Week 1 Flashcards

Question

Statistical contributions

Answer 1

- Standard deviation - Regression to the mean - Devised persons correlation coefficient

Answer 2

- Galton was a cousin of Charles Darwin - Read and admired Darwin’s origin of the species - Published Hereditary Genius - Individual differences in intelligence must be innate

Answer 3

- Classified families as eminent or not - Closer the kinship, the greater likelihood of eminence (gene sharing) - First attempt to account for heritability of psychological characteristics - Closer the relative, the more likely for shared environment - 31% of fathers were eminent - 27% of brothers were eminent - 48% of sons - 5-8% of grandfathers, grandsons, uncles and nephews

Answer 4

- Galton believed that, because horses can be bred with certain characteristics - So, could humans - “Produce a highly gifted race of men during several consecutive generations” - Eugenics – improving the human race by selective breeding - Set up anthropometric lab - Eugenics generally abandoned after early 20th century

Answer 5

- Alfred Binet – french doctor - 1905 – joined a government commission to identify school children with mental handicap - Worked with Theodore Simon to develop tests - Wanted to create a fair system of testing intelligence, not based on previous education experience - Used large banks of tests, including word associations, drawing and digit span - Realised that age needed to be considered

Answer 6

- Binet and Simon constructed first usable test of intelligence – 1905 - Comprised of 30 separate items with increasing difficulty

Answer 7

- German psychologist William Stern introduced intelligence quotient in 1912 - Mental age divided by chronological age times by 100

Answer 8

- Mental testing ad IQ is still in common use - Tests often updated every few years - Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children - Galton’s and Binet’s ideas very influential and have had major impact on modern psychology

Answer 9

- Problem of subjectivity - Study things that are objective - Perception, sensation, physical components

Answer 10

- Found nerve fibres passing from one side to the other of the brain (commissures) - Comparative anatomist – compared brains - The larger the brain, the more advanced the mental functions - Mostly accurate except in adult human population - A mixture of anatomical research and wind speculation - Put the brain centre stage – brain an important higher function

Answer 11

- Gall believed that certain faculties were based in specific parts of the brain - Bumps and indentations on the surface of the skull reflect the size of phrenological organs in the brain - Ultimately discredited by the initial ideas were based on empirical observations

Answer 12

- How do we measure the mind scientifically - Physics was the natural model for early psychology - Psychophysics – the objective investigation of subjective experience - Interested in sensation and perception

Answer 13

- Pioneered methods for measuring the sensitivity of the senses - Especially looked at thresholds - Conscious sensations of stimuli may not reflect reality - One way of constraining the problem of subjectivity is to measure thresholds

Answer 14

- Smallest quantities that give any sensation at all - Level of stimulus intensity at which stimulus can no longer be detected

Answer 15

- Are the smallest quantitative change that is noticeable - Minimum difference between two items to be able to tell them apart - Also known as Just noticeable differences - The Weber-Fechner Law states they are a constant proportion of the absolute intensity - It was hopes that psychophysics would steadily discover all such laws

Answer 16

- Only notice a change when the magnitude of the change is bigger than a critical fraction

Answer 17

- One of the greatest 19th century physiologists - Adopted a doctrine of mechanism - Opposed to vitalism

Answer 18

- Initially used frogs legs - Stimulating the nerve in the leg would cause the foot to twitch - Stimulated different distances from the foot and measured time taken for foot to twitch - Calculated the neural conduction = 25 meters per second

Answer 19

- Groundbreaking work on colour perception - Noted only three colour receptor cones - But can see many different hues - Hues arise from a mix of cones excited to different degrees

Answer 20

- Realised that image on the retina may not accurately reflect the external world - Eg blind spot - Sometimes the brain’s perceptions contradict the raw sensations - Visual illusions - Derive the most probable explanation (unconscious interference) - Based on prior visual learning experience

Answer 21

- Psychophysics revealed a lot about senses - But not about how sensated become perception - Gestalt psychology – a whole is more than just its parts - Principles – emergence, reification, multistablity, invariance

Answer 22

- Considered the founder of experimental psychology - Set up first experimental psychology lab in Leipzig Germany - Supervised 186 PhDs including Titchener, William James, Cattell

Answer 23

- 10 volume work on cultural psychology - Religion, language, myths, history, art, laws, customs - Not only shaped by sensation / perception but by culture - Very interested in language – verbal communication of idea one wants to say

Answer 24

- consciousness is inner experience - every living thing has this experience - every living being must have always had this inner experience - the beginnings of mental life date from the beginnings of time - so psychology must begin with self-observation - introspection - combines self-observation with experimentation - this yields quantitative data bout consciousness - psychology is the scientific study of the mental life

Answer 25

- Wondered whether complex mental experience could be broken down into simple processes – building blocks - Influenced by physicists and chemists breaking down molecules into atoms - Systematic introspection

Answer 26

- There is external observation and internal observation – inside own mind - Wundt described psychology as the science of conscious experience - Therefore the best method is to observe the conscious experience - However, only the person having the experience can observe it - Thus he used introspection - Had explicit rules for how to use introspection - Must be possible to systematically manipulate the experimental conditions

Answer 27

- Could the taste of apple pie - Be broken down into elements - Hot, sweet

Answer 28

- Observation – observer must pay close attention to the stimulus – used observers trained in introspection - Experimental control – experiment creates external conditions that are stables across time and participants - Observer must report the elements of consciousness

Answer 29

- Wundt noticed that introspective reports were unverifiable - Memory can often play tricks with recollection of psychological states - As a result, higher mental processes will be too complex to study

Answer 30

- Participants may not agree on their introspection - Wundt acknowledges this problem but thought that further training could help - Introspection could also be classified as retrospection – depending on the time between the stimulus and report - Examining an experience in an introspective manner may alter it (anger) - Imageless thoughts - Cannot report on their introspections – the solution just appears - Implies that many psychological processes are not available for introspective access

Answer 31

- First to teach psychology course – Harvard 1875 - The stream of consciousness - Consciousness is not a thing but a process - Did not believe in breaking down experiences - Pragmatism – true beliefs are those the believers find useful - Functionalism

Answer 32

- The whole is greater than the sum of its parts

Answer 33

- The study of conscious experiences by introspection

Answer 34

- The usefulness of beliefs

Answer 35

- Consciousness is a stream

Week 1 Flashcards

(59 cards)