PREFACE Human mind is incredibly mysterious and complicated phenomenon.

Cognitive science, specifically cognitive psychology work to crack this hard nut. In science we take the mechanism of the mind as cognition. So cognition encompasses scientific study of human mind and how it processes information. In his book Foundation of Cognitive Psychology Daniel J. Levitin writes . The mind is enormously complex system holding a unique position in science: by necessity we must use mind to study itself, and so the focus of the study and the instrument used for the study are recursively linked. Cognitive science is still in its infancy in Mongolia due to technological weakness and the lack of experimental laboratories. As a result it has not been possible to write a sound foundational Cognitive Psychology textbooks for students at any level. Thus this book can be seen as a well organized and finely evaluated compilation of writings by different cognitive psychologists rather than a brand new textbook, too. And you will understand why experimental psychology is so crucial for studying cognitive psychology later in this book. This book is essentially designed to give cognitive science and cognitive psychology background for those who are doing courses in the field of humanities and psychology at different levels. The discipline cognitive psychology is one of the most extensive interdisciplinary subject which is intertwined with scientific fields from neuroscience through linguistics and computer science.

Philosophy Underlying Cognitive Psychology

Philosophy is the historical parent of psychology. Much in philosophy is concerned with psychological phenomena and a knowledge of philosophy is important to psychologists. The first work on virtually all scientific problems was done by philosophers, and the nature of human consciousness is no exception. The philosophical debate underlying human psyche is commonly known as mind-body problem in other words a question of what the relationship between mental events and physical events is. From the day human noticed the fact that we think, feel, learn, memorize and even sometimes we get sick in those activities we were confronted with series of questions including Are all these activities real or abstract?, Where do they come from? and What is real? Number of people especially juggled with these questions and finally came down to a conclusion that they are either related to one of the two distinct concepts mind and body or both. This led philosophers to be divided into two groups: Dualists and Monists. Dualism Dualism refers to a belief that the mind and the body are separate entities. One cannot reduce mind soul or psyche into the body or the brain. According to dualists mind can exist without the body. Consequently the soul can exist after death. Figure 1

The historical roots of dualism are closely associated with the writings of the great French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist Rene Descartes. Descartes believed that animals

are machines and like animals human body is like machine but it has a soul. He maintained a view that the soul resides in a part of the brain called Pineal Gland. Figure 2

Descartes called it the "seat of the soul". He believed that it was the point of connection between the intellect and the body. The relevant quotation as to Descartes' reason for believing this is, My view is that this gland is the principal seat of the soul, and the place in which all our thoughts are formed. The reason I believe this is that I cannot find any part of the brain, except this, which is not double. Since we see only one thing with two eyes, and hear only one voice with two ears, and in short have never more than one thought at a time, it must necessarily be the case that the impressions which enter by the two eyes or by the two ears, and so on, unite with each other in some part of the body before being considered by the soul. Now it is impossible to find any such place in the whole head except this gland; moreover it is situated in the most suitable possible place for this purpose, in the middle of all the concavities; and it is supported and surrounded by the little branches of the carotid arteries which bring the spirits into the brain. (29 January 1640, AT III:19-20, CSMK 143) Indeed, the classical version of dualism, substance dualism, in which mind and body are conceived as two different substances, is often called Cartesian dualism. Because most philosophers find the notion of physical substances unproblematic, the central issue in philosophical debates over substance dualism is whether mental substances exist and, if so, what their nature might be. Vivid sensory experiences, such as the appearance of redness or

the feeling of pain, are among the clearest examples, but substance dualists also include more abstract mental states and events such as hopes, desires, and beliefs. It is possible to maintain a dualistic position and yet deny the existence of any separate mental substances, however. One can instead postulate that the brain has certain unique properties that constitute its mental phenomena. These properties are just the sorts of experiences we have as we go about our everyday lives, including perceptions, pains, desires, and thoughts. This philosophical position on the mind-body problems is called property dualism. It is a form of dualism because these properties are taken to be nonphysical in the sense of not being reducible to any standard physical properties. It is as though the physical brain contains some strange nonphysical features or dimensions that are qualitatively distinct from all physical features or dimensions. Even if one accepts a dualistic position that the mental and physical are somehow qualitatively distinct, there are several different relations they might have to one another. One critical issue is the direction of causation: Does it run from mind to brain, from brain to mind, or both? Descartess position was that both sorts of causation are in effect: events in the brain can affect mental events, and mental events can also affect events in the brain. A simple explanation is that body influences on the soul/ mind through perception and soul influences the body to speak, move and act. This position is often called interactionism or psychophysical interaction because it claims that the mental and physical worlds can interact causally with each other in both directions. Monism The opposing view to dualism is called monism which states that there is only one aspect. Majority of the monists hold a view that all that exists is the body. They are also called materialists as they relate our mental activities into physical matters of the brain. But there are minor group of monists who believe all that exists is mind or sometimes called spirit. They are referred to as idealists.

Materialism: The vast majority of monists believe that only physical entities exist. They are called materialists. In contrast to idealism, materialism is a very common view among modern philosophers and scientists. Forefather of this view is Thomas Hobbes who believed that the universe is composed of only matter and motion. For him man is a machine whose mental activity is reducible to the motion of atoms in the brain. He said The universe is corporeal, all that is real is material, and what is not material is not real

Materialists posits that events will ultimately be reduced to material events in much the same way that other successful reductions have occurred in science. In other words just like urine is from bladder our mental processes are to be reduced to the neural activity of the brain. This view is also called mind-brain identity theory because it assumes that mental events are actually equivalent to brain events and can be talked about more or less interchangeably. Figure 3

Idealism: A monist who believes there to be no physical world, but only mental events, is called an idealist (from the ideas that populate the mental world). This has not been a very popular position in the history of philosophy, having been championed mainly by the British philosopher Bishop Berkeley. Berkley argued that knowledge is based on perception. There is no reality in the perception itself, it is the mind which interprets the sensations. He held a view that physical objects are composed of ideas. Figure 4

The most significant problem for idealism or spiritual monism is how to explain the commonality of different peoples perceptions of the same physical events. If a fire engine races down the street with siren blaring and red lights flashing, everyone looks toward it, and they all see and hear pretty much the same physical events, albeit from different vantage points. How is this possible if there is no physical world that is responsible for their simultaneous perceptions of the sound and sight of the fire engine? One would have to propose some way in which the minds of the various witnesses happen to be hallucinating exactly corresponding events at exactly corresponding times. Berkeleys answer was that God was responsible for this grand coordination, but such claims have held little sway in modern scientific circles. Without a cogent scientific explanation of the commonality of shared experiences of the physical world, idealism has largely become an historical curiosity with no significant modern following. Problem of others mind While behaviorist philosophy boasts of its ability to escape mind-body problem there still exists a problem of others mind as they neglect a firstperson knowledge. One do not need to observe his/ her behavior in a mirror or on a video in order to be able to say what he believes or what he feels. Behaviorism, by making ones mental states as a matter of how I behave reverses all this and leads to a jokes such as: One behaviorist meet another on the street. You feel fine, says to the other. How do I feel? So by merely observing others external behavior we cannot comprehend everything the person is experiencing mentally. The question at stake is do we know that others are conscious of the same things I am. Peculiar and unique features of my consciousness is its internal, private nature: Only I have direct access to my conscious experiences, and I have direct access only to my own.

Understanding Cognitive Psychology

Psychology's roots can be traced back to the ancient Greeks, who considered the mind to be a suitable topic for scholarly contemplation. Later philosophers argued for hundreds of years about some of the questions psychologists grapple with today. For example, the seventeenthcentury British philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) believed that children were born into the world with minds like "blank slates" (tabularasa in Latin) and that their experiences determined what kind of adults they would become. His views contrasted with those of philosophers such as Plato (427-347 B.c.F..) and French philosopher and mathematician Renee Descartes (15961650), who believed that Some knowledge was inborn in humans. However formal beginning of psychology as a scientific discipline is generally considered to be in the late nineteenth century, when, in Leipzig, Germany, Wilhelm Wundt established the first experimental laboratory devoted to psychological phenomena. At about the s.lmc time, William James was setting up his laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When Wundt set up his laboratory in 1879, his aim was to study the building blocks of the mind. He considered psychology to be the study of conscious experience. His perspective, which came to be known as structuralism, focused on uncovering the fundamental mental components of perception, consciousness, thinking, emotions, and other kinds of mental states and activities. To determine how basic sensory processes shape our understanding of the world, Wundt and other structuralists used a procedure called introspection, in which they presented people with a stimulus-such as a bright green object or a sentence printed on a card-and asked them to describe, in their own words and in as much detail as they could, what they were experiencing. Wundt argued that by analyzing their reports, psychologists could come to a better understanding of the structure of the mind. Over time, psychologists challenged Wundt's approach. They became increasingly dissatisfied with the assumption that introspection could reveal the structure of the mind. Introspection was not a truly scientific technique, because there were few ways an outside observer could confirm the accuracy of others' introspections. Moreover, people had difficulty describing some kinds of inner experiences. such as emotional responses. Those drawbacks led to the development of new apprD.1ches, which largely supplanted structuralism. The perspective that replaced structuralism is known as functionalism. Rather than focusing on the mind's structure, functionalism concentrated on what the mind does and how behavior jlllleliolls. Functionalists, whose perspective became prominent in the early 1900s, asked what role behavior plays in allowing people to adapt to their environments. For example, a functionalist might examine the function of the emotion of fear in preparing us to deal with an emergency situation. Led by the American psychologist William James, the functionalists examined how behavior allows people to satisfy their needs and how our "stream of consciousness" permits us to adopt to our environment. The American educator John Dewey drew on functionalism to develop the field of school psychology, proposing ways to best meet students' educational needs. Another important reaction to structuralism was the development of gestalt psychology in the early 1900s. Gestalt psychology emphasizes how perception is organized. Insteild of considering the individual parts that make up thinking, gestalt psychologists took the opposite tack, studying how people consider individual elements together as units or wholes. Led by German scientists such as Hermann Ebbinghaus and Max Wertheimer, gestalt psychologists proposed that "The whole is different from the sum of its parts," meaning that our perception, or understanding, of objects is greater and more meaningful than the individual elements that make up our perceptions. Gestalt psychologists have made substantial contributions to our understanding of perception.

Ulric Neisser coined the term "cognitive psychology" in his book Cognitive Psychology, published in 1965[3]wherein Neisser provides a definition of cognitive psychology characterizing people as dynamic information-processing systems whose mental operations might be described in computational terms. Also emphasising that it is a "point of view" that postulates the mind as having a certain conceptual structure. Neisser's point of view endows the discipline with a scope beyond high-level concepts such as "reasoning" that other works often espouse as defining psychology. Neisser's definition of "cognition" illustrates this well: The term "cognition" refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations... Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do; that every[4]psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. But although cognitive psychology is concerned with all human activity rather than some fraction of it, the concern is from a particular point of view. Other viewpoints are equally legitimate and necessary. Dynamic psychology, which begins with motives rather than with sensory input, is a case in point. Instead of asking how a man's actions and experiences result from what he saw, remembered, or believed, the dynamic psychologist asks how they follow from the subject's goals, needs, or instincts. Cognitive psychology is one of the more recent additions to psychological research, having only developed as a separate area within the discipline since the late 1950s and early 1960s following the "cognitive revolution" initiated by Noam Chomsky's 1959 critique[5] of behaviorism and empiricism more generally. The origins of cognitive thinking such as computational theory of mind can be traced back as early as Descartes in the 17th century, and proceeding up to Alan Turing in the 1940s and '50s. The cognitive approach was brought to prominence by Donald Broadbent's book Perception and Communication in 1958. Since that time, the dominant paradigm in the area has been the information processing model of cognition that Broadbent put forward. This is a way of thinking and reasoning about mental processes, envisioning them as software running on the computer that is the brain. Theories refer to forms of input, representation, computation or processing, and outputs. Applied to language as the primary mental knowledge representation system, cognitive psychology has exploited tree and network mental models. Its singular contribution to AI and psychology in general is the notion of a semantic network. One of the first cognitive psychologists, George Miller is well-known for dedicating his career to the development of WordNet, a semantic network for the English language. Development began in 1985 and is now the foundation for many machine ontologies.

This way of conceiving mental processes has pervaded psychology more generally over the past few decades, and it is not uncommon to find cognitive theories within social psychology, personality psychology, abnormal psychology, and developmental psychology. In fact, the neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development have fully integrated the developmental conception of changes in thought with age with cognitive models of information processing.[6] The application of cognitive theories to comparative psychology has driven many recent studies in animal cognition. However, cognitive psychology dealing with the intervening constructs of the mental presentations is not able to specify: "What are the non-material counterparts of material objects?" For example, "What is the counterpart of a chair in mental processes, and how do the non-material processes evolve in the mind that has no space?" Further, what are the very specific qualities of the mental causalities, in particular, when the causalities are processes? The plain statement about information processing awakes some questions. What information is dealt with, its contents, and form? Are there transformations? What are the nature of process causalities? How do subjective states of a person transmute into shared states, and the other way around? Finally, yet importantly, how is it that we who work with cognitive research are able to conceptualize the mental counter concepts to construct theories that have real importance in real every day life? Consequently, there is a lack of specific process concepts that lead to new developments, and create grand theories about the mind and its abysses. The information processing approach to cognitive functioning is currently being questioned by new approaches in psychology, such as dynamical systems, and the embodiment perspective. Because of the use of computational metaphors and terminology, cognitive psychology was able to benefit greatly from the flourishing of research in artificial intelligence and other related areas in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, it developed as one of the significant aspects of the interdisciplinary subject of cognitive science, which attempts to integrate a range of approaches in research on the mind and mental processes.[7]

Cognitive psychology developed in relation to the development of experimental psychology. Hence, though Wilhelm Wundt is considered to be the founding father of experimental psychology he can also be considered as an important contributor to cognitive psychology.

As [sabel sat down 10 llIanksgiving dinner, her father carried Ihf! turkey in on a Iray and placOO it squarf!ly in the ("('nleT of the lable. Thf! noise level. already high from the talking and laughter of family members, grew louder still. As Isabel picked up her fork, the smell of the turkey reached her and she felt her stomach growl hungrily. The sight and sound of h(>J" family around the tablf!, along with the smells and tnstes of the holiday mf!al, made lsaJxoI feel more relaxed than she hnd since starting school in the fa IL. Put yourself in this setting and cons ider how d ifferent it might be if anyone of your senses was not functioning. What if you were blind and unable to see the faces of your fami ly members or the welcome shape of the golden-brown turkey? What if you had no sense of hearing and could not listen to the conversations of family members or were unable to feel your stomach growl, smell the dinne r, or taste the food? Clearly, you would experience the dinner very differently than would someone whose sensory apparatus was intact. Moreover, the sensations mentioned above barely sc ratch the surface of sensory experience. Although perhaps you were taught, as I was, that there are just five senses-sight, sound, taste, s mell, and touch- that enumeration is too modest. Human scnsory capabilities go well beyond the basic five senses. For example, we are sens itive not merely to touch but to a conSiderably wider set of stimuli- pain, pressure, temperature, and vibration, to name a few. In addition, vision has two subsystemsrelating to day and night vision-and the car is responsive to information that allows us not only to hear but also to keep our balance. To consider how psychologiSts understand the senses and, more broadly, sensation and perception, we first need a basic working vocabulary. [n formal terms, sensation is the activation of the sense organs by a source of physical energy. Perception is the sorting out, interpretation, analysis, and integration of stimuli carried out by the sense organs and brain. A stimulus is any passing source of phySical energy that produces a response in a sense organ. Stimuli vary in both type and intensity. Different types of stimuli activate different sense organs. For instance, we can differentiate light stimuli (which activate the sense of sight and allow us to see the colors of a tree in autumn) from sound stimuli (which, through the sense of hearing, permit us to hear the sounds of an orchestra). How intense a light stimulus needs to be before it can be de tected and how much perfume a person must wear before it is noticed by others are questions related to stimulus intensity. The issue of how the intensity of a stimulus influences our sensory responses is considered in a branch of psychology known as psychophysics. Psychophysics is the study of the relationship bctv,reen the physical aspects of stimuli and our psychological experience of them. Psychophysics played a central role in the development of the field of psychology, and many of the fi rst psychologists studied issues related to psychophysics (Chechile, 2003; Gardner, 2005).

Examination of brain damage has a long tradition. The Ancient Romans observed that gladiators with head injuries often lost their mental skills, whereas injuries to other parts of the body did not have such an effect. It was inferred that there was a possible link between the mind and brain. Today, the assumption that the mind is somehow implemented in the brain is taken for granted, and even the common-sense understanding presupposes a relation between

mental and neuronal processes. Subsequently, research on the brain became more and more important, and the psychological methods being used shifted to systematic scientific examination of the brain. The crucial question then became: How is this relation realized, and what properties of the brain are capable of causing mental and cognitive events? As it is not possible, in this introductory passage, to cover the entire configuration of the brain in an appropriate manner, we will just give a brief summary of the concepts behind neural signal transduction, and smoothly switch over to the anatomy of the brain. This in turn will then serve as background information in the attempt to link cognitive functions to brain structure. Such messages-as well as those which enable us to think, remember, and experience emotionare passed through specialized cells called neurons. Neurons, or nerve cells, are the basic elements of the nervous system. Their quantity is staggering-perhaps as many as 1 trillion neurons throughout the body are involved in the control of behavior (Boahen, 2005). Although there arc several types of neurons, they all have a similar structure, as illustrated in Figure 1. Like most cells in the body, neurons have a cell body that contains a nucleus. The nucleus incorporates the hereditary material that determines how a cell will fu nction. Neurons are physically held in place by glial cells. Glial cells provide nourishment to neuro insulate them, help repair damage, and generally support neural functioning (Uylings & Vrije, 2002; Fields, 2004; Kettenmann & Ra115Om, 2005). In contrast to most other cells, however, neurons have a distinctive feature: the ability to communicate with other cells and transmit information across relatively long distances. Many of the body's neurons receive signals from the environment or relay the nervous system's messages to muscles and other target cells, but the vast majority of neurons communicate only with other neurons in the elaborate information system that regulates behavior. As you can sec in Figure 1, a neuron has a cell body with a cluster of fibe rs called dendrites at one end. Those fibers, which look like the twisted branches of a tTl'f', n><"P;VP mf'sg.'8f>S from nthf'~ np"mns. On thp nppnsitp pnel nf thp ("pll hnrly is "long, slim, tubeli ke extension called an axon. The axon carries messages received by the dendrites to other neurons. The axon is considerably longer than the rest of the neuron. Although most axons are several millimeters in length, some are as long as three feet. Axons end in small bulges called terminal buttons, which send messages