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conceptual and historical psychology > Behaviourism and the Cognitive Revolution > Flashcards

Behaviourism and the Cognitive Revolution Flashcards

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1
Q

what is British associationism?

A
  • The idea we form more complex concepts from simpler thoughts
  • put forward by John Locke
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2
Q

what did David Hartley do?

A
  • British associationist
  • developed a neurophysiological theory of the mind
  • Body and mind function in concert – psychological processes emerge from the body (neurological)
  • Materialist - no separate mental matter
  • First to propose physiological associationist model of the mind
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3
Q

what is the associationist model of the mind?

A
  • Nerves ”vibrate”, changes in vibration (frequency or amplitude) transmit to other nerves
  • Because nerves are so connected, this basic mechanism gives rise to action.
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4
Q

Who was Alexander Bain?

A
  • another associationist
  • Marked transition between early and 18th century psychology. Started from associationist principles, and focused on the psychology of action:
    1. Psychophysical Parallelism
    2. Hedonism
    3. Voluntarism
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5
Q

what is Psychophysical Parallelism?

A

mind and body occur together without causal relationship

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6
Q

what is Hedonism?

A

pleasurable associations more likely to be repeated than unpleasant ones

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7
Q

what is Voluntarism?

A

importance of voluntary action in understanding experience and learning

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8
Q

who was Edward Thorndike?

A
  • was a functionalist that set the stage for behaviourism with his work on cats
  • operant conditioning
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9
Q

what is the law of exercise and disuse?

A

(aka learning and extinction)
more often an association is used, the stronger the connection, and the less often it is used, the weaker the connection.

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10
Q

what is the law of effect?

A

if an action is followed by a “satisfying state of affairs”, the organism is more likely to repeat it, and less likely if it doesn’t.

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11
Q

what does the law of exercise and disuse and the the law of effect form the basis of?

A

operant conditioning

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12
Q

Who was Ivan Pavolv?

A
  • one of the key behaviourists, was influenced by Darwin
  • Famous for classical conditioning
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13
Q

what is classical conditioning?

A
  • Start with a US (food) and UR (salivating)
  • Pair the US with a CS (e.g. bell)
  • Rough this pairing, CS produces CR without US
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14
Q

what are the foundations of Behavioursim?

A
  • Can trace a line of influence from Darwin to William James and functionalism
  • Watson and Pavlov very heavily influenced by Darwin and the development of evolutionary biology
  • Took on functionalism’s pragmatic claims, but used them to critique existence of the mind
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15
Q

What is behaviourism?

A

Paradigm in psychology from the early to mid 1900’s

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16
Q

what is methodological behaviour?

A

psychologists must study behaviour

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17
Q

what is psychological behaviourism?

A

psychology should be the study of behaviour

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18
Q

what is Philosophical or logical behaviourism?

A

– language about mental states and terms is just behavioural dispositions

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19
Q

what is radical behaviourism?

A

adopting all three of methodological, psychological, philosophical or logical behaviourism (e.g. skinner)

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20
Q

Who was John B. Watson?

A
  • behaviourist
  • Little Albert with classical conditioning
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21
Q

what was Watson’s Behaviourism?

A
  • methodological behaviourism
  • focused on classical conditioning
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22
Q

What are the objectives of behaviourism?

A
  • adjustment and maladjustment (to the environment)
  • Phylogenetic continuity (with other animals)
  • Determination (and control) of behaviour)
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23
Q

what are the 3 types of behaviour?

A
  • Somatic (hereditary) - habits, instinctive reactions
  • Somatic (acquired) – Habits
  • Visceral (acquired) – Emotions
24
Q

Who was Clark Hull?

A
  • he moved beyond S-R relationship to look at organismic variables (motivations)
25
Q

what is Drive Reduction Theory?

A
  • Reaction Potential (to a stimulus) (sER)
  • Habit strength – prior conditioning (sHr)
  • Drive – extent of need to satisfy biological drive (D)

sEr = sHr x D
Hull believed this equation (and its successors) could explain all behaviour.

26
Q

Who was Edward Tolman?

A
  • similar critical of a purely S-R account of behaviour
  • believed Behaviourism was the study of “twitches”
  • Although behaviourist, recognized we cannot escape mentalist terms, cognitive maps, goals, appetites etc.
  • Saw evidence of animals of goal direcred behavior, and cognitive processes
  • looked at place learning
  • ‘Cognitive’ behaviourist – methodologically, but not psychologically or philosophically behaviourist
27
Q

what is place learning?

A

maze learning in rats
- Argued they develop a cognitive map
- Latent learning (in absence of reinforcement or punishment)
- Expectancy learning – induction

28
Q

who was B.F Skinner?

A
  • proposed operant conditioning
  • Rejected organismic (e.g. Hull, Tolman) accounts of behavior

Two accounts of learning:
- Type S: Classical Conditioning
Stimulus response learning
- Type R: Operant Conditioning
Response outcome learning
‘Voluntary’ behaviours

29
Q

what is positive reinforcement?

A

positive = addition
reinforcement = good
addition of something good will increase behaviour

30
Q

what is negative reinforcement?

A

negative = remove
reinforcement = good (inc behaviour)
removing something bad will increase behaviour

31
Q

what is positive punishment?

A

positive = addition
punishment = bad
addition of something bad will decrease behaviour

32
Q

what is negative punishment?

A

negative = remove
punishment = good
removal of something good will decrease that behaviour

33
Q

positives of behavioursim

A

-While behaviourism aimed to banish mental language, it has proven remarkably consistent.
- A lot of the behaviourist paradigm was trying to operationalize these into intervening constructs

34
Q

negatives of behaviourism

A

Concern about the behaviourists limited view of science – many discoveries in this century have been beyond direct observation

35
Q

what is behavioural genetics?

A
  • genes strongly influence behavior it can’t just be learning (but equally plenty of epigenetic)
  • Conditioning can amplify or inhibit these
  • Prenatal environment affects certain behaviours
    We learn certain phobias more rapidly than others, same with aversions to food that makes us ill
36
Q

what is instinctive drift? (Breland & Breland)

A
  • conditioning cannot entirely overcome certain instinctive patterns
  • Certain behaviours are very difficult to condition
  • not all learning can be explained in Type S or Type R learning e.g. language can be incidental and language
37
Q

what is Phylogenetic continuity?

A
  • uses similarities and differences of the characteristics of species to interpret their evolutionary relationships
    Given the differences in brain structure and volume, why would the key laws of psychology be the same in a rat as a human?
  • some animals have different perceptual capacities – we learn differently about food aversion to birds (favour colour)
38
Q

how did cognition emerge?

A

through the idea that psychologists should not be studying mental processes

39
Q

what is Gestalt psychology?

A

emphasizes that the whole of anything is greater than its parts
- formed a basis of the modern psychology of perception, through looking at the form of objects

40
Q

what is the bundle hypothesis?

A

Objects of consciousness made up of fixed, atomic elements (this might seem familiar pace Titchener) – complex things the sum of simple ones
- Gestalt psychologists rejected this hypothesis

41
Q

what is the constancy hypothesis?

A

Direct mapping between stimulation and sensation – conscious sensory object corresponds to stimulation on a sensory organ
- Gestalt psychologists rejected this hypothesis

42
Q

what is Phi and Beta?

A
  • Gestalt principle
  • apparent motion (i.e. in neon signs) – our perceptions go beyond the physical evidence, doesn’t map onto reality
43
Q

what is the Law of Pragnaz?

A
  • Gestalt principle
  • we are innately driven to experience things in as orderly, regular, simple fashion as possible.
44
Q

what are some of the Gestalt laws?

A
  • Similarity
  • Closure
  • Proximity
  • Symmetry
  • Continuity
45
Q

Who was Frederic Barlett?

A

studied recall in his “War of the Ghosts” study
- recall errors
- what they thought should happen rather than what did
- schema theory= mental framework for semantics and memory - active reconstruction against a snapshot model

46
Q

who was Jean Piaget?

A
  • developmental psychologist and genetic epistemologist
47
Q

how did Piaget believe we acquire knowledge?

A
  • replace structures as we acquire more complex means of reasoning with maturity
  • Direct challenge to behaviourist model – while both are focused on the interaction between an organism and the environment, Piaget assumes the use of cognitive structures
  • , the child is active instead of passively learning
  • assumes learning changes as a function of development, whereas this is constant in a behavioural model
48
Q

how did the work of Alan Turing challenge behaviourist psychology?

A
  • Developments in information processing, cybernetics and artificial intelligence started to challenge behaviourist psychology
  • Turing machine – simple operations (e.g. binaries) can give rise to any complex functions
  • Work by McCulloch and Pitts in parallel showed similar operation of the brain
49
Q

what sos Norbert Weiner (1894-1964) do?

A

invented cybernetics
- Mathematical tools for describing systems of feedback, communication and control
- Especially negative feedback mechanisms (e.g. thermostat)
- Popularized terms like input, output and feedback
- Crucial to information processing and cognitive models of mind

50
Q

what did Claude Shannon (1916-2001) do?

A

developed Information Theory
-Mathematical model of communication – information can be measured in terms of uncertainty, modelled using binary logic.
- Concepts such as noise, filters, capacity, degradation

51
Q

what is the computational theory of mind?

A
  • Brain as a computer (or lots of little ones) – hardware
  • Mind as software
52
Q

what did Noam Chomsky do?

A
  • published critique of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour in 1959
  • Skinner claimed that language acquisition can be explained using principles of operant conditioning
  • Chomsky critiqued the basis of translating from animals to humans behaviourist terms such as stimulus and reinforcement
53
Q

Chomsky’s critique of verbal behaviour

A

Chomsky pointed out the failings of this enterprise with language
- Flexibility of language means conditioning has little predictive value
- Required a rule based, combinatorial system
- Imitation is a poor basis for language – misapplying abstract rules
- Poverty of the stimulus – must be some innate contribution
He argued we have a language acquisition device equipped with a universal grammar

54
Q

what is the Cognitive revolution?

A
  • Chomsky’s work is seen as pivotal in ushering in a cognitive revolution:
  • This upended psychology as the science of behaviour
  • Pushed psychology back towards looking at mediating, mental events (memory, attention, decision making)
    Cognitive science at outset became a multidisciplinary exercise with linguistics, philosophy etc.
55
Q

what did George Miller do?

A
  • applied aspects of information theory to psychology, with his focus on STM capacity
  • Miller’s Magic Seven – we can hold seven (+/- 2) pieces of information in our STM
  • Chunking – can increase capacity by processing as chunks of info
  • Varies on some factors (e.g. talking speed)
  • Philosophical implication – concepts from information theory can inform the study of the human mind
  • Established the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard in 1960 with Jerome Bruner
55
Q

Problems with the cognitive revolution

A
  • Not all behaviourists rejected cognitive processes
  • Behaviourism did change psychology
  • Behaviourism still exists!
  • Extremely American centric

conceptual and historical psychology (9 decks)

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