Week 1 Flashcards
1
Q
Why study the history of psychology
A
- The study of the study of minds
- Reveals how concepts and approaches to mind have changed
- Learn about key advances in study of mind
- Evolving schools of thought and zeitgeists
- Place contemporary psychology in context
2
Q
Psyche
A
mind
3
Q
Logia
A
To study
4
Q
Origins of psychology
A
- Psychology is a relatively young science
- Less than 200 years old
- However study of human nature is much longer
5
Q
Ancient Greek thought
A
- Before development of science
- The world was viewed as full of minds (souls and spirits) and magic
- Greek science was first step towards naturalistic view of the world
- EG Pythagorus, astronomy
- Began to question what we really know about reality
6
Q
Appearance and reality
A
- There is sometimes a difference between appearance and reality
- Which is to be trusted?
7
Q
Plato – rationalism
A
- Senses can be deceiving
- Thus they should not be trusted
- People should rely on logic instead
8
Q
Allegory of the cave
A
- Prisoners in a cave can only see shadows on a wall
- These shadows become their reality
- Once they are allowed to leave the cave can they see real objects
- Cave is a parable of the human condition
- Soul imprisoned in body and forced to look at imperfect copies of objects
- Forms are the only true example
9
Q
Empiricism
A
- Contrasts with rationalism
- Emphasises role of experience
- Gains information through sensory perception and observation
10
Q
Aristotle 384-322 BC
A
- Gained knowledge from observation
- Believed observation and analysis are reliable
- Empiricist
- He did no experimentation
- Studied living things and analysed the nature of causes
- Defined the soul as that which animates and gives form to matter
11
Q
History after Aristotle
A
- Romans invade Greece
- Roman empire falls
- Greek ideas preserved by Islamic scholars
- Christian scholars rediscover the Greeks
- Scientific revolution – Newton
- Enlightenment – questions about how to approach the mind scientifically emerge
12
Q
Rene Descartes
A
- Mind body dualism
- Rationalist
- Cogito ergo sum
- I think therefore I am
13
Q
Mind body dualism
A
- Ontological distinction
- Mind and matter are fundamentally different things
- Matter occupies space but doesn’t think
- Mind thinks but doesn’t occupy space
- The human mind is uniquely reflexive, linguistic and rational
14
Q
John Locke
A
- How do we acquire knowledge
- Nature vs nurture
- We don’t have innate ideas
- Perception vs reality
- Tabula rasa
15
Q
David Hume
A
- Skepticism
- The age of reason
- One of the central figures of the Scottish Enlightenment
- Argued that reason is the slave of passions
- We argue from our convictions, not to them
- What do we really know from experience?
- Experience actually provides fewer grounds of belief than we conventionally assume
- Problem of falsifiability – swans
16
Q
Correlation is not causation
A
- This reasoning applies to what we take to be causes
- Flames have so often been accompanied by the experience of heat that we take them to be the cause of heat
- But there is no necessary reason to do so
- It is merely a habitual belief
- Cause itself is not perceivable
17
Q
19th Century
A
- Empirical science started investigating the senses experimentally
- Move to apply physiology to study of the mind
- Modern psychology emerged between 1850 and 1900
- Principles of materialism and mechanism expressed the spirit of modernism
- Around 1840, Helmholtz, Brucke and other German scientists signed an anti-vitalism oath
- No other forces other than the common physical chemical ones are active within the organism
18
Q
Emerging Zeitgeist
A
- Scientific revolution – empirical methods are the best way of knowing
- Modernism – principles of objectivity in measurement
- Materialism – everything is rules by physical forces
19
Q
Early experimental psychology
A
- Psychometrics – intelligence testing
- Psychophysics – perception and sensation
- Structuralism and consciousness
20
Q
Early experimentalists
A
- Francis Galton
- Alfred Binet
- Franz Joseph Gall
- EH Weber
- Hermann von Helmholtz
- Wilhelm Wundt
- William James
21
Q
Psychometrics
A
- Measuring the mind
- Science of measuring mental faculties
- Intelligence, personality, educational problems
22
Q
Francis Galton – 1822-1911
A
- Cousin of Darwin
- Born in Birmingham
- Made first weather maps
- Classified fingerprints
- Great statistical contribution to psychology
23
Q
Galton – statistical contribution
A
- Suggested intelligence could also be form of normal distribution
- Developed the standard deviation
- Plotted scores from top 100 candidates at Cambridge
24
Q
Galton board
A
- Demonstrates that with sufficient sample size
- The binomial distribution approximates a normal distribution
- It afforded insight into regression to the mean
25
Q
Statistical contributions
A
- Standard deviation
- Regression to the mean
- Devised persons correlation coefficient
26
Q
Hereditary genius – evolution of intelligence
A
- Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin
- Read and admired Darwin’s origin of the species
- Published Hereditary Genius
- Individual differences in intelligence must be innate
27
Q
Inheritance of eminence
A
- Classified families as eminent or not
- Closer the kinship, the greater likelihood of eminence (gene sharing)
- First attempt to account for heritability of psychological characteristics
- Closer the relative, the more likely for shared environment
- 31% of fathers were eminent
- 27% of brothers were eminent
- 48% of sons
- 5-8% of grandfathers, grandsons, uncles and nephews
28
Q
Eugenics
A
- Galton believed that, because horses can be bred with certain characteristics
- So, could humans
- “Produce a highly gifted race of men during several consecutive generations”
- Eugenics – improving the human race by selective breeding
- Set up anthropometric lab
- Eugenics generally abandoned after early 20th century
29
Q
Binet intelligence scales
A
- Alfred Binet – french doctor
- 1905 – joined a government commission to identify school children with mental handicap
- Worked with Theodore Simon to develop tests
- Wanted to create a fair system of testing intelligence, not based on previous education experience
- Used large banks of tests, including word associations, drawing and digit span
- Realised that age needed to be considered
30
Q
First intelligence test
A
- Binet and Simon constructed first usable test of intelligence – 1905
- Comprised of 30 separate items with increasing difficulty
31
Q
IQ test
A
- German psychologist William Stern introduced intelligence quotient in 1912
- Mental age divided by chronological age times by 100
32
Q
Intelligence testing today
A
- Mental testing ad IQ is still in common use
- Tests often updated every few years
- Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children
- Galton’s and Binet’s ideas very influential and have had major impact on modern psychology
33
Q
How do we measure the mind?
A
- Problem of subjectivity
- Study things that are objective
- Perception, sensation, physical components
34
Q
Franz Joseph Gall
A
- Found nerve fibres passing from one side to the other of the brain (commissures)
- Comparative anatomist – compared brains
- The larger the brain, the more advanced the mental functions
- Mostly accurate except in adult human population
- A mixture of anatomical research and wind speculation
- Put the brain centre stage – brain an important higher function
35
Q
Phrenology
A
- Gall believed that certain faculties were based in specific parts of the brain
- Bumps and indentations on the surface of the skull reflect the size of phrenological organs in the brain
- Ultimately discredited by the initial ideas were based on empirical observations
36
Q
Psychophysics
A
- How do we measure the mind scientifically
- Physics was the natural model for early psychology
- Psychophysics – the objective investigation of subjective experience
- Interested in sensation and perception
37
Q
EH Weber 1795-1878
A
- Pioneered methods for measuring the sensitivity of the senses
- Especially looked at thresholds
- Conscious sensations of stimuli may not reflect reality
- One way of constraining the problem of subjectivity is to measure thresholds
38
Q
Absolute thresholds
A
- Smallest quantities that give any sensation at all
- Level of stimulus intensity at which stimulus can no longer be detected
39
Q
Relative thresholds
A
- Are the smallest quantitative change that is noticeable
- Minimum difference between two items to be able to tell them apart
- Also known as Just noticeable differences
- The Weber-Fechner Law states they are a constant proportion of the absolute intensity
- It was hopes that psychophysics would steadily discover all such laws
40
Q
Webers Law
A
- Only notice a change when the magnitude of the change is bigger than a critical fraction
41
Q
Hermann Von Helmholtz
A
- One of the greatest 19th century physiologists
- Adopted a doctrine of mechanism
- Opposed to vitalism
42
Q
Rate of neural conduction
A
- Initially used frogs legs
- Stimulating the nerve in the leg would cause the foot to twitch
- Stimulated different distances from the foot and measured time taken for foot to twitch
- Calculated the neural conduction = 25 meters per second
43
Q
Helmholtz – trichromatic theory
A
- Groundbreaking work on colour perception
- Noted only three colour receptor cones
- But can see many different hues
- Hues arise from a mix of cones excited to different degrees
44
Q
Helmholtz – unconscious interference
A
- Realised that image on the retina may not accurately reflect the external world
- Eg blind spot
- Sometimes the brain’s perceptions contradict the raw sensations
- Visual illusions
- Derive the most probable explanation (unconscious interference)
- Based on prior visual learning experience
45
Q
Gestalt psychology
A
- Psychophysics revealed a lot about senses
- But not about how sensated become perception
- Gestalt psychology – a whole is more than just its parts
- Principles – emergence, reification, multistablity, invariance
46
Q
Wundt
A
- Considered the founder of experimental psychology
- Set up first experimental psychology lab in Leipzig Germany
- Supervised 186 PhDs including Titchener, William James, Cattell
47
Q
Wundt – cultural psychology
A
- 10 volume work on cultural psychology
- Religion, language, myths, history, art, laws, customs
- Not only shaped by sensation / perception but by culture
- Very interested in language – verbal communication of idea one wants to say
48
Q
Wundt’s ideas
A
- consciousness is inner experience
- every living thing has this experience
- every living being must have always had this inner experience
- the beginnings of mental life date from the beginnings of time
- so psychology must begin with self-observation
- introspection - combines self-observation with experimentation
- this yields quantitative data bout consciousness
- psychology is the scientific study of the mental life
49
Q
Wundt – structuralism
A
- Wondered whether complex mental experience could be broken down into simple processes – building blocks
- Influenced by physicists and chemists breaking down molecules into atoms
- Systematic introspection
50
Q
Introspections
A
- There is external observation and internal observation – inside own mind
- Wundt described psychology as the science of conscious experience
- Therefore the best method is to observe the conscious experience
- However, only the person having the experience can observe it
- Thus he used introspection
- Had explicit rules for how to use introspection
- Must be possible to systematically manipulate the experimental conditions
51
Q
Wundt and structuralism
A
- Could the taste of apple pie
- Be broken down into elements
- Hot, sweet
52
Q
Introspection process
A
- Observation – observer must pay close attention to the stimulus – used observers trained in introspection
- Experimental control – experiment creates external conditions that are stables across time and participants
- Observer must report the elements of consciousness
53
Q
Wundt – problems for introspection
A
- Wundt noticed that introspective reports were unverifiable
- Memory can often play tricks with recollection of psychological states
- As a result, higher mental processes will be too complex to study
54
Q
Criticism of introspections
A
- Participants may not agree on their introspection
- Wundt acknowledges this problem but thought that further training could help
- Introspection could also be classified as retrospection – depending on the time between the stimulus and report
- Examining an experience in an introspective manner may alter it (anger)
- Imageless thoughts
- Cannot report on their introspections – the solution just appears
- Implies that many psychological processes are not available for introspective access
55
Q
William James
A
- First to teach psychology course – Harvard 1875
- The stream of consciousness
- Consciousness is not a thing but a process
- Did not believe in breaking down experiences
- Pragmatism – true beliefs are those the believers find useful
- Functionalism
56
Q
Gestalt
A
- The whole is greater than the sum of its parts
57
Q
Structuralism
A
- The study of conscious experiences by introspection
58
Q
Pragmatism
A
- The usefulness of beliefs
59
Q
Functionalism
A
- Consciousness is a stream
