History - Chapter 1 Content Flashcards
What is empiricism?
The belief is that knowledge comes from an individual’s own
experience and the key is associations between these experiences. (Locke and Hume)
What is nativism?
The belief is that knowledge is hard-wired into your brain and cannot be learned from experiences, information is innate. (Kant and Descartes)
How did Wundt use introspection?
He had trained observers who were presented with various stimuli and were told to describe their experience. This is based on experimental self-observation and must be done in a lab under controlled conditions.
Functionalism
The big question was why does the mind work as it does? This focused more on the function, applying it to real-world experiences rather than the content of the brain. Introspection was used here in a more natural setting. (James)
Structuralism
A mode of knowledge wanting to identify the simple units to understand more complex ones. Mode, quality, intensity, and durations are the 4 elements of the unconscious that experiences can be broken down into. (Wundt and Baldwin)
Behaviourism
The theory is that behaviour can be explained through conditioning, relationship between inputs (stimuli) and the outputs (responses). This became from the rejection with the lack of progress being made with introspection. (Skinner and Watson)
What is a mental representation?
An internal depiction of information
Gestalt
The belief is that one cannot construct a simple coherent perception of sensory aspects but instead create a whole structure of an experience as a whole, focusing on the holistic aspects of the conscious experience. The whole is perceived more than the sum of its parts. Used introspection. (Kohler)
Localization of function
The neural structure supporting the functions resides in this specific area of the brain
What is naturalistic observation?
Observing people is a familiar everyday context when they are going about their own cognitive business. This can have ecological validity as a benefit but experimental control as a disadvantage.
What are the positives and negatives of introspection?
The positives are that observing one’s reactions and behaviour can give them an insight into an experience that can be richer and more complete than anyone could observe. Whereas the negative is that people tend to be biased about their own cognition.
What is the most common way to collect evidence?
Doing a true experiment involving the manipulation of one or more variables and observing how the recorded measures, being the dependent.
The difference between a between and within-subject design.
Between: participants are assigned to specific conditions and the researchers look at the differences between the groups
Within: the participants are exposed to all the conditions and the researcher compares the performance of the same participants within the different control groups.
What is a quasi experiment?
Participants are randomly assigned a control group and it cannot be based on sex, gender, ethnicity, and age.
What is a paradigm?
It is all the different ways the mind can be represented in the field of psychology.
Information-processing approach
The analogy of human cognition and a computer processing info.
Connectionism
Explaining cognition as a network of connections composed of simple units (neural networks).
Cognition
Actively processing, transforming, reducing, elaborating, storing, and recovering information.
What are the 4 sub sections of cognition?
Attention, perception, pattern recognition and memory.
Define Individual differences.
The idea is that intelligence, morals and personality were innate and that people differ in the way different processes function. Used tests and questionnaires to asses mental abilities. (Galton)
How did human factors enginerring present new problems?
This promoted a paradigm shift and focused on thinking about mind connection and the optimal usage of humans in machines in order for them to be efficient.
What is the cognitive revolution?
It is the way that studying cognition had to be changed because new things were being found and introduced into the world.
How did behaviourism fail to explain language?
Conditioning was primarily focused on how we learned language through imitation and reinforcement. But this was questioned when children were using improper grammar when not reinforced to do so.
How did localization of the brain with function create discussion in cognitive psychology?
This helped to explain how different sub-processes occurred in certain areas of the brain. One thought was that this occurred from connections between neuron groups and the other thought was that early experiences with the development of the nervous system were very important.
