Week 1 - Chapter 1 Flashcards
Early work in Cognitive Psychology
In what Millenium were ideas about the mind dominated by the belief that it was not possible to study the mind
1800’s
Why was it believed that it was not possible to study the mind?
- Because it was not possible for the mind to study itself
- Because properties of the mind cannot be measured
Who did the first experiments about cognitive psychology?
Dutch Physiologist, Franciscus Donders
In what year was the first cognitive psychology experiment undertaken?
1868, 11 years before the founding of the first scientific psychology laboratory
What year was the term cognitive psychology coined?
1967
What did Donders pioneering experiment measure?
Reaction time - and how long does it take the participants to make a decision
What two measures were compared to deduce reaction time?
Simple reaction time and Choice reaction time
How long was the decision-making time concluded by Donders?
One-tenth of a second
Mental responses cannot be measured directly but can be inferred by…….?
Behaviour
Who founded the first scientific psychology laboratory in 1879
Wilhelm Wundt
What was Wilhelm Wundt’s approach to psychology that dominated the late 1800’s and early 1900’s?
Structuralism
Wundt wanted to create a “periodic table of the _________”
Mind
Structuralist approach purports that our overall experiences are determined by combining basic elements, called __________?
Sensations
What technique did Wundt use to achieve scientific description of our experience?
Analytic Introspection
What was Herman Ebbinghaus’s Memory Experiment?
What is the Time Course of Forgetting? How rapidly information that is learned is lost over time
Who used the savings method to measure forgetting?
Herman Ebbinghaus in 1885
According to Ebbinghaus’s experiment of forgetting, longer delays result in smaller __________
Savings
Smaller savings mean more __________
Forgetting
According to Ebbinghaus’s savings curve, memory drops rapidly for the first (how many) days, after the initial learning and then levels off.
Two
Ebbinghaus and Donders both measured _________ to determine a property of the mind
Behaviour
Which pioneering psychologist taught Harvard’s first psychology course and wrote the textbook Principles of Psychology (1890)
William James
What did William James study to understand cognition?
Observations of his own experience
William James determined that paying ____________ to one thing involves withdrawing from other things
Attention
_________ _________ observations included a focus on the nature of attention
William James
A negative reaction to _________ ___________ was a major influence on psychology rejecting the study of mental processes
Analytic Introspection
John Watson founded the ________ approach to psychology
Behaviourism
What two reasons did John Watson believe were a problem with the Analytic Introspection method?
Invariable results and results were difficult to verify
John Watson was associated with _____________ Conditioning
Classical
B F Skinner was associated with ___________ Conditioning
Operant
