Skip to main content
Loading Explore guides…
Cognition · Acedra
Home
Explore
Psychology
Cognition
Sign in to save
Chat
If YouTube asks you to sign in, open the video on YouTube.
Watch on YouTube
Reload player
Transcript
45 segments
Copy
Hide video
0:00
Introduction to Cognition (a history of the mind) We have a lot of expressions and metaphors that have something to do with how we think. “Don’t mind it,” “Mind your own business,” and “You’re always on my mind” have something to do with a thing or person living inside your head rent-free, of being conscious or aware of them. “Off the top of my head” and “I can’t get you out of my head” look at the mind as some sort of place that contains things.
0:27
Meanwhile, “What do you think,” “Are you thinking of what I’m thinking,” and “Cause when I’m with him, I am thinking of you” all have something to do with opinions, decisions, and memories, and the processes that lead to them. Actually, cognition has something to do with all of these. Cognition refers to our mind, a system that creates representations and controls mental functions and processes, allowing us to act in the world and achieve the goals we set.
0:54
Cognitive psychology is then the study of the mind and mental processes, including its characteristics, properties, and operations. And from that definition, you might think it’s boring. Processes functions representations wow, exciting. Don’t be fooled. Cognition is so crucial to our everyday lives because it shapes how we perceive the world (and how we fall for illusions), how we remember and organize information (and why you remember
1:23
the correct answers only after you’ve submitted the exam), how we understand and use language (and why things sound better in our head, and are a disaster when we say them out loud), and how we make reasoned solutions and decisions (but still make bad assumptions and choices most of the time). Cognitive psychology is the study of what’s going on inside our head, how we can think better, and why we mess up anyway. Cognitive psychology has a long past and an exciting present
1:56
You can say that cognitive psychology, and psychology overall, began with the question: How do we know what we know? Put another way, where does knowledge come from? And so, in our field’s long history, we started with our philosopher friends over in Greece until enlightenment period Europe who battled out with their ideas. Rationalism, based on the ideas of “theory of forms” Plato and Rene “cogito ergo sum” Descartes, emphasized that knowledge is derived from how we think about things
2:25
and how we process information to come up with new conclusions. Meanwhile, empiricism, as can be seen in the writings of “potentiality-actuality” Aristotle, John “tabula rasa” Locke, and Francis “scientific method” Bacon, argued for the opposite side: knowledge can come only from experience and observation of the world. Makes sense: you need observations that become knowledge first before you can organize anything.
2:52
The point of this is that over the years and up to the present, we have been trying to understand how much our thinking processes rely on incoming versus preexisting information when perceiving, remembering, knowing, talking, solving, or deciding. We say that a process is data-driven or bottom-up when we focus on novel data we’re encountering at present, and knowledge-driven or top-down when we rely on what we know and remember.
3:20
However, these processes work together so we can have a holistic and accurate experience of the world around us. Indeed, English philosopher John Stuart Mill and German physiologist-turned-psychology-founder Wilhelm Wundt talked about creative synthesis, or how complex ideas can be traced to the organization of more basic thoughts. So, we use both our knowledge inside our head and the knowledge outside in the world to make sense of the people and places we encounter everyday.
3:49
At present, cognitive psychologists typically follow four paradigms when they theorize and do research about our cognitive processes. These approaches to cognition emerged because of the great influence of other natural, social, and applied sciences on our field. Word of warning: These influences are by no means linear, so they overlap and occupy the same time periods, giving us the diversity of perspectives we have in cognitive psychology.
4:17
When we study the origins of cognition in the brain, we look at neural structure and function One debate that has occupied much of psychology’s history is the mind-body problem: how can sensory experiences and neural activation be transformed into conscious perception and thought? Early thinkers believed in the duality of mind and body — that these two are separate entities. So, there needs to be a place where the two meet. Aristotle proposed that the mind is at the heart.
4:51
Meanwhile, Descartes argued that the two meet in the pineal gland, the only part of the body that does not have a mirrored partner across the mid-sagittal plane which divides the body split down the middle. Then, around the time of the Industrial Revolution, physicists and engineers began to develop the first robots called automata, which operate through clockwork mechanisms and fluid dynamics. Trying to solve the mind-body problem, philosophers of that time believed that humans operated
5:20
in the same way: with gears in our heads, and the substance of ideas coursing through our (hollow-tube) nerves. They were onto something: Everything can be explained using the laws of nature, so the brain could also be reduced into chemicals and physical parts. Eventually, biologists and physiologists provided a more accurate picture of what's happening inside us by investigating how brain functions correlate with specific behaviors.
5:47
Two of our paradigms in cognitive psychology are then focused on neural structure and functioning. First, cognitive neuropsychology tries to establish brain and body connections by looking at the deficits and disorders experienced by people who have some form of brain injury. This includes studies involving autopsies of human cadavers (or the clinical method), brain lesioning of animal samples (or extirpation and ablation), and case studies of individuals
6:14
with unique forms of brain injuries that affect equally specific behaviors (or dissociation). For instance, the work by the physicians Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke started how we understood language processing in the brain, by looking at the brains of patients who have noted disturbances in their language abilities. British neurologist Oliver Sacks is also well known for publishing many books that describe
6:38
his own observations regarding patients he encountered who had unusual neural and behavioral differences. The point is that they correlate what parts of the brain are injured with what behavioral deficits are observed. Meanwhile, cognitive neuroscience tries to understand how our brain functions by using neural recording and brain imaging methods. Camillo Golgi and Franz Nissl completed early studies on neuron structure and function by
7:08
introducing the silver nitrate strain and cresyl violet techniques to highlight the neuron's overall structure and its cell body features, respectively. Yes, the Golgi apparatus and Nissl bodies in cells are named after them. Later on, the single neuron recording procedure made possible discoveries on the mechanisms of propagated neural responses. In recent years, we use more advanced technologies to study the brain.
7:34
Techniques such as computerized tomography and transcranial magnetic stimulation are used to see where in the brain a particular function originates. Meanwhile, event-related potentials detected using electroencephalography, magneto-encephalography, positron emission tomography, and functional magnetic resonance imaging give us information about brain function by seeing how different parts of the brain are activated across time when engaged in a particular task.
8:04
These techniques differ on two dimensions: spatial resolution (or how clear brain images are, allowing us to pinpoint specifically what parts of the brain are involved in a particular function), and temporal resolution (or how well the method allows us to measure the duration and progression of functions). Given these insights, how far have we come on resolving the mind-body problem? German physiologist Johannes Muller tried to resolve this crisis by saying that both
8:31
mind and body are made of the same substance. In his Doctrine of Specific Nerve Energies, all nerve fibers carry the same type of electrical signals. The nature of sensory information is then specified by which fibers are active (or simply, where the signal is coming from). Then, as physiologist Karl Ewald Hering would eventually declare, all psychological processes are dependent on some neural activity, a principle we now call psychophysical isomorphism.
9:02
The field's purpose is then to discover how these connections came to be, since how electrical information is transformed into conscious experience remains an open question. Cognitive neuroscience and cognitive neuropsychology focus on the brain to discover the neural underpinnings of psychological behavior. Beyond that, the methods and techniques used in these approaches show us that many of the cognitive functions we thought are independent actually share the same neural networks, which
9:32
allow for the coordinated and complex behaviors that we’re able to do everyday. 1.3: We can study cognition by experimenting on and modelling psychological processes and behaviors Question: How do you measure the mind? Well, as the cognitive neuroscientists and neuropsychologists showed, you can scan the brain or look for damages that cause changes in behavior. But surely, taking out the brain, poking it around, and slicing it into bits while its owner is still alive is not the answer.
10:07
Instead, as researchers in experimental cognitive psychology did, you must infer cognitive processes by looking at observable behaviors. This insight sounds obvious to us now, but it actually took a long time for us to realize which methods can most reliably and validly measure what’s going on inside our heads. In fact, prior to developments in the 1800s, it’s largely believed we can’t actually study the mental basis of behavior objectively at all. Then this was proven wrong.
10:36
For example, Dutch physiologist Franciscus Donders designed reaction time studies to see how people make choices about stimuli presented to them: He found that it takes longer for people to decide whether one of two lights turned on, rather than just pressing a button when a light turns on. So, adding an element of decision-making makes people think longer, thus taking more time to finish the task. Meanwhile, Ernst Weber and Gustav Fechner were curious about how well people are able
11:07
to perceive stimuli of different intensities. So, they developed psychophysics, a set of methods that aimed to connect stimulus intensity with a person‘s judgments of how strong a sensation is. Through these methods, they discovered our absolute threshold (or how strong a stimulus should be before we notice that it’s present) and difference thresholds (or how big a change in the intensity of a stimulus should happen before we notice that something did change).
11:34
Put another way, the absolute threshold is how many teaspoons of sugar you have to put in a sugarless coffee before you taste the sugar, while the difference threshold is how many more teaspoons of sugar you need to add before you end up with a sugar solution that happens to have coffee in it. Hermann von Helmholtz, Thomas Young, and Karl Ewald Hering (who we've met earlier) also used methods such as reaction time studies, illusions, and light matching experiments
12:02
to discover how we perceive color and provide insights that would later inform physiologists about the biological basis of color perception. Similarly, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted studies on memory and quantified how long it took for us to forget things, how much and how fast memory decays simply because of the passage of time. Then, Wilhelm Wundt (often called the father of psychology) and Edward Bradford Titchener
12:31
founded structuralism with an emphasis on analytic introspection, the process of analyzing conscious experience into more basic sensory units. Their argument is that for us to understand how the brain works, we need to partition consciousness into its parts and discover the rules of how they’re put together. However, drawing on the work of evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin, William James reacted with functionalism how psychology should instead focus on the adaptive and survival functions
13:01
of consciousness and cognition. Simply, for the first few years of psychology, the mind and cognition were of central interest in the field. Then everything changed when the behaviorists attacked. American psychologists John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner pioneered behaviorism, an approach to studying human abilities by focusing on observable behavior. While Skinner was amenable to translating mental functions into their observable manifestations,
13:30
Watson was adamant that psychology would only attain the status of a respectable science if it would abandon cognition. In these decades when behaviorism took center stage in the US, psychology lost its mind. In its place, Watson emphasized classical conditioning (or studying how behaviors can be activated by pairing reflexes with stimuli), and Skinner focused on operant conditioning (or how reinforcement and punishment patterns changed how frequently behaviors occurred).
14:00
Simply they believed that all human behavior and learning abilities can be reduced to relationships between stimuli and the responses they activated. No thinking required. But later behaviorists were questioning this oversimplification of human behavior, thus setting forth the cognitive revolution: the return of cognition into the center of psychology. Edward C. Tolman studied how rats navigated mazes to get food, and found that the rats
14:26
would eventually develop cognitive maps or internal representations of the surroundings they’re moving around in. Meanwhile, Albert Bandura designed studies to show that children are capable of learning not only by experience but also through observation or modelling. At the same time, we have human agency, or the ability to think about our actions, plan ahead, and evaluate if we’re reaching the goals we set for ourselves. Watson’s and Skinner’s style of behaviorism can’t account for these.
14:57
Then, linguist Noam Chomsky argued that everyone across cultures had the capacity for language acquisition because of innate language abilities. He was pointing out that Skinner’s account of language development, where infants learned how to talk merely through imitation and reinforcement, can’t explain the complexity of language that children can produce. Chomsky says that there are too many parts of language that are learned even without
15:23
being reinforced, and that children end up making grammatical errors almost spontaneously despite being unrewarded. Across the Atlantic in Europe, Gestalt psychologists Max Wertheimer (studying perceived motion), Kurt Koffka (on perception), and Wolfgang Köhler (investigating insight) would declare that the whole is different than the sum of its parts by introducing the principles of perceptual organization. Unfortunately, the onset of World War II would postpone further studies on this field as
15:55
European psychologists were forced to evacuate from their home universities. Eventually, Gestalt psychology will be rediscovered in the US thus driving further the birth of cognitive psychology. Perhaps, another reason for the cognitive revolution is the change in technologies that were available, which have been influential in deciding what metaphor to use when describing human cognition. We’ve had automata as a precursor to a mechanistic and chemical view of humans, then telegraph
16:25
and typewriters for observable stimulus-response relationships. However, the 1950s saw the beginnings of the modern computer which would find its way to our households and workplaces. Because of this, computational cognitive science borrowed technological terms to explain even more complex conceptions of cognition: processing speed, task switching, input-output, processing capacity, all of these. One significant contribution that psychology contributed to this multidisciplinary field
16:56
(shared with philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and anthropology among others), is the information-processing approach which explains how people take in, operate on, and use information they gather from the world. Essentially, as in computer science, this approach laid down flow diagrams that described the systems architecture and operational cycles of the human mind. British psychologists Colin Cherry and Donald Broadbent designed experiments on attention
17:24
to understand how people filter multiple streams of information and decide which one to prioritize at a given time. Herbert Simon and Allen Newell created actual programs that tried to mimic human logic and problem solving, thus realizing mathematician James McCarthy’s proposal of a machine capable of human thinking which he called artificial intelligence. Experimental cognitive psychologists, by discovering the capacities and limits of human cognition,
17:53
allowed computational cognitive scientists to determine the rules and principles that their own computer simulations must follow in order to more closely reflect human thinking. For example, George Miller famously declared seven (plus minus two) as a magical number, referencing his discovery that this is the optimal capacity of our short term memory. Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin inspired explorations into higher mental processes
18:22
by specifying the intricate relationships between sensory, short term, and long term memory stores. Then, Endel Tulving demonstrated that long term memory has episodic, semantic, and procedural memory components. These findings are important because computer simulations become more informative in modelling our abilities when we have a more precise understanding of the components and processes of human cognition.
18:48
Still, we’ve been dancing around what cognitive psychology is, even with the almost 300 years of history we’ve been talking about, from the early physiologists to the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Symposium on Information Theory conferences. So far, we’ve had findings but not a field. Finally, in 1967, Ulric Neisser published the textbook “Cognitive Psychology”, which
19:18
he wrote to assess the state of the field at the time. His book focused more on basic perception and information processing, while higher mental processes and the influence of neuroscience were less emphasized. And that’s where we are now. We have four paradigms of research on human cognition because of its sheer complexity - that after all of these years, we still don’t know everything there is to know about our own cognitive abilities.
19:44
That’s why neuroscientists and neuropsychologists look at the brain and the nervous system, why experimental psychologists and cognitive scientists use behavioral measures and computer models: each approach, method, and means of looking at human cognition provides a piece of the puzzle into understanding the biological, psychological, and sociocultural bases of human perception, memory, knowledge, language, and thinking.
20:10
It’s been a long journey, and we hope that it will still be an interesting adventure into human cognition from here on out. In this lesson, we defined cognition and cognitive psychology, while taking a time travel trip across time and space to see that cognitive psychology took a while to be a formal field. We found that research on human cognition relied on insights from physics, chemistry, anatomy, and physiology, thus the emphasis on neural structure and function in cognitive
20:43
neuroscience and neuropsychology. Meanwhile, working with computer scientists, linguists, philosophers, and other social and natural scientists, experimental psychologists and computational cognitive scientists designed studies to understand the characteristics and principles that underlie our abilities. So, why is it important to look at the history of our field? Especially for cognitive psychology, our past shaped our priorities, methods, and directions at present.
21:12
Indeed, the sequence of our lessons would begin with more basic perceptual and memory abilities. Then, with the basics covered, we’d proceed with the more complex knowledge, language, problem solving, and decision making processes. See you then!
Here to help you learn
Sign in to keep a private conversation with your course tutor.
Ask me anything about the material…
Sign in to chat