Applications of Cognitive Psychology

Problem Solving, Education, and Computing

Dale E. Berger, Kathy Pezdek, William P. Banks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780898597103
• eBook ISBN: 9781136560958
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Published in the year 1986, Applications of Cognitive Psychology is a valuable contribution to the field  of Cognitive Psychology.

I A RANGE OF EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS

The first section of the book includes five chapters that highlight a range of educational applications that are of interest to cognitive psychologists. In the first chapter, Kathy Pezdek presents her research on “Television Comprehension as an Example of Applied Resarch in Cognitive Psychology.” She stresses that with children and adults in this country spending more time with television than with any other leisure time activity, it is important to study how we comprehend television and what information we retain from television. Her finding that children's ability to comprehend information presented on television is uncorrelated with reading ability has important implications for presenting educational content, especially to poor readers.

Interest in media processing is also the topic of Patricia Greenfield's chapter, “Electronic Technologies, Education, and Cognitive Development.” According to her view, the educational system has developed an overreliance on text as the dominant medium through which education occurs. Her findings support numerous educational advantages for utilizing a broader range of media including television and computer games. For example, she presents support for her view that television viewing develops visual/spatial skills, and that practice with computer games improves problem-solving ability.

The next chapter also focuses on the use of a nontraditional form of media in the classroom, the computer. One specific educational use of computers is the learning of computer programming languages. In their chapter, “Learning Programming Languages: Research and Applications,” Richard Mayer, Piraye Bayman, and Jennifer Dyck report some of the findings from their program of research investigating how novices learn computer programming. In particular, they report that novice programmers often have ineffective mental models for how a program operates, they fail to transfer their programming knowledge beyond what is taught and they lack certain cognitive skills that are prerequisite to learning computer programming. Like Greenfield, Mayer and his colleagues have found that some cognitive skills are learned as a byproduct of working with computers. However, they suggest that learning computer programming enhances a specific set of cognitive skills such as procedure comprehension and problem translation. Greenfield claims that computer experience and processing various other forms of media stimulate cognitive development more generally.

As more and more school systems purchase computers for classroom use and incorporate this new educational medium into the curriculum, many questions have arisen regarding how best to utilize these computers. One of these questions has been addressed by David Trowbridge in his chapter, “An Investigation of Groups Working at the Computer.” In this chapter, Trowbridge presents his research examining the social and cognitive advantages of having students work on computers individually versus in various sized groups. He reports that there is no need for a computer for each individual student. In fact, there are numerous educational advantages of utilizing task-focused small groups for computer activities.

In the final chapter in this section, we return to a more traditional educational medium, text and the process of reading. In his chapter, “Applying Cognitive Development Theory to the Acquisition of Literacy,” George Marsh traces the historical development of numerous approaches to the reading process. These include projects conducted by academic as well as applied researchers. He concludes by describing his work utilizing an information processing approach to study reading, and argues for the advantages of this approach.

Together, the chapters in this section promote a broader view of “education” than is traditionally encountered. These researchers have generally focused on learning skills rather than on the acquisition of declarative knowledge, and have not restricted their interest to the print medium. Productive exchange between research and application is one of the benefits of applied cognitive psychology, in this case leading to findings that have implications for shaping significant aspects of the educational system.

1 Television Comprehension as an Example of Applied Research in Cognitive Psychology

Kathy Pezdek
The Claremont Graduate School

ABSTRACT

This chapter provides a framework for approaching and conducting cognitive psychology research from an applied perspective. Definitions are offered to differentiate basic versus applied research, and cognitive applied psychology versus applied cognitive psychology. The development of my own research program examining comprehension and memory for information presented on television is offered as an example that incorporates both the advantages and disadvantages of these various research approaches. By elaborating an alternative to basic research, this chapter aims to encourage cognitive psychologists to step back from their theories and their familiar methodologies and think in practical ways about the behaviors that they are interested in understanding. I assert that there is room in our field to shift the focus in the direction of addressing more interesting applied behaviors without abandoning empirical rigor or theoretical progress.

INTRODUCTION

The goal of this chapter is to provide a framework for approaching and conducting cognitive psychology research from an applied perspective. The development of my own research program examining comprehension and memory for information presented on television is offered as an example of such an approach. This research program, with all of its ups and downs, illustrates the costs and benefits of several different approaches to applied research in cognitive psychology. I hope that this chapter will consequently motivate a greater interest in and appreciation for the contributions of applied research in cognitive psychology.

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY RESEARCH

Research in the area of cognitive psychology (and other disciplines as well) has traditionally been divided into two categories: (a) basic research and (b) applied research. Simply put, the goal of basic research is to inductively or deductively contribute to the growth of theoretical knowledge in a discipline. The goal of applied research is to come to better understand some interesting real-world behavior. But the real difference between applied and basic research in cognitive psychology is greater than this. As Baddeley (1979) described it, “For many years applied psychology seems to have been regarded either as an occupational net, providing work for those who were not good enough to reach the ethereal heights of ‘ pure’ psychology, or at best as a pardonable perversion practiced among a few eccentric groups of experimental psychologists” (p. 367).

Since the formal origin of the field of cognitive psychology with Broadbent's (1958) classic text, Perception and Communication, the large majority of the published research in the field has been basic research. This makes sense in a new field. During the infancy of a field, it is important to develop good theories to provide a structure for the knowledge that is acquired. A theoretical structure successfully provides a firm foundation upon which the field can develop and it also helps to define the parameters of the field. However, the path of development of theory in cognitive psychology is not without criticism, and because cognitive psychology is still such a new field, it is important to consider these critiques and what might be done to respond to them.

The major criticism relevant to the point of this chapter is that despite the proliferation of researchers and research in cognitive psychology over the last few decades, knowledge is not accumulating into an integrated theoretical base in the field. This view has been expressed by Tulving (1979) in his claim that “ours is not yet a cumulative science, … we have not yet succeeded in constructing a stable foundation of knowledge and understanding of memory… . The progress we have made in the past, therefore, must be regarded as rather modest” (p. 27). A similar position has been taken by Newell (1973), who doubts whether another 30 years of research on isolated phenomena will really advance our understanding of cognitive psychology.

What is the evidence that research in cognitive psychology is not developing a cumulative theoretical knowledge base? Tulving's evidence for his own opinion is largely based on two points of criticism: first, that cognitive psychologists, with their heightened concern for methodological precision, often do experiments on experiments rather than experiments on ideas; and second, that theoretical models have been developed to account for data sets that are too small, in some cases single experiments. Together, these points contribute to segregating rather than integrating the research in cognitive psychology.

Another very convincing line of evidence that the knowledge base in cognitive psychology, and memory in particular, is quite diverse and unfocused has been offered by White (1983). If a field is developing a cumulative knowledge base, then it would be expected that a relatively large and stable source of references would be frequently cited in the literature in that field. White selected the eight most popular textbooks on human memory. The total number of different references (books as well as journal articles) in these eight textbooks was just over 3,500. Of these 3,500 individual references, only .3% (i.e., 10 references) were cited in all eight books!

Similarly disappointing findings were reported by Garfield (1978a, 1978b, 1979). He found that among the approximately 3,000 potentially citable books and articles published in cognitive psychology between 1969 and 1977, only 21 received more than 20 citations a year. Along with these authors, I take the view that if research in cognitive psychology were becoming focused and integrated around a firm theoretical structure in the field, this theoretical structure would be reliably identified in terms of a significant core of frequently cited references, and this apparently is not the case. White refers to this as the “publish-and-perish” phenomenon.

What can be done to facilitate the development of a cumulative theoretical knowledge base in cognitive psychology? Several suggestions have been offered by Tulving (1979), Newell (1973), and others in line with utilizing the “strong inferences” notions of Piatt (1964) and the principles of a paradigmatic science articulated by Kuhn (1962). These suggestions essentially remind us to follow the method of inductive inference that we all learned in our first research methodology class. This method involves systematically (a) generating alternative hypotheses, (b) devising a critical experiment that excludes one or more of the hypotheses, (c) carrying out the critical experiment, and (d) recycling this procedure making subhypotheses or refining the hypotheses that remain. These reasonable suggestions would have important implications for cognitive psychology. However, this chapter offers an alternative solution to the above problem.

This chapter takes the firm position that theory is of central importance to the development of a discipline. Nothing said in this chapter should be misconstrued as promoting an atheoretical approach to cognitive psychology. However, the course of the theoretical development in cognitive psychology has not been encouraging. A number of principals in the field have argued that the plethora of research findings in cognitive psychology is not becoming more integrated or focused around useful theories. We are acquiring more “trees” without acquiring more or better “forests.” Given that the large majority of these research findings are from the basic research mold, this chapter suggests that the time has come to encourage a different research mold, specifically that of applied research.

APPLIED RESEARCH IN COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Applied researchers in cognitive psychology begin by selecting some interesting real-world behavior and try to understand the cognitive processes involved in this behavior. The hope is always that in studying the interesting real-world behavior, sound theoretical advances will be made. But, rather than beginning with the theory, as basic researchers do, applied researchers begin with an applied problem and either (a) draw on relevant theory or (b) let the theory follow from unde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Dedication
• PART I: A RANGE OF EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS
• PART II: THE TEACHING OF THINKING AND PROBLEM SOLVING
• PART III: TRADEOFFS IN THE DESIGN OF HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERFACES
• Author Index
• Subject Index