Chapter 1 (History, Methods, Paradigms) Flashcards
knowledge comes from an individuals own experience
empiricism
emphasizes role of biological factors in determining ones cognitive abilities
nativism
created the first laboratory for experimental psychology
Wilhelm Wundt
primary goal was to discover the elemental components of the mind
structuralism
created the first experimental psychological laboratory in Canada
James Baldwin
involved presenting highly trained observers with various stimuli and asking them to describe their experience
introspection
argued that experimental psychologists primary goal should be to explain the functions of the mind
functionalism
argued that scientists should only focus on that which was observable overt behaviour
behaviourism
central assumption was that psychological phenomena had to be analyzed and studied in their entirety and could not be reduced to simple elements
gestalt psychology
wondered whether intellectual abilities could be subject to the same pressures as natural selection
Sir Francis Galton
military personnel had to be trained to operate complicated equipment, so engineers had to design equipment to suit the capabilities of the people operating it
human factor engineering
idea that machinery operated by a person must be designed to interact with the operators physical, cognitive, and motivational capacities and limitations
person-machine system
means that people can only do so many things at once
limited capacity processors
claim that the neural structures supporting that function reside in a specific brain area
localization of function
consists of an observer watching people in familiar, everyday contexts
naturalistic observation
one in which the experimenter manipulates one or more independent variables and observes the recorded measures
experiment
different experimental participants are assigned to different experimental conditions and the researcher looks for differences in performance
between subjects design
exposes the same experiment participants to one or more conditions
within subjects design
studies that appear in other ways to be experiments but that have one or more of these factors as independent variables
quasi-experiment
body of knowledege structured according to what its proponents consider important and what they do not
paradigm
based on the idea that cognition can be thought of as information
information processing
cognition is composed of highly interactive network of connections among simple processing units
connectionism
in order to understand cognition, we need to understand the evolutionary pressures our ancestors went through
evolutionary approach
all cognitive activities are shaped by the culture, context, and the situation under which they occur
ecological approach
