The Different Facets of Mental Functioning - Essay Example

Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology that deals with the scientific study of the mind. Generally, "mind" means the normally functioning human mind, but cognitive psychologists study abnormally functioning human brains (such as stroke or trauma victims), developing minds of young children, animal minds and computers to help develop theories of how the mind performs various tasks. Cognitive psychology as a distinct area of study developed in the mid-20th century around the same time as early computer systems were being developed, so it is no surprise that computers are used both as models and as tools in many experiments. Cognitive psychology is considered one area of the wider interdisciplinary field of cognitive science, which includes, among other areas, computer science, linguistics, philosophy and cognitive neuroscience (Kellogg, 2002). British psychologists Michael W. Eysenck and Mark T. Keane include anthropology as well (2000). Cognitive psychologists look at many different facets of mental functioning, which Kellogg lists as: perception, consciousness, intelligence, thinking, language, knowledge representation, memory and learning (2002). Cognitive psychology began to distinguish itself from an older branch of psychology, behaviorism, when researchers realized that to study the mind often meant studying processes that could not be directly observed, such as the "stimulus-response" experiments common to behaviorism. A central concern of linguists in the cognitive arena is the relationship between language and thought. The linguistic relativity theory, put forth by Benjamin L. Whorf in 1956 states that language either determines thought or influences it heavily. The famous "Eskimos have 27 words for snow" notion, under relativity, means they perceive snow differently from, say, a Florida resident, and therefore have a more highly developed categorizing system for snow. However, the theory did not take into account that different environments, whether physical or created, may affect how much time and effort people focus on various things, which is then reflected by language. Later studies by Heider-Rosch (1972, 1973, in Eysenck, 1984) on color perception across languages with vastly different color naming systems seem to show that it is thought that determines language. However, there may be some cultural or culturally-based learning differences as evidenced by studies on bilingual individuals. The central focus, then, of cognitive psychologists is the structure and processes of the mind, which are generally equated with representation (the structures) and computation (the processes), as well as the inclusive dynamic systems process (Braisby & Gellaltly, 2005). Representation deals with what things are about, such as the subject matter of a book -- versus its physical qualities such as molecular structure, weight and dimensions -- is what the book is about. Computation is how the mind processes information and it is in this area that the mind is most often linked to computers and how they learn. Two major systems of computation have been developed, and supporters argue for the relative importance of them, or some interaction of both. Symbol systems investigate how the mind combines the various discrete symbols in the environment to arrive at conclusions and decisions. Connectionism views this process by relying both on the physical structure of the brain, with the interconnectedness of neurons serving as a basis, plus how networks within a computer system operate; "interconnectedness" is its basic assumption (Braisby & Gellaltly). Artificial intelligence has been defined as "the science that holds that computers, by virtue of their mathematical structure, can reason" (Wagman, 1991, p. 2). Tasks that can be performed include planning, control, scheduling and a variety of recognition tasks such as speech or facial structures. Names such as ELIZA, BORIS and FERMI have been given to various software/modeling systems that process speech, plot points from Shakespearean plays, diagnosing electrical system problems, etc Early AI researchers, strongly supportive of the symbolic system, saw problem solving as the process of creating a symbolic representation of the problem (the problem space) that helps in determining several levels of solutions to the problem (Wagman, 1998). Modern advancements in neuroscience have helped cognitive psychologists study the brain as it is working, through imaging techniques such as PET scans. Braisby and Gellaltly describe a series of experiments over time where imaging science has gotten intricately involved in cognitive theories. They begin with a 1984 experiment (Warrington & Shallice) that described patients whose ability to recognize living things was impaired, though their ability to recognize non-living things was much less or not impaired. A later experiment (Hillis & Caramazza, 1991) showed the opposite -- people who were much better at recognizing living things but whose categorical memory of non-living things was impaired. By 2000, Devlin et al. showed in PET scans that there was no difference in where the information of living versus non-living categories were processed, although it is possible such distinctions are too fine for the scanner to distinguish. However, a computer model study by Greer et al. (2001) showed that a connectionist computer network could be damaged in such a way as to provide a distinction between living and non-living categories. The system, which may model how the human brain works as well, showed that the "living things" category may be more impervious to damaging. This may be because there are more connections and correlations made about living things, such as "That is a dog. It is a mammal. All mammals breathe, have fur, bilateral symmetry, etc" Memory is an important mental process that assists humans (and animals) in everything they do. Memory was first conceived of as a storage-only type process, until an influential article in 1972 by Craik and Lockhart theorizing that it was not important where (in which of many "stores") information was stored, but how it was encoded when it was placed into memory. The greater depth or importance the person placed while processing the memory, the more likely it was the information would be remembered. Memory is commonly described as either short term or long term. Neuroscience has shown that short-term memory is stored in acoustic or speech-based form, but long-term memory is encoded based on meaning (Hitch, in Braisby & Gellaltly, 2005). An important distinction can be also made between episodic memory and semantic memory. Episodic memory involves the incidents that happen to us, our life experiences, including both actual events and our subjective experience of them. General knowledge is called semantic memory, and is the memory used to identify objects, animals and people in our environment. Animal studies in memory have been helpful pinpointing various types and subtypes of memory, such as spatial memory. London cab drivers retain an extensive spatial knowledge of the city and have been shown to have an enlarged hippocampus (Maguire et al., 2000). Likewise, British researchers have found that birds that store their food in many places also have enlarged hippocampi (National Academy of Sciences, 2001, from Franklin Institute Online), lending credence to the belief that the hippocampus is important for spatial memory. More common experiments involve training animals (such as rats) in various tasks to study what is remembered under various experimental variables. Such experiments have shown a linkage, for example, between the production of cortisol, the "stress hormone," and failure to recall previously learned material (Nature, 1998, from Franklin Institute Online). As this brief overview shows, cognitive psychology, as part of cognitive science, covers a broad sweep of subjects related to the concept of mind. It is still relatively new as a formal discipline and will undoubtedly foster many new theories as it matures over time. References Braisby, N. & Gellatly, A. (2005) Foundations of Cognitive Psychology. In Cognitive Psychology, Braisby, N. & Gellatly, A, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Craik and Lockhart (1972). Levels of processing: a framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, Vol. 11, pp. 671-684. In Hitch, G.J., chapter in Cognitive Psychology, Braisby, N. & Gellatly, A, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press (see below). Devlin, J.T., Russell, R.P., Davis, M.H., Price, C.J., Wilson, J., Moss, H.E., et al. (2000). Susceptibility induced loss of signal: comparing PET and fMRI on a semantic task. NeuroImage, vol. 11, pp. 77-115. Eysenck, M.W. (1984). A Handbook of Cognitive Psychology,. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Eysenck, M.W. & Keane, M.T. (2000). Cognitive Psychology: A Student's Handbook (4th ed.). East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press Ltd. Franklin Institute Online. The Human Brain. Retrieved April 18, 2006 from http://www.fi.edu/brain/stress.htm Greer, M.J., van Casteren, M., McLellan, S.A., Moss, H.E., Rodd, J., Rogers, T.T., et al. (2001). The emergence of semantic categories from distributed featural representations. Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hitch, G.J. (2005). Working Memory. In Cognitive Psychology, Braisby, N. & Gellatly, A, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hillis, A.E. & Caramazza, A. (1991). Category-specific naming and comprehension impairment: a double dissociation. Brain Language, vol. 114. pp. 2081-94. Kellogg, R.T. (2002). Cognitive Psychology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Inc. Maguire, E.A., Gadian, D.G., Johnsrude, I.S., Good, C.D., Ashburner, J., Frackowiak, R.S.J., et al. (2000, April 11). Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 97(8), pp. 4398-4403. Retrieved April 16, 2006 from http://pavlov.psyc.queensu.ca/flanagan/ PSYC100/pdf/MagGadJoh_PNAS_00.pdf Wagman, M. (1991). Artificial Intelligence and Human Cognition: A Theoretical Intercomparison of Two Realms of Intellect. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Wagman, M. (1998). Language and Thought in Humans and Computers: Theory and Research in Psychology, Artificial Intelligence and Neural Science. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Warrington, E.K. & Shallice, T. (1984). Category specific semantic impairments. Brain, vol. 107, pp. 829-54. Read More