COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

Introduction

Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology that studies mental processes including how people think, perceive, remember and learn. Aspart from the larger field of cognitive science, this branch of psychology is related to other disciplines including neuroscience, philosophy, and linguistics. Core focus of cognitive psychology is on how people acquire, process and store information. There are numerous practical applications for cognitive research, such as ways to improve memory, how to increase decision making accuracy, and how to structure educational curricula to enhance learning.

Discussion

Visual search is a type of perceptual task requiring attention that typically involves an active scan of the visual environment for a particular object or feature (the target) among other objects or features (the distractors). Visual search can take place either with or without eye movements. Common examples include trying to locate a certain brand of cereal at the grocery store or a friend in a crowd. The scientific study of visual search typically makes use of simple, well-defined search items such as oriented bars or colored letters. The cognitive architecture of the visual system is hen assessed by establishing which factors affect the amount of time taken by the observer to indicate whether a search target is present or absent. One of the most common factors affecting such measures of reaction time (RT) relates to the number of distractors present in the visual search task. An increase in the number of distractors often leads to an increase in search RT and is thus also related to an increase in difficulty of the task. The measure of the involvement of attention in the search task is often manifested asa slope of the response time function over the display size, or number of distractors.

Visual memory for scenes is surprisingly robust. We wished to examine whether an analogous ability exists in the auditory domain. Participants listened to a variety of sound clips and were tested on their ability to distinguish old from new clips. Stimuli ranged from complex auditory scenes(e.g., talking in a pool hall) to isolated auditory objects(e.g., a dog barking) to music. In some conditions, additional information was provided to help participants with encoding. In every situation, however, auditory memory proved to be systematically inferior to visual memory. This suggests that there exists either a fundamental difference between auditory and visual stimuli, or, more plausibly, an asymmetry between auditory and visual processing.

In the most dramatic demonstration, Standing (3) showed observers up to 10,000 images for a few seconds each and reported that they could subsequently identify which images they had seen before with 83% accuracy. This memory isfar superior to verbal memory (4) and can persist for a week (5). Recent research hasextended these findingsto show that we have a massive memory for the detailsof thousandsof objects(6). Here, we ask whether the same is true for auditory memory and find that it is not. (Wolfe, Cave, Frazil, 1989, 419-33)

Results

For Experiment 1, we recorded or acquired 96 distinctive 5-sound clips from a variety ...