Cognitive Psychology In and Out of the Laboratory
Instructor Resources
SAGE Journal Articles
Tip: Click on each link to expand and view the content. Click again to collapse.
Chapter 1. Cognitive Psychology History, Methods, and Paradigms
Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.
Summary: Modern cognitive psychology has strictly adhered to the experimental methodology of the natural sciences. Often, contributions in Theory and Psychology have addressed shortcomings and possible remedies of this predominant approach and its emphasis on “effects.” My comment contrasts this approach with the generative theories (cognitive simulation models) developed in cognitive science about 30 years ago and still not widely accepted in psychology. I characterize these generative theories and discuss their weaknesses and their advantages over the usual way of theorizing in cognitive psychology. I hope to convince at least some readers that (a) in order to proceed in this manner, you need not buy a ready-made “cognitive architecture” and (b) this approach results in a much more rigorous theorizing (although still well controllable as a scientific endeavor).
Summary: Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) show inefficiencies in cognitive performance including working memory functions. Since these problems impact on quality of life and overall well-being, the current study was aimed at improving patients’ situations by evaluating the computerized cognitive training tool, BrainStim.
Chapter 2. The Brain: An Overview of Structure and Function
Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.
Summary: Innovations in physics and computing technology over the past two decades have provided a powerful means of exploring the overall structure and function of the brain using a range of computerized brain imaging technologies (BITs).
Summary: Regular exercise and greater aerobic fitness are associated with greater brain volume, improved neurophysiological responses to stimuli as measured by electroencephalography (EEG), and higher levels of growth factors that promote growth of brain tissue, neurogenesis, and angiogenesis.
Summary: Six experiments explored hemispheric memory differences in a patient who had
Chapter 3. Perception Recognizing Patterns and Objects
Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.
Summary: We investigated how visual perception and motor action respond to moving objects whose visibility is reduced, and we found a dissociation between motion processing for perception and for action.
Summary: Theories of lightness, like theories of perception in general, can be categorized as high-level, low-level, and mid-level.
Summary: Distractor interference in the flanker task is commonly viewed as an outcome of unintentional, involuntary processing, a by-product of attention-controlled processing of the target.
Chapter 4. Attention: Deploying Cognitive Resources
Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.
Summary: This article provides a brief review of schema theory as situated in literacy studies.
Summary: The authors hypothesize that greater working memory capacity might modulate the effect of attention sets on noticing because working memory is associated with the ability to focus attention selectively.
Summary: The visual search paradigm has had an enormous impact in many fields. A theme running through this literature has been the distinction between preattentive and attentive processing, which this author refers to as the two-stage assumption.
Chapter 5. Working Memory: Forming and Using New Memory Traces
Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.
Summary: This study shows that selective attention can restore forgotten items to visual short-term memory (VSTM).
Summary: Working memory retains information and makes it available for processing. People often need to hold several chunks of information available while concentrating on only one of them. This process requires selective attention to the contents of working memory.
Summary: Any item that violates its current context will be well remembered, a phenomenon typically attributed to distinctiveness. Distinctiveness often is used as a synonym for difference, but, in fact, the beneficial effects of distinctiveness on memory arise only when both similarity and difference are encoded.
Chapter 6. Retrieving Memories From Long-Term Storage
Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.
Summary: Examines the effect of anxiety on encoding processes in memory.
Summary: Older adults have a harder time than younger adults remembering specific events and experiences (episodic memory), whereas the ability to use one’s general knowledge either improves or remains stable over the life span.
Summary: This study examined whether age-related differences in cognition influence later memory for irrelevant, or distracting, information. In Experiments 1 and 2, older adults had greater implicit memory for irrelevant information than younger adults did.
Chapter 7. The Reconstructive Nature of Memory
Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.
Summary: Recent studies have demonstrated that the retrieval of biographical information about familiar people is easier when we see their faces than when we hear their voices.
Summary: Organizational memory plays a central role in theories of organizational learning and forgetting.
Summary: A comprehensive review of the molecular basis of short and long-lasting synaptic plasticity literature leads us to propose that the hydrogen-bonding pattern at the molecular level may be a permissive, vital step of memory storage.
Chapter 8. Knowledge Representation: Storing and Organizing Information in Long-Term Memory
Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.
Summary: Recent studies have demonstrated that the retrieval of biographical information about familiar people is easier when we see their faces than when we hear their voices.
Summary: Organizational memory plays a central role in theories of organizational learning and forgetting.
Summary: A comprehensive review of the molecular basis of short and long-lasting synaptic plasticity literature leads us to propose that the hydrogen-bonding pattern at the molecular level may be a permissive, vital step of memory storage.
Chapter 9. Visual Imagery and Spatial Cognition
Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.
Summary: While the mental structures of the present are necessarily determined by the events of the past in a genetic sense, they do not necessarily reflect these events as they occurred.
Summary: Mental imagery typically involves the voluntary retrieval and representation of a sensory memory, but it can also sometimes be involuntary.
Summary: Two experiments are reported that investigate recent claims that a visual memory and a visual image access different mechanisms within working memory and are differentially susceptible to interference.
Chapter 10. Language
Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.
Summary: A series of discoveries in the past two decades has changed the way we think about bilingualism and its implications for language and cognition.
Summary: This article investigates whether bilingual pupil’s perceptions of teachers’ appreciation of their home language were of influence on bilingual cognitive advantages.
Summary: While indexical information is implicated in many levels of language processing, little is known about the internal structure of the system of indexical dimensions, particularly in bilinguals.
Chapter 11. Thinking and Problem Solving
Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.
Summary: Attentional focus is important for many cognitive processes, including problem solving. In this article, we discuss working memory capacity (WMC), a construct related to the ability to focus attention, and its differential effects on analytic and creative problem solving.
Summary: Two studies provide insight into how professionals in creative jobs deliberately use pacing that allows for incubation.
Summary: Evaluative thinking (ET) is an increasingly important topic in the field of evaluation, particularly among people involved in evaluation capacity building (ECB). We propose that ET is essentially critical thinking applied to contexts of evaluation.
Chapter 12. Reasoning and Decision Making
Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.
Summary: Participants in this study completed the CAPSOL Style of Learning Assessment-Form B and the Logical Style Exercise.
Summary: Over the last 20 years, both naturalistic decision making and fast and frugal heuristics programs have radically broken with mainstream decision science, moving beyond the confines of artificial tasks and safe academic laboratories.
Summary: Diagnostic reasoning and medical decision making have been focal areas of research in the fields of medical education, cognition, and artificial intelligence in medicine
Chapter 13. Cognitive Development Through Adolescence
Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.
Summary: Findings suggest that for certain cognitive skills, training during late adolescence and adulthood yields greater improvement than training earlier in adolescence, which highlights the relevance of this late developmental stage for education.
Summary: In this article, we discuss three key developmental transitions toward more flexible behavior.
Summary: Findings indicate that adolescents can exert adult-like control over their behavior but that they have limitations regarding the consistency with which they can generate optimal responses compared with adults.
Chapter 14. Individual Differences in Cognition
Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.
Summary: The key aims of this article are to relate the construct of cognitive style to current theories in cognitive psychology and neuroscience and to outline a framework that integrates the findings on individual differences in cognition across different disciplines.
Summary: Our comparisons of American and Asian International students living in the United States provided relatively little evidence for robust and consistent cultural differences in global/local biases, relative and absolute length judgments, or change detection performance.
Summary: Participants in this study completed the CAPSOL Style of Learning Assessment-Form B and the Logical Style Exercise.
Chapter 15. Cognition in Cross-Cultural Perspective
Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.
Summary: As cross-cultural interactions become more commonplace and of shorter durations, understanding the abilities that enable some sojourners to function competently in unfamiliar cultural contexts is increasingly important.
Summary: Findings from research in educational and cognitive psychology have shown that metacognition, defined as the awareness, monitoring, and evaluation of one’s knowledge and cognitive processes, exerts substantial influence on individual performance.
Summary: Interpersonal influence and interpersonal adjustment play crucial roles in structuring social interactions.