Midterm Review Flashcards
Plato
A Greek philosopher who believed that the mind and body are separate entities. Once we die, our body dies, but our mind doesn’t and it continues to live after death. He also believes that knowledge is innate and we inherit our behavior.
John Locke
An English philosopher that discovered the concept of tabula rasa. Tabula Rasa is the idea that the mind is a blank slate
Rene Descartes
A French philosopher that believed in Socrates and Plato’s idea of innate knowledge. He believed that the brain’s fluids contain spirit animals which led to the discovery of the nerve paths.
Aristotle
A Greek philosopher that disagrees with Socrates and Plato’s ideas of innate knowledge. He believed that the mind and body are together. Once you die, both, mind and body, dies. Also, he believed that behavior is learned from experience.
Socrates
A Greek philosopher and a mentor of Aristotle. He believed in innate knowledge and that the mind and body are separate.
Wilhelm Wundt
A German scientist. He’s considered as the father of psychology. Wundt believed that psychology should be an independent field instead of being a branch of physiology and philosophy. He discovered the method of introspection. Introspection is the idea that you must look within yourself to understand the mind.
William James
An American Harvard professor. Discovered functionalism - a school of psychology that focuses on the mental and behavioral processes function. One of the co-creators of the James - Lange theory of emotion. The theory states that emotions come from events that cause changes in the body – the release of hormones.
B.F. Skinner
An American behaviorist psychologist. He focused on the things that are observable and objective. He discovered operant conditioning and invented the skinner box.
Jean Piaget
A Swiss psychologist. She focused on cognitive development. Piaget discovered the Stage Theory of Development. This theory describes how children of different stages in life use different cognitive abilities.
Sigmund Freud
Discovered the psychoanalytic school of psychology. This school focuses on the role of the unconscious mind. He also studied dreams and our experiences from our childhood affect our adult personality.
Edward Titchener
Studied elements of consciousness. He discovered structuralism.
Immanuel Kant
Kant combined rationalism and empiricism. Kant believed that mental processes can’t be observed because it lacked substance.
Charles Darwin
A British scientist who discovered the Theory of evolution. His ideas of natural selection influenced psychology. Evolution psychology states that the stronger characteristics will continue to be passed on to the next generation.
Albert Bandura
An Canadian - American psychologist that discovered Social Learning Theory. He also conducted the Bobo doll experiment. In this experiment, a child had to witness a researcher verbally and physically abusing the clown doll. As a result, the child copied the same type of behavior
Edward Thorndike
An American psychologist that created the Law of Effect. He discussed the effects of punishment and reward. Thorndike concluded that learning is the outcome of associating responses with stimuli
Phineas Gage
He was the first patient who survived severe damage to his brain. This caused the discovery of the correlation between the functions of the front area of the brain and personality
Nervous System
Dendrites
The bushy, branching extensions of a neuron that receive messages and conduct impulses toward the cell body
Axon
the extension of a neuron, ending in branching terminal fibers, through which messages pass to other neurons or to muscles or glands
Neurons
A nerve cell; the basic building block of the nervous system
Myelin Sheath
A layer of fatty tissue segmentally encasing the fibers of many neurons; enables vastly greater transmission speed of neural impulses as the impulse hops from one node to the next
Action Potential
a neural impulse; a brief electrical charge that travels down an axon
Nervous System
the body’s speedy, electrochemical communication network, consisting of all the nerve cells of the peripheral and central nervous system
