Early Contributors (Exam 1) Flashcards
Aristotle
Associationism - Memory dependent on the formation of linkage between pairs of events, sensations, or ideas, so that recalling or experiencing one member of the pair elicits a memory or anticipation of the other (e.g., cat —> dog)
Three Fundamental Principles aka
Universal Laws of Association
- Contiguity
- Frequency
- Similarity
Contiguity
Nearness in the time or space: events experienced at the same time (temporal contiguity) or space (special contiguity) tend to be associated.
Frequency
The more often we experience events that are contiguous the more strongly we associate them
Similarity
If two things are similar, the thought or sensation of one will tend to trigger a thought of the other.
Empiricism
philosophical school of thought which holds that all ideas we have are the result of experience
(Greek empiricus = experience)
Aristotle believed that each baby was born with a blank slate
Nativism
Philosophical school of thought which holds that the bulk of our knowledge is inborn (or native)
Plato’s theory
Empiricism vs. nativism
Nature vs. Nurture
What about animals?
Aristotle “Many animals have memory, and are capable of instruction, but no other creature except man can recall the past at will.”
Research has improved and found interesting data on animals, they do have memory but may not be able to communicate them
Learning
1.) The process by which changes and behavior arise as a result of an organism’s experience interacting with the world.
2.) Process of forming associations between the elements of an experience
Memory
an organism’s internal record of past experiences, acquitted through learning.
William James
Taught first psychology course
* memory networks - remembering an event involves a network of multiple connections between the components
* believed in associationism
Remember the most recent event you attended; you might remember the weather (hot/cold), the food you ate, and the songs you danced to.
10 tips for a better memory
- Pay attention
- Create association
- Create a picture
- Practice makes perfect
- Use multiple senses
- Reduce overload
- Time travel
- Get some sleep
- Try a rhyme
- Relax
Ivan Pavlov
Russian Physiologists known for studying animal learning accidentally discovered classical conditioning by training dogs to salivate for their food by ringing a bell.
Classical Conditioning aka
Pavlovian Conditioning
Type of learning by which the organism learns to respond to a previously neutral stimulus that has been repeatedly presented along with a biologically significant stimulus.
Stimulus
sensory event (door bell)
Learning curve
a graph showing learning performance (the dependent variable usually plotted on the vertical axis) as a function of training time (independent variable, usually plotted along the horizontal axis)
Dependent variable
the factor whose change is measured as an effect of changes in the independent variable
Independent variable
the factor that is manipulated in the experiment
Response
the behavioral consequence of perception of a stimulus
Extinction
process of reducing a learning response to a stimulus by ceasing the pair that stimulus with a reward or punishment
Generalization
transfer of past learning to novel events and problems
Edward Thorndike
The Law of Effect
Instrumental conditioning/Operant conditioning
- Showed that animals learn to associate given behaviors with desirable or undesirable outcomes
Operant Conditioning
the process by whereby organisms learn to make responses in order to obtain or avoid important consequences; also called instrumental conditioning
Law of Effect
the observation, made by Thorndike, that the probability of a particular behavioral response increases or decreases depending on the consequences that have followed that response
Rene Descartes
“Cotigo Ergo Sum” –> “I think therefore I am”
Dualism
the principle that the mind and body exist as separate entities, each with different characteristics and governed by its own laws.
Reflex arc
an automatic pathway from a sensory stimulus to a motor response
John Locke
Broke down the hormone oxytocin (happy pair bonding)
Education for all “All men are created equal….life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness”
Shallow Processing
Involves only maintenance rehearsal which leads to short-term retention (the only type of rehearsal that takes place within the multi-store model)
Deep Processing
involves elaboration rehearsal which involves a more meaningful analysis (e.g., images, thinking , associations) of information and leads to better recall
Structural Processing
when only the physical qualities of something (typeface of word or how the letters work)
Phonemic Processing
when the sound of the thing is encoded
Semantic Processing
when the meaning of a word is encoded and related to similar words with similar meanings
John Watson’s Behaviorism
School of thought that says psychology should restrict itself to the study of observable behaviors and not seek to infer unobservable mental processes (learned motor habits/skills)
B.F. Skinner
Behavior —> Consequences
Radical behaviorism
an extreme form of behaviorism holding that consciousness and free will are illusions and that even so-called higher cognitive functions (e.g., human language) are merely complex sets of stimulus-response associations
Erasmus Darwin
1731-1802
1800’s shift ——-> animals could be studied to better understand humans
evolution
states that living species change over time
Charles Darwin
Natural selection 1809-1882
* collected and cataloged animals
Natural selection
“Survival of the fittest”
Species evolve when there is some trait that is inheritable, varies naturally across individuals and increases an individual’s “fitness” or chance of survival and reproductive success.
Edward Tolman
Neo-behaviorism
Stimulus —-> response and purposeful operation toward the desired goal
*** Rats have goals and intentions and are intrinsically motivated to learn the general layouts of mazes
Cognitive map
an internal psychological representation of the spatial layout of the external world
Latent learning
unconnected to a positive or negative consequence and that remains undetected (latent) until explicitly demonstrated at a later stage/
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Human Memory Experiments (on himself, not quite valid)
use on nonsense words for memorization: BAP, KEP, DAK
Learning, delay, test, relearning
Forgetting
how memory deteriorates over time
Retention curve
graph showing forgetting or relearning as a function of time since initial learnign
Hypothesis
supposition based on limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation
Subject bias
influence a subject’s prior knowledge or expectations can have (consciously or unconsciously) on the outcome of an experiment
Blind design
experimental design in which the participants do not know the hypothesis being tested
Experimenter bias
influence an experimenter’s prior knowledge or expectation can have (consciously or unconsciously) on the outcome of the experiment
Double-blind designs
experimental design in which neither the experimenter nor the subjects know group assignments
Placebo
inactive substance such as a sugar pill, that is administered to one group of participants in an experiment to compare the effects of an active substance, like a drug
Clark Hull
Mathematical models of learning
(survived typhoid fever = memory difficulties
survived polio = onset paralyzed)
believed in behaviorism = stimuli and response
W.K. Estes
Mathematical Psychology- a subfield of psychology that uses mathematical equations to describe the laws of learning and memory
George Miller
Millers magic number 7 +_2 (what someone can remember)
Information Theory
a mathematical theory of communication that provides a precise measure of how much information is contained in a message
David Rumelhart
The Connectionist Model
Developed models of learning and memory that he described as “connectionist network models”
Connectionist models
models that represent learning and other thought processes as networks of connections between simple processing units called nodes.
Distributed representation
representation in which information is coded as a pattern of activation distributed cross many different nodes.
