Intro to Cognitive Psychology (CH 1) Flashcards
What is the Mind?
- System= creates representations
- Acts within & helps us achieve our goals
What is Donders (1868) famous for?
- Measured how long it took a person to make a decision
- Measured interval between stimulus presentation & response
- Introduced Simple RT Task & Choice RT Task in his experiment
- Time to make a decision= Choice RT minus Simple RT
What are the different types of Reaction Times Tasks that Donders used in his experiments?
- Simple RT Task= pushing button quickly after light appears
- Choice RT Task=Realizing if light was Left or Right & pushing the corresponding key
What did Wundt (1879) famous for?
- Approach to Structuralism
- Believed overall experience= combining different basic elements= Sensations
- Used analytic introspection
What did Ebbinghaus (1885-1913) famous for?
- Worked on Memory & Forgetting
- Experimented on himself= read list of nonsense syllabus aloud= determine # of repetition to repeat list w/o errors
- Savings= Original time to learn minus Time to relearn list after a delay
What did Ebbinghaus determine from his self-experiments?
-Forgetting occurs faster after 2 days of initial learning then curve levels off = Savings curve
What was William James famous for?
- 1st professor of psych at Harvard
- Observations based on OWN mind= no experiments
- Considered many topics
What is Watson (1900s) famous for?
- Focused more on Behaviorism= had beef with introspection bc it has extremely variable results & difficult to verify
- Wanted to study observable behavior
- “Little Albert”
What was Watson’s experiment “Little Albert” about?
- Examined pairing 1 stimulus w/ another affected behavior
- Classical Conditioning= Pair neutral event w/ event that naturally produces outcome
What was B.F Skinner (1938) famous for?
- Determining the relationship between stimuli & response
- Rewarded behavior= more likely to be repeated
- Operant Conditioning= Behavior is strengthened by positive reinforcers (food/social approval) or w/ negative reinforcers (shocks/social rejection)
What was Tolman (1938) famous for?
- Trained rats to find food in 4-armed maze
- Rats create Cognitive Map
- Caused revolution bc the idea is different from behaviorism
What was the Decline in Behaviorism?
- Contraversy of Langauge Acquisition
- Skinner= Verbal Behavior= children learn language through Operant Conditioning
- Chomsky=Language development= Inborn biological program that holds across cultures= product of the way the mind is constructed
What’s the Study of Mind today?
- Makes Inferences about underlying cognitive activity
- Understand how the mind Operates= what behavior says
What’s Info Processing?
- Shifts stimulus response to explain behavior in terms of Mind
- Input –> Filter–> Dectector–> Memory
What is Neuropsychology?
-Study behavior of people with brain damage
