bump?

What is the 'Transfer Appropriate Processing' principle?