Psych 10 UCLA Ankowski

Wilhelm Wundt

father of psychology 1879, reaction time studies, structuralist

Behaviorism

the science of behavior that focuses on observable behavior only

Phrenology

Localization of the brain

Phineas Gage

Railroad worker who survived a severe brain injury that dramatically changed his personality and behavior; frontal lobe damage -> personality

Structuralism

Analyze conscious experience by breaking it down into basic elements, introspection

Functionalism

Focused on how our mental and behavioral processes function - how they enable us to adapt, survive, and flourish, natural selection, William James

Psychoanalytic Theory

Attempts to explain personality, motivation, and mental disorders by focusing on unconscious determinants of behavior

Schools of Thought Prevalence

Cognitive, Neuroscience, Psychoanalytic, Behavioral

Cross-Cultural Psychology

compares the behavior of people from different cultures

WEIRD

Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic

Cognitive Psychology

The scientific study of mental processes, including perception, thought, memory, and reasoning

psychoanalytic theory

focus on the role of the unconscious in affecting conscious behavior

basic research vs. applied research

basic: quest for knowledge for its own sake. Applied: designed to solve specific problems.

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Why the scientific method?

Reduce bias

Theory

Needs to be falsifiable

Hypothesis

Needs to be specific and testable

correlational design

research design that examines the extent to which two variables are associated; cannot infer causation

experimental design

To show "X causes Y" we measure behavior Y when X occurs; can infer causation, precise, can be impractical, unethical, too general

Bobo doll experiment

Observed an adult play aggressively (yelling & hitting) with an inflatable clown (Bobo); when children were later allowed to play with the Bobo, those children who witnesses the Bobo doll performed the same aggressive actions and improvised new ways of playing aggressively, Bandura, experimental

experimenter bias

researcher expectations skew the results of the study

demand characteristics

cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behavior is expected

Hawthorne effect

A change in a subject's behavior caused simply by the awareness of being studied

quasi-experimental design

compares two groups that already exist in the population, cannot infer causality

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Neurons

Send and receive messages

Cerebellum

motor control (hindbrain)

Medulla

Heart rate, respiration (hindbrain)

Reticular formation

Sleep, wakefullness, arousal (hindbrain)

Pons

Relays information from the cerebellum to the rest of the brain (hindbrain)

Thalamus

Filters and transmits senses (forebrain)

Hypothalamus

Regulates 4 F's = fighting, fleeing; body temeprature, hunger, thirst. (forebrain)

subcortical structures

Amygdala: emotions, Hippocampus: memories,

occipital lobe

vision

temporal lobe

hearing and language

somatosensory cortex

registers and processes body touch and movement sensations

frontal lobe

A region of the cerebral cortex that has specialized areas for movement, abstract thinking, planning, memory, and judgement

Prefrontal cortex

develops last

Broca's area

speech production

Wernicke's area

language comprehension

Dendrites

receive messages from other cells

Axon

the neuron extension that passes messages through its branches to other neurons or to muscles or glands

Synapse

Gap between neurons

myelin sheath

covers the axon of some neurons and helps speed neural impulses

action potential

a neural impulse; a brief electrical charge that travels down an axon; ALL-or-NONE

resting potential

the state of the neuron when not firing a neural impulse; outside +, inside -

acetylcholine

transmitter between motor neurons and voluntary muscles, botox

dopamine

motor behavior, motivation, pleasure, emotional arousal

serotonin

sleep, wakefulness, eating

MRI

image of brain and its structure

fMRI

measures ongoing brain activity

EEG

electrical activity from neurons, good temporal, bad spacial

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absolute threshold

the weakest amount of a stimulus that a person can detect half the time

difference threshold

the smallest detectable difference between two stimuli

top-down processing

the use of preexisting knowledge to influence our perceptions

bottom-up processing

analysis that begins with the sensory receptors and works up to the brain's integration of sensory information

signal detection theory

the response to a stimulus depends both on a person's sensitivity to the stimulus in the presence of noise and on a person's response criterion

Rods

120 million, periphery, high dim light sensitivity, low color/detail sensitivity

Cones

6 million, center, low dim light sensitivity, high color/detail sensitivity

trichomatic theory

the theory that our color vision is based on three primary colors (blue short, green medium, red long)

opponent-process theory

the theory that opposing retinal processes enable color vision

Feature detection

Feature detector -> High-level analyzers -> decision

Dorsal

"Where"

Ventral

"What"

Visual Agnosia

Inability to recognize objects

Prosopagnosia

Inability to recognize faces

Monocular depth cues

stimuli that enable us to judge depth using only one eye

McGurk Effect

a perceptual phenomenon that demonstrates an interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception. The illusion occurs when the auditory component of one sound is paired with the visual component of another sound, leading to the perception of a third sound.

Synesthesia

when one kind of sensory stimulus evokes the subjective experience of another

Hubel and Wiesel

discovered feature detectors, lines and angles

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Ivan Pavlov

discovered classical conditioning; trained dogs to salivate at the ringing of a bell

John B. Watson

father of behaviorism; famous for Little Albert study in which baby was taught to fear a white rat, CS = white rat

Prepardness

a predisposition to develop certain fears

B.F. Skinner

operant conditioning, skinner box

Reinforcement

increase behavior

Punishment

decrease behavior

Partial vs. Continuous Reinforcement

PARTIAL = more resistant to extinction

Interval vs. Ratio Schedules

Ratio = number, Interval = time (variable ratio is best)

Fixed vs. Variable

Fixed = specific, variable = average (variable ratio is best)

Edward Thorndike

Law of Effect-relationship between behavior and consequence, behaviorism

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Craik and Tulving

levels of processing

Sensory Memory

Holds senses, briefest

Short-term memory

20 seconds, 7 +/- 2 chunks of information

serial position effect

our tendency to recall best the last and first items in a list

Explicit Memory

"what", verbal, conscious awareness, (LTM)

Implicit Memory

"how", behavioral, non-declarative memory, (LTM)

Episodic Explicit Memory

Specific time, place, personal, prospective memory

Semantic Explicit Memory

Facts, general knowledge

Procedural Implicit Memory

Skills, "how to do something"

Priming Implicit Memory

Exposure influences behavior

Encoding Specificity Principle

Memory is improved when information is available at encoding and is also available at retrieval

Proactive Interference

the disruptive effect of prior learning on the recall of new information

retroactive interference

the disruptive effect of new learning on the recall of old information

Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm

Recall a false, related word

Loftus' misinformation effect

Memory changes due to misinformation

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Availability bias

Readily available information is incorrectly assessed to also be more likely.