Lecture 2: History and Methodology Flashcards
Cognitive Psychology
- The study of structures and processes of the mind and brain that take in, transform, and use information
Behaviorism
- No looking into the black box
- Led by Ivan Pavlov, John Watson, and B.F. Skinner
- Emphasis on what can be directly observed
- Stimuli, responses, reinforcements/rewards
Introspectionism
- Look inside the black box and see what’s going on
- Led by William Wundt and his student Edward Titchener
- Titchener observed his own brain
Problems with behaviorism
§ Cant account for the diversity of human behavior (language)
§ Limiting science to what you can observe leaves out a lot
Cognitivism
○ Infer what’s going on inside the box
○ The mind is like a computer program
○ Led by Donders
Interaction
Occurs when multiple independent variables converge at a point, or when one impacts the other
Mental Chronometry
Invented by Donders, it is the study of the time course of mental processes
Main Effect
- Occurs when change in independent variable changes the dependent variable
- No main effect is just a horizontal line
- Could be multiple main effects for multiple independent variables
Subtractive method
You can find the time one mental process takes by subtracting out the times of the other mental processes measured individually
Problems with Subtractive Method
○ Assumption of pure insertion, that all processes remain the same when another is added
○ Assumption of additivity assumes that there is no overlap between processes
○ Assumption of knowing what the stages are
Simple Reaction Time
The time in which it takes to do one thing, i.e. press a button for a green light
Choice Reaction Time
The time it takes to make a choice then do something, i.e. press a button to the corresponding light
Problem with confirming evidence
- Confirming evidence is weak because something can be true for many reasons; does not prove a particular hypothesis. Disconfirming evidence is good evidence that a hypothesis is wron
Huppert and Piercy Experiment
- Had people study pictures, gave a 20 minute delay, and asked if they remembered a particular picture
- Compared the performance of control subjects and amnesiacs
-Encoding: Putting information into your memory- Storage: Keep the memory in your brain
- Retrieval: Brings the memory out of your memory to your mind
- Wondered if amnesiacs had problems with encoding
- Then had people study the pictures for as long as they needed to improve encoding and tested memories at different delays
- Amnesiacs and controls scored about the same
- Can’t say for sure that the problem was an encoding deficit, but it could have been a retrieval deficit, however it does disconfirm the idea that it is a storage deficit
Dialectic Progression
Tradition that allows current beliefs (thesis) to be challenged by alternative and contrasting belief (antithesis), which my lead to new ideas based off the old (synthesis)
