CHAPTER 1 Flashcards
Greek philisophers
Plato: all knowledge is innate
Aristotle: all knowledge is acquired through experience (tabula rasa)
Rene Descartes (17th century)
Mind- Study of the mental world: Mentalism (Structuralism)
(mental world)
Cartesian Dualism
Body - Study of reflexes: Reflexology (Behaviorism)
(physical world)
Mind & body were two separate entities that interact to form the human experience Some behaviors (reflexive behaviors) are mechanistic & could therefore be scientifically investigated The study of animal behavior might yield useful information about the reflexive aspects of human behavior ( comparative psychology)
Scientific method of psychological process did not take place until the end the 19th century
Evolution theory (Darwin) & functionalism (William James)
Focus on adaptive behavior on all species (behavior)
There are common & different features across species: comparative psychology
Interest in animal intelligence
Info about animal intelligence filled the news of the time
Far away lost dogs coming back home
Impact of other sciences
Physics & applied physics (engineering), chemistry, biology
Physiology & psychophysics **
Scientific (non-religious) view of the human mind
Two main schools of thought during the first decades of psychology (1870s-1920s):
Structuralism
Functionalism
Structuralism
Goal: determine the structure of the mind by identifying its basic elements
Main method of investigation: introspection (similar to think-aloud protocols)
Problems with introspection:
Unreliable: difficult or impossible to replicate
It cannot be used to study children or animals
Complex topics, such as learning, development, mental disorders, & personality cannot be investigated
Cognitive functioning is not open to conscious experience
But, think-aloud techniques in usability, use of questionnaires & surveys in personality, social psychology, etc
Reaction to introspection: Behaviorism (until late 1950s) Roots on reflexology (Pavlov) & functionalism
Functionalism
Goal: investigate the function or purpose of mental processes rather than its structure (mechanisms of adaptation: focus on behavior)
Influence on comparative psychology, behaviorism, evolutionary psychology, biological/ physiological psychology
Gestalt psychology
Reaction to structuralism and behaviorism
This approach to psychology began in Germany & Austria during the late 19th century in response to the molecular approach of structuralism.
Instead of breaking down thoughts & behavior to their smallest elements, the Gestalt psychologists believed that you must look at the whole of experience
We experience things as unified wholes: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts
Proposed that the mind often processes information simultaneously rather than sequentially:
The human eye & brain perceive a unified shape in a different way to the way they perceive the individual parts of those shapes
Our mental representations do not correspond completely with those that exist in reality, we construct them ourselves
Impact on the study of attention, perception, learning, memory, problem solving Gestalt principles (laws) of perceptual organization
Problem: approach is vague & ambiguous (“ not scientific enough”)
Cognitive Psychology
studies mental process related to perceiving, attending, memory, problem solving, creativity, thinking, & language mainly through inferences from behavior
Three main influences of the Cognitive revolution
World War II
Computer science: AI
Computers process information
world war II
New goals: Human factors (attention, perception, usuability …)
Behaviorism failed to address these new problems satisfactorily
Computer science: AI
Computers as symbolic machines
Turning 1948: Intelligent machinery
Computers can represent reality: numbers, letters, graphics, video, audio … mental processes?
Computer process information
Parallelism with human reasoning
Psychology: info processing theories
S>O>R
I>CPU>O
“Thoughts” represented through algorithms
Knowing the input (S) & its impact on the output (r) , you can reverse engineer the algorithm (O)
Computer metaphor or analogy
Sternberg’s Search Paradigm 1966
Example of the information processing approach
Parallel, Serial: Terminating “Yes or No”, Serial: Exhaustive
Beyond stimulus- response links proposed by behaviorism
We cannot have a complete understanding of behavior without understanding the mediational processes of the organism
Chomsky 1950 in MIT
Poverty of the stimulus argument ( against behaviorism)
Natural language grammar is unlearnable given the relatively limited data available > innate linguistic capacity
Theory of generative grammar
Language is generative = novel
Distinction between structure (universal) & content (learned )
Counterarguments to the poverty of the stimulus argument ( Chomsky)
The issue of the rules & the case of past tense: How Children learn to deal with irregular past tenses?
Innate rules vs associative learning Rumelhart & McClelland 1986: Computer neural network model for past tense
The model was trained with a set of 420 pairs of the root with the past tense
The model mirrored the standard developmental sequence of children, first generalizing correct irregulars then overgeneralizing and finally getting it right
