1. (b)
There are many basic assumptions which most cognitive psychologists would make when they study cognition. Best (1986) wants to remind us that there is no single theory of cognition that is shared by all psychologists.
There are two of these in this perspective. The first one is that scientific methods involving experiments and hypothesis testing are in the best way to gather knowledge about human cognition, and the other one is that information-processing models are likely to be very useful in explaining human behaviour.
There are many beliefs that underpin these two basic assumptions. One is that mentality can be divided into a group of interrelated cognitive processes and every one of these can be studied separately. Another is that although much information processing takes place simultaneously, it can often be understood in a serial fashion. These beliefs mean that it is appropriate to use experiments to test specific hypothesis about specific aspects of cognition, rather than try to understand human cognition as a whole.
Cognitive psychologists also believes that we know a lot more than we think we know and that many things we know never enters our awareness because they are not called upon. For example if we were just to ask people what they think is going on inside of their heads, there would be no need for experiments. Cognitive psychologists also believe that human mental events are abstract and best understood in terms of basic processes rather than physical brain activity (biology) or beliefs and attitudes (social psychology).
Another study is the relevance of explanations of non-human behaviour to humans. Cognitive psychologists seek to explain why we think what we think rather than how we think. Theories that describe cognition at this level are concerned with the social context in which behaviour occurs cognitive models based on information processing in computers seem a long way away from this type of work. Computers are machines that have no attitudes or beliefs other than those they are programmed with. The computer model seems less useful in understanding social cognition, although it still has a value in helping us to understand more basic processes at the level of brain function.
2. (a)
Atkinson and Shifrin (1968) made a memory model and proposed that memory can be understood as a series of structures: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. There are associated processes that pass information between the stores including: attention, perception, rehearsal, encoding and retrieval. These terms are shown on the diagram below:
Our senses (eyes, ears etc.) are constantly taking in new information and this information comes into our sensory memory, where it is held for a fraction of second in its original sensory form (sound, image etc.).
If we pay attention to this information, it is selected and a meaning is made out of it, for longer storage in short-term memory. We cannot attend to every sensation and we therefore select the most important ones. This is called selective attention. This means that we focus our attention on a limited aspect of all that we experience. Wilson (2002) concluded that our five senses take in an estimated of 11 000 000 bits of information per second, 40 of which we consciously process. We intuitively make use of all the other bits.
When selected the information we want to focus on and made sense of, it is transferred into short-term memory. Short-term memory can only keep a small amount of information for a small amount of time before it is lost or stored in long-term memory. Experiments have shown that you can remember, for example a friend’s phone number, better if you rehearse it. Then it improves the chances of the information being encoded into long-term memory.
So, the information may be encoded to long-term memory, which seems to be able to hold indefinitely. It also seems to have an unlimited storage capacity, allowing us to keep adding information throughout our lives. To compare the long-term memory to a computer, long-term memory is like the information stored on hard drives.
Information can also retrieve to short-term memory, and the information may be lost.
2. (b)
The model by Atkinson and Shifrin helps us to better understand how our memory works. There are two ways we can store our memory. Those are short-term memory and long-term memory, and it seems that the way in which memories are stored differs between these two types of memory. The model helps us to understand why we forget some things and why we remember other things. A study by Baddeley (1966) investigated the process of encoding in short- and long-term memory. He suggested that when participants used their short-term memory they relied more on acoustic coding, or what the word sounded like. On the other hand, if participants were asked to recall words later, using long-term memory, then semantic coding or words that had similar meaning were remembered better.
The model also helps us to understand what we have to do if we want to remember something. If we for example study for a test, it is important that the information gets encoded into long-term memory. Organising of information is an effective way of remembering things. If information can be categorised into groups or “chunks”, then we only have to remember the chunks that contain the rest of the information.
When we forget something we loose information that was once stored in either short-term memory or long-term memory. Either we cannot bring it to mind or that it has disappeared from our memories. Then it is maybe better to write things down on a calendar if you know that you may not remember it. Another reason why we forget things can be that we have not encoded the information properly, or because it was learned but forgotten or because we were not successful in retrieving the information.
Words presented at the beginning and end of a list are remembered better than those presented in the middle. We may fail to remember words in the middle of the list because they could not be included in the limited- capacity short-term memory store and had not been encoded sufficiently to be included in long-term store. Forgetting also depends on the length of time passed since being exposed to the information.