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
