| Test 1: Review Chapter 1: Be familiar with the assumptions of behaviorism and how behaviorism developed as a response to introspective psychology. Understand what forces led to the eventual downfall of behaviorism. Be familiar with the three basic assumptions that pervade the field of cognitive psychology. Chapter 2: Explain how psychologists use time and accuracy measures to scientifically study human cognition. Understand how the computer analogy has guided thinking on human memory and cognition. Is the analogy valid? Trace information flow in the standard stage model of human memory, from the sensory registers through long-term memory. Identify the limits of the standard model of memory, and how modern cognitive psychology has updated the model to include elements like parallel processing and context effects. Be able to label/identify various brain structures, as well as the function of each structure. How do the principles of contralaterality and hemispheric specialization help in understanding the effects of brain damage on cognitive processes? Chapter 3: Describe Sperling’s study, including the difference between the partial and whole report conditions. Also focus on how Sperling’s tasks allows us to determine the duration and amount of information that can be stored in visual sensory memory. Describe the template and feature detection models of pattern recognition. Explain whether these models account for both data-driven and conceptually-driven processes in pattern recognition. Explain how connectionist models of pattern recognition work, by describing the processing underlying the input, hidden, and output units. Explain the general idea behind agnosia, using prosopagnosia, apperceptive agnosia, and associative agnosia as specific examples. Describe how researchers estimate the loss mechanism, amount and duration of storage in auditory sensory memory. Chapter 4: Be able to explain how spotlight attention works, using data from Posner’s spatial cuing task. Describe selective attention, as well as Norman’s pertinence model. Be familiar with the criteria for automatic and effortful processing, and how these criteria help explain the Stroop effect. Know how practice relates to automaticity. Think of examples where automaticity is a disadvantage. |
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