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.
What was Karl Lashley famous for researching?
Lashley hoped (but failed) to find the precise spot in the brain of rats where learning occurred.
He tested rats abilities to run through mazes.
What type of psychology did Karl Lashley’s work lead to?
Physiological Psychology, which later became known as Behavioural Neuroscience
Define “Behavioural Neuroscience”
An approach to psychology that links psychological processes to activities in the nervous system and to other bodily processes
What technological breakthrough came about in the 1980s?
Non-invasive brain scanning techniques;
They made it possible for psychologists to watch what happens inside a human brain as a person performs a task such as reading, imagining, listening, or remembering
Define “Cognitive Neuroscience”
The field of study that attempts to understand the links between cognitive processes and brain activity
Who is famous for the quote “neurons that fire together, wire together.”
Donald Olding Hebb, who was a Canadian psychologist
This famous rule is now widely considered to describe one of the most important cellular mechanisms of learning and memory. Although Hebb made the suggestion in 1949, the biological techniques required to observe it did not become available until the late 1960s.
Which three scientists were instrumental in the formation of Cognitive Neuroscience?
Donald Hebb, Wilder Penfield, Brenda Milner
Hebb
Penfield
Milner
What contribution is Brenda Milner most well-known for?
Her discovery of the critical importance of a specific part of the brain, the hippocampus, to memory.
She studied patients with removals of different parts of the brain (usually to relieve seizure disorders), in order to understand how the different regions contribute to human cognition and behaviour.
Who was Wilder Penfield?
A Canadian neurosurgeon who pioneered the surgical treatment of epilepsy by carefully removing in each patient the specific part of his or her brain causing seizures.
In the process, he was able to create the first detailed functional maps of the human brain—locating the regions responsible for feeling touch on different parts of the body, for moving different parts of the body, and for understanding and producing language
He relied on Milner and Hebb to evaluate the psychological effects of the surgeries he conducted
What 1960/70s insight led to the boom of Evolutionary Psychology?
Rats can learn to associate nausea with the smell of food much more quickly than they can learn to associate nausea with a flashing light
; as displayed by John Garcia and his colleagues
Define “Evolutionary Psychology”
Explains mind and behaviour in terms of the adaptive value of abilities that are preserved over time by natural selection.
How do Evolutionary Psychologists view the mind?
Evolutionary psychologists think of the mind as a collection of specialized “modules” that solve the human problems our ancestors faced as they attempted to eat, mate, and reproduce over millions of years.
the brain is not an all-purpose computer that can do or learn one thing just as easily as it can do or learn another; rather, it is a computer that does a few things well and everything else not at all.
It is a computer that comes with a small suite of built-in applications that are designed to do the things that previous versions of that computer needed to have done
What is the primary focus of Evolutionary Psychology?
Evolutionary psychology focuses on how abilities are preserved over time if they contribute to an organism’s ability to survive and reproduce
