Chapter 1 Flashcards
What are two ways of defining the mind?
- The mind creates and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning.
- The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals.
Why could we say that Donders and Ebbinghaus were cognitive psychologists, even though in the 19th century there was no field called cognitive psychology?
Describe Donders’s experiment and the rationale behind it, and Ebbinghaus’s memory experiments. What do Donders’s and Ebbinghaus’s experiments have in common?
Donders was able to measure reaction time. He wanted to know how long it took for someone to make a decision.
Ebbhinghaus studied memory and forgetting, more specifically how rapidly a learned material is lost over time.
Both of these experiments are measures of the mind and how it works, experiments done far before the term cognitive psychology was coined.
Who founded the first laboratory of scientific psychology? Describe the method of analytic introspection that was used in this laboratory.
Wundt founded the first laboratory of psychology. He trained participants to describe their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli.
What method did William James use to study the mind?
William James used behaviorism to study psychology, but didn’t study the mind itself.
Describe the rise of behaviorism, especially the influence of Watson and Skinner. How did behaviorism affect research on the mind?
Behaviorism, which quickly dominated America, eliminated the mind entirely as a subject of study, replacing it with directly observable behavior. Skinner’s operant conditioning became a huge tool in behavior and response as it focused solely on changing behavior.
How did Edward Tolman deviate from strict behaviorism?
Tolman’s experiment with rats in a maze led him to believe that rats were developing cognitive maps in their brains, something that is unobservable and only present in the mind and part of the study of cognitive psychology.
What did Noam Chomsky say about Skinner’s book “Verbal Behavior”, and what effect did that have on behaviorism?
While Skinner thought language was born from operant conditioning, Chomsky critiqued it, pointing out that children learned and said things that weren’t reinforced (such as “I hate you, Mommy” and grammatically incorrect statements). Thus language came from the developing mind. This forced psychologists of the time to rethink the basics of language away from behaviorism.
What is a scientific revolution, according to Thomas Kuhn? How is the cognitive revolution similar to the revolution that occurred in physics at the beginning of the 20th century?
Kuhn defined a scientific revolution as a shift from one paradigm to another, where a
paradigm is a system of ideas that dominate science at a particular time (Dyson, 2012). A scientific revolution, therefore, involves a paradigm shift.
The cognitive revolution is similar to the physics revolution in that the theory of relativity and quantum theory were introduced. It was a shift from classic physics to modern physics.
Describe the events that led to the “cognitive revolution.” Be sure you understand the role of digital computers and the information-processing approach in moving psychology toward the study of the mind.
No one study marked the beginning of the paradigm, but the mind’s connection to the computer helped things along. They could be compared to how the mind works in that they process information in stages (which psychologists dubbed the information-processing approach) and how they’re able to focus on some information while other information is being presented at the same time.
What was the state of cognitive psychology in 1967, according to Neisser’s (1967) book?
There was almost a complete absence of physiology and we didn’t know a lot about higher mental processes.
What are neuropsychology, electrophysiology, and brain imaging?
Neuropsychology: the study of the behavior of people with brain damage.
Electrophysiology: measuring electrical responses of the nervous system.
Brain imaging: Taking pictures or recordings of the brain.
What new perspectives on behavior emerged as cognitive psychology developed?
Modern psychology revolves around people people in more “real-world” situations. Also seeing a person move through the world and act on it
