Lecture 1 Historical Context Flashcards
What is cognitive psychology?
- Process (flow of information): how we process information through our perceptual cognitive system - how it gets from out there in to the point of understanding and thinking about things
- Structure: - Representation of knowledge
- Limits: - Restriction in flow ; humans are limited in ability of processing information
How do we examine these processes, structures and limits?
- Philosophy - logic and argumentation
2.Psychology - empirical approach
Who was a student of Socrates?
Plato
Which person created the “theory of forms”?
1.Socrates
2.Plato
3. Wundt
4.Aristotle
2.Plato
What is the “theory of forms”
We do not perceive the real world but only an image of the real world. The physical world is out there ,but you can’t just grab it and put it into your brain, it gets coded as some image
We are born with innate knowledge already have in our brains the forms that represent the physical world that allow us to represent that physical world (don’t have to learn things it is innately given)
Who has to do with the idea of “blank slate” (tabula rasa)
Aristotle
What is the meaning behind “blank slate”
Aristotle believed that the mind has a more active role and that we come into the world as a “blank slate” which we start to learn and populate the blank slate. This is not innate knowledge it is learned through ASSOCIATIONS
Who talked about empiricism?
Aristotle
Describe empiricism
The basis of science is observation: getting some data or some evidence to support your ideas rather than just arguing about stuff
Associations =
A.Process
B.Structure
C.Limits
A.Process
Stored knowledge =
Structure
Who were the roots in psychology?
Plato
Aristotle
John Mill
J.S. Mill
What is structuralism? (Titchener)
The study of the structure of consciousness
Who would agree with: psychology as the study of “conscious process and immediate experience”
Wundt: because he wanted to study things we could consciously experience (immediate memories) rather than unconscious processes
Who established cognitive psychology as its own science?
Wundt
Who came up with Introspection Technique?
Wundt
What is Introspection?
Wundt trained people to try and reflect on their own personal thoughts and experiences and then reporting them (self reflection)
Explain structuralism by Wundt
“structuralism” : introspect on elements of mind’s structure; Understand the elements of the mind and how the minds organized and what the structures are by using introspection
Stimulus error
try to explain what you experience rather than what an item actually is
What are 2 problems with introspection?
- “Boss” validates results
2.Cannot introspect on many mental processes & structures
What is Functionalism?
Study the functions of consciousness, not its structure
Who talked about immediate memory?
William James
Who talked about hidden memory
William James
What is immediate memory?
short term memory, (active small memory system)
What is hidden/passive memory?
Long term memory
Who wanted to actually gather data on learning through associations?
Ebbinghaus
Who conducted the experiment where people were given 2 lists, A items and B items where they had to pair the items and learn their connections?
Ebbinghaus
What are Nonsense syllables (CVC): Consonant-vowel-consonant used for
Words that have no meanings to reduce extraneous factors while experimenting associated learning
What did verbal learning grow from
Ebbinghaus and associationism: what if we started looking at words strongly connected already vs words more weakly connected
What was the dominant approach in psychology from 1910-1960
Behaviorism
Behaviorism
Study of observable quantifiable behaviour
What were John B Watson and B.F. Skinner NOT interested in?
things you could not observe, they didn’t care about ; things that were “hidden” in the mind, internal mental processes or structures, the unconscious
S-R approach was studied by
Behaviourists (John B Watson, B.F. Skinner) because you can measure and manipulate stimulus (shock) and measure responses that happened as result to that stimulus
Who allowed cognitive psychology to be a science?
Skinner, Watson, Ebbinghaus
Was Gestalt psychology rigorous?
No!
What do Gestalt Psychologists like to study?
Normally want to study principles of organization and to discover these laws of how our perceptions are organized
What is meant by the “whole is greater than the sum of the parts”
when we perceive things we might perceive bits and pieces of things, but we still know what the information is telling us.
What is one of our innate ways of organizing things?
Into figure and ground, by similarities
What was Hebb interested in?
he was interested in the brain mechanisms that support organization of perception and learning
Who created “cell assembly”
Hebb
What is “cell assembly theory”
Assemblies of neurons formed through associations.
When the brain learns something new , neurons are activated and connected with other neurons, forming a neural network
Assumptions of science
- Determinism: universe and the brain is lawful, and it is orderly
2.We have to assume things have a limited amount of causes (finite causation)
Who was the most studied person in psychology?
HM
Who was HM?
A guy who had a minor seizure when he was young, and his seizures got worse and worse as he got older. He got surgery on hippocampus and there were no real differences in his personality after. Early (pre operational) memories in tact, active short term was good, but he could not learn new information
What did the HM study suggest
There is more than 1 type of memory (STS) (LTS)
Three-store model
SM: sensory memory; These are the memory systems that register your sensory information that first comes into your senses
STS: short term store
LTS: Long term store
