PSYC 101 > Chapter 1 > Flashcards

Chapter 1 Flashcards

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1
Q

What is psychology

A

Scientific study of mind and behavior
Mind: Private events in someone’s head we can’t see
Behavior: Public events through actions that can be observed by others

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2
Q

What did Rene Descartes believe about the body and mind?

A

The body was a physical container for the nonphysical mind.

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3
Q

What structure did Rene Descartes call the “seat of the soul”?

A

The pineal gland — the point of connection between mind and body.

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4
Q

Dualism

A

The mind and the body are two completely different things (dualism; two parts)

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5
Q

What did Gilbert Ryle believe in

A

The ghost (the mind) in the machine (the body)

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6
Q

What did Thomas Hobbes believe in

A

argued that the mind and body aren’t fundamentally different things at all. Rather, the mind is what the brain does.

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7
Q

Materialism

A

the view that all mental phenomena are due to physical phenomena. (All thoughts/feelings/memories are explained by the physical processes of the brain and body)

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8
Q

Realism

A

the view that our perceptions of the physical world are a faithful copy of information from the world that enters our brains through our sensory apparatus

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9
Q

What did John Locke believe in

A

believed that a newborn baby is a tabula rasa, or “blank slate” upon which experience writes its story

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10
Q

What did Immanuel Kant disagree with in Locke’s theory?

A

He thought Locke’s idea that the mind is a blank slate was too simple and wrong.

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11
Q

How did Kant describe human perception?

A

Less like a photograph (recording reality) and more like a painting (interpreting reality).

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12
Q

Idealism

A

our perceptions of the physical world are our brain’s best interpretation of the information that enters through our sensory apparatus
- Our brain is painting a picture of the information based on our own worldly experiences

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12
Q

What did Kant argue about knowledge?

A

Humans are born with some basic knowledge of the world that helps them acquire further knowledge.

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13
Q

Empiricism

A

the view that ALL knowledge is acquired through experience

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14
Q

Navitism

A

the view that some knowledge is innate rather than acquired (knowledge is built from birth)

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15
Q

Structuralism

A

an approach to psychology that attempted to isolate and analyze the mind’s basic elements.

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16
Q

How could structuralism elements be discovered

A

systematic self-observation (introspection) the analysis of subjective experience by trained observers

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17
Q

What did Titchener believe in

A

analyzing the reports from many trained observers who had been exposed to many stimuli, he would eventually discover the basic building blocks of subjective experience.

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18
Q

What is the problem with structuralism

A

our inner experience is private. No one else can directly access it. Introspection wasn’t trustworthy, the method itself was weak.

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18
Q

What did Hermann Von Helmholtz study

A

Human reaction time
- Found out that when you touch your thighs it’s faster than vs. when you touch your toes b/c the nerves on your thighs are closer to your brain than your toes, transmitting a signal quicker (Shorter distance to travel)

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19
Q

Who is Psychology’s “first”

A

Wilhelm Wundt Taught the world’s first psychology course in experimental psychology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany

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20
Q

What did Wundt study

A

Study of conciousness

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21
Q

What is functionalism

A

an approach to psychology that emphasized the adaptive significance of mental processes

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22
Q

adaptive significance

A

the reason a trait or behavior exists in terms of survival and reproduction.

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23
What does William James believe in
reasoned that if our physical characteristics had evolved because they were adaptive, then the same should be true of our psychological characteristics.
24
Natural Selection
Process by which specific attributes that promote an organism’s survival and reproduction become more prevalent in the population over time. - The attributes that promote survival and reproduction are the ones that are passed along to the next generation.
25
Hysteria
- a loss of function that has no obvious physical origin - Symptoms disappeared when patients were hypnotized.
26
What did Freud suspect about his patients’ painful childhood experiences?
That they repressed them because they were too painful to remember.
27
What did Freud discover about the mind?
The unconscious — a part of the mind containing information people are not aware of.
28
What did Freud believe caused his patients’ hysterical symptoms?
Repressed memories from the unconscious.
29
Psychoanalytic theory
general theory that emphasizes the influence of the unconscious on feelings, thoughts, and behaviours.
30
What did Freud implement
Freud suggests we have to understand people’s traumas and inner thoughts to know why they do the things they do
31
Psychoanalysis
a therapy that aims to give people insight into the contents of their unconscious minds.
32
How did Freud practice psychoanalysis in sessions?
The patient sat while Freud sat behind them, asking about dreams or encouraging free association.
33
What is free association in Freud’s psychoanalysis?
Patients talk about anything that comes to mind or respond quickly to a prompt (e.g., “mother”).
34
Criticism of psychoanalytic theory
Lack of empirical evidence, unfalsifiable, highly subjective interpretations, etc. Received little attention from experimental psychologists
34
Why did Freud use dreams and free associations?
He believed they revealed the unconscious mind, which allowed him to identify hidden issues and heal patients.
35
Behaviourism
an approach to psychology that restricts scientific inquiry to observable behaviour.
36
What did Pavlov originally study, and what did he observe?
studied digestion in dogs, and he knew that dogs naturally start salivating when they are presented with food (behaviourism)
37
How did Pavlov train dogs to salivate to a tone?
He paired a tone with food. After several pairings, the dogs salivated when hearing the tone alone.
38
In Pavlov’s experiment, what was the stimulus and what was the response?
The tone = stimulus; salivation = response.
39
What is classical conditioning?
Learning through the association of a stimulus with a response (stimulus–response learning).
40
How did Watson expand on Pavlov’s findings?
He argued that stimulus and response could be the building blocks of behaviourism, focusing psychology on observable relationships.
41
By the 1930s, what approach dominated experimental psychology?
Behaviourism.
42
Stimulus
Object or event that elicits a response from an organism.
43
Response
Action or physiological change elicited by a stimulus.
44
Who was Burrhus Frederick Skinner?
A psychologist who studied how animals act on their environments to obtain rewards, leading to his theory of reinforcement.
45
What is a “Skinner Box”?
A cage with a lever that delivers food when pressed by a rat, plus a cumulative recorder that tracks lever-press frequency.
46
What usually happened when Skinner first put a rat in the box?
The rat explored until it accidentally pressed the lever, which released food.
47
What is reinforcement?
The idea that any behaviour rewarded will be repeated, while behaviour not rewarded will fade.
48
What did Skinner’s rats learn in the experiment?
They learned to operate on their environment—pressing the lever—to produce food.
49
How did reinforcement affect the rats’ behaviour?
When pressing the lever produced food (reinforcement), the rats repeated the behaviour; when it didn’t, they stopped.
50
Who was Max Wertheimer and what did he study?
A psychologist interested in how people perceive motion, leading to his work on illusory motion.
51
What happened when participants saw two lights flash with a long time gap?
They correctly reported the lights flashed in sequence.
52
What happened when the lights flashed about 1/5th of a second apart?
Participants reported seeing one light moving back and forth (illusory motion).
53
What is illusory motion?
The perception of movement when none exists, based on the mind’s assumptions about how the world works.
54
Why did participants in Wertheimer’s experiment perceive different things even with the same stimuli?
Because perception depends on mental assumptions and interpretations, not just raw sensory input.
55
What is Gestalt psychology?
An approach to psychology that emphasizes how the mind creates perceptual experience.
56
What does Gestalt psychology suggest about perception?
We perceive the whole rather than just the sum of the parts.
56
Give an example of Gestalt perception.
When we see an image of a shape, we see it as a whole—including meaning drawn from personal experience.
57
What are illusions in Gestalt psychology?
Errors of perception, memory, or judgment where subjective experience differs from objective reality.
58
How do illusions connect to Gestalt ideas?
They show how the mind actively interprets stimuli, sometimes creating perceptions (like illusory motion) that don’t match physical reality.
59
Who was Sir Frederic Bartlett and what did he study?
A psychologist who studied why people remember things incorrectly, focusing on memory errors over time.
60
What did Bartlett find when participants recalled stories after delays?
They often remembered what they expected rather than what they actually read, and errors increased over time.
61
What was Bartlett’s famous study called?
The “War of the Ghosts” study.
62
Why was the story “War of the Ghosts” difficult for British participants?
It described hunting seals, which was unfamiliar to them.
63
How did participants often recall “hunting seals”?
They changed it to “fishing,” since that fit their expectations.
64
What did Bartlett argue about memory?
Memory is not a recording device; instead, it is reconstructed using knowledge, expectations, and cultural schemas.
65
What does Bartlett’s study show about memory?
Memory is shaped by how we think the world typically works.
66
Who is Jean Piaget
trying to understand the minds of children, which he often did by examining the mistakes they made. Proposed different stages of cognitive development
67
What are schemas?
Mental frameworks or categories used to organize knowledge and experiences.
68
What is equilibration?
The process of balancing new information with existing knowledge.
69
What is assimilation?
Incorporating new experiences into existing schemas.
70
What is accommodation?
Changing schemas to fit new information.
71
What is developmental psychology?
The study of how psychological phenomena change over the life span.
72
What is social psychology?
The study of the causes and consequences of sociality.
73
Who was Lev Vygotsky and what did he emphasize?
A psychologist who highlighted the role of social interaction in cognitive development and learning.
74
Who was Kurt Lewin?
A Jewish psychologist who fled Germany and studied leadership, communication, attitude change, and racial prejudice.
75
What was Lewin more interested in studying compared to others like Wertheimer?
How people treated each other rather than how they perceived moving lights.
76
According to Lewin, what determines behavior?
Behavior depends on how a person interprets or understands a situation, not just the raw environment or stimulus.
77
Give an example of Lewin’s key idea.
Two people in the same environment might act differently because they interpret it differently.
78
What was Lewin’s key contribution to psychology?
Showing that it’s not the raw stimulus that matters (as behaviorists thought), but the meaning we assign to it.
79
Who was Solomon Asch and what did he study?
A psychologist who studied how the order of information affects impression formation.
80
What was Asch’s experiment with trait lists?
He gave participants the same list of traits (envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious, intelligent) but in different orders—bad-to-good vs. good-to-bad.
81
What did Asch find in his trait list study?
Participants liked the man more when they heard his good traits first.
82
What is the primacy effect?
The tendency for the first traits or information we learn to shape how we interpret later information.
83
Why does the primacy effect occur?
Early words create a theory or impression that the mind then uses to interpret later words.
84
What are examples of “mentalistic” phenomena?
Beliefs, stereotypes, prejudices, identities, and intentions.
85
How did behaviourism treat “mentalistic” phenomena?
They were banished or ignored, since behaviourism focused only on observable behaviour.
86
How did social psychology treat “mentalistic” phenomena?
They became the heart and soul of social psychology, central to understanding human behaviour.
87
What did Noam Chomsky argue against behaviourism?
That behaviourist principles could not explain how humans learn language.
87
What evidence did Chomsky use against behaviourism?
Children often create novel sentences they have never heard before, which reinforcement alone cannot explain.
88
What question did Chomsky raise about children’s language use?
How do children produce sentences they’ve never heard before?
89
What was Chomsky’s answer to how children acquire language?
Universal Grammar—an innate ability to acquire language.
90
What is cognitive psychology?
The study of human information-processing.
91
Which early fields influenced cognitive psychology?
Cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and computer science (e.g., teaching computers to play chess).
92
How is a computer’s behaviour compared to a rat’s in psychology?
Both can produce a response to a stimulus, but a computer’s internal processes are observable and not mysterious.
93
What do computers demonstrate about cognition?
Circuits (not ghosts) allow computers to learn, reason, and remember in ways similar to thinking.
94
In the computer metaphor, what is the relationship between the brain and the mind?
The brain is the hardware, and the mind is the software.
95
What does the hardware/software metaphor imply about the mind?
That thinking is not spooky or unmeasurable, but can be studied like a program.
96
What is evolutionary psychology?
The study of how the human mind has been shaped by natural selection.
97
How did behaviourism and cognitive psychology differ in studying the mind?
Behaviourism set the mind aside, while cognitive psychology brought it back.
98
What did John Garcia propose about learning?
Organisms are “biologically prepared” to learn some associations more easily than others.
99
What is an example of biological predispositions in learning?
Rats easily learn to associate nausea with food because, in nature, spoiled food often causes illness.
100
Why did Garcia’s lab rats associate food with nausea despite never eating spoiled food?
Their ancestors had evolved this predisposition, shaping their learning abilities.
100
What is the core idea of neuroscience?
The mind is what the brain does.
101
How have psychologists studied the brain to learn about the mind?
By examining brains damaged naturally and by creating controlled damage to study behavioural effects.
102
What did Karl Lashley’s rat maze experiments show?
Damaging different parts of the cortex had similar effects, suggesting learning is not localized to one brain area.
103
What is cognitive neuroscience?
The study of the relationship between the brain and the mind, especially in humans.
104
What is behavioural neuroscience?
The study of the relationship between the brain and behaviour, especially in nonhuman animals.
105
What is cultural psychology?
The study of how culture (values, traditions, and beliefs of a group) influences mental life.
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