Chapter 4 Flashcards
A notion which David Hume’s skeptical philosophy challenged, and which Immanuel Kant tried to rescue in his philosophical reformulation, was
causality.
The argument that our sense of causality is not absolute but only probabilistic, based on the assumption that event sequences observed in the past are highly likely to be repeat-ed in the future, was proposed by
Immanuel Kant.
According to Kant, the __________ world consists of “things in themselves” which exist independently of human experience and reason.
noumenal
According to Kant, the objective external world can never be known directly. Instead, we only know the external world as it impacts the human mind. This inner and subjective world is also known as
the phenomenal world.
According to Kant, time and space are
intuitions.
When you press gently on the side of your eyeball and experience the visual sensation of colored light, you illustrate
the law of specific nerve energies.
Helmholtz decided to study medicine because
as a non-wealthy student he was eligible for a free medical training program in ex-change for service as an army surgeon.
__________ was a university friend of Helmholtz’s who later collaborated with him in determining the electrochemical nature of the nervous impulse.
Emil de Bois-Reymond
The idea that all living things are imbued with an ultimately unanalyzable “life force” is the major tenet of what doctrine?
vitalism
A belief in the doctrine of vitalism implied that
physiological processes could not be fully understood through scientific analysis.
A major consequence of the adoption of the doctrine of physiological mechanism by Helmholtz and his fellow students was that they
were encouraged to try to solve problems that previously seemed unsolvable, such as analyzing and measuring the nervous impulse.
To Helmholtz, the law of conservation of energy implied all of the following EXCEPT
causality is probabilistic, not absolute.
Helmholtz’s early experiments with frogs’ and humans’ legs indicated that the speed of the nervous impulse was
slow enough to suggest reaction times of two seconds or more in very large ani-mals.
Helmholtz’s attempt to measure the speed of the nervous impulse in human subjects
helped introduce the “reaction time” method into psychology.
Helmholtz divided his discussions of vision and audition into sections devoted to which three of the following general categories?
physical, physiological, and psychological
According to Helmholtz’s distinction, the discontinuous patches of colored light you experience when viewing a landscape are your __________, while the “trees,” “grass,” and “sky,” etc., you become aware of are __________.
sensations; perceptions
Within the structure of the eye, the lens brings near objects into focus by bulging in the middle and brings distant objects into focus by assuming a relatively flat shape. This process is known as
accommodation.
A photograph providing an image identical to what is recorded by the eye would feature
all but the center of the scene as blurred.
How did Helmholtz define perception?
the psychological process by which sensory information is actively organized and interpreted by the brain
According to Helmholtz’s analysis of the eye, the sharpness of focus within the visual field is
impressively acute only in a very small region near the center.
The orange light of the spectrum and the orange produced by mixing red and yellow spectral light
are indistinguishable from each other by the human color senses.
Which two names are used to refer to Helmholtz’s theory of color vision?
trichromatic theory and Young-Helmholtz theory
Pairs of colored lights which produce a sensation of white light when mixed together are called
complementary colors.
Three colors—a certain red, green, and a blue-violet—can be mixed in various combinations to produce any other color on the spectrum. These colors are known as
primary colors.
Relative to Kant in his theory of visual perception, Helmholtz was more
empiricist.
When subjects in Helmholtz’s experiment learned to adjust their responses to the distorted images produced by prismatic glasses, they illustrated
perceptual adaptation.
In Helmholtz’s theory, an important hypothetical process underlying such perceptual phenomena as depth perception was called
unconscious inference.
Eleanor Gibson’s studies of the responses of visually inexperienced animals and human infants to the “visual cliff” seem to
disconfirm aspects of Helmholtz’s empiricist perceptual theory.
An apparatus that features a platform with a transparent glass floor, part of which is set over an area with no visible surface directly below, is referred to as a
visual cliff.
The study of relationships between the objectively measured intensities of various stimuli and the subjective impressions of those intensities is referred to as
psychophysics.
Gustav Fechner used the pen-name “Dr. Mises” for which of his writings?
his often satirical medical and philosophical speculations
The inspiring idea that led most directly to Fechner’s development of psychophysics was
Weber’s demonstration of the jnd.
Gustav Fechner was especially pleased to discover his psychophysical law because
it indicated an underlying harmony between the “two faces” (physical and psycho-logical) of nature.
In his mid-career, Fechner was tormented by an apparently unresolvable conflict between
a purely mechanistic “night view” versus a “day view” that saw the universe as having some soul-like properties.
Fechner’s law expresses in mathematical terms the
observed mathematical relationship between physical and subjective stimulus intensities
The smallest intensity of a stimulus that can be reliably detected, used by Fechner as the “zero point” in his scale of subjective intensities, is called the
absolute threshold.
For stimuli such as electric shocks, where the jnd’s become smaller with higher intensities, the psychophysical relationship is best expressed by
Stevens’ (power) law.
Ernst Weber is important for introducing which of these concepts?
the just noticeable difference
The first topic to be seriously investigated by Wertheimer and his fellow Gestalt psychologists was
apparent movement and the phi phenomenon.
Why was Fechner important in the development of a scientific, experimental psychology?
He was among the first to demonstrate how a psychological phenomenon could be measured and quantified, and shown to relate lawfully to other variables.
Gestalt psychology focuses on the
ways the mind organizes experiences and perceptions into organized wholes that are more than the sum of their parts.
The “squareness” of a square and the basic tune of a melody are both examples of
Gestalt qualities.
Who of the following was NOT a founder of the movement known as Gestalt psychology?
Ernst Weber
All of the following are true of the phi phenomenon EXCEPT it
was discovered by Kant.
As you read this page, the words you are aware of constitute the__________, and the page on which they are printed is the__________.
figure; ground
According to the Gestalt psychologists, our perceptual processes tend to do all of the following EXCEPT
provide conscious sensations that are exact reproductions of objects in the external world.
The three founders of Gestalt psychology moved to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s because they
anticipated the coming rise of Nazi Germany and its atrocities.
An important concept from physics with which Köhler tried to integrate Gestalt psychology was
the force field.
Köhler’s principle that “psychological facts and the underlying events in the brain resemble each other in all their structural characteristics” is known as the
Hypothesis of Psychophysical Isomorphism.
Gestalt-trained psychologist __________ argued that every individual lives within a unique psychological field or __________, which is the totality of the individual’s psychological situation at any given moment.
Kurt Lewin; life space
