Cognitive Psychology: Memory

I want you to imagine looking at your house. Now, i would like you to count how many windows you have. Just figure it out for me.

Now here is a secret. I dont really care how many windows you have in your house. What i would like you to consider is what actually went on inside your head when you were trying to retrieve those memories. How did you go about it? Were you standing outside your house looking in? Or were you inside your house and you were moving from room to room? Did you ever take into account what was going on in your head or did you just do it naturally? Infact, how on earth did it even get into your head in the first place?


This is what we study in Cognitive Psychology: Memory


I will now just outline some key parts of the following chapter, so that you can go off and do your own research, if i have not posted anything on that subject yet.


Models Of memory:

Here i wish to study the two main models of memory:

-The Multi Store Model (MSM), including the concepts of encoding, capacity, and duration.
Along with strengths and weaknesses of the model.

-The Working Memory Model (WMM), including its strengths and weaknesses.


Memory in Everyday life:

-Eyewitness testimony (EWT) and factors affecting the accuracy of the EWT, inculding anxiety and age of witness.

-Misleading information and the use of the cognitive interview.

-Stratagies for memory improvement.

Salutations. As you will no doubt be able to work out i am new to this blogging. I would like to make a recomendation. Before you sink into the history of psychology, or how it effects the ways we work, i must say that you will have to study cognitive psychology first, if you want to go anywhere. After you study how the memory works, i would then go on to study developmental psychology, which is how our minds develop as we grow up. Once you know about these two you can pretty much go where ever you want as far as human psychology is concerned (unless you wish to follow bowlby the bastards approach and study ducks first).

Philosophical Origins of Psychology

Rene Descartes: (1596 - 1650)
'I think, therefore I am'

This theory was that the mind and the body were separate and independent of each other.
The body - a complex machine,
The mind - the seat of the soul, both interacting through the brain.

This theory also continues on to the reason, how we are different from animals.
Descartes believed that animals operated blindly, as in that they didn't have a reason for doing things, they just produced action from instinct.

This thory was called Cartesian Dualism.


John Locke: (1632 - 1704)

had a different thory. He shared the theory, with several others on empiricism.

Empiricism, was the view that any external stimuli (or surrounding happenings) and the behaviour that arose from it, as a result, was what could be understood as valid findings to understand any human being.
This also went on as the people who believed in it, also believed that the human process of 'thinking' was unobservable and unimportant.
Thinking, they believed, was only a reaction to external stimulation and this was understood by the way that you could induce a behavioural reponse.
This they called behaviourism.

Locke thought that we dont respond to each stimulus as it occurs, but to alot of different stimuli all associated in some way or another. Which sounds alot like 'deja vu' but not so much an experience, as a relation. This comes under the name of associationism.

Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882)
'Survival of the fittest'

The theory of evolution, came from his study of the human body as the continuous need to develop and adapt to the surroundings. This came through his finding, that each and every animal, would genetically evolve in order to survive. Over generations, all types of that said species, would share that adaptation, as it were, to provide survival.

Darwin also found and singled out selective emotions that humans had in common with animals. These included: fear, rage and pleasure. He concluded, that through these various emotions, we shared the expressions of these said emotions with the animals.

iMMense

Ths start of something new.

As this may be the start of my new career in the future, I have decided to create another blog, just for research and notes for my A level exams.

Thanks and enjoy,

iMMense