Cognitive Approach
- Created by: Karen Askew
- Created on: 19-10-16 20:08
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- Cognitive Approach
- Focuses on the ways in which we perceive, process, store and respond to information
- Interested in what is going on in our minds
- Our mental processes affect out behaviour
- Both conscious and non-conscious thoughts
- Compares the mind to a computer
- Cannot be seen so we have to make inferences
- Central processing unit (CPU)
- Brain encodes information into a suitable format for process or storage
- Information flows through the cognitive system in a sequence of stages
- Input, storage, retrival
- Schema
- The mental representation of experience and knowledge and understanding
- Barlett's hypothesis was that memory is reconstructive and that people store and retrive information according to expectations formed by cultural schemas
- Participants changed a story in a process called distortion
- 3 patterns of distortion
- Assimilation: cultural expectations - details were changed to fit the norms of British culture
- Levelling: shorter - Participants omitted information that was seen as not important
- Sharpening: - Participants changed the order and added detail and/or emotions
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Scanning techniques to study human brains
- Can accurately map the function of the brain
- Can see what areas of the brain are involved in specific cognitive functions
- Before this we relied on case studies of brain damaged individuals
- Unsatisfactory because data from before the damage was rare, plus these individuals were atypical
- Allows us to study healthy brains
- Scanning techniques to study human brains
- Focuses on the ways in which we perceive, process, store and respond to information
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