Broadbent explained the ways our brains ignore certain types of information, and how we learn to selectively focus on certain channels of information. We can choose what we pay attention to, and we can decide whether we care about the meaning of the information we...
Psychology
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Different kinds of memory
Memory continues to play an important role in cognitive science today, especially with the work of the Canadian psychologist Endel Tulving, who proposed that human beings store memories in two distinct ways: short-term (STM) and long-term (LTM). However, because the...
Recalling memories
Cognitive psychology’s approach to the study of mental processing was largely based on the notion of information storage and recall, and the connection between them. Endel Tulving demonstrated how memories can be categorized by our minds into different stores and can...
Seven sins of memory
Although we remember a lot throughout our lifetimes, our brain is often a let down when it’s time to recall these memories. Daniel Schacter calls the deviation in our memory recalls as ‘seven sins of memory’. This may be due to transient factors: that memories fade as...
Unreliable memories
What Schacter called ‘the sin of suggestibility’, has particular relevance in the law. Cases often rely heavily on evidence obtained from victims and witnesses, but we remember events less than reliably. American psychologist Elizabeth Loftus showed in experiments...
Illusions and paradoxes
Our minds can often deceive us into thinking that what we see is reality. When we try to understand something, our mind interprets visual cues to determine if those things are where they should be. We know that two objects placed next to each other in space will not...
Decision making
Humans' ability to reason and make logical decisions is commonly regarded as one of the most important of human mental abilities. Yet it was not given much attention by psychologists until the 1970s when they began studying how memory and perception sometimes lead...
Psychoanalysis and psychodynamics
At the end of the last century, a different approach to psychological therapy emerged from the medical treatment of psychiatric disorders. At the forefront were the Vienna neurologists Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer. They discovered that a person could get better if...
The talking cure
Freud used hypnosis to treat patients in his private neurological practice in Vienna, and he observed that the process of verbalization could lead to an improvement in the patient’s symptoms. A similar approach, known as ‘free association’, was taken by another of his...
The unconscious
Freud developed a comprehensive theory about how the human mind works. He realized that what we think we're thinking is just one part of what's really happening in our heads. Beneath the surface level of the conscious mind lies the preconscious, containing thoughts...
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Cognitive behaviourism
In contrast to Watson's strict interpretation of behavior as a result of stimulus-response conditioning, Edward Tolman realized that learning involved more mental processes. Tolman was a firm believer in the science of behaviorism, but he also found himself fascinated...
A single lesson
Classical conditioning was based upon Pavlov’s finding that repeated pairing of a stimulus and a reward (a conditioned stimulus) can cause a response (an unconditioned response). Although subsequent behaviorist psychologists such as B.F. Skinner refined and extended...
Radical behaviourism
Behaviorists (or experimental psychologists) were those who believed that learning occurred through the modification of behaviors, rather than through changes in mental states. They also believed that any psychological change should be observable and measurable. B.F....
Operant conditioning
Perhaps, the most influential idea stemming from Skinner's radical behaviorism was his theory of operant conditioned behavior. He argued that behavior is influenced by the consequences of actions, not by the stimuli that precede them. For example, if a person is given...
Positive and negative reinforcement
Operant conditioning explains why we learn behavior through our interaction with our environments. The major factor in teaching behavior, according to B.F. Skinner is the reinforcement provided by the consequences of an action. Positive results, such as receiving...
Free Course in Semiology
A completely and truly free course on Semiology (Semiotics). Learn about the meaning of signs, how and why did the field emerged. What is the relationship between the street signs and the signs that we use every day - words.
