Ch. 1. The Science of the Mind Flashcards
Cognition
COGNITION – what you know, what you remember, and what you think.
Cognitive Psychology
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY – the scientific study of the acquisition, retention, and use of knowledge.
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Our emotional adjustments to the world rely on our memories. Even our ability to understand a simple story – or our ability to understand ANY experience.
- Any experience requires prior knowledge in order to make any sense.
- Our self-concept depends on our knowledge – without memory, there is no self.
Introspection (Wilhelm Wundt)
WILHELM WUNDT – “Father of Experimental Psychology.” – believed that the only way to study thoughts is through INTROSPECTION – which is the reflection on our inner (conscious) thoughts.
INTROSPECTION – means “looking within,” to observe the content of our own mental lives and the sequence of our own experiences.
- Introspection is the study of conscious experiences, so of course, it can tell us nothing about unconscious events.
- With introspection, this testability of claims is often unattainable, so alone, Introspection has little value as a scientific tool.
- Psychologists gradually became disenchanted with it, because people lie and otherwise may not even recognize their ‘True’ thoughts.
Behaviorist Movement
BEHAVIORISM – By strictly observing behavior and our reaction to rewards and punishments, we can reveal the workings of the mind.
BEHAVIORIST MOVEMENT – The movement uncovered a range of principles concerned with how behavior changes in response to various stimuli (including “rewards” and “punishments”).
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But Behaviorism was NOT enough – Psychologists were convinced that a lot of our behavior could not be explained in these terms. The reason, basically, is that the ways people act, and the ways they feel, are guided by how they understand or interpret the situation, and NOT by the objective situation itself.
- Therefore, if we follow the behaviorists’ instruction and focus only on the objective situation, we will often misunderstand why people are doing what they’re doing and make the wrong predictions about how they’ll behave in the future.
The IMPORTANCE of MEANING:
- The BEHAVIORIST PERSPECTIVE demands that we not talk about mental entities such as beliefs, memories, and so on, because these things cannot be studied directly and so cannot be studied scientifically. Yet it seems that these subjective entities play a pivotal role in guiding behavior, and so we must consider them if we want to understand behavior.
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Ex: Imagine you’re sitting in the dining hall. A friend produces this physical stimulus: “Pass the salt, please,” and you immediately produce salt-passing behavior. “Could I have the salt?” would have done the trick. Ditto for “Salt, please!” or “Hmm, this sure needs salt!”
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What do these stimuli have in common?
- It’s clear, that the various stimuli that evoke salt passing do have something in common: They all MEAN the same thing!
- To predict your behavior in the dining hall, we need to ask what these stimuli MEAN to you – something the Behaviorist Perspective would ignore.
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What do these stimuli have in common?
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Ex: Imagine you’re sitting in the dining hall. A friend produces this physical stimulus: “Pass the salt, please,” and you immediately produce salt-passing behavior. “Could I have the salt?” would have done the trick. Ditto for “Salt, please!” or “Hmm, this sure needs salt!”
Transcendental Method - “Inference to Best Explanation”
TRANSCENDENTAL METHOD (philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) – you:
- Begin with the observable facts and then…
- Work backward from these observations to…
- Reach an explanation of those observable facts.
- In essence, you try to discover the reason that these observations came about – try to find the underlying causes that led to these effects.
- This method, sometimes called “INFERENCE TO BEST EXPLANATION” is at the heart of most modern science.
- To get to the “BEST EXPLANATION”, researchers reproduce and vary experiments to test hypotheses.
- This is what enables scientists to assert that their hypotheses have been rigorously tested, and it’s what gives scientists assurance that their theories are correct.
- It’s what gives science its power.
Cognitive Revolution.
COGNITIVE REVOLUTION – Says that Underlying mental processes must be analyzed and considered in order to understand the way the brain works. But because these are not directly observable, we must observe them INDIRECTLY. More precisely:
- We know that we need to study mental processes if we’re going to understand behavior. That’s what we learned from the limitations of classical BEHAVIORISM (Which measures only OBSERVABLE behavior).
- We also know that mental processes cannot be observed directly; we learned that from the downfall of INTROSPECTION (which analyzes only CONSCIOUS thoughts).
- Our path forward, therefore, is to study mental processes INDIRECTLY, relying on the fact that these processes, themselves invisible, have visible consequences. This is done by:
- Looking at what we CAN SEE DIRECTLY and…
- Watching the effects that those unobservable actions produce.
- From that, you begin to see a Cause-and-effect that gives clues to what the UNOBSERVABLE mind is doing and thinking.
- This is done with a combination of testing, experimentation, interviews – a combination of objective and subjective analyses – in order to come up with a ‘BIG PICTURE’ of what is going on.
- In essence, observable behavior, conscious thoughts, AND underlying mental processes must be considered in order to get a true understanding of the way the mind works.
Edward Tolman (1886-1959)
EDWARD TOLMAN – a researcher who can be counted both as a behaviorist and as one of the forerunners of cognitive psychology.
- Prior to Tolman, most behaviorists argued that learning could be understood simply as a change in behavior.
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Tolman argued, however, that learning involved something more abstract – the ACQUISITION OF KNOWLEDGE – REGARDLESS of whether or not that new knowledge was reflected in the current behavior.
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Ex: In one of Tolman’s studies, rats were placed in a maze day after day. For the initial 10 days, no food was available anywhere in the maze, and the rats wandered around with no pattern to their behavior. Across these days, therefore, there was no change in behavior — and so, according to the conventional view, no learning. But, in fact, there was learning, because the rats were learning the layout of the maze. That became clear on the 11th day of testing, when food was introduced into the maze in a particular location. The next day, the rats, placed back in the maze, ran immediately to that location. Indeed, their behavior was essentially identical to the behavior of rats who had had many days of training with food in the maze.
- What happened here? Across the initial 10 days, rats were acquiring what Tolman called a “cognitive map” of the maze. In the early days of the procedure, however, the rats had no motivation to use this knowledge. On Days 11 and 12, though, the rats gained a reason to use what they knew, and at that point, they revealed their knowledge
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Ex: In one of Tolman’s studies, rats were placed in a maze day after day. For the initial 10 days, no food was available anywhere in the maze, and the rats wandered around with no pattern to their behavior. Across these days, therefore, there was no change in behavior — and so, according to the conventional view, no learning. But, in fact, there was learning, because the rats were learning the layout of the maze. That became clear on the 11th day of testing, when food was introduced into the maze in a particular location. The next day, the rats, placed back in the maze, ran immediately to that location. Indeed, their behavior was essentially identical to the behavior of rats who had had many days of training with food in the maze.
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Tolman argued, however, that learning involved something more abstract – the ACQUISITION OF KNOWLEDGE – REGARDLESS of whether or not that new knowledge was reflected in the current behavior.
The key point, is that – even for rats – we need to talk about (invisible) mental processes (e.g., the formation of cognitive maps) if we want to explain behavior.
B.F. Skinner (1904–1990)
B.F. SKINNER – was an influential American behaviorist. He applied his style of analysis to humans’ ability to learn and use language, arguing that language use could be understood in terms of behaviors and rewards.
Gestalt Psychologists
GESTALT PSYCHOLOGISTS – argued that behaviors, ideas, and perceptions are organized in a way that could not be understood through a part-by-part, element-by-element, analysis of the world. Instead, they claimed, the elements take on MEANING only as part of the WHOLE — and therefore psychology needed to understand the nature of the “whole.”
- Emphasis is on the ROLE of the perceiver in organizing his or her experience (i.e. PERCEIVERS shape their own experience – that is a central theme for modern cognitive psychology).
Frederic Bartlett
FREDERIC BARTLETT – He is best known for his studies of memory and the notion that people spontaneously fit their experiences into a “SCHEMA,” and they rely on the schema both to guide their understanding and (later) to guide their memory.
Cognitive Neuroscience
COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE – the effort toward understanding humans’ mental functioning through close study of the physical brain and nervous system.
- Uses MRI and fMRI to measure brain activity as individuals participate in a designated activity.
Clinical Neuropsychology
CLINICAL NEUROPSYCHOLOGY – It is the study of brain function that uses DAMAGED BRAINS to pinpoint functions of various brain parts/structures.
Neuroimaging Techniques
NEUROIMAGING TECHNIQUES – Uses imaging to scrutinize the:
- Precise structure of the brain (MRI or CT Scan) and to…
- Track the moment-by-moment pattern of activation within someone’s brain (fMRI or PET Scan).
- Different patterns of brain activation during learning lead to different types of memory.
Questions to Answer
- Why is memory crucial for behaviors and mental operations that don’t in any direct or explicit way ask you “to remember”?
* Everything we understand about the world is a function of what we remember about it. Our ability to function in society and in life depends on our ability to remember things that we might never think of consciously. - What aspects of H.M.’s life were disrupted as a result of his amnesia?
* H.M.’s inability to remember anything cost him his identity and idea of ‘self’ without memory he had no idea who he really was. - Why is introspection limited as a source of scientific evidence?
* Introspection – is the internal reflection on conscious thoughts. The problem with that is that people often don’t understand their conscious thoughts or they lie about them. Because of this inability to discern whether or not the information from introspection is true or interpreted correctly, it is not very useful as a scientific tool. - Why do modern psychologists agree that we have to refer to mental states (what you believe, what you perceive, what you understand) in order to explain behavior?
* To understand the mind, you must take into consideration both the internal mental states being reported and inferred through direct observation of a researcher as well as the behavior that is observable. And only in combination can the clues be pieced together to create a comprehensive cause-and-effect that reveals the working of the mind.
