Chapter 2

Mind-body problem

The question of how mental events, such as thoughts, beliefs, and sensations, are related to physical mechanisms taking place in the body

Dualism

The mind and body are different kinds of substances or properties

Monism

The view that there is only one kind of basic substance in the world, either all physical or mental

Physicalism/materialism

Part of monism; the view that all of reality is material or physical

Idealism

Part of monism; all of reality is mental in nature; exotic kind of monism

Neutral monism

Part of monism; the mental and physical are identical and all of reality is made of one thing

Structuralism

A school of psychology whose approach relied on introspection; Wilhem Wundt

Intropspection

A technique by structuralists to study the mind by having people examine their own conscious experience

Replication

Being able to repeat an experiment by using the same methods

Cortical blindness

A condition which an individual with damage to the visual cortex will report having no visual experience; they have functional eyes

Blindsight

someone who reports blindness due to cortical damage still shows behavior consisting with some perception

Think-aloud protocol

A method that involves having participants verbally their thought process when completing a task

Behaviorist

A school of psychology that emphasized using observable stimuli and behaviors as the basis of scientific experimentation; John Watson

Classical conditioning

an involuntary behavior is paired with a stimulus, eventually leading to that behavior being elicited by the stimulus alone; Ivan Pavlov

Operant Conditioning

A method that reinforces certain behaviors through a system of rewards and punishments; B.F. Skinner

Skinner Box

A chamber used to contain and automatically provide behavioral feedback to an animal during operant conditioning experiments (used on a rat)

Reinforcement Learning

A form of behavioral conditioning based on punishment and reinforcement (reward) feedback

Latent Learning

Learning int eh absence of any reward or punishment conditioning; used in Tolman’s maze experiment

Function

Mappings from inputs and outputs

Algorithm

A set of operations that produced the input/output mapping of a function

Transistor

A device used in computers to control whether or not a current flows through parts of the system

Cognitive Revolution

A movement in 1950s that proposed that the mind should be understood as a computational system

Cognitive approach

based on the ideas that we can measure the observable behavior in order to test theories of the underlying mental processes

Reaction Time (RT)

A measure of how long it takes a subject to respond to a given task; Franciscus Donders—go/no go experiement

Stroop Effect/Interference

Phenomenon in which reporting the ink color of words is slowed down when the words spell out the name of a different color

Human Factors

A field of applied cog. psychology concerned with the interaction between human perception and the design of systems

Cognitive Neuroscience

A scientific field that merged brain imaging with behavioral experimentation

Optogenetics

A technique used to control the activity of brain cells based on introducing light-sensitive proteins (opsins) into the cells and activating them with light

Computational Neuroscience

Scientific field that uses computer models of the brain to model real brain function

The human brain is estimated to have around how many neurons and connections each and in total?

86 billion neurons with 7000 connections each, resulting in 600/602 trillion neural connections

Who invented the school of structuralism?

Wilhem Wundt

Who founded the behaviorist school?

John Watson

What does the behaviorism approach ignore?

Ignores how the subject generated the response from the stimulus and treats the brain as a black box that cannot be investigated

Who invented classical conditioning?

Ivan Pavlov

Example of Classical conditioning

Little Albert, who developed a fear of all types of furry objects by being manipulated and conditioned to do so

Who invented Operant Conditioning?

BF Skinner

Review Q: in the context of nature v nurture, what did behaviorists believed produced cognition

Nurture; it was believed that our cognition was learned

Explain negative, positive, and both pos. and neg. reinforcement and punishment

Negative decreases behavior (it means something is taken away, whether good or bad), positive increases behavior (means the addition of something whether good or bad)

Both pos. and neg. reinforcement will increase the behavior

Both pos. and neg. punishment will decrease the behavior

When did the cognitive revolution happen?

In 1950s, right after behaviorism rose, and the rise of computers helped lead to a new way of thinking about the mind

Who invented RT?

Franciscus Donders

Review Q: Order the different conditions of Donder’s experiment based on observed RT from shortest to longest

Detection condition is the quickest

Discrimination is the second quickest as you have to discriminate between two things

Choice condition is the longest as you have to choose between two things

Information Processing

Sensory information serves as an input, and the brain processes it to output a behavior

Review Q: How could recognizing a face be described as a sequence of information-processing?

An image of a person is an input, which is then going through a classifier (function), and the output is identification/recognition of the person

Review Q: How can a psychologist study memory or attention when neither process can be observed directly?

Through cog. neuroscience, where imaging tech can help show brain activity and where the brain is stimulated

Speed-accuracy trade off

When one depends on speed rather than accuracy, resulting in errors