Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of how people and animals process information. It studies how we acquire information, store information in memory, retrieve information and work with information to reach goals. In all these cases, individuals deal with internal or mental representations.There is a long history of cognitive psychology:Ancient Greeks (500 B.C)Plato stated that there is ultimate knowledge and we only see representations of that. The ancient Greeks are also the founders of epistemology.Empiricism and associationism (17th – 19th century)Empiricists stated that all knowledge comes from experience and the followers of the associationism stated that ideas and memories were linked by associations (e.g: cow and milk are associated and thus easier remembered together).IntrospectionismThe followers of Introspectionism stated that all cognitive processes could be consciously reported by using introspection. The disadvantages of this are that it required a lot of training and could not be used with a lot of people, with children and with people with reduced mental capacities. The idea that all cognitive processes could be consciously reported was later debunked because a person is not able to report how that person perceives visual illusions. Besides that, reporting a process also has the potential to slow down the process.BehaviourismThis approach states that it is impossible to know what cognitive processes are active. The only observable things are the input and the output. It also states that all behaviour can be explained by reinforcement and punishment; all mental phenomena could be traced to behavioural activity. Behaviourists also state that language is learned by reinforcement and punishment as well.Tolman was a behaviourist but was the beginning of the end for behaviourism. He stated that rats have mental maps or mental representations of a spatial layout. Tolman partially debunked the behaviourist approach...

Attention is a limited resource that is deployed to facilitate the processing of critical information. One basic taxonomy of attention states that there are two types of attention:Internal attentionThis refers to selecting control strategies and maintaining internally generated information, such as rules, responses, long-term and working memory. It involves regulating our internal mental life. Internal attention deals with our internally generated thoughts, desires and motivations.External attentionThis refers to selecting and controlling incoming sensory information.Posner stated that there is an attention system, that exists of three different systems:Alerting (brain stem and frontal cortex)This is responsible for achieving a state of arousal. It uses the neurotransmitter norepinephrine.Orienting (frontal and parietal cortex, including the frontal eye fields)This is responsible for directing our processing resources to incoming information. It can be described as external attention. It uses the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Executive function (medial frontal and parietal cortex)This is responsible for the supervision of attention. It decides where the attention should go. It can be described as internal attention. It uses the neurotransmitter dopamine.The cocktail party problem refers to focusing on one speaker in a background of noise and other conversations. There are several theories of attention. There are filter theories, that describe when we process the incoming information:Theory of early selectionThe sensory memory briefly maintains information from all perceptual systems and only the relevant information gets stored in the short-term memory. The irrelevant information gets sorted out early on in the information processing cycle.Theory of late selectionAll sensory information is identified, but only attended information gets stored for further processing. The irrelevant information gets sorted out late in the...

The case of H.M demonstrates three important aspects of long-term memory processes:Long-term memory processes are not distributed throughout the brain.Long-term memory encompasses a number of different abilities.Memory is separable from language, perceptual and other cognitive functions. Amnesia refers to a pattern of memory loss affecting elements of long-term memory, while short-term memory remains intact. It is sometimes also called the amnesic syndrome. Amnesia has a number of general characteristics:Short-term memory is intactMemory for language and concepts is intactThere is severe and lasting anterograde amnesia: memory for events after the onset of amnesia will be impaired.There will be retrograde amnesia, the patient will have a loss of memory for events prior to the onset of amnesia.Skill learning, conditioning and priming will be unaffected.Ribot’s law states that recently formed memories are more susceptible to impairment than are older memories. The Wechsler Memory Scale is a widely used neurocognitive assessment that measures visual memory, auditory memory and working memory. There are several causes for amnesia, such as brain surgery, infections, head injuries, a stroke or Korsakoff’s syndrome, in which a thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency causes brain damage. James made the difference between primary and secondary memory. Secondary memory is long-term memory. Verbal learning refers to the area of experimental psychology concerned with how we learn and remember language-based items. There is a distinction in long-term memory between the following to long-term memory types:Non-declarative memory (implicit memory)This is the memory that is not accessed consciously and that we are not able to report verbally. It includes memory which benefits from previous experience but without our awareness of that experience.Declarative memory (explicit memory)This is the memory that involves conscious recollection of memories...

Concepts are mental representations of classes of items (e.g: dogs). Imagery is the mental representation of sensory properties of objects, experiences as like perceiving the object but with less vividness than in reality. There are different approaches to concepts.The definitional approach looks at the definition of an object in order to form a concept. The concepts are based on the definition of the word. This approach looks for well-defined concepts. The main problem with this approach is that most everyday concepts are not so well defined. The prototype approach looks at the most typical of a ‘family’ of concepts which represents the other concepts. Typicality is the extent to which an object is representative of a category. Members of a category share a family resemblance. This is the tendency for members of a category to be similar to each other but without having any characteristic in common to all of them. The more an item of a category has a family resemblance, the more typical it is deemed to be. The item in a category that has the highest overall family resemblance to the other category members is the prototype of that category. The prototype is an ideal example that best represents a category. The prototype does not have to exist. It is the statistically average member of the category. Categories and concepts typically form into hierarchies. Lower level categories are nested within higher-level categories. The mid-level category is the basic level of categorization. These are categories formed of items that are highly similar and at an intermediate level in a concept hierarchy. The problems with the prototype approach are that some objects are more readily categorized as something, even though it looks more like a different prototype and some things don’t have prototypes, such as rules or beliefs. Ad hoc categories are categories formed of items that meet a given goal. The family resemblance does not work for ad hoc categories....