History Flashcards
Psychology
- the study of the soul & mind
- the science of mental processes and behaviour
Cognition
mental functions pertaining to the action of process of knowing
cognitive psychology
the scientific study of how people perceive, learn, remember, think about, and act on information
- rejects introspection as a primary tool
- accepts the existence of internal mental states
plato
rationalism
- first approach
- reality lies in the abstract idea of objects that exist in our minds
- truth through reason
aristotle
empiricism
- reality lies only in the concrete world of objects that our bodies sense
- truth through observing
Descartes
dualism
- mind is immaterial (irrelevant)
- brain is physical
Donders
first scientific psychologist
mental chronometry
- measuring how long a cognitive process takes
reaction-time experiment
-measures interval between stimulus presentation and person response to stimulus
mental responses cannot be measured directly but can be inferred from the participants behavior
simple RT task
participant pushes a button quickly after a light appears
measurement of how long it takes to respond to a single stimuli
choice RT task
participant pushes one button if light is on right side, another if light is on left side
measurement of how long it takes to react to one of multiple stimuli
subtraction method
choice RT - simple RT = time to make a decision
how much longer for choice RT than simple RT
0.1 seconds (100 millisecond)
assumption of serial stages
processing stages occur one after another, not in parallel
assumption of pure insertion
adding an additional stage does not change the length of the other stages
Ebbinghaus
- savings curve method for studying forgetting
- the quantitative measurement of mental processes (info we can store in our mind & how long things stick around)
- mental contents cannot always be measured directly but can be inferred from the participants behaviour
savings method
savings = [initial reps - relearning reps] / initial reps
Wundt
First psychology laboratory
Approach: Structuralism
- experience is determined by combing elements of experience called sensations
Method: Analytic introspection
- participants trained to describe experience and thought processes in response to stimuli
William James
Wrote the first psychology textbook - principles of psychology
based on introspection
John Watson
Behaviorist
- wanted to eliminate the mind as s topic and study directly observable behaviour
- pavlov’s dog
- thought introspection had extremely variable results from person to person and that they are difficult to verify
Pavlov’s dog
unconditional stimulus - food unconditional response - salvation neutral stimulus - bell conditional stimulus - bell conditional response - salvation
Little Albert
classical conditioning of fear
9-m old became frightened by a rat after a loud noise was paired with every presentation of the rat
rat is - unconditional response
B.F. Skiner
operant conditioning
- shape behaviour by rewards or punishment
- behaviour that is reward is repeated & punished is less likely
radical behaviourism (verbal behaviour)
- children learn language through operant conditioning (imitate speech they hear & correct speech is rewarded)
Noam Chomsky
children do not only learn language through imitation and reinforcement
- they say things they have never heard and not be imitating
- say things that are incorrect and have not been rewarded for
- language must be determined by inborn biological program
Tolman
trained rats to find for in a 4-armed maze
2 interpretations
1. behaviourism predicts that the rats learn ed to ‘turn right to find food’
2. the rats had created a cognitive map of the maze and were navigating to a specific arm
when flipped the maze the rats went to the specific arm where they previously found food
- supported dolmens interpretation and not behaviourist
Cognitive Revolution
digital computer
- theory of computation
- information theory
- computer science
- artificial intelligence
cognitivism
mental functions can be explained by the use of experiments following the scientific method
- cognition consists of the internal mental states whose manipulation can be described in terms of algorithms
Behavioural Methods
- naturalistic observations
- case studies
- correlational studies
- self-reports
- controlled laboratory experiments
behavioural methods strength & weaknesses
- generalizability (findings applicable across populations
- ecological validity (relevant to real word)
- experimental control (cause and effect)
- observer effect (presence of researcher)
- observer bias (researcher acting as neutral)
naturalistic observation
- observing participants in real-life settings without manipulation by the researcher
- strengths = high ecological validity
- weakness = no experimental control, potential for an observer effect/observer bias
- rarely used
case studies
- detailed analysis of one or a small group of participants
- strengths = highly detailed analysis of rare conditions
- weaknesses = observation can be subjective and biased, hard to generalize to the population
- occasionally used
correlational studies
- measure multiple variables and analyze them for relationships between them
- strengths = can look at variables that can’t be manipulated, good ecological validity
- weakness = no experimental control
occasionally used
self reports
participants report on themselves using tools such as surveys, interviews, and verbal reports
- strengths = large samples generalize well to the population, can look at variables that can’t be manipulated
- weakness = no experimental control, potential for observer bias and social desirability bias can distort findings
controlled laboratory experiments
- carefully controlled tasks with independent and dependent variables
- strengths = experimental control
- weakness = poor ecological validity, can e hard to generalize to the population, observer effects
- frequently used
which method has the best ecological validity
naturalistic observation
computational models
provide quantitive specifications of theories and explore ideas about the nature of cognition
- make specific predictions
- test non-intuitive ideas
- understand our assumptions and realize what we are overlooking
- formal language of psyc
types of computational models
mathematical symbolic (if then) connectionist reinforcement biological dynamic (enters & exits in diff ways) bayesian (stats)
variability within each participant
- Practice effects, 1 or 2 reaction times could be explained for the being the first few trials
- Distractions, attentional effects
- Random error
- How quickly after you press the button down does the machine detect that
variability between participants
- Different equipment (mouse, keyboard, touch)
- Different environments
- Different times of day, levels of alertness
- Eyesight, bad vs good
- How big your screen is, changes size of circle
- Motor skills, how quickly they can respond
- Computer games vs people who don’t use a computer
- Genetic factors
