Neuro

• Cognitive Psychology is the study of how people perceive, learn, remember, and think about information
• Examples of cognitive psychology questions:

  • Why do objects look farther away on foggy days than they really are?
  • Why do people remember specific experiences but forget names of people they've known for years?
  • Why are many people more afraid of traveling in planes than in automobiles?
  • Why do we easily remember people from childhood but not those we met recently?
  • Why do marketing executives spend so much on advertisements?
• Heuristics are mental shortcuts used to process information
• Dialectic is a developmental process where ideas evolve through exchange over time
• Rationalism (Plato) believes in knowledge through logical analysis
• Empiricism (Aristotle) believes in acquiring knowledge through empirical evidence
• Descartes favored introspective, reflective methods over empirical for finding truth
• Locke believed in empirical observation, coined "tabula rasa" for acquiring knowledge
• Psychology emerged as a new field of study in a dialectical way
• Structuralism analyzes the structure of the mind and perceptions into constituent components
• Wilhelm Wundt is considered the founder of structuralism in psychology
• Functionalism focuses on the process of thought rather than its contents
• Associationism examines how events or ideas become associated in the mind for learning
• Edward Lee Thorndike's law of effect states that a stimulus will produce a response if rewarded
• Pragmatists believe knowledge is validated by its usefulness
• Behaviorism focuses on observable behavior and environmental events
• William James' "Principles of Psychology" is a landmark in the field
• Ivan Pavlov's classical conditioning with dogs salivating to a lab technician
• John Watson believed psychologists should study only observable behavior
• Herman Ebbinghaus studied learning and memory through rehearsal
• Criticism of behaviorism: it doesn't account well for complex mental activities like language learning and problem solving
• B. F. Skinner believed operant conditioning could explain all forms of human behavior
• Using behaviorism techniques to study nonhuman animals was often easier than studying humans
• Tolman thought that understanding behavior required considering the purpose of and the plan for the behavior
• Bandura's view emphasizes how we observe and model our own behavior after others
• Gestalt psychology states that we best understand psychological phenomena when viewing them as organized, structured wholes
• Behaviorism did not account well for complex mental activities like language learning and problem solving
• According to Gestalt psychology, we cannot fully understand behavior by breaking phenomena down into smaller parts
• Some psychologists wanted to understand what goes on inside the head, not just people's behavior
• Hippocrates stated that the brain is the seat and center of sensation, thought, emotions, and judgment
• Muslim scientists were the first to record brain dissections with anatomical details
• Edward Tolman (1886 – 1959) believed that all behavior is directed toward some goal
• Bandura noted that learning can result from observations of rewards or punishments given to others
• Franz Gall presented the concept of phrenology and the idea that the two brain hemispheres are joined by the corpus callosum
• Paul Broca presented evidence for speech expression in specific brain areas (Broca’s area)
• Hughlings Jackson presented the idea of differentiation of two types of language functions: expressive and receptive
• Wernicke presented evidence for control of receptive speech in the temporal lobe (Wernicke’s area)
• Donald Hebb proposed the concept of cell assemblies as the basis of learning for the brain
• Biological psychiatry studies the biological basis of psychiatric disorders and treatment utilizing brain manipulations
• Flourens was the first to experiment with ablation of avian brains and proposed the concept of equipotentiality of the brain