Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience, 3rd Edition

Researching the Mind • 15

Researching the Mind

How is the mind studied? The basic principle of using behavior to infer mental processes, as

Donders did, still guides present-day research. In addition, new technologies have enabled

psychologists to expand their research to also study the relation between mental processes

and the brain. To illustrate how cognitive psychologists have used both behavioral and

physiological approaches to studying the operation of the mind, we will now describe a

few experiments designed to study a phenomenon called memory consolidation.

MEMORY CONSOLIDATION

FROM A BEHAVIORAL PERSPECTIVE

A football player is running downfi eld, the ball tucked securely under his arm.

Suddenly, his run is unexpectedly cut short by a vicious tackle. His helmet hits the

ground, and he lies still for a few moments before slowly getting up and making his

way back to the bench. Later, sitting on the bench, he can’t remember getting hit, or

even taking the handoff from the quarterback at the beginning of the play.

The football player’s lack of memory for the events that occurred just before he

got hit illustrate that our memory for recent events is fragile. Normally, he would

have had no trouble remembering the handoff and run, but the hit he took wiped

out his memory for these events. More accurately, the hit prevented the information

about the handoff and run from undergoing a process called memory consolidation,

during which the information about the handoff and run, which was in a fragile

state, could become strengthened and transformed into a strong memory that is

more resistant to interference by events such as taking a hit to the head.

Research on the phenomenon of memory consolidation dates back to the begin-

nings of the study of cognition, when the German psychologists Georg Muller and

Alfons Pilzecker (1900; also see Deware et al., 2007) had two groups of participants

each learn two lists of nonsense syllables. The “immediate” group learned one list and

were then asked to immediately learn a second list. The “delay” group learned the fi rst

list and then waited for 6 minutes before learning the second list (● Figure 1.13). When

recall for the fi rst list was then measured, participants in the delay group remembered

48 percent of the syllables, but participants in the immediate group remembered only

28 percent of the syllables. Apparently, immediately presenting the second list to the

immediate group interrupted the forming of a stable memory for the fi rst list—the

process that came to be called consolidation.

(a) Immediate group

1 2

No delay

Test for

list 1

Recall of

first list

28%

(b) Delay group

1 2

6 minutes

Test for

list 1

48%

● FIGURE 1.13 Procedure for Muller

and Pilzecker’s experiment. (a) In the

immediate condition, participants

learned the fi rst list (1) and then

immediately learned the second

list (2). (b) In the delay condition,

the second list was learned after a

6-minute delay. Numbers on the right

indicate the percentage of items from

the fi rst list recalled when memory for

that list was tested later.

Cherry:

Attention

experiment

First

commercially

available

digital

computer

M.I.T. and

Dartmouth

conferences

Broadbent:

Flow

diagram

Neisser:

First cognitive

psychology

book

1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1967

Tolman:

Cognitive

map

1948

Skinner:

Verbal

Behavior

Chomsky:

“A Review of B. F.

Skinner’s Verbal

Behavior”

● FIGURE 1.12 Timeline showing events associated with the decline of the

infl uence of behaviorism (above the line) and events that led to the development of

the information-processing approach to cognitive psychology (below the line).

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