Lecture 1 Flashcards
Introduction
What is a sensation?
A conscious experience resulting from a stimulation of a specific organ
What was psychology referred to up to the 1920s?
The study of the mind
After the 1920s, psychology was referred to as…
the study of behaviour
Why did the definition of psychology change in the 1920s?
For psychology to be a science it needs to be observable. You can’t study the mind but behaviour is a product of the mind and is observable
What is perception?
Our sensory experience of the world, viewed through our senses
Why can our perception be wrong?
Our perception can be altered by things such as colour, light, social background, time of day, our mood
What may influence our perception?
Knowledge
What is a good way study how we perceive differently
Illusions such as the Muller-Lyer illusion
What happens to the information we receive through our senses?
If we pay attention to it, mental processes will begin to manipulate the information. If we don’t pay attention, then it is ignored and forgotten
Name the mental processes and explain them
- perception, interpreting information from the senses
- attention, selecting small amounts of the incoming information
-memory, manipulating the information, storing and retrieving it when necessary
What happens once we process the information
The output is our behaviour, the things we do, say, think and feel
A false memory
stating we saw something occur that we actually didn’t
e.g. in eyewitness testimonies
What creates false memories?
Schemas, and categorising information into a hierarchy in our memory e.g. fruit
Pain is a cognitive process. So using Input-Process-Output how do we relief it
Through distractions we remove our attention from it, and therefore our output is we no longer feel it
Affordance is…
the potential actions an individual perceives when interaction with an object in their environment.
e.g. on a door a flat plate affords only pushing and a bar handle affords only pulling
phasic pain
immediate pain upon an injury
tonic pain
after the injury has occurred
pressure
the more receptors in a specific location, the more sensitive the area
Gate control theory of pain
Sensation of pain requires not only that pain reception on the skin are active but also the neural gate in the spinal cord is open and allowing the signals from the pain receptors to pass to the brain
periaqueductal gray
A region of the midbrain. Neurons in the PAG are connected to other neurons that inhibit cells that would normally carry out the pain signals rising in the pain receptors. So when the PAG neurones are active, the gate is closed; when the PAG neurones are not active, the gate opens. Therefore perceived intensity of pain can be reduced by the persons mental state.
PAG is the main place where painkillers seem to affect the neural processing
