History and methodologies Flashcards
What are the three ways of studying psychology?
- Introspectionism
- Behaviorism
- Cognitive Psychology
What is cognitive psychology?
- Functions (how things get done and how they work)
- Scientific study of the mind and cognitive process.
- Study of mental processes involved in perception, attention, memory, language, problem solving, reasoning and decision making.
- Studies healthy functioning
What is not studied in cognitive psychology?
- Emotions
- Individual differences
- Unhealthy functioning (mental and psychological disorders)
What is the mind?
A system that creates mental representations of the world and controls mental functions. It’s unobservable.
What were the ideas behind introspectionism?
Explored the idea of individual experience. “What you are conscious of is you psychology”. Got introspective reports from people while they did different things or were exposed to a stimuli (analytic introspectionsim).
What is structuralism? and why did it fail?
Wundt proposed that experience was composed of sensations (elements) that when put together formed more complex things. This was similar to the idea of elements in chemistry.
This idea failed as there were too many elements of visual experience found. There was also a big difference in the results of different labs. And, there were many reliability problems.
What were the problems with introspectionism?
- It was difficult to verify
- Events were very private
- Couldn’t get reliable data
- It studied the end product of cognitive processing and not the process itself
- negative reaction to Wundt’s analytic introspectionism cause people to reject the stusy of mental processes
What is the difference between simple RT and choice RT and what were they used for?
Simple RT- Reacting to the presence or absence of a stimulus
Choice RT- Having to choose between a number of stimuli before reacting
Donders first proposed this techniques to measure the difference in simple detection task and choice task –> bc choice task took longer, he concluded that there must be more processes involved when choosing between stimuli rather than just reacting to seeing one.
Subtraction method (choice RT - simple RT) used to calculate duration of cog processes.
Describe the savings method to measure forgetting?
Used as a quantitative measurement of mental processes. Savings were a measured used by Ebbinghaus to determine the magnitude of information left from initial learning. Higher savings indicate greater memory.
What is behaviorism?
Approach founded by Watson, which stated that the only valid data for psychology comes from observing the behavior and determining its causes. He believed the consciousness and other unobservable mental processes are not worthy of being studied. Psychoanalysis was also considered useless.
What is classical conditioning?
Condition in which pairing a neutral stimulus with a stimulus that elicits a response causes the neutral stimulus to produce the response.
Eg., Pavlov’s dogs
–> Paired bell ringing (neutral stimulus) with presentation of food
–> Bell ringing (conditioned stimulus) causes salivation in dogs (conditioned response)
What is instrumental/operative conditioning? and who invented it?
Operant conditioning was invented by B.F. Skinner.
Focuses on how behavior is strengthened by positive reinforcements, such as food or social approval, or withdrawal of negative reinforcers.
He believed that he could teach any animal or person to learn complex behaviors.
What is the difference between fixed and variable reinforcements?
Fixed- this are predictable so it’s easier to extinguish behavior, you just stop giving reinforcement.
Variable- subject don’t always get a reward so it’s harder to extinguish behavior as individuals keep waiting for possible reward. E.g., gambling.
What were some problems with behaviorism?
- It couldn’t account for differences in human behavior
- It was limiting science tp directly observable things
What were some steps leading to the cognitive revolution?
Tolman introduced the idea of the existence of a cognitive map in his studies with rats. In addition, Chomsky did a review of Skinner’s book about learning through operant conditioning in which he reinforced the importance of learning about mental processes.
