Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
chapter 1 until 8 + 10
written by
mlvkusters
On Stuvia you will find the most extensive lecture summaries written by your fellow students. Avoid
resits and get better grades with material written specifically for your studies.
www.stuvia.com
Psychology’s roots
Two ‘schools of thoughts’ of psychologists;
- Structualists = psychologists who tried to analyse the mind by breaking it
down into basic components.
- Functionalists = who focused on how mental abilities allow people to
adapt to their environments.
1
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
Sigmund Freud:
Unconscious = the part of the mind that operates outside conscious
awareness but influences conscious thoughts, feelings and actions.
Psychoanalytic theory = an approach that emphasizes the importance of
unconscious mental processes in shaping feelings, thoughts and
behaviours.
Psychoanalysis = therapeutic approach that focuses on bringing
unconscious material into conscious awareness to better understand
psychological disorders.
2
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
3
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
4
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
5
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
6
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
7
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
X Y (X causes Y)
Y X (Y causes X)
Z X and Y (Z causes X and Y but X and Y may not be causally related.
Third-variable correlation = two variables are correlated only because
each is causally related to a third variable.
Matched samples = a technique whereby the participants in two samples
are identical in terms of a third variable.
Matched pairs = a technique whereby each participant in one sample is
identical to one other participant in another sample in terms of a third
variable.
We can’t dismiss all third variables. If we remove one, there might occur a
new one.
Third-variable problem = the fact that a causal relationship between two
variables cannot be inferred from the natural correlation between them
because of the ever-present possibility of third-variable correlation.
Experiment = a technique for establishing the causal relationship between
variables.
Manipulation = systematically alter a variable in order to determine its
causal relationship to an outcome of interest.
When you manipulate the variable instead of measuring the other
variable, you never have to wonder if a third variable might have caused
it. Because we were the cause of the changes in the second variable.
Three critical steps in doing an experiment;
1. Perform manipulation independent variable = the variable that
is manipulated in an experiment. There are two groups of
participants. The experimental group = the group of people who
are exposed to an experimental condition under investigation
8
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
9
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
10
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
11
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
12
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
Memories, moods, motives intertwine with what you are seeing, hearing
and smelling at any given time. This internal ‘noise’ competes with your
ability to detect a stimulus with perfect attention. As a consequence of
noise, you may not perceive everything that you sense, and you may
perceive things that you don’t sense.
A spontaneous action potential when a neuron fires while there was no
stimulus.
Signal detection theory (SDT) = assumes that the response to a stimulus
depends on a person’s sensitivity to the stimulus in the presence of noise
and on a person’s response criterion.
In an SDT experiment you can get 4 possible outcomes.
o Hit when a stimulus was shown and the participant responded
o Miss when a stimulus was shown and the participant didn’t
respond.
o False alarm when there was no stimulus shown but the participant
responded.
o Correct rejection when there was no stimulus shown and the
participant didn’t respond.
d’ = d-prime = a statistic that gives a relatively pure measure of the
observer’s sensitivity or ability to detect signals.
Signal detection theory proposes a way to measure perceptual sensitivity
=how effectively the perceptual system represents sensory events. This is
separate from the observer’s decision-making theory.
13
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
Vision
Visual acuity = the ability to see fine detail.
Light = waves
o Wavelength determines the hue (colour)
o Amplitude/intensity brightness of light
o Purity number of wavelengths that make up the light, we perceive
this as saturation.
14
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
Mach bands and black and white tv actually white and green tv. But the
green was so dark compared to the white that it looked black.
15
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
Optic chiasm = place where the optic nerves cross. If you would have a
tumour here, you would see in tunnel vision.
10 s
white
ite red White
10 20 8
A great deal of visual processing takes place within the retina; encoding of
simple features such as spots of light, edges and colour. More complex
aspects of vision enlist in the brain.
Thalamus receives inputs from all the senses except for smell.
The first relay station in the thalamus is the lateral geniculate nucleus
(LGN). Most neurons from the LGN project to V1.
Area V1 is comprised in 6 layers. The information from the LGN enters in
layer 4.
16
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
Area V1 = the initial processing region of the primary visual cortex. This
area is located in the occipital lobe.
Binding problem = how features are linked together so that we see unified
objects in our visual world.
Illusory conjunction = a perceptual mistake where features from multiple
objects are incorrectly combined.
Feature integration theory = a theory that proposes that attention binds
individual features together to comprise a composite stimulus. (saying
that illusory conjunctions easily occur when the participant has difficulty
paying attention to the features that need to be glued together.)
The binding process makes use of feature information processed by
structures within the ventral stream (recognition pathway) and within the
dorsal stream (locating pathway).
Parietal activity is related to attentional processes needed for binding,
synaesthetic bindings such as seeing a particular digit in a particular
colour depend on attention.
How does the visual system get from an array of light hitting your eye to
the accurate perception of an object?
o Modular view; that specialized brain areas, or modules, detect and
represent faces or houses or even body parts. modularization =
the process of relatively enclosed function (e.g. some perceptual
categories such as faces may have their own region in the brain
where they’re recognized)
o Distributed representation; there is a specific part of the brain
dedicated to recognizing faces, but there are more parts of the
brain involved.
Perceptual constancy = even as aspects of sensory signals change,
perception remains consistent.
Gestalt perceptual grouping rules (Gestalt psychology = we often perceive
the whole rather than the sum of its parts;
How features and regions of things fit together;
17
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
18
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
Binocular disparity = the difference in the retinal images of the two eyes
that provides information about depth.
Motion parallax = a depth cue based on the movement of the head over
time. also done by comparing retinal images.
Optic flow = the pattern of motion that accompanies an observer’s
forward movement through a scene.
Illusions = errors of perception
Audition
Sense of hearing is all about sound waves.
Pure tone = a simple sound wave that first increases air pressure and then
creates a relative vacuum.
Frequency or wavelength in Hz depends on how often the peak in air
pressure passes the ear.
Changes in the physical frequency are perceived as a change in pitch =
how high or low a sound is.
Amplitude of a sound wave refers to its height, relative to the threshold of
human hearing. Amplitude corresponds to loudness = a sound’s intensity.
Differences in complexity mix of frequencies, correspond to timbre = a
listener’s experience of sound quality or resonance.
The ear is built up of three parts;
o Outer ear (pinna + eardrum) collects sound waves.
o Middle ear (ossicles; hammer, anvil, stirrup) transmits the
vibrations to the inner ear.
o Inner ear (cochlea) vibrations are transduced into neural impulses.
Cochlea = a fluid-filled tube that is the organ of auditory
transduction.
Basilar membrane = a structure in the inner ear that moves
up and down when vibrations from the ossicles reach the
cochlear fluid.
Hair cells = specialized auditory receptor neurons embedded
in the basilar membrane.
From the inner ear, action potentials in the auditory nerve travel to the
thalamus and then to the opposite hemisphere of the cerebral cortex
area A1 = a portion of the temporal lobe that contains the primary
auditory cortex.
Place code = the cochlea encodes different frequencies at different
locations along the basilar membrane. works best for higher frequencies
Low frequency the wide, floppy tip (apex) of the basilar membrane
moves.
High frequency the narrow stiff end (base) of the membrane moves the
most.
19
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
Temporal code = the cochlea registers low frequencies via the firing rate
of action potentials entering the auditory nerve handles low frequencies.
Visual orienting = a behavioural response to move the eyes towards a
target.
Interaural intensity difference (IID) = to localize high frequency tones. A
tone coming from the left sounds louder in the left ear than in the right
ear.
Interaural time difference (ITD) = to localize low frequency tones. A tone
coming from the left is detected earlier in the left ear than in the right ear.
For every IID and ITD combination there is a cone of confusion.
Ventriloquism effect = when a sound is synchronized with a visual event
from a different location.
Pain
pain receptors free nerve endings
o A-delta fibres transmit the initial sharp pain right away
o C fibres transmit longer lasting, duller pain
Pain withdrawal reflex is coordinated by the spinal cord. But neural signals
for pain travel to two distinct areas in the brain and evoke two distinct
psychological experiences
o One pathway sends signals to the somatosensory cortex, identifying
where the pain is occurring and what sort of pain it is (sharp,
burning, dull)
o Second pathway sends signals to the motivational and emotional
centres of the brain, such as the thalamus, amygdala and frontal
lobe. This is the aspect of pain that is unpleasant.
Referred pain = the feeling of pain when sensory information from internal
and external areas converge on the same nerve cells in the spinal cord.
when an internal organ hurts, we feel it on the surface of the body
Gate-control theory = signals arriving from pain receptors in the body can
be stopped, or gated, by interneurons in the spinal cord via feedback from
two directions. pain can be gated by skin receptors, by rubbing affected
area. pain can also be gated from the brain by modulating the activity of
pain-transmission neurons.
The neural feedback comes from a region in the midbrain called the
periaqueductal grey (PAG)
When stimulated PAG can send inhibitory signals to supress pain or send
signals to increase pain sensation.
Gate-control theory shows that perception is two-way street;
20
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
Taste
Responsibility of taste is to identify things that are poisonous and lethal for
you.
The tongue is covered with papillae. In each papillae are hundreds of taste
buds = the organ of taste transduction.
Five main taste receptors
o Salt
o Sour
o Bitter
o Sweet
o Umami (=savoury)
CHAPTER 5: MEMORY
Memory = the ability to store and retrieve information over time.
21
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
22
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
Remembering
In order to remember, three processes must be executed successfully;
o Encoding = the process by which we transform what we perceive,
think or feel into an enduring memory.
o Storage = the process of maintaining information in memory over
time.
o Retrieval = the process of bringing to mind information that has
been previously encoded and stored.
People encode and reconstruct memories via schemas = mental models of
the world that contain knowledge that helps us to encode new information
into a meaningful context. ( Sir Frederic Barlett discovered this)
Based on Barlett’s findings we can say that memories are made by
combining information we already have in our brains with new information
that comes in through our senses.
Memories are constructed not recorded.
Three types of encoding processes;
o Elaborative encoding = the process of actively relating new
information to knowledge that is already in memory. we can easily
remember 20 experiences but not 20 random numbers because
most of the time we think of the meaning behind our experiences,
and so we elaborately encode them. elaborative encoding takes
mostly part in the left temporal lobe and the lower left part of the
frontal lobe.
o Visual imagery encoding = the process of storing new information
by converting it into mental pictures. method of loci = a memory
aid that associates information with mental images of locations.
This works because 1) by creating a visual image you relate
incoming information to knowledge already in memory. 2) you end
up with two ‘placeholders’ for the items; a visual one and a verbal
one, so you have more ways to remember.
o Organizational encoding = the act of categorizing information by
noticing the relationships between a series of items. Organizational
encoding is a type of mnemonic = a device for reorganizing
information into more meaningful patterns to remember. The
relationship between things – how they fit together and how they
differ – can help us remember.
23
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
24
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
There must be two kinds of memory because patients who suffer from
amnesia ‘learn’ how to make themselves a cup of tea in their new home
but can’t tell where to find the tea or a mug in their kitchen.
o Explicit memory = when people consciously or intentionally retrieve
past experiences.
o Implicit memory = when past experiences influence later behaviour
and performance, even though people are not trying to recollect
them and are not aware that they are remembering them.
Procedural memory = the gradual acquisition of skills as a
result of practice or ‘knowing’ e.g. remember how to ride a
bike. So, hippocampal structures are not necessarily needed
for explicit memory.
Priming = an enhanced ability to think of a stimulus, such as
a word or object, as a result of a recent exposure to the
stimulus.
Semantic memory = a network of associated facts and concepts that
make up our general knowledge of the world.
Episodic memory = the collection of past personal experiences that
occurred at a particular time and place.
Autobiographical memory = the personal record of significant events of
one’s life.
Flashbulb memories = detailed recollections of when and where we heard
about shocking events.
The hippocampus is not necessary for acquiring new semantic memories.
Forgetting
Transience = forgetting what occurs with the passage of time. This occurs
during the storing phase of memory, after an experience has been
encoded and before it is retrieved.
Memories don’t fade at a constant rate as time passes; most forgetting
happens soon after an event occurs, with increasingly less forgetting as
more time passes.
Serial position effect = the enhanced memory for events presented at the
beginning and at the end of a learning episode. It involves two separate
processes:
25
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
26
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
Metamemory
Metamemory (= the subjective awareness of one’s own memory), is how
we know that our memories are correct. This is the important difference
between remembering you turned off your iron and knowing that you did
so.
When you remember, you have a vivid recollection of encoding the
information and can access that information in consciousness.
When you know something, you do not necessarily remember how and
where you learned the information.
Feeling of knowing (FOK) = the subjective awareness of information that
cannot be retrieved from memory.
Strong FOK judgements (when people strongly feel they know) are related
to increasing amounts of partial information.
As partial information mounts up, individuals switch from initially knowing
to remembering.
Different memory processes are operating when remembering instead of
knowing.
Source monitoring = recall of when, where and how information was
acquired.
Memory misattributions = assigning a recollection or an idea to the wrong
source. can contribute to the formation of false memories.
Three basic types of source monitoring;
o Internal; distinguishing between events that an individual thought
about doing versus events they actually did. perceptual details
such as remembering seeing to switch of the light, are critical for
establishing the validity of the memory.
o External; distinguishing between two external sources contextual
information helps to decide the likely source of the memory.
o Reality; distinguishing between an actual event and an imagined
one. reality can usually be checked against corroborating
evidence, such as the presence of other witnesses.
Déjà vu experience = where you suddenly feel that you have been in a
situation before even though you can’t recall any details.
Déjà vécu = a confabulated (made up) memory where the individual is
certain that the new experience is old.
An explanation might be that the familiar associated recollections from
long-term memory are normally inhibited, but in these cases this inhibition
partly fails. You experience the ‘familiarity’ signal but not the associated
memory.
False memories = recollection of events that never happened.
False recognition = a feeling of familiarity about something that hasn’t
been encountered before.
Bias = the distorting influences of present knowledge, beliefs and feelings
on recollection of previous experiences.
Bias can influence memory in three ways;
o Consistency bias; altering the past to fit the present.
27
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
CHAPTER 6: LEARNING
Defining learning: experience that causes a permanent change
Learning = a relatively permanent change in the state of the learner due
to experience.
Habituation = a general process in which repeated or prolonged exposure
to a stimulus results in a gradual reduction in responding. simple form of
learning
28
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
29
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
Little Albert got upset from hearing a loud noise (US) and then was
presented a white rat (CS). Later Albert started to cry by only seeing a
white rat. Generalization also occurred. Albert started crying by seeing a
white rabbit, seal fur and Santa Claus’ mask.
Watsons goal:
o Show that relatively complex reactions could be conditioned using
Pavlovian techniques.
o Show that emotional responses such as fear and anxiety could be
produced by classical conditioning and don’t need to be the product
of deeper unconscious processes. Fears could be learned.
o Confirm that conditioning could be applied to humans as well as to
other animals.
Neural elements of classical conditioning;
o Amygdala is critical for emotional conditioning.
Cognitive elements of classical conditioning;
o Behaviourists viewed conditioning as something that happens to the
animal apart from what the organism thinks about the conditioning
situation. Zener provided evidence that show otherwise when
dogs heard the buzzer, they approached the food tray, expecting
the food. (some thinking after all?)
o Contingency = the organism has an expectation about how well the
CS signals the appearance of the US. dogs formed an expectation
that the buzzer was going to be followed by food, the expectation
started them to salivate.
o Blocking = when a stimulus (tone) has been paired with a shock to
produce a conditioned fear response, this experience blocks the
capacity to learn other association when the tone is present.
Evolutionary elements of classical conditioning.
o Adaptive value =
Psychologist Martin Seligman got sick after eating steak with sauce
Bearnaise and couldn’t eat it anymore. He found it disgusting. But this was
not classical conditioning because it didn’t follow all the Pavlovian rules. It
could be because of evolutionary factors; adaptive value.
To have adaptive value, the mechanism should have several properties;
o Rapid learning that occurs in perhaps one or two trials. if learning
process takes too long, animal could die from eating toxics.
o Conditioning should be able to take place over long intervals, e.g.
several hours. toxics often don’t cause illness immediately,
animals need to be able to associate illness with eaten foods after
several hours.
o Development of aversion to the smell or taste of the food. more
adaptive to reject food beforehand by its smell than when they ate
it.
o Learned aversions should occur more often with novel foods than
familiar ones.
o Biological preparedness = a propensity for learning particular kinds
of associations over others. so that some behaviours are relatively
easy to condition in some species but not others.
Conditioning works best with stimuli that are biologically relevant to the
organism.
30
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
31
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
32
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
Implicit learning
Implicit learning = learning that takes place largely independent of
awareness of the process and the products of information acquisition (e.g.
learning to speak when you’re really young) knowledge that sneaks in
‘under the wires’
Studying implicit learning
o Artificial grammar task letter strings, one grammatical the other
nongrammatical. Participants developed a vague sense of
correctness. (we can very easily see a grammar mistake in a
sentence and correct it, but we often don’t know what grammar
mistake it was.
o Serial reaction time task participants had to press the box that lit
up. There was a sort of pattern. The participants didn’t know the
goal of the research so were learning without awareness.
Differences between explicit and implicit learning;
o Implicit learning people differ little from each other
o Explicit learning people show large individual-to-individual
differences.
o Implicit learning unrelated to IQ
o Implicit learning changes little across the life span (age doesn’t
matter)
o Implicit learning extend well into old age and they decline more
slowly than explicit learning.
33
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
34
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
Speech act we try to get things done with language. Speech acts can fall
into five communication categories:
o Representative; asserting a fact or conveying a belief that a
statement is true – ‘I am a psychology student.’
o Directive; trying to get someone to do something, e.g. answering a
question – ‘are you a student too?’
o Commissive; an assertion of a future goal – ‘I want to graduate.’
o Expressive; revealing an internal psychological state – ‘I am not sure
that…’
o Declarative; announcing a new or previously unattended state of
affairs – ‘This is the first time that I told this.’
Success of conversations also depend on alignment = speakers share a
reciprocal arrangement to exchange information. Achieved by 4 automatic
mechanisms;
o Priming = to think of something because of a recent exposure to a
stimulus.
o Inference = speakers generate deeper conceptual understanding
based on what has been said.
o Routine expressions = unambiguous conventions that facilitate
language.
o Speech monitoring and repair = speakers interact to understand
what others are saying. They seek clarification.
35
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
Behaviourist explanations
o Children learn language through operant conditioning (so through,
reinforcement, punishment, shaping and extinction).
o The behavioural explanation is attractive because of its simplicity
but the theory cannot account for many fundamental characteristics
of language development;
Parents don’t spend much time teaching their children to
speak grammatically. Parents respond more to the truth
content than to the grammar.
Children generate more grammatical sentences then they
ever hear.
Children wouldn’t make overgeneralizations if they only
learned language through trial-and-error.
Nativists explanations;
o Nativist theory = language development is best explained as an
innate, biological capacity.
o Chomsky human brain has a language acquisition device (LAD) =
a collection of processes that facilitate language learning.
o Genetic dysphasia = a syndrome characterized by an inability to
learn the grammatical structure of language despite having
otherwise normal intelligence.
o Nativist theory of the LAD explains why new-born babies can make
contrasts between phonemes that occur in all languages. And why
deaf babies babble speech sounds. Furthermore, language can only
be acquired during the first period of life. once puberty is reached,
learning a language is extremely hard.
Interactionist explanations;
o Natitvists merely explain why language developes, not how.
o Interactionists address ‘language learning’ by the complete theory
of the processes by which the innate biological capacity for
language combines with environmental experiences.
o Language development also depends on social interaction. So,
adults speaking directly to the child.
Apes can’t speak a human language because their vocal tracts cannot
accommodate the sounds used in human languages.
Sign language had more success.
Washoe was the first ape that learned the signs. Her adopted infant
learned signs from her.
The ability to produce grammatically complex sentences appears to
depend on having particular neural circuitry. This circuitry seems to be
36
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
Unlike spoken language, reading and writing are skills that need to be
learned through education.
Lexicon = our mental dictionary
Graphemes = units of written language that correspond to phonemes.
‘have’ has an irregular grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence. It is not
pronounced the same as ‘rave’, ‘save’ and ‘wave’.
Reading requires a system that can cope with regular and irregular words.
Dual-route models = propose that there are essentially two pathways to
the lexicon.
o Irregular words; direct lexical route = one where the grapheme
maps directly onto the phoneme, based on the info stored in the
lexicon.
o Pronunciation is accessed via an indirect sublexical route = one that
does not involve the lexicon at all, but maps the grapheme directly
onto the pronunciation.
Dyslexia = a disorder involving difficulty with reading and writing.
o Surface dyslexia = unable to read irregular words (they’re impaired
in the direct lexical route).
o Phonological dyslexia = unable to read pronounceable non-words
(they can only use the direct lexical pathway and are impaired on
the indirect sublexical route).
o Deep dyslexia = readers cannot retrieve the meaning of words. In
this case the word is daughter but the person would say sister.
suggests that grapheme-to-phoneme mapping is only part of the
process.
Semantics = meaning of a word.
Semantic priming = the meaning of a word influences the processing of
other words that are conceptually related.
37
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
38
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
39
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
o List the differences between the current state and the goal state.
o Reduce the list of differences by;
Direct means procedure that solves the problem without
intermediate steps.
Generating a sub goal an intermediate step on the way to
solving the problem.
Finding a similar problem that has a known solution.
Analogical problem solving = solving a problem by finding a similar
problem with a known solution and applying that solution to the current
problem.
Creative and insightful solutions often rely on restructuring a problem so
that it turns into a problem you already know how to solve.
Findings suggest that even insightful problem solving is an incremental
process one that occurs outside conscious awareness.
Different parts in the brain are active when solving problems by insight
than by analysis. The front part of the right temporal lobe is more active
for insight solutions than other parts of the brain.
Moments before a problem was solved with insight solutions, there was
increased activity in a part deep in the frontal lobes, known as anterior
cingulate. Researchers suggested that this increased activity allowed
participants to attend to and detect associations that were only weakly
activated and that facilitate sudden insight.
Insight is rare because problem solving (like decision making) suffers from
framing effects.
Functional fixedness = the tendency to perceive the functions of objects
as fixed. we don’t think more of objects than they’re usually used for. I
didn’t think to use an empty box of matches as a candle holder, because
you normally wouldn’t use it in that way.
40
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
CHAPTER 8: CONSCIOUSNESS
Conscious and unconscious: the mind’s eye, open and closed.
Cartesian theatre = a mental screen or stage on which things appear to be
presented for viewing by your mind’s eye.
Hard problem of consciousness = the difficulty of explaining how
subjective experience could ever arise.
Phenomenology = how things seem to the conscious person, in terms of
the quality of experience.
Homunculus problem = the difficulty of explaining the experience of
consciousness by advocating another internal self. we feel like we live
inside our head. As if we are a machine driver that drives the machine (our
body).
The case for the existence of free will being responsible for decisions may
be scientifically weak (Skinner said that there is no free will, all behaviour
can be learned and explained by environmental factors), the personal
experience of free will is extremely strong.
Problem of other minds = the fundamental difficulty we heave in
perceiving the consciousness of others. there is no clear way to
distinguish a conscious person from someone who might do and say all
the same things as a conscious person but who is not conscious.
Qualia =mental states subjective experiences we have as part of our
mental life.
Materialism = the philosophical position that mental states are a product
of physical systems alone (the brain).
Anthropomorphism = the tendency to attribute human qualities to
nonhuman things.
How do people perceive other minds? People judge minds according to the
capacity for experience (feeling pain) and the capacity for agency (ability
for self-control and thought).
Mind-body problem = the issue of how the mind is related to the brain and
body.
René Descartes human body is a machine made of physical matter,
human mind is a made of ‘thinking substance’. He proposed that the mind
has its effects on the brain and body through he pineal gland. This was not
true.
Research showed that the brain is activated 500 ms before voluntary
action.
The brain also starts to show activity before a person’s conscious decision
to move. Although your personal intuition is that you think of an action
and then dot it, experiments suggest that your brain is getting started
before either thinking or doing.
Personal experience of consciousness feels like someone is in charge of
decision making, but in fact, consciousness may simply be making sense
of our thoughts and actions after they have already been activated.
Choice blindness = when people are unaware of their decision-making
process and justify a choice as if it were already decided.
41
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
42
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
43
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
44
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
45
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
46
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
47
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
o Slow pathway; from the thalamus to the cortex and then to the
amygdala.
Emotional car metaphor the amygdala presses the emotional accelerator
pedal and the cortex then hits the brakes.
Emotion is a primitive system that prepares us to react rapidly and on the
basis of little information to things that are relevant to our survival or
wellbeing.
48
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
Liars speak more slowly, take longer to respond to questions and respond
in less detail than those who are telling the truth. Most people think that a
liar speaks quickly or averts their gaze but that is not true.
Polygraph is a lie detector. It detects lies better than change, but still has a
high error rate.
People with Capgras syndrome typically believe that one or more of their
family members are imposters. This is due to damage of the neural
connections between the temporal lobe and the limbic system. They
recognize the faces of their family members but don’t feel the warm
emotions that these faces once produced. So, their family members
‘looked right’ but didn’t ‘feel right’.
Because the world influences our emotions, our emotions provide
information about the world.
Hedonic principle = the notion that all people are motivated to experience
pleasure and avoid pain. our emotional experience can be thought of as
a measure ranging from good to bad, and our primary motivation – maybe
our sole motivation – is to be as close as possible to good.
49
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
At every moment, your body sends signals to your brain about its energy
state.
o Orexigenic signal when your body needs energy (appetite is
stimulated. E.g. by ghrelin)
o Anorexigenic signal when your body has sufficient energy
(appetite is suppressed e.g. by leptin)
Lateral hypothalamus receives orexigenic signals.
Tromedial hypothalamus receives anorexigenic signals.
Obesity BMI >30
Overweight BMI >25
Obesity can result from biochemical abnormalities, and It seems to have a
strong genetic component, but overeating is often a part of its cause.
People overeat because;
o Whether people eat depends on their knowledge when they last eat.
o Emotional eating.
o Eating out of habit.
Our bodies developed two strategies to avoid starvation.
o A strong attraction to high calorie foods.
o An ability to store excess food energy in the form of fat, which
enables us to eat more when there is plenty of food and live of our
reserves when food is scarce.
Human body resists weight loss in two ways;
o When we gain weight, the number of fat cells and the size of them
grows. But when we lose weight, the fat cells won’t die. They only
become smaller in size.
o Our bodies respond to dieting by decreasing our metabolism.
Bulimia nervosa = a disorder characterized by binge eating followed by
activities intended to compensate for the food intake.
Bulimics eat out of negative emotions such as sadness and anxiety, but
are then concerned about weight gain. They feel guilty and try to
compensate to lose weight.
Anorexia nervosa = a disorder characterized by an intense fear of being
fat and severe restriction of food intake.
Anorexics tend to have a distorted body image, and tend to be high-
achieving perfectionists. The amount of ghrelin in their blood is really high
but they suppress their hunger signal.
50
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
51
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Stuvia.com - The Marketplace to Buy and Sell your Study Material
52
Downloaded by: benjaminochmann1 | benjamin.ochmann1@gmail.com
Distribution of this document is illegal
Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)