1913 Watson's "Behavior Manifesto"

- against introspective technique

A commitment to the ideas of equipotentilaity and tabul rasa eventually cause trouble for strict behaviorism

The Brelands' Miserly Raccoon

1961 The Misbehavior of Organisms

"Instinctual drift" overwhelms learned behaviors

- nonlearned behaviors

Verbal Learning

Tulving (1962)

List of unrelated words

Multitrial free recall

Subjective organization

Linguistics

1957 Skinner language is verbal behavior

1959 Noam Chomsky "Cognitive Manifesto"

- rejected behavioral explanations of language

- language is creative and novel

- internal rules

Computer Science and Communications

Three Assumptions of Cognitive Psychology

1. Mental processes exist

- Lawful, systematic events that can be studied scientifically

2. Humans are active information processors

3. Time and accuracy measures can be used as objective measures of mental activity and to answer questions about mental processing

For example: How do people read?

In general, it takes less time to recognize a word than a single letter

Encoding, storage, and retrieval of information

Subject to distortions due to expectancy, emotion, attention.

Three Ways to Measure Memory

1. Recall

2. Recognition

3. Relearning

Three Stages of Memory:

1. Sensory Memory

Sensory Registers

Iconic, echoic

Encoding: direct veridical code

Storage capacity: large

Duration: brief (several hundred ms)

2. Short Term Memory

Encoding: Articulatory/Acoustic coding, Visiospatial Sketch Pad

Storage Capacity: 7 +/- 2 chunks

Duration: 20 seconds without rehearsal

3. Long Term Memory

Constant interaction with short term memory

Rote vs. elaborate rehearsal

Encoding: Semantic, schematic, constructive

Storage Capacity: Unlimited?

Duration: Forever?

Subtypes of LTM:

1. Procedural

2. Declarative

a. episodic

b. semantic

Forgetting

Decay

Interference

Retroactive

Proactive

 

Evidence for a distinction between short-term and long-term memory

1. Serial Position Curves

primacy and recency effects

2. Anterograde and Retrograde Amnesia

Improving Memory: Mnemonics

Peg Word Method

Method of Loci