NEUR1020- Module 1

What are the features of science?

* it is grounded in observation. data is needed to confirm/disconfirm ideas
* it is cumulative: a body of knowledge that grows and refines with time
* it is self correcting: errors and misconceptions are eventually excised
* it achieves explanation and understanding: a single theory can account for a multitude of theories, allowing us to develop expectations from the world.
* it adheres to the scientific method: observation → explanation → prediction, implying incremental refinement and allowing our knowledge to progressively become a closer approximation of reality

What is the scientific method? Steps to this process?

The means by which scientific knowledge is amassed, tested and refined.

It goes through 3 phases:


1. Observation (data): The phenomena the scientific discipline seeks to explain
2. Explanation (theory): Statements that seek to organise data coherently, explaining how observations relate
3. Prediction (hypothesis): Using the theories to predict future events

Why are research methods important?

Research methodology imposes control and structure over the observations we make. The more structure there is, the more confident we can be about the causal status between events.

* Confirmation bias: people will look for what they want to look for to defend pre-existing ideas and confirm their beliefs. Needs methods to un-bias the process.
* the occurrence of favoured/expected ideas are highlighted and others are minimised
* this is highly problematic when we are trying to infer a causal relationship between events

Least to most control in common methods:

* introspection
* natural observation
* case history
* surverys
* correlational designs
* experiments

Often a variety of methods are used to provide converging evidence for a theory.

What properties make a theory scientific? Describe falsifiability

1. Generate testable predictions that we evaluate against data
2. The theory allows for it to be shown false
* Falsifiability means that the theory is open to contrary observations proving it incorrect.
* When data aligns toward a particular theory it is only provisionally accepted until inevitably falsified by future data/hypotheses.
* If a theory is falsified you can either 1: refine it or 2: Abandon it in favour of an alternative idea. Either way, understanding of the universe is honed. You can’t have a theory that doesn’t explain all observations or it isn’t a valid approximation of reality.

How can you judge competing theories to see which is best?/ what makes a theory good?

1. Data quality: how trustworthy is the data/observations the theory is based on?
2. Theory adequacy: is the theoretical explanation general or tailored to this specific study?
3. Alternate explanations: correlation vs causation. does the experiment show the effect that the researcher thinks it does? 2 variables being related doesn’t mean one causes the other.
4. Theories should be parsimonious: provide the simplest possible explanation that suffices to explain ALL relevant observations to eliminate excess flexibility. We favour the simpler theory.

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Ideally, the theory should be both reliable and valid to make legitimate inferences from it:

* reliability= how respectable/consistent a measure is (getting the same result after repeats)
* validity= the degree a measure assesses the thing it is purposed to assess (do they correspond?)

Uncertainty within Psychology

* it has lots of verbal labels, using quantitative measurement. We come up with a task and attach numbers to it to get indirect results. However, this isn’t a specific mathematical scale
* quantitative measure allows us to make comparisons between groups of individuals or the same individual through time.
* the uncertainty of sampling
* in most experiments a sample is measured to make generalized inferences about the population at large. But:
* What is true of a sample/population need not be true of the individual
* what is true of one sample need not be true of another sample (even if both are drawn from the same population)
* Altogether inferences are uncertain, but replication and checking the consistency of results helps support them. This way you won’t miss information or trust inconsistent observations.

What is a paradigm?

A framework for understanding and investigating phenomena within a discipline

* offers perspective on how phenomena are understood
* kind of like an ideology or world view- it is the background assumed ideas that allow progress
* define the concepts used in theories, research questions worth investigating and methodologies used to assess these questions

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3 main kinds are behaviorist, cognitive and biological, but modern research draws on insights gained through all 3 paradigms and all 3 adhere to the scientific method.

Describe the Behaviourist Paradigm and Watson vs Skinner’s Behaviourism

Human psychology is shaped by the external environment: we ourselves are born as blank slates.

* runs on the law of effects: behaviours that are rewarded tend to be repeated.

**Watson’s methodological behaviourism=** External stimuli have behavioural consequences.

* rejects the study of unobservable, “private” phenomena like thoughts and feelings as unscientific
* only public, observable phenomena can be studied scientifically
* Questions about how external stimuli with rewards and punishments affect subsequent behaviour are studied experimentally, often with animals

**Skinner’s Radical behaviourism=** the external environment is a determinant of both observable and unobservable behaviours.

* “Behaviour” includes privates events like thoughts and feelings as legitimate scientific studies, as the external environment affects these things too
* Mental behaviours (thoughts/feelings) are events produced by the environment

Describe the Cognitive Paradigm

Places mental events and representations as the centre of psychology: thoughts are causes, not effects of the environment, that we need to understand and study

* seeks to understand the processes that transform stimuli into behaviours
* People operate like a computer: they are provided an external input, it is processed and an output is produced. We can’t see the transformation but we can observe outputs to attempt to characterise the inside processes
* The key concept is mental representation and mental states
* study experimentally, often with human participants (adopted experimental approach from behaviourism)

Asks questions like:

* What processes are needed to accurately relate changes in stimuli to changes in behaviour?
* What is the functional relationship between different kinds of cognitive processes? (This is often explored by testing formal mathematical models of psychological processes)
* what cognitive processes affect attention, memory and decision making?

Describe the biological paradigm

Explains cognition and behaviour in terms of biological processes, like brain and neural activity patterns

* Same interests as cognitive but doesn’t focus on just abstract functional relationships: it wants to know the physical basis/structural biological properties of thought and behaviour
* much of it’s prominence is due to technological developments in imaging and analysing neural data. it is studied experimentally as well as via case studies.
* some of it’s key concepts are evolution, genetics and physiological functions.

Some questions:

* what brain regions are responsible for particular cognitive functions?
* what biological mechanisms that implement cognition are associated with specific cognitive activities?
* how are cognitive functions performed by neurobiological mechanisms?
* what is the influence of genetic on behaviour patterns?

Example: the Miasma Theory paradigm. What was it?

Idea that stink causs disease and disease spreads by people coming in contact with miasma (Stink)

* the procedure developed based on this paradigm was to improve sanitation and swelling in urbane areas. This was beneficial but not disease preventing.
* Doctors also wore wax coated cloaks, glass goggles and beak masks filled with aromatics for anti-stink
* Alternative evidence eventually favoured the germ theory, when having doctors enforce washing their hands after touching corpses reduced the spread of disease between patients compared to a hospital that did not do this.

Define psychology

The scientific study of mind, brain and behaviour

Includes:

* cognitive (how thoughts influence behaviour)
* neuro (neural mechanisms giving rise to thought/behaviour)
* biological
* social (individual behaviour in group context and how this changes through development)
* organizational
* evolutionary (selection pressures that force cognitioin to exist as it does)
* mathematical (can regularities in human behaviour be characterised with formal maths)

psychology!

Sigmund Freud

He was the founder of psychoanalysis and one of the reasons therapy is such a large/famous focus of psychology

* he believed that there are unconscious forces that we don’t have direct access to: Id, Ego and Superego
* The effects of these 3 characters manifest in our behaviour outside of our awareness
* Id wants things to happen for pleasure, Ego constrains Id and operates on reality principle and Superego makes the rules for what is acceptable for us to do (and that Ego enforces on Id)
* He also came up with symbolic dream interpretation, oedipus complex (every boy wishes to murder their father and marry their mother) and psychosexual development (if you don’t overcome the key conflict of each stage in your life you will become a bad person).

He had other theories that were all bs but he did also come up with talk therapy: overcome problems by talking with a qualified therapist. We still employ this today! It is his only success though lol.

What is introspection?

The process of “looking inward” to monitor what one perceives to be the mechanisms of one’s mind

* the basis of data collection for early psychology
* involves observing and reporting on the contents of one’s own mind without embellishing or being influenced by prior knowledge
* can also be used to gather information about psychological processing: for example, does the way you see an image of a dog get affected by how your brain sifts through past experiences and knowledge of the animal? How is it’s presence processed?
* as problems and processes become more complex, more and more ways of approaching and processing a task exist and introspective analysis becomes more variable between individuals and less reliable.

What is a case study/biographical information?

the biographical information of an individual is obtained retrospectively, often via interview

* often focused on individuals with rare/unusual clinical disorders, providing detail on the condition and serving as “existence of proof” of the psychological phenomena.
* can **hint** at the causal relationships between brain and behaviour. For example, if a head collision creates a change in brain function/behaviour (eg. amnesia, personality shift), a potential causal relationship is noticed between that region of the brain and the behaviour/function suddenly changed.
* It can’t be used to infer causality alone, but it can provide guidance for future more structured experimental research. For the head example, this observation would lead to more biological research on that brain region.

Describe survey based research

Studies with surveys have fixed questions and answers (eg. scale of 1-10)

* maintains the structural aspect of case studies but the insights achieved via introspection can be quantified! This is the most common methodology

What is naturalistic observation?

Participants don’t respond to specific questions by the researcher and are instead observed performing a certain task or activity with no intervention

* having this objective approach eliminates self-report bias
* a way of establishing a baseline set of behaviours that can later be targets for modification or further research

What are correlational designs? Compared to experimental designs?

**Correlational designs**= A way of identifying relationships among variables: the goal is to quantify the statistical strength of the relationship between 2 bariables

* this can rely on observational data OR data collected in a lab
* although this can identify associations, it can’t be used to make claims about causality. Eg. just because people in a study who wear hats happen to be friendly doesn’t mean hats cause friendliness. Causality vs correlation.

**Experimental designs** on the other hand CAN make causal inferences as they are organised to specifically do so

* randomly allocate people to groups and add an experimental manipulation that introduces only a single systematic difference between the groups
* independent variable= manipulated feature defining the differences between the groups
* dependent variable= measured variable.
* all other factors are held constant across all groups by either being allowed to vary randomly or deliberately equating
* A significant difference in the dependent variable between groups occurring can be attributed to the manipulation of the independent variable as all other factors are controlled identically.

What would each of the 3 paradigms think about 1. depression’s cause, 2. treatment pathways and 3. research questions?

Behaviourist:


1. sad events/environment, being around other depressed people, traumatic events/history
2. remove environmental cues associated to depressive behaviour
3. to what extent can we train the behaviour? how often do you need to be exposed to absorb depressive behaviour?

Cognitive:


1. inside processes consuming/interpreting the world around them
2. cognitive behavioural therapy: with focus on how events have been interpreted in the brain to lead to depression by going into one’s history. Then, introduce new ways of thinking/patterns of interpretation.
3. how do we process external events to induce depressive feelings?

Biological:


1. neurochemical imbalances, inherited disorders/vulnerabilities
2. hormonal modification, shock therapy, medication
3. what is the effect of different drugs on depressive behaviour and how do they target specific neurotransmitters?

What is bias? Define sampling bias, expectation effects and operational designs

Bias= factors that affect the data that we obtain in a study

* can have follow on effects onconclusions and theoretical inferences and, if undetected, can compromise them

Sampling bias= study sample is not representative of the population which you wish to generalize the study conclusions to.

Expectation effects= bias from the expectations of individuals involved in the experiment

* single-blind research can restrict participant knowledge of study aims to help avoid expectation bias
* types of participant bias include placebo effect, hawthorne effect (behaviour change when being watched), stereotype threat (stereotype distracts you, changing performance) and the demand effect (told this is hard so you try harder)
* double-blind research can restrict experimenter knowledge of participant groups to avoid expectation bias
* eg. rosenthal effect. Tell the teacher one group is smart and one is dumb, so he helps the smart kids more and gives up on the others and the smart kids do better.

Operational definitions= defining variables in terms of the methods used to observe/measure/manipulate them

* sometimes the method used to define a psychological construct is not a true reflection or effective measure
* operational definitions aren’t all equally valid: some are more linked to theoretical concepts than others