Week 3 Flashcards
1
Q
What is the problem of a psychological science?
A
- Early experimentalists focus on measurement
- But how do we measure mind and consciousness?
- Methods of introspection have limitations
- Psychoanalysis looks at unconscious mind
2
Q
Behaviourism reaction against the unobservable
A
- Introspection is not verifiable as the subjective is not objective
- Caused a shift to behaviourism
- Psychology is not because of experience but about observable objective behaviour
- Use animal learning as can carefully control environment
3
Q
Pavlov – 1849-1936
A
- Physiologist – studied dog digestion
- Discovered conditional reflexes by chance
- Looked at saliva excretion in dogs to dilute acid stimulus on tongue
- Found that dogs started salivating when they began laboratory preparation
- These stimuli were previously unlinked
4
Q
Pavlov’s classical conditioning
A
- A type of learning in which a neutral stimulus acquires the capacity to evoke a response that was originally evoked by another stimulus
5
Q
Conditioned reflexes
A
- Found associations between previously unlinked stimuli
- Unconditioned stimulus – food
- Unconditioned response – salivating
- Conditioned stimulus – sight of keeper
- Conditioned response – salivating
6
Q
Edward Thorndike – 1874-1949
A
- Focused on the acquisition of behaviour
- How cats learned to escape from a puzzle box
- Animals made a response and were rewarded if correct
- Eg escaping and food
- Law of effect
- Stimulus and response probabilities (stimulus-response)
7
Q
Law of effect
A
- Behaviour depends on consequence
- Reward/punishment
8
Q
Stimulus and response probabilities
A
- Learning occurs when there is an increase in S-R probabilities
- Forgetting occurs when there is a decrease in S-R probabilities
9
Q
J B Watson – 1878-1959
A
- Founder of behaviourism
- Did not like introspection or participating in introspection
- Wanted a break between philosophy and psychology
- Knowledge should be based on observable phenomena
- Learned about Pavlov’s work with animals
- Looked at conditioning with humans
10
Q
Watson and behaviourism
A
- Published an article outlining behaviourism
- Psychological review 1913
- Must be completely objective – rules out any subjective interpretations
- Not to describe a conscious state but to predict and control overt behaviour
- Believed that work on animals could tell us about human behaviour
11
Q
Little Albert
A
- 11-month-old boy
- Conditioned Albert to fear a white rat
- Generalised to other stimuli
- Watson
12
Q
Conditioned learning
A
- Watson believed conditioned learning could account for all kinds of behaviour
- Eg human emotions are conditioned
- All except fear, rage and love which are innate responses
- Conditioned reflex was a model for behaviour
- Thinking did not involve the brain – muscular act
13
Q
Nature versus nurture – Watson
A
- Watson believed it was environment that was important
- You can train any infant to become successful
14
Q
B F Skinner – 1904-1990
A
- Radical behaviourism
- Learning in life requires more than passive acquisition
- Operant conditioning – modification of behaviour
- Respondent conditioning – new S-R connections built on Thorndike’s law of effect – relationship between response and reward
- Skinner box
15
Q
Skinner’s operant conditioning
A
- Learning in which voluntary responses come to be controlled by their consequences
- Favourable consequences – reinforcers – cause organisms to repeat
- Unfavourable – punishers – discourage behaviours
16
Q
Skinner box
A
- Rats pressed a lever by accident
- Dropped food pellet
- Rewarded for behaviour
- Reinforcement – behaviour occurs with greater frequency
- Punishment – behaviour occurs less frequently
17
Q
Shaping
A
- Skinner believed operant conditioning could explain all behaviour
- Trained pigeons to play ping-pong
- Trained pigeons to be superstitious
18
Q
Project Pigeon
A
- World war 2 – US navy required a weapon effective against German battleships
- Lenses projected an image of distant objects onto a screen in front of each bird
- When the missile was launched from an aircraft with sight of an enemy ship
- An image would appear on the screen
- The screen was hinged – pecks at image of the ship would guide the missile towards the ship
- Project was abandoned
19
Q
Air crib
A
- Aka the heir conditioner
- When skinner and wife had a baby
- Skinner designed this crib
- Intention to make baby comfortable, confident, mobile and healthy
20
Q
The philosophy of radical behaviourism
A
- Complex behaviours are just chains of simple associations
- Behaviourism can account for all behaviour and human psychology
- Reinforcement determines behaviour
- Including language
- Is free will an illusion
21
Q
Behaviourism
A
- A theoretical orientation based on the premise that scientific psychology should study observable behaviour
- Behavioural theorists view personality as a collection of response tendencies that are tied to various stimulus situations
- Response tendencies are shaped by classical and operant conditioning
22
Q
Behaviourists
A
- Pavlov – first observed classical conditioning in dogs
- Thorndike – law of effect – behaviour depends on consequence
- Watson – father of behaviourism – conditioning in humans
- Skinner – operant conditioning – shaping behaviour
23
Q
Problems for behaviourism
A
- Behaviourists wanted to remove mind, consciousness, purpose and cognition from psychology
- Behaviour often does show purpose
- Evolutionary constraints on what is learnt
- Much of human experience is unobservable
- It cannot explain a natural language
24
Q
Language – problem for behaviourism
A
- Noam Chomsky
- Language is infinitely creative and flexible – it is not due to behaviourism
- We learn rules for language, not associations
- Children has an innate capacity to learn and produce speech
- Language acquisition device
- Infants in every culture follow a patterned sequence of language development
- Cooing
- Babble – 9 months
- First word – first birthday
- Meaningful words – four years old
- After producing first words, infants soon combine them into two-work sentences
- Linguistic skills develop rapidly – age 3 – 3,000 words vocabulary
25
Q
Cognitive psychology
A
- Behaviourism suggests all behaviour can be explained by S-R relations
- But behaviour is goal-directed – not just reflexive
- Complex processes may intervene between stimulus and response
- Cognitive psychology infers central mental processes from observable behaviour
26
Q
The cognitive revolution
A
- New approach
- Developed in late 50s and early 60s
- Directly tied to the development of the computer
- Researchers seized on the computer as a model for the way in which human mental activity takes place
- The computer was a tool that allowed researchers to specify the internal mechanisms that produce behaviour
- BINAC – the binary automatic computer – 1949
27
Q
Information processing
A
- The cognitive revolution made it seem possible that psychologists could study internal mental life objectively
- Storage systems, operations, rules, mental images, memory representations
- These cannot be observed directly, but information processing models could be made of them
28
Q
1956 – information processing
A
- Newell and Simon
- Began development of artificial intelligence
- Studies about thinking
- Notions of cognitive strategies
- Magic 7 plus or minus 2
- Signal detection theory applied to perception
29
Q
1956 – moment of conception
A
- Interdisciplinary approach
- AI
- Maths
- Computer science
- Language
- Neuropsychology
30
Q
Cognition
A
- Way in which information is processed and manipulated in remember, thinking and knowing
31
Q
Cognitive psychology definition
A
- Approaches seeking to explain observable behaviour by investigating mental processes and structures that cannot be directly observed
32
Q
Beginning of cognitive psychology
A
- George Miller and Jerome Bruner – 1950-60s
- Developed Center for Cognitive Studies in Harvard
- Looked at language, memory and perception
- George Miller – magic number 7 plus or minus 2
33
Q
Chunking
A
- George Miller
- Many uses of chunking
- Breaking larger things down into memorable chunks
34
Q
Knowing is a process, not a product
A
- Bruner
- An all-out effort to establish meaning as the central concept of psychology
- It was not a revolution against behaviourism with the aim of transforming behaviourism into a better way of pursuing psychology by adding a little mentalism to it
- Its aim was to discover and to describe formally the meanings that human beings create out of their encounters with the world
- And then to propose hypotheses about what meaning-making processes were implicated
35
Q
Steven Pinker – five ideas that made the cognitive revolution
A
- The mental world can be grounded in the physical world by the concepts of information, computation and feedback
- The mind is not a blank slate
- An infinite range of behaviour can be generated by finite combinatorial programs in the mind
- Universal mental mechanisms can underlie superficial variation across cultures
- The mind is a complex system composed of many interacting parts
36
Q
Ideas of the cognitive revolution
A
- Information processing – inputs and outputs, computation
- Put a bunch of these together and you get a brain
- Mind is brain
- Mind is real, but it is mechanistic
37
Q
Implications of the cognitive revolution
A
- Can we study consciousness
- Implications for AI
38
Q
The study of consciousness
A
- Consciousness is enigmatic
- Primarily because of qualia
- Qualia – the subjective feel of things
- Without qualia – there would be no mind-body problem
- Nagel – whats it like to be a bat
- Chalmers – subjectivity is the hard problem
39
Q
The illusion of conscious will
A
- D Wegner
- Feeling of conscious will is actually a retrospective construction
- Feel will if we think about an action before
- But this feeling is not necessarily connected
- 3 features predict
- Priority, consistency, exclusivity
40
Q
The computer analogy
A
- Human – input – brain, mind, cognition – output
- Cognition – memory, problem solving, reasoning, consciousness
- Computers – input – hardware and software – output
41
Q
Artificial intelligence
A
- Computer metaphor
- Storage capacity = memory
- Programming codes = language
- Do computer programs function same as human mind
- They both:
- Receive and process large amounts of information
- Store information
- Retrieve information
42
Q
Alan Turing 1912-1954
A
- Considered by some as the father of computer science
- Played a major role in the development of AI
- Turing machine – stores information in memory and has the process to operate on that information
43
Q
The Turing test
A
- Test a machine’s capability to demonstrate intelligence
- Computer may be able to follow instructions/ simulate intelligence
- But is this a test for real intelligence?
44
Q
Is AI dangerous?
A
- Twitter bots sharing fake news
- Racist facial recognition
- Moral decisions made by self-driving cars
45
Q
The two paradigm shifts
A
- Both behaviourism and the cognitive revolution were paradigm shifts
- They reacted or responses to previous zeitgeist
- Behaviourism – all nurture, not nature – no point in conjecture of the mind
- Cognitive – mind as information processing
