Midterm 1 Flashcards
Describe Plato’s view
- Idea was that we use logic to understand our world
- The world is a reflection of reality
- Proposed dualism and rationalism
- Knowledge comes from observation but is also “a priori”
What is dualism?
the mind is separate from the body
What is rationalism?
knowledge is acquired through reason, without the aid of the senses
Describe Aristotle’s view
- An empiricist
- Combined philosophical and scientific approaches to thinking
• Thought is forming associations based on observations
• The mind is nothing before forming associations
What is empiricism?
Knowledge comes only or primarily through sensory experience
What is structuralism?
Focused on identifying the basic building blocks of the conscious experience with analytic/experimental introspection
- Systematic, controlled observation was emphasized
- Focused on understanding the structure of the mind and higher cognitive processes
Who is Wilhelm Wundt?
Founded the first formal lab that studied psychological processes and proposed INTROSPECTION
Who is Edward Titchener?
Established experimental study of psychology and suggested that all things (sensations, memories) can be broken down into elements
What is funcitonalism?
- Focused on WHY the mind works
- Not interested in breaking down mental states to basic elements, but rather the usefulness of knowledge
- Did not think introspection was effective alone, focused on observing actions
Who is William James?
- Believed consciousness is personal and cannot be broken down into parts
- It is constantly changing, we never have the exact same idea
What is behaviourism?
- Study stimulus-response relationships; ignore mental processes
- Shifted from a focus on the mind to behaviour
ex: operant and classical conditioning
PROBLEM: failed to account for many aspects of complex human behaviour
Who is Ulric Neisser?
Responsible for birth of cognitive psychology
What was the main aim of the cognitive revolution?
understanding cognition involves breaking thinking down into abstract information into a series of steps or stages
What is the invariance assumption?
human cognition is promoted by processes that are
invariant & regular across situations
What is the control assumption?
situations/experiments can & must be controlled to allow
conclusions to be attributed specifically to the variable being manipulated
What are Personal-level explanations?
focus on describing & understanding the person as
an active agent interacting with their environment
What are Subpersonal-level explanations?
focus on describing & understanding the brain
mechanisms that support cognitions
What is cognitive ethology?
States that cognitions are contextualized to the situation in which they occur & vary as a function of the
situation
According to the classic cognitive view, what are the two things present at an information processing stage?
- Representations: a symbolic form of an entity
- Processes: what is manipulating or transforming the representation (the + in an equation)
What is the information theory?
• We are information processors and it takes time to process information
• We process information to reduce uncertainty
- The less likely an ‘event’, the more information processing
What is Hick’s law?
a mathematical equation to show that the more information contained in a signal (the more bits), the longer it takes to make a (correct) response to this signal (the more ‘energy’ consumed)
What is decision fatigue?
taxing cognitive processes has consequences on our ability to make later decisions
What is ecological validity?
the extent to which the findings of a research study are able to be generalized to real-life settings
What is a schema?
organized mental templates to assist information processing that direct exploration of the environment