The cognitive approach - Approaches [A-Level Psychology]

[0:00]Are you a computer? That might seem like a really silly question. But there are big similarities. If we imagine a phone, which is basically a portable computer, it has inputs like camera and microphone. You have similar inputs, your eyes and ears. It has outputs a screen and speakers. You have similar outputs, your body and your voice. Your phone has a physical component that can hold on to and work with information. It's the CPU, the central processing unit. You have a physical component that can do the same, your brain. Now, if I asked you if you have YouTube on your phone, you'd likely say yes. Maybe you're watching me on it right now. But then I pass you a hammer, and I told you to smash up your phone. And then I ask you to show me the little bit of the phone that is the YouTube part, you'd likely think I was insane. YouTube and other apps like YouTube are not physical things on the phone, they are programs. They are a set of processes designed by computer programmers. And this is similar to how cognitive psychologists think and explain the brain's functions. It's internal mental processes, so memory, attention, and perception. And understanding how these cognitive processes are connected to the physical activity of the brain is the basis of one of the most exciting and modern fields of psychology, cognitive neuroscience. The Psych Boost app now has three features: flashcards, multiple-choice quizzes, and see if you can work out the key term from its definition with the key term tester. Try paper one for free right now. And Patreon supporters can watch Psych Boost videos ad-free, learn from over 17 hours of exclusive exam tutorial videos, and access hundreds of digital and principal resources, including mind maps, quiz sheets, worksheets, teaching slides, and more. The cognitive approach: defining characteristics. Cognitive psychologists argue that behavior is the result of internal mental processes, and psychological research should be focused on studying those internal mental processes. As I mentioned in the introduction, internal mental processes are how information is used or processed in the mind, including all conscious and unconscious thoughts. Common areas of research for cognitive psychologists are attention, perception, and memory. Most of the examples I'll give in the rest of this video are going to be focused on memory. This is because memory is an entire unit of study on the A-level. And talking about cognitive psychology in the context of memory here should help you understand that unit a little better. It's also important we know how cognitive psychologists study internal mental processes. Cognitive psychologists try to be as scientific as possible by conducting highly controlled experiments with large samples of participants.

[2:41]Often to ensure control, cognitive research will be conducted in a lab setting, and the materials used will be highly standardized. This is good, as the experiments have high internal validity. But studying internal mental processes is problematic. This is because internal mental processes cannot be directly observed. This means cognitive psychologists have to rely on making inferences. This is going beyond the research evidence, the behavior directly observed in the experiment, and making an assumption about the internal mental processes that produced the participant behavior observed in an experiment. Here's an example of what I mean. Let's say I asked 50 people to listen to and then immediately recall a string of digits. I start with one digit, and then add one digit each time. I record the point that each participant fails to correctly recall the number sequence. In my dataset, I get some outliers, people who perform exceptionally well or poorly, but generally I find the vast majority of participants recall between five and nine numbers. Now, I can't directly see the participant's short-term memory stores actually filling up in their minds. But on the basis of these observations, I can make a fairly confident guess, an inference, that the storage capacity of short-term memory is seven items plus or minus two. And if you've already studied memory, you'll likely remember this as Miller's classic research study on the capacity of short-term memory. The big problem of inferences are they are guesses, and guesses can be mistaken. This is the reason cognitive psychologists, despite their highly controlled lab studies, are not as scientific as behaviorists or biological psychologists, who support their theories with directly observable behaviors and physical processes. Despite this limitation, inferences are the only way to study internal mental processes. And many of the inferences made about internal mental processes like memory are supported by later studies, increasing our confidence in the validity of the original inference. This means cognitive psychology is able to study behavior that cannot be studied by other approaches. The role of schema. A particular type of internal mental process we need to define and understand the role of is a schema. Simply defined a schema is a mental framework, a collection of basic knowledge about a concept or object built from our previous experience with the world. So if I say the word chair to you, chances are that you have a schema for a chair. It has legs, a back, and if you sit on it, it would support your weight. If I say classroom, then your schema for a classroom would include a whiteboard, desks, and chairs. If you are a student in that classroom, you'll instantly have a set of schemas that help you understand your role and the behaviors expected of you in that role. In this way, schemas work as mental shortcuts. We use them to quickly understand and navigate through the world and interact with people and objects in the world. This means it doesn't take too much mental energy to decide how to respond in a range of situations. There are a range of advantages to using schema to navigate through the world, but depending on schemas as shortcuts, also causes us some serious problems. The main advantage of schemas is they allow us to process lots of information very quickly. Imagine walking into that classroom without any schemas at all. If you had to process everything in that room from scratch, you'd be overwhelmed by sensory information, and have to consciously work out exactly what each object was and how to act.

[6:02]Imagine if every time you opened your eyes, you felt like this, unable to immediately categorize everything that you see. So schemas help us process lots of information quickly in the moment. Well, schemas also allow us to predict the future. This is because schemas are based on our previous experiences in similar situations. Let's go back to our classroom example. Imagine you're a student in this classroom, and you've arrived early from break. You can predict that the teacher and other students will enter the room soon. The other students will sit in the other seats. The teacher will take the register, the projector will come on, and you'll need to get your pen and paper out of your bag to start to take notes. This is all predictable, as all the people in the room are working to similar schemas, the teacher acting to the teacher's schema, the students to the student's schemas, or at least their versions of it. This means that predictions based on schemas are usually accurate. A problem with schemas is they influence memory, leading to inaccurate recall. This is a particular problem for eyewitness testimony. People may feel they're remembering accurately, however, their recall has been altered by leading questions. A researcher called Loftus found that average participants who watched a video of a car crash and were asked, "How fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?" gave a speed nine miles per hour faster when the word contact was replaced with smashed. This is because our schema for smashed is more intense than our schema for contacted. Using smashed altered their memory, so they recalled the crash as more dramatic. Faulty schemas can also lead to mental health issues. This is an issue we'll cover in more detail when discussing the cognitive approach to depression. According to Beck, people with depression have a negative triad of schemas that bias their thinking. These three include negative beliefs about themselves, called self-schemas, such as always seeing themselves as inadequate or unworthy. Negative schemas about the world, seeing it as hostile and threatening, and negative schemas about the future, assuming that things will always turn out badly. The use of theoretical and computer models. To explain internal mental processes, cognitive psychologists rely on models. We need to explain what a computer and a theoretical model is. The computer model is how I introduced this video. Asking you to think about the similarity between a computer's CPU running software programs and the biological brain running internal mental processes. Both of these systems have inputs and produce outputs. The computer and the mind are both assumed to process information in a series of programmed steps. Which leads me to theoretical models, but there is an evaluation for the computer model I want to give you first. The computer model of the mind is criticized as being overly simplistic. In fact, this particular criticism has a term, machine reductionism. This is the argument that the human brain is far more complex than a computer. The human mind has consciousness and emotions, and these often lead to irrational behavior. And many of the features that computers and humans share are very different. For example, human memory is flawed and reconstructive, while computer memory is stored and recalled with perfect accuracy. The other type of model used by cognitive psychologists are theoretical models. These are flow chart representations of how a particular mental process works, describing a series of pre-programmed steps. This particular theoretical model is the multi-store model of memory. It shows how information is received by the senses and if it isn't forgotten at any stage, passes through short-term memory and into long-term memory until it's recalled. These models are used to create testable theories, and each assumption of the model can be tested scientifically. If behavior matches the model, it can be inferred that the model is correct. If behavior goes against the predictions of the model, the model can be adapted or rejected. The emergence of cognitive neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience is the current cutting edge of psychological research, and it is fascinating. It's an attempt to scientifically study and identify the neurological structures and chemical processes in the brain that are responsible for the internal mental processes we've spoken about in this video. So, to be clear, cognitive neuroscience is the study of the relationship between cognitive and biological processes. This is now possible due to the development of brain scanning techniques. PET and FMRI scanners allow researchers to give participants cognitive tasks and observe activity in different areas of the brain in real time. It is true, the relationship between mental processes and brain structure have been studied for some time, through the use of unusual individuals with brain damage. One of the most famous examples is Tan. Tan had difficulty with speech production, only being able to say Tan. After Tan died, a postmortem revealed brain damage in an area that was called Broca's area after Tan's doctor. Many years later, we can now see brain activation in Broca's area when neurotypical brains produce language, confirming Broca's area as a location of speech production. Another example is PET research by Tulving. This revealed activity in separate brain regions when participants recalled episodic, semantic, or procedural memories. Supporting cognitive theories that there's more than one type of long-term memory. Evaluating the cognitive approach. So, I've already explained the first three evaluations, cognitive psychology's relationship with science, and machine reductionism, as well as cutting-edge research in cognitive neuroscience that's providing objective biological evidence for cognitive theories previously only supported by inference. We did say that cognitive psychology is highly scientific. However, one more point we can make is that many of the research studies conducted by cognitive psychologists are highly artificial. For example, in memory research, participants are often asked to recall stimuli like long digits, nonsense letters, trigrams, or random lists of words. This is not how people use memory in everyday life. So while cognitive psychologists may know how memory works in the lab, this knowledge might not be generalizable to normal cognitive tasks, like how memory works in real life. We can also evaluate by considering the real-life applications of cognitive psychology. Our understanding of schemas has led to the development of CBT. In CBT, therapists will help clients change their negative schemas through cognitive restructuring. Knowledge of how schemas can influence the accuracy of eyewitness testimony has been used to inform juries about its limitations and potentially avoid miscarriages of justice. And research into cognitive neuroscience is helping to develop treatments for neurological language, as well as memory disorders. As well as helping computer coders who are developing the neural networks that power artificial intelligence. The final evaluation is based on the free will determinism debate. Cognitive psychologists argue for soft determinism. They agree that to an extent, behavior has biological and environmental causes. Experiences form schemas that run on the biological hardware of the brain. However, they argue that thought processes allow for an individual to make the final decision and have some control over their behavior. This is the basis of CBT. And it's often argued to be empowering, giving clients the tools they need to change their patterns of thinking. This gives a client an active role in their recovery, compared to the passive role of biologically determined drug treatment. I want to thank everyone over on Patreon for supporting the channel. Because of you, I've been able to teach part-time, meaning I can make Psych Boost on YouTube for everyone. I do have extra resources that are exclusive to my Patreons, so if you decide to sign up, you can grab those over my website. And these include over a hundred exam questions to tutorial videos, of course, including questions on the approaches unit. I hope this was helpful, and I'll see you in the next Psychology video.