Introduction: What is cognitive psychology?

Historically, psychology was divided into three divisions, cognition, affection, and conation. Cognition dealt with perception, thought and behavior; affection concerned itself with emotions and feelings; and conation with motivation and will. Cognitive Psychology still primarily deals with what processes take place and how they are done, rather than why we do it or how it feels.

Perception, attention, memory, reasoning, decision making, comprehension, skilled performance, expertise, comprehension, interpretation. These are the topics that Cognitive Psychologists study and the topics for our course.

The primary method for cognitive psychology is experiment. Cognitive psychologists are almost all experimental psychologists. Many other students of cognition such as cognitive neuroscientists and researchers in education also primarily use experimental methods, but many, philosophers of mind, cognitive linguists, computer scientists, cognitive anthropologists, and logicians, primarily use other methods. We all learn from each other under a broad discipline called Cognitive Science.

Cognition is the foundation of most human endeavors. Knowing something about human cognition can profit you in almost anything that you might do.

Basic concepts in cognitive science

Although the interest in cognition goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, new ideas and technology that developed in the 20^th Century lays the groundwork for modern cognitive science. The most important advances revolve around new concepts of Information, and Information Processing. The concepts are difficult to understand, and we still do not know all that we should, but much of what has happened, not only in cognitive science, but also in the modern technological world are based on these ideas.

What is information? Information is a pattern or form that can ride on matter or energy. What is critical is the pattern, rather than the energy itself. Patterns can be saved in different media; they can be transformed into new patterns and then restored; they can interact with other patterns to produce new patterns; they can be changed, they can be simplified, they can be transduced or changed. Seeing a duck is identifying a pattern of light. Listening to a sentence is responding to a pattern of sound. Reading a sentence is responding to a pattern of marks organized into a pattern of letters and words. In these cases, the intensity of the energy that carries the pattern is not informative of the pattern itself. A man named Alan Turing, in 1950 showed how information can be transformed into a sequence of elements and then reconstituted, if needed elsewhere.

Information processing is the study of the flow of information from one location to another and how it gets transformed, reconstituted, or interfered with. The information superhighway is the technological system that makes full use of these ideas.

Information processing systems:

All information processing systems seem to have these general components.
receptors--senses
processors--transform, interpret, integrate, select--attention, set, automatic and controlled processes.
memories--long term, short term, working, STSS.
effectors--muscles, glands

History.
The topics studied by cognitive psychologists are some of the first topics studied by psychology, both prior to and after it became a science. The earliest issue was probably How do we know about the world? Two early answers were that we know by experience (empiricism), and we know by reason (rationalism). This led to the study of perception and thought. The question of memory and the obvious fact that things that we know and learn are organized led to ideas of association of ideas and ultimately to the methodological techniques of introspection and the experimental study of behavior (behaviorism). The studies of those periods led to methods and ideas which are used today.

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