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How does the cognitive approach explain behaviour?
Explains it in terms of internal mental processes such as beliefs and memories so if thinking changes, behaviour will also change.
What internal mental processes does the cognitive approach focus on?
Memory
Perception
Language
Attention
Thoughts / Beliefs
What did Noam Chomsky (1959) study?
Explained how language cannot be learned through classical/operant conditioning, instead we build mental models of the rules of grammar e.g. added ‘-ed’ to a verb to make it past tense.
How is the cognitive approach practical?
It can be applied to therapies e.g. Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy for disorders such as anxiety and depression by changing peoples beliefs and thinking patterns.
What are schemas / schemata?
How thoughts and memories are linked together to influence future thinking. These are influenced by the culture you grow up in.
What did Piaget discover about schemas?
New information is added to schemas through assimilation and that new schemas form through accommodation.
What is an example of assimilation?
A child having the schema for a ‘bug’ to include both insects and spiders.
What is an example of accommodation?
A child learning a spider is not an insect so ‘spider’ and ‘insect’ become separate schemas in the child’s mind.
What did Bartlett (1932) find in regards to how schemas can distort memory?
When telling his 20 students stories about a Native American battle, they tended to change parts of the stories to fit their own cultural schemas when they recalled the information.
What three patterns of distortion took place in Bartlett (1932) study?
Assimilation - story became more consistent with participants’ own cultural expectations.
Levelling - the story became shorter, cutting information not seen as relevant.
Sharpening - changes to the order of the story to make sense, using terms more familiar to their culture.
They also added details or emotions showing how memory is reconstructive and shaped by cultural schema.
What is a stereotype?
An example of a schema - a simplified set of ideas about a person/group that can affect later thinking and behaviour.
What is role schema?
Knowledge about how to act in a certain role.
What is event schema?
Known as scripts - knowledge and expectations of what shuld happen in certain scenarios.
What is self schema?
About us, what we are, how we were in the past, what we hope to be in the future.
Our sense of self.
Why are maladapted schemas an issue?
Can lead to negative thoughts, bias and prejudice. They are a factor in many mental illnesses such as depression, social phobias and OCD.
How can schemas be helpful?
They are cognitive shortcuts that we use to understand everyday life.
How does the cognitive approach explain internal mental processes?
Using theoretical computer models to explain behaviour - this is called making inferences
What is an example of a computer model?
Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) model of memory shows memory as being processed and stored.
What is a weakness of using computer models?
There are lots of differences between computers and the human mid - they don’t actively think and are not conscious of their surroundings.
What is materialism?
The idea that cognitive process are linked to brain activity - cognitive neuroscience assumes all cognitive processes are based on the activity of brain areas and their neurons.
What method is used in cognitive neuroscience?
fMRI - Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging - allows researchers to see which parts of the brain are active when people are performing cognitive tasks.
What is neuroscience?
The study of the brain - accepted in psychology as it provides useful information about cognition.
What is the computer analogy?
Explains how information is processed in the brain the same as a computer - information is taken in via the 5 sense (input), processed by the brain and becomes behaviour (output).
Information can also be stored into the brain like a hard disk on a computer.
What is the Central Processing Unit?
The brain - it encodes information into a suitable format for process/storage.
What is a limitation of the computer analogy?
Machine reductionism - they reduce complex thought processes down to simple mechanical processes.
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