Minor Concept Summary: Information Processing 

ED 304: Psych and Human Development

Author: Abby Porter

Disclosure: ChatGPT was used in the creation of this resource.

In cognitive psychology information processing is the flow of information through our nervous system and the different operations we go through to acquire, organize, store, retrieve, and use the information. This theory came about in the 1950s, which is about when computers were invented, and psychologists started using computers as a metaphor to explain the functions of the human mind. Before the Information Processing theory came into existence psychology was dominated by behaviorism not knowing much about the inner workings of the mind. 

As information processing became bigger in psychology some multiple models or frameworks were proposed (ex: Broadbent's Filter Model, Treisman's Attenuation Model, Deutsch and Deutsch's Late Selection Model, etc.) Of these various models, most of them seem to be composed of three main elements:

1. Information stores: the different places in our mind where we store information, such as our long-term and short-term memory.
2. Cognitive processes: the processes that transfer memory among different memory stores
3. Executive cognition: awareness of the way information is processed within an individual

Even with all of these various models representing Information Processing Theory, many critiques come along with it. Some of these include:

• The information processing models assume one process has to be completed before the next starts, which is called selective processing when there is some evidence showing that some processes involved in cognitive tasks occur at the same time, which is called parallel processing
• The evidence for the theories or models is all largely based on experiments under controlled, scientific conditions
• The analogy comparing our brains and how we process information to computers is not perfect

Media Examples

https://youtu.be/aURqy9BEJO4

Quiz Questions

In the Information Processing Theory, what do psychologists compare our brains to?

Computers

Robots

Anything AI

What are some of the critiques of the Information Processing Theory?

The models seem to assume we have selective processing

We don't need this theory because we were just fine with behaviorism

The analogy comparing our brains to computers is not perfect

It can't be accurate because of how many varying models there are