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Clinical Cognitive Science: Applying Quantitative Models of Cognitive Processing to Examine Cognitive Aspects of Psychopathology
Book chapter

Clinical Cognitive Science: Applying Quantitative Models of Cognitive Processing to Examine Cognitive Aspects of Psychopathology

Teresa A Treat, Richard M McFall, Richard J Viken, John K Kruschke, Robert M Nosofsky and Shirley S Wang
Advances in clinical cognitive science: Formal modeling of processes and symptoms, pp.179-205
American Psychological Association
2007
DOI: 10.1037/11556-006

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Abstract

The overarching aims of this chapter are to introduce a unified class of theoretical, measurement, and analytical models that can be used to examine research questions about clinically relevant cognitive processing and to illustrate the generalizability and applicability of cognitive science models to more real-world research questions. This well-established class of models treats participants' perceptual organizations of stimuli as a primitive on which other processes--such as classification, memory, and learning--operate. Formal process models specify mathematically the theorized links among these interrelated processes and afford rigorous examination of the mechanisms underlying task performance. Thus, this approach not only accounts simultaneously for the operation of multiple cognitive processes but also specifies well-integrated theoretical, measurement, and analytical models of these processes. To examine the feasibility and utility of using this clinical cognitive approach, we deliberately have examined it in parallel across multiple areas of psychopathology, with a primary focus on problematic eating patterns and sexually aggressive behaviors. Theoretical approaches within both domains increasingly have focused on the role of information-processing patterns in the etiology and maintenance of these behaviors and in the development of prevention and intervention strategies. In this chapter, we focus on the use of cognitive science methods to characterize individual differences in men's processing of women's facial affect and physical appearance, with implications for our understanding of sexual aggression, and individual differences in women's processing of other women's facial affect and body size, with implications for our understanding of eating disorders. We open this chapter with a section on stimulus-construction issues, given their centrality to the utility and validity of the approach. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)
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