Chapter 1 Flashcards
Learning
The process by which changes in behavior arise as the result of experience interacting with the world
Memory
The record of our past experience which are acquired through learning
Describe what happened to Clive Wearing
He had syphlitis and ended up damaging a a portion of the brain where he can’t make any new memories. He can still learning though. He can’t recall.
Put the philosophers in order by date.
Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Darwin, James, Pavlov
Nativist
Human are shaped primarily by their biological inheritance (nature).
Philosophers that were nativists
Plato and Descartes
Empiricists
Humans are shaped primarily by their experience (nurture)
Philosophers that were empiricists
Aristotle and Locke
Tabula Rasa
We are born with blank slates
Dualism
Immaterial soul + mechanical body
Who came up with dualism?
Descartes
Mechanical side
Our bodily similarity to machines and non-human animals
Immaterial soul
Our ability to think and freely make decisions
Rules of association
Contiguity, frequency, Similarity
Who came up with the rules of association?
Aristotle
Contiguity
Experiences near each other in time/space are joined together
Frequency
Experiences often repeated are connected more strongly
Similarity
Experiences similar to one another are connected
William James
Isolated experiences and connected them to learn
Evolution
The theory that species. can change overtime. and that all existing species are descendant of common ancestors.
natural selection
The notion that heritable traits that provide reproductive advantages become more common in a population, leading overtime to changes in existing species and even the evolution of new species.
Darwin’s three criteria for traits to evolve through natural selection
Inheritable trait, natural variability, relevance to survival
How did Ebbinghaus study memory
Empirically (collecting data), manipulating independent and the outcomes of the dependents ( experimental), Quantitative (expressed observations numerically)
What did Ebbinghaus do?
He studied nonsense words and timed and tested himself to see how long it took for him to know the words.
What does exponential forgetting curve show?
Rapid initial forgetting, but progressively less forgetting with time.
What happened in Pavlov’s study?
He came up with classical conditioning by conditioning dogs to salivate by associating food to a doorbell.
What happened in Thorndike’s study?
He placed cats into a small chamber they didn’t like with a pulley system that allowed them to escape. At first the cat escaped by accident but overtime they learned.
Law of effect
Behaviors with positive effects are repeated; behaviors with negative effects are not.
Who are behaviorists?
Watson, Hull, Skinner
What do behaviorist think about mental processes?
They think they are subjective and irrelevant.
What happened in Tolman’s study
He showed that the cause and effect of the stimulus to response misses something. Rats that were trained for one way in the maze can still find their way when the normal path is blocked.
