Cognitive Psychology Essay Sample

Descriptive observation methods are scientific methods which are of three main types; Observational , case study and survey methods. This method largely researches more on behavioral and observable features in a research. It is of little help to a cognitive psychologist because unlike behaviorism, cognitive studies majors more on the study of the mental process including how people think, learn and how they perceive ideas.
Reaction time ( RT) is the speed of response in human beings , to listen to instructions and make specific responses out of it. Reaction time and accuracy are vital in cognitive psychology since they are the variables that will make a cognitive psychologist deduce the required information as intended.
Experimental research design is advantageous in cognitive psychology because one is able to manipulate one variable in order to know how it affects the other. For instance when you want to know how noise (first variable) would affect children studying mathematics(second variable)
Top-down is whereby stimulus is processed from information that is general and is to help organize the said stimulus. Bottom-up refers to the processing of a stimulus from a physical stimulus. For example, when you are seated idly on the roadside classifying people into males and females but all of a sudden there emerges an ambiguous figure which you are at first not able to classify.
An example of synthensia is when an individual has a pre-set mind that perceives, say, letter’ S’ as color green in their mind or may be number ‘0’ as white. One can also see a text typed in a black font but in their mind, they also see it as yellow in color.
The Cocktail party phenomenon refutes the theory of auditory attention since it confirms the ability to focus your attention to a single speaker or talker among a group of other speakers or in the midst of a lot of background noise.
Parallel Processing is whereby the mind processes multiple things at a time, while Serial Processing on the other hand is when the mind is processing one thing at a time in a series. For instance, it takes less time to find a single white dot amongst many black dots as compared to finding a bunch of letter ‘I’ in a group of letter ‘j’.