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Psychology study materials
Psychology study resources

Psychology: Cognitive psychology (learning, memory, thinking, language, intelligence)

Psychology · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

All guide sections

Cognitive psychology (learning, memory, thinking, language, intelligence)

This domain covers how organisms acquire, store, and use information. Questions usually present a behavior and ask which process or schedule explains it, so learn the defining features rather than the labels.

Conditioning and learning

  • Classical conditioning: a neutral conditioned stimulus paired with an unconditioned stimulus acquires the power to elicit a conditioned response. Extinction is new learning, not erasure; spontaneous recovery shows the old association survives.
  • Operant conditioning: reinforcement increases behavior, punishment decreases it. Negative reinforcement removes an aversive stimulus and is not punishment. Ratio schedules count responses, interval schedules count time; variable ratio produces the greatest resistance to extinction (slot machines).
  • Observational learning (Bandura) requires attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation.

Memory

  • Modal model: sensory memory, short-term/working memory (about 7 plus or minus 2 chunks, seconds without rehearsal), long-term memory (durable, vast).
  • Encoding depth matters (levels of processing: semantic beats phonological beats structural); spacing beats massing; retrieval practice beats rereading.
  • Explicit memory depends on the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe; procedural memory on the basal ganglia and cerebellum.
  • Forgetting: decay, interference (proactive = old disrupts new; retroactive = new disrupts old), retrieval failure. Serial position shows primacy (LTM) and recency (STM).

Thinking, language, intelligence

  • Heuristics: availability (ease of recall), representativeness (similarity to a prototype), anchoring (adjustment from a starting value); base rates are neglected.
  • Language has phonemes, morphemes, syntax, semantics, pragmatics. Broca's area governs production; Wernicke's governs comprehension.
  • Intelligence: Spearman's g, Cattell-Horn fluid (novel reasoning, declines with age) versus crystallized (knowledge, stable or rising), Sternberg's triarchic (analytical, creative, practical), Gardner's multiple intelligences.

Worked example

A patient is described as quiet, neat, and shy. You guess librarian over salesperson. Reasoning: the description matches the librarian stereotype (representativeness), but there are far more salespeople than librarians, so base rates should dominate; most such descriptions come from salespeople. The error is base-rate neglect driven by representativeness.

Traps

Equating negative reinforcement with punishment; answering variable-interval instead of variable-ratio for slot machines; swapping proactive and retroactive interference; assuming fluid intelligence rises with age.