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cognitive psychology

who is interested in this? from what i gather it seems to be a study of the logical portion of the brain, and how we make decisions.

studies memory (working memory and all its parts, long term, etc), comprehension, language processing, language production, attention....to name a few.



basically cognitive psychologists will create a construct which loosely gives meaning to what various parts of the brain do. so they will make up the term working memory, they will theorize about what it does and what parts of the brain it might be processed in. they set up experimental tasks and explore it.


it kind of sucks cause they are just working with abstract ideas (constructs) and not with observable things. like when you study behavior you can see it....you cannot see comprehension of written language.

you can see comprehension of written language when you respond to a question though. it seems to me like a verbal ink-blot test, or free association almost? if a stimulus is provided like the word 'manipulation', the response is supposed to be seen as what memories are accessed, under unique conditions?

quote:

Originally posted by camsr you can see comprehension of written language when you respond to a question though. it seems to me like a verbal ink-blot test, or free association almost? if a stimulus is provided like the word 'manipulation', the response is supposed to be seen as what memories are accessed, under unique conditions?

never say ink blot or free association again!!! those are fluffy tests clinicians use and are meant to have millions of interpretations. In fact if you take these projective tests with 20 different clinicians you will get about 20 different responses.



anyways, the way comprehension is tested is a person is given a passage of information (the topic vary as some people are good at remembering some topics as opposed to others) and they are asked to paraphrase it. or they select out of 4 options which sentence best summarizes the passage. they will vary the length of the passage, complexity of words used, number of passsages presented before recall, time before recall, they might use a distraction task inbetween reading and recall (mostly testing memory though)....


and after all that you have to judge whether they fully comprehended the passage or partially comprehended on a scale. then you average their score and that score is suppose to describe a persons comprehension.


the problems in cognitive psych are mostly philosophical and i dont really read much from cog psych people. but you run into problems when you just make up a word, make up a test to measure the word, and say the test actually measures this word. you have a general idea about what comprehension is, but creating an accepted operational definition is tough.

Re: cognitive psychology

quote:

Originally posted by camsr who is interested in this? from what i gather it seems to be a study of the logical portion of the brain, and how we make decisions.

this is part of our developmental psychology class. i do have to take it next semester though. but we pretty much are studying it now.

quote:

Originally posted by Boomer187 the way comprehension is tested is a person is given a passage of information (the topic vary as some people are good at remembering some topics as opposed to others) and they are asked to paraphrase it. or they select out of 4 options which sentence best summarizes the passage. they will vary the length of the passage, complexity of words used, number of passsages presented before recall, time before recall, they might use a distraction task inbetween reading and recall (mostly testing memory though)....

so to test comprehension, a stimulus like a story or article is provided, and the paraphrase measures cognition, basically? what role does emotional elicitation play when measuring a response? the capacity of cognition under different emotional states?

quote:

Originally posted by camsr so to test comprehension, a stimulus like a story or article is provided, and the paraphrase measures cognition, basically? what role does emotional elicitation play when measuring a response? the capacity of cognition under different emotional states?

yes, the thinking is that you have to be able to comprehend something if you are going to paraphrase it accurately. If you dont understand it, your paraphrase will be off.


now you are onto fun research. I heard of a few studies looking at attraction and emotional states. Some researcher got a girl to interview people just as they got off this huge suspension bridge you walk across (the attractiveness of the interviewer was controlled for, so they got hot ones and ugly ones). Now after walking across this bridge your emotional state is going crazy (i dont know much about emotions hehe). so after this chick interviews them, everyone felt as if the girl was into them, or was it they were more attracted to her...something like that.


another thing is mood research, where you get someone in a sad mood, bad mood or good mood then have them do some experimental task. researchers would have people read really sad stories about their family dying n such and their g/f leaving them....or really happy stories. i dunno any specific results though, been a while since I heard about them.

but yea there's some stuff out there about it.

very interesting. thanks for the insight

anyone else here know about cognitive psychology? ive heard a few ppl mention it here before

quote:

Originally posted by Boomer187 yes, the thinking is that you have to be able to comprehend something if you are going to paraphrase it accurately. If you dont understand it, your paraphrase will be off.

I dig how you paraphrased your sentence about paraphrasing. That's some funky subconscious cognitive loop craziness!

quote:

Originally posted by Boomer187 never say ink blot or free association again!!! those are fluffy tests clinicians use and are meant to have millions of interpretations. In fact if you take these projective tests with 20 different clinicians you will get about 20 different responses.

funny story about inkblobs...

The first psych course I took, my textbook had a picture of an inkblob as an example, and it looked exactly like darth vader. I showed it to everyone and they all immediately said it looked like darth vader.

is this the loudest-beer-burp contest thread?????



















oh... sorry..cognitivity..

quote:

Originally posted by Project-K funny story about inkblobs... The first psych course I took, my textbook had a picture of an inkblob as an example, and it looked exactly like darth vader. I showed it to everyone and they all immediately said it looked like darth vader.

my intro prof always thought they looked like poodles after they had been run over by a car. he was crazy though.

Hey, we talked about Piaget today in sociology. I thought I'd mention that in this thread.

quote:

Originally posted by Boomer187 my intro prof always thought they looked like poodles after they had been run over by a car. he was crazy though.

I saw a ninja in one. The lady just laughed at me!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_psychology

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