Week 6 Flashcards
List some examples of how philosophers have taken an interest in human cognition through the ages?
- Edwin Smith’s papyrus
- Aristotle - heart seat of soul
- Plato - soul split into three - higher reasoning (brain), sensation (heart), and appetite (liver)
- Ancient Egypt - brains taken out before mummification
- Galen
- Phrenology
- Renaissance
Why did Aristotle view the heart as the seat of the soul?
- Heart is warm, brain is cooling mechanism
- Heart pumps blood
- Heart source of blood
- Heart essential for life
- Heart sensitive to pain
- Heart develops first and last to stop working
- All animals have a heart
List the five discoveries of the 19th century that preceded the cognitive revolution
- Cerebrospinal axis
- Localisation of brain function
- Discovery of the nerve cell
- Reflexes
- Communication between neurons
What influenced the rise of neuropsychology?
- Soldiers who had prosopagnosia
- Psychologists took greater interest than physicians
- Neuropsychologia publication
Two problems within the field of neuropsychology
- Correlations between brain function and physical function are difficult to draw. Damage usually never specific to one single region.
- Implications of physical neurological damage hard to conclude
Describe the Capgras delusion from a Freudian psychoanalytic view, and give a limitation
Represents family tensions or negative affect with family members arising from sexual tension with father. However, not everyone with the delusion had family issues.
Describe the Capgras delusion from a cognitive neuropsychological standpoint
Disconnection between temporal cortex (vision of faces) and limbic system (emotions).
How has Piaget contributed to psych as a science?
- Four stages of cognitive development (genetic epistemology)
How has Vygotsky contributed to psych?
Development/learning is a combination of subject, object and tools that lead to successful learning outcomes. Development is inherently social and is a transformative collaboration.
How is the genetic epistemology relevant to cognitive psych?
- Based on cognitive structures
- Cognitive structures matured over time through experience, which is why children answer questions differently to adults
What are the alternative explanations for the rise of cognitive science
- has been there all along, just not as prevalent
- did not try to replace behaviourism, wanted to add to it
- rise was progressive, not radical
- cog science focused on previous theoretical assumptions
What are the similarities between Piaget and Vygotsky’s approaches?
- development is transactional
- development is transformative
- development is innate
- knowledge is dynamic
What was the main difference between Vygotsky and Piaget’s approaches?
Vygotsky said that development and learning was inherently social; Piaget said it was autonomous and individual. Constructions cannot be situated outside of historical, cultural and power dynamics in society
List in order the aspects of a Kuhnian paradigm shift
- Prescience
- Normal science
- Model drift
- Model crisis
- Model revolution
- Paradigm shift
What was Galen’s hypothesis?
After experimenting on animals, he demonstrated that the brain communicated with other organs, but this was distributed through spirits that manifest through ventricles
What did Broca find?
Localisation of speech in left frontal lobe
What did Wernicke find?
Localisation of language understanding in the rear part of left hemisphere
What did Santiago Ramon y Cajal do?
Established the neuron doctrine, positing that the brain consists of individual neurons that communicate
What did Charles Scott Sherrington do?
Described mechanisms of the spinal reflex
What is the capgras delusion?
The persistent perception that a close family member has been replaced by an identical double
What were Kuhn’s ideas about paradigm shifts?
- knowledge never disappears, even if we don’t pay attention
- a dominant paradigm doesn’t mean other’s vanish, it’s just that they are latent
What happens in a model crisis?
When current models can’t explain certain phenomena, others hold on to it thinking we’ll be able to explain it with the tools we have
What are the three stages of psychological science?
- pre psychology
- Psychology (Current)
- revolutionary
Describe the pre psychology stage
- philosophy is psychology
- no unifying theory
- many competing view points
