THE INFORMATION PROCESSING APPROACH

Cognitive Psychology PSY 504

Lesson 02

THE INFORMATION PROCESSING APPROACH

The information processing approach, unlike the stimulus-response model of behaviorism, looks

at how input is transformed into output. In other words, what happens between sensation and

behavior is amore important question for cognitive psychologists than just which sensation

produced which behavior. Cognitive Psychology treats the sensation as bits of information which

are subjected to various processes in the mind and ultimately behavior may or may not result

from this.

These processes are usually performed in stages. There are also different layers or levels of

processing in each stage. We can talk about these layers as levels of description rather than

actual process itself. Just as in a computer we can talk about hardware level and software level

descriptions of a process, we can also talk about human information processing as having a

hardware level description - such as what happens in the brain or nervous system when a

sensation occurs and a software level description like when we close our eyes to recall an

image of that sensation, how are we able to recall the image.

The hardware level description may consist of studying the visual sensation itself. And we can

study how the sensory neurons carry the information higher in the system. We can study the

visual cortex, the part of the brain concerning itself with visual processing. The connection of

visual cortex with other parts of the brain would also come under a hardware level description of

the process. Then there are complex processes in the brain we don't know enough about.

Afterwards, afferent neurons take the decisions via nerves to the muscles which implement the

decision. The above description would be the summary of a hardware level understanding of the

different processes underlying visual processing.

A software level description would start at the sensation but then continue with sensory storage,

discuss the possibility of a filter underlying selective attention, then move on to short term/working

memory which will process and transform the material into something that can be kept in the long

term memory. From Long term memory the information is retrieved back into the working memory

for use when needed. We will discuss these processes in great detail in the following Lessons so

at the moment you shouldn't be too concerned if you don't grasp these concepts straight away.

We have used the example of attention in the Lesson to show how doing two tasks at the same

time can impair the quality of performance at both tasks. This has allowed psychologists to

generate limited resource or limited capacity models of attention, a topic we will discuss in much

greater detail later on in the course.

Cognitive Psychologists generate these descriptions of the different stages of information

processing and then they develop models that incorporate these descriptions into new theoretical

frameworks. These models are then tested in the laboratory using experiments mostly on human

subjects.

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