WEEK 1 - Behaviour, Mind and Brain

Question 1

What is the APA definition of psychology?

Answer 1

o Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. The discipline embraces all aspects of the human experience — from the functions of the brain to the actions of nations, from child development to care for the aged. In every conceivable setting from scientific research centers to mental healthcare services, “the understanding of behaviour is the enterprise of psychologists.

Question 2

What did Konrad Lorez win a nobel prize for?

Answer 2

Physiology or Medicine - for discoveries concerning organisation and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns

Question 3

What is the theory that Konrad Lorez came up with?

Answer 3

Imprinting - newly hatched geese will imprint on the first things they see when they hatch. There is a critical period following birth where this will occur

Question 4

John O’Keefe won a nobel prize for…

Answer 4

physiology or medicine - for the discovery of cells that constitute a position system in the brain

Question 5

What was the experiment that O’Keef won his nobel prize for?

Answer 5

Place cells are neurons in the hippocampus that fire when the animal occupies a specific location within its environment. As different place cells have different place fields (locations where they fire), they are thought to provide a cognitive map for the rat.

Question 6

Roger Sperry won a nobel prize for?

Answer 6

physiology and medicine - for his discoveries concerning the functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres”

Question 7

who was responsible for discovering lateralisation of brain function?

Answer 7

Roger Sperry

Question 8

what are split brain patients

Answer 8

patients who had undergone a transection of the corpus callosum

Question 9

What happens to a split brain patient?

Answer 9

When split-brain patients are shown an image only in their left visual field, they cannot vocally name what they have seen. - If a split-brain patient is touching an object with only the left hand, while also receiving no visual cues in the right visual field, the patient cannot say out loud the name of that which the right side of the brain is touching.

Question 10

What were discovered in split brain patients?

Answer 10

1. Processing of visual fields by the contralateral hemisphere
2. Language processing localised to the left hemisphere

Question 11

Why did Daniel Kahneman win a nobel prize for?

Answer 11

“for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty” and introducing the framing effect

Question 12

What is the framing effects?

Answer 12

The framing effect is an example of cognitive bias, in which people react to a particular choice in different ways depending on how it is presented; e.g. as a loss or as a gain. People tend to avoid risk when a positive frame is presented but seek risks when a negative frame is presented.

Question 13

what does a cognitive agent need to be able to do?

Answer 13

Sense stuff – get data from the world
Know stuff – understand that data
Learn stuff/Remember stuff
Think stuff – figure out what to do 
Do stuff -  perform actions
Want stuff?
Communicate stuff?

Question 14

how to build a cognitive agent?

Answer 14

In order to act and communicate in the world, acognitive agent needs to be able to:
perceive, recognise, understand, remember, think, plan, decide, etc.

and it needs machinery/hardware capable of supporting these processes

Question 15

what does a cognitive agent need?

Answer 15

behaviour, mind and brain

Question 16

when was the belief that proper psychology should focus on behaviour?

Answer 16

early 20th century

Question 17

What was pavlov responsible for?

Answer 17

Behaviourism - classical conditioning

Question 18

what was Watson responsible for?

Answer 18

behaviourism - behaviourist manifesto, association “little albert”

Question 19

what was Skinner responsible for?

Answer 19

operant or instrumental conditioning - emphasis on reward and punishment and instrumenting behavioural change

Question 20

what was the mind known as in the 20th century?

Answer 20

a black box

Question 21

what are the proper subjects of psychology?

Answer 21

stimulus-response contingencies and observable behaviour

Question 22

during WWII what did Alan Turning and Tommy Flowers do?

Answer 22

built programmable machines such as the Collosus to decrypt German messages which produced the metaphor for understanding the mind - information processing

Question 23

What did Allan Newell and Herb Simon discover??

Answer 23

the general problem solver

Question 24

Noam Chomsky disxcovered…

Answer 24

stimulus response contingencies cannot account for linguistic competence and the generative richness of language use – innate capacity for acquiring language grammars

Question 25

What did Jerry Fodor discover?

Answer 25

the language of thought and the modularity of mind

- Thought as symbolic representation and manipulation – MIND as a set of “programs”

Question 26

what were the years of cognitivism?

Answer 26

1960s - 1990s

Question 27

during cognitivism, what changed in the “black-box”?

Answer 27

it can be opened and understood in terms of symbolic representation information processing

Question 28

what does cognitive neuroscience seek?

Answer 28

to explicitly map cognitive models onto brain substrates taht support them

Question 29

What mental processes were discovered during cognitivism?

Answer 29

perception, thinking, memory, learning and problem-solving

The rise of cognitive neuroscience

Question 30

What is cognition?

Answer 30

he mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.