1.4 - Return of the Mind - Psychology Expands Flashcards
What are a few reasons for the decline of Behaviourism?
- It ignored some mental processes, such as how children learned language
- It ignored the evolutionary history of the organisms it studied
This type of psychology deals with perception, memory, subjective experience, attention, and language
What is “Cognitive Psychology”
What did Max Wertheimer study?
The study of illusions, errors of perception, memory, or judgement in which subjective experience differs from objective reality.
(He did the flashing lights test/ where people would eventually see one flash instead of two…)
What is Gestalt Psychology?
A psychological approach that emphasizes that we often perceive the whole rather than the sum of the parts
What did Sir Frederic Bartlett study?
Memory
Bartlett believed that it was more important to examine memory for the kinds of information people actually encounter in everyday life, so he gave people stories to remember and carefully observed the kinds of errors they made when they tried to recall them at a later time
He suggested that memory is not a photographic reproduction of past experience and that our attempts to recall the past are powerfully influenced by our knowledge, beliefs, hopes, aspirations, and desires.
Who was Jean Piaget / what did he study?
Swiss psychologist who studied children’s perceptual and cognitive errors in order to gain insight into the nature and development of the human mind
He did the clay experiment on young children..
Piaget theorized that younger children lack a particular cognitive ability that allows older children to appreciate the fact that the mass of an object remains constant even when it is divided. For Piaget, errors such as these provided key insights into the mental world of the child
This psychologist argued that a person’s behaviour in the world could be predicted best by understanding the person’s subjective experience of the world
Kurt Lewin
Lewin realized that it was not the stimulus, but rather the person’s “construal” of the stimulus, that determined the person’s subsequent behaviour
What invention had a major influence on the attention given to mental processes by psychology?
Computers, in the 1950s.
They led to a reemergence of interest in mental processes, and led to COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
How did military technology cerated for WW2 relate to psychological research?
The topic of attention limitations arose. Soldiers being trained to effectively use radar technology had to be extremely precise in their attention.
It required that those who designed the equipment think about and talk about cognitive processes, such as perception, attention, identification, memory, and decision making
What was Donald Broadbent known for studying?
He studied what happens when people try to pay attention to several things at once.
For instance, Broadbent observed that pilots can’t attend to many different instruments at once, and must actively move the focus of their attention from one to another.
Which publication led to the ironic emergence of Cognitive Psychology?
Skinner’s behavioural analysis of language; “ “Verbal Behaviour”
Who heavily critiqued Skinner’s “Verbal Behaviour”
Noah Chomsky; who is known as “the father of modern linguistics”
What was Chomsky able to explain that behaviourists could not?
Language relies on mental rules that allow people to understand and produce novel words and sentences
The ability of even the youngest child to generate new sentences that he or she has never heard before flew in the face of the behaviourist claim that children learn to use language by reinforcement
Who wrote the landmark book “Cognitive Psychology”?
Ulric Nessier in 1967
Which aspect of the mind did Cognitive Psychologists neglect?
The “hardware of the brain”, or perhaps, the biological aspect and anatomical structure of the brain.
