phrenology, introspection, psychophysics

Question 1

Phrenology

Answer 1

• a process that involves observing and/or feeling the skull to determine and individual’s psychological attributes
• Franz Joseph Gall believed that the brain. was made up of 27 individual organs that determined personality (19 of these organs also in other animal species)
• the size correlates to individual cognitive differences

Question 2

Introspection

Answer 2

• systematic observations of ones own mental processes eg studies of memory and forgetting
• the generalisability of insights about individual. processes to generate mechanisms of human psychology is limited.

Question 3

Psychophysics

Answer 3

• studies the interactions of subjective experience and physical properties of a stimulus
• Absolute threshold: the minimum intensity of a stimulus that a person can detect 50% of the time
• Difference threshold: the minimum required difference between two stimuli for a person. to detect change 50% of the time