Lecture 4 Flashcards
What are the three separate philosophical claims relating to behaviourism?
Methodological behaviourism: psychologists must study behaviour
Psychological behaviourism: psychology should be the study of behaviour
Philosophical or logical behaviourism: language about mental states and terms is just behavioural dispositions
Thorndike
- Law of exercise and disuse: the more often an association is used, the stronger the connection and vice versa
- Law of effect: if an action is followed by a satisfying state of affairs, the organism is more likely to repeat it and vice versa
David Hartley
- Body and mind function in concert
- no separate mental matter
- nerves vibrate, changes in vibration transmit to other nerves
- this gives rise to action
Bain
- Psychological parallelism: mind and body occur together without casual relationship
- Hedonism: pleasurable associations more likely to be repeated than unpleasant ones
- Voluntarist: importance of voluntary action in understanding experience and learning
Types of behaviours
- somatic (hereditary): habits, instinctive response
- somatic (acquired): habits
- visceral (acquired): emotions
Drive reduction theory
sER (reaction potential to a stimulus)= sHr (habit strength prior to conditioning) * D (drive)
Tolman
- Behaviourism= study of twitches
- saw evidence in animals of goal directed behaviour and cognitive processes
- looked particularly at maze learning in rats (place learning)
Skinner
Type S learning: Classical conditioning- stimulus response learning
Type R learning: Operant conditioning - response outcome learning, voluntary behaviours
Bartlett
- Studied recall in war of the ghosts study
- found participants stated what they thought should happen rather than what actually happened
Craik
- The Nature of Exploration
- Argued the mind creates mental models of reality
- we build internal models to simulate future events and make decisions
Piaget
- Developmental model of knowledge acquisition - superseding structures as we acquire more complex means of reasoning with maturity
- Assumes learning changes as function of development whereas this is constant in behaviourist model
Weiner
- invented cybernetics
- popularised terms such as input, output and feedback
- crucial to information processing and cognitive models of mind
Shannon
- Information theory
- Mathematical model of communication- information can be measured in terms of uncertainty, modelled using binary
What were Chomsky’s critiques of Skinners Verbal behaviour?
- Flexibility of language- conditioning has little predictive value
- Rule based, combinatorial system
- Imitation poor basis for language
- Poverty of the stimulus- must be innate contribution
What did Chomsky propose instead?
That we have a language acquisition device equipped with universal grammar
Miller
- Miller’s Magic Seven: we can hold seven +/- 2 pieces of information in STM
- Chunking: can increase capacity by processing as chunks of information
- Varies on some factors
Miller
- Miller’s Magic Seven: we can hold seven +/- 2 pieces of information in STM
- Chunking: can increase capacity by processing as chunks of information
- Varies on some factors
