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Cognitive level of analysis

Cognitive processes

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Activity

• Show the image on the right to a group of people sat in chairs.

• Ask them to stand up when they see something wrong with it.

• Time how long it takes for all of them to stand up.

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Read the two studies below and see if you can explain using the concept of schema why participants perceived and

remembered things in the way that they did

Balcetis & Dunning (2006) briefly flashed a figure that could be a B or a 13. Participants told that seeing a letter would earn them a nice drink perceived a letter, while those told seeing a number would earn them the nice drink perceived the number.

Postman & Bruner (1947) showed a picture of a white man, with a knife, arguing with an unarmed black man. However, many participants remembered the black man as carrying the knife.

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Command words: The language of the learning outcomes

• Exam questions will require candidates to assess the effectiveness and value of schema theory, in the extent to which it can explain cognitive processes, such as perception and memory.

• This could occur through an assessment of schema theory’s strengths and weaknesses, based on research evidence, as well as a consideration of methodological issues, practical applications and other general evaluative points.

Learning outcome: Evaluate schema theory with reference to research studies

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Theories of visual perception

Gregory’s ‘top down’ theory

• An explanation that understands perception as an interpretation of sensory data based on previous experience.

• Perception is indirect, as it involves going beyond sensory data to analyze information at a higher top down cognitive level of processing.

• As sensory data is often incomplete/ambiguous, perception is constructed through perceptual set; a readiness to interpret data in a pre-set manner due to previous experience, emotional states, motivational factors and cultural influences.

Gibson’s ‘bottom up’ theory

• An explanation that understands perception as arising from sensory data provided by the optical array (the pattern of light entering the eyes).

• Sensory data is seen as rich enough to permit direct perception without need for any higher level cognitive processing and thus is a bottom up procedure.

• Perception occurs through detection of environmental invariances, unchanging aspects of the visual world that permit features of the environment to be established.

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Command words: The language of the learning outcomes

• Exam questions will require candidates to assess the effectiveness and value of two explanations of one cognitive process (e.g. Gregory and Gibson for perception).

• This could occur through an assessment of the theories’ strengths and weaknesses, based on research evidence, practical applications and direct comparison of the two explanations, as well as a consideration of the nature (Gibson) versus nurture (Gregory) debate and methodological issues.

Learning outcome: Evaluate two models or theories of one cognitive process

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Are memories reliable?

Loftus & Pickrell (2003) asked 120 participants who had visited Disneyland as children to assess advertizing copy.

• Group 1 read a fake Disney advert featuring no cartoon characters.

• Group 2 read a fake advert featuring no cartoon characters, but with a cardboard figure of Bugs Bunny in the room.

• Group 3 read a fake advert featuring Bugs Bunny.

• Group 4 read a fake advert featuring Bugs Bunny and with a cardboard figure of Bugs Bunny in the room.

8% of Group 1, 4% of Group 2, 30% of Group 3 and 40% of Group 4 recalled meeting Bugs Bunny as a child and shaking his hand.

1. Explain by reference to Loftus & Pickrell’s study how using misleading information led to participants remembering meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland; an impossibility, as Bugs is a Warner Brothers character.

2. What does this suggest in general about the reliability of our memories?

3. How might advertizers use the findings of this research to get us to falsely recall their products as desirable?