chap 1 Flashcards
Psychology is
the science of behavior and the mind.
behavior refers to the _.
observable actions of a person or an animal
Mind refers to
an individual’s sensations, perceptions, memories, thoughts, dreams, motives, emotions, and other subjective experiences. It also refers to all of the unconscious knowledge and operating rules that are built into or stored in the brain and that provide the foundation for organizing behavior and conscious experience.
three fundamental ideas of psychology:
1.
2.
3.
- Behavior and mental experiences have physical causes that can be studied scientifically.
- The way people behave, think, and feel is modified over time by their experiences in their environment.
- The body’s machinery, which produces behavior and mental experiences, is a product of evolution by natural selection.
Until the eighteenth century, Western philosophy was tightly bound to and constrained by religion. The church maintained that each human being consists of __—a view referred to today as _.
two distinct but intimately conjoined entities, a material body, and an immaterial soul
dualism
In Descartes’ view, the one essential ability that humans have but dogs do not is _, which Descartes defined as _ and _.
thought
conscious deliberation
judgment
Descartes’ Dualism:
the subject can be reduced to a “res cogitans” and the body as “res extensa”, composed solely of matter, does not form part of the subject’s identity: I am a consciousness, and I have a body.
Thomas Hobbes and the Philosophy of
Materialism
Hobbes argued that _, a philosophy now known as _
spirit, or soul, is a meaningless concept, and that nothing exists but matter and energy
materialism
Most of Hobbes’s work was directed toward politics and government, but his ideas helped inspire a school of thought about the mind known as _
empiricism
the French physiologist _ demonstrated that nerves entering the spinal cord contain two separate pathways: one for _ and one for _.
François Magendie
carrying messages into the central nervous system from the skin’s sensory receptors
carrying messages out to operate muscles
Empiricism, in this context, refers to
the idea that human knowledge and thought derive ultimately from sensory experience (vision, hearing, touch, and so forth) (John Locke)
Locke viewed a child’s mind as a _
tabula rasa, or blank slate
experience that serves as the chalk that writes on and fills the slate.
law of association by contiguity:
(Aristotle)
Contiguity: closeness in space or time. then, if a person experiences two environmental events (stimuli, or sensations) at the same time or one right after the other (contiguously), those two events will become associated (bound together) in the person’s mind,
nativism, the view that the _
(VS empiricism) most basic forms of human knowledge and the basic operating characteristics of the mind, which provide the foundation for human nature, are native to the human mind—that is, are inborn and do not have to be acquired from experience.
what well-known philosophist is a nativist?
Kant
Kant distinguished between _, which is built into the human brain and does not have to be learned, and _ knowledge, which one gains from experience in the environment. Without the first, argued the nativists, a person could not acquire the second.
a priori knowledge
a posteriori
what important book was written by Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
The Origin of Species
who is the theorist of natural selection?
Charles Darwin
Darwin was studying the _ of behavior—the ways in which _.
how to study/understnad it?
functions
an organism’s behavior helps it to survive and reproduce
One approach to understanding such characteristics is to analyze their evolutionary functions—the specific ways in which they promote survival and reproduction.
Natural selection also offered a scientific foundation for _ views of the mind.
nativist
level of analysis:
neural (brain as cause),
physiological (internal chemical functions, such as hormones, as cause)
genetic (genes as cause),
evolutionary (natural selection as cause),
learning (the individual’s prior experiences with the environment as cause),
cognitive (the individual’s knowledge or beliefs as cause),
social (the influence of other people as cause),
cultural (the culture in which the person develops as cause),
developmental (age-related changes as cause).
level of analysis refers to
the level, or type, of causal process that is studied
The research specialty that centers on the neural level of explanation is _.
behavioral neuroscience
