Glossary

Counterfactual Emotions Counterfactual arguments involve reasoning which makes assumptions contrary to the facts in evidence (e.g., “If I were King, I’d make everyone rich”). Counterfactual emotions are feeling states, such as regret and disappointment, which require a comparison between some state of affairs and what might have been. Gambler’s Fallacy The idea that prior outcomes, such as a string of “red” numbers in roulette, can influence the outcome of some future outcome, such as a “black” number; it is a fallacy because, in a truly random game, each outcome is independent of the others. Dichotic Listening A technique in which different auditory messages are presented over separate earphones; the subject is instructed to repeat (shadow) one message but ignore the other. Dissociation A statistical outcome in which one variable, either a subject characteristic (such as the presence of brain damage) or an experimental manipulation (such as the direction of attention), has different effects on two dependent measures (such as free recall or priming). Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) A brain-imaging technique using magnets to measure the changes in the ratios of deoxygenated to oxygenated hemoglobin due to neuronal activity. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) A brain-imaging technique using Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs) to measure changes in weak magnetic fields caused by the brain’s electrical activity. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) A brain-imaging technique which uses positrons (positively charged electrons) to measure blood flow, metabolic rate, and biochemical changes in the brain. Priming The facilitation (or, in the negative case, inhibition) of perceptual-cognitive processing of a target stimulus by prior presentation of a priming stimulus. Schemata Organized knowledge structures representing a person’s beliefs and expectations, permitting the person to make inferences and predictions. Sensory Thresholds In psychophysics, the minimum amount of energy required for an observer to detect the presence of a stimulus (the “absolute” threshold) or a change in a stimulus (the “relative” threshold). Tabula Rasa From the Latin, “blank slate”; refers to the empiricist view that there are no innate ideas, and that all knowledge is gained through experience.

Definition

Cognition has to do with knowledge, and cognitive psychology seeks to understand how human beings acquire knowledge about themselves and the world, how this knowledge is represented in the mind and brain, and how they use this knowledge to guide behavior.

A Short History of Cognition in Psychology

Psychology was cognitive at its origins in the mid to late 19th century. Structuralists like Wilhelm Wundt and E.B. Titchener attempted to decompose conscious experience into its constituent sensations, images, and feelings. On the very first page of the Principles of Psychology (1890), the discipline’s founding text, William James asserted that “the first fact for us, then, as psychologists, is that thinking of some sort goes on”, and the functionalist tradition that he and John Dewey established sought to understand the role of thinking and other aspects of mental life in our adaptation to the environment. In the early 20th century, however, John B. Watson attempted to remake psychology as a science of behavior rather than, as James had defined it, a science of mental life. For Watson, public observation was the key to making psychology a viable, progressive science. Because consciousness (not to mention “the unconscious”) was essentially private, Watson argued that psychology should abandon any interest in mental life, and instead confine its interest to what could be publicly observed: behavior and the circumstances under which it occurred. In Watson’s view, thoughts and other mental states did not cause behavior; rather, behavior was elicited by environmental stimuli. Thus began the behaviorist program, pursued most famously by B.F. Skinner, of tracing the relations between environmental events and the organism’s response to them. Psychology, in the words of Robert S. Woodworth, lost its mind.