Lecture #1 Flashcards
Introduction ( what is mind?)
What’s mind’s role?
memory, problem solving, and making decisions
Definition of mind?
The mind creates and controls mental
functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning
How does the mind operates?
The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals.
What is Cognitive psychology?
the study of mental processes, which includes determining the characteristics and properties of the mind and how it operates
What was Franciscus donders experiment about?
how long it takes for a person to make a decision and he determined this by measuring REACTION TIME.
What were the 2 measures of Reaction Time?
- Simple reaction time
- Choice reaction time
What was the Simple reaction time experiment?
Measured by asking the participants to push a button as rapidly as possible when they saw a light go on
What was the Choice reaction time experiment?
Measured by by using two lights and asking participants to push the left button when they saw the left light go on and the right button when they saw the right light go on
What was the conclusion of Donders experiment (How long was the reaction time?)
one-tenth of a second
What year did Wilhelm Wundt found the 1st laboratory of scientific psychology and where?
In 1879, At the University of Leipzig In Germany.
What was Wundt’s Approach called?
Structuralism
Analytic introspection?
a technique in which trained participants described their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli.
Whose approach was the “Memory experiment”? What year and Which university?
German Psychologist -Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885/1913), University of Berlin
What was Hermann Ebbinghaus’s Memory experiment about?
What is the time course of forgetting
What Method did Ebbinghaus used?
Quantitative method
Who did he used as the participant, and how did he do it?
Using himself as the participant, he repeated lists of 13 nonsense syllables such as DAX, QEH, LUH, and ZIF to himself one at a time at a constant
rate. He used nonsense syllables so that his memory would not be influenced by the meaning of a particular word
What measure did Ebbinghaus used?
Savings (Original time to learn the list)
What is Savings curve?
shows that memory drops rapidly for the first 2 days after the initial learning and then levels off.
1st American Psychologist
William James
Name of the book by William James
Principles of psychology (1890)
What approach did John Watson found?
Behaviourism
Where did John Watson graduated from?
University of Chicago
What was John Watson’s most famous experiment?
Little Albert
what is classical conditioning?
learning that occurs when a neutral stimulus (e.g., a tone) becomes associated with a stimulus (e.g., food) that naturally produces a behaviour.
Classical Conditioning in dogs was done by?
Ivan Pavlov’s , 1890s
Who introduced OPERANT CONDITIONING?
B. F. Skinner, PhD from Harvard in 1931
operant conditioning
which focused on how behavior is strengthened by the presentation of positive reinforcers, such as food or social approval (or withdrawal of negative reinforcers, such as a shock or social rejection).
Cognitive Revolution
a shift in psychology from the behaviorist’s focus on stimulus–response relationships to an approach whose main thrust was to understand the operation of the mind.
What are the 3 components that Long term memory is subdivided into?
- Episodic Memory
- Semantic Memory
- Procedural Memory
Episodic memory definition
memory for events in your life (like
what you did last weekend)
Semantic memory definition
is memory for facts (such as the
capitals of the states)
Procedural memory definition
memory for physical actions (such
as how to ride a bike or play the piano)
Neuropsychology
the study of the behavior of people with brain damage
Electrophysiology
measuring electrical responses of the nervous system, made it possible
to listen to the activity of single neurons
PET (positron emission tomography)
to see which areas of the human brain are activated during cognitive activity
- A disadvantage of this technique was that it was expensive and involved injecting radioactive tracers into a person’s bloodstream
what was PET replaced with? and why?
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) - it didn’t involve
radioactive tracers and which was capable of higher resolution
Paradigm shift
a change in the way psychologists think and work, often due to new evidence that challenges the current paradigm.
ex. the behaviourist approach transitioned into the cognitive approach
