PSYC 215 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Ulric Neisser, Kurt Koffka, Noam Chomsky

• School: Emory University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 215
• Professor: Daniel Dilks

Document Summary

History of cognition: ulric neisser, father of cognitive revolution, "all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used" sensory input processing. Light waves cognition: psychological antecedents of cognitive psychology, structuralism: Proponents: william james (father of psychology; principles of psychology: behaviorism. Goal: study observable behavior; any hypotheses about internal thoughts and ways of thinking are nothing more than speculation: we cannot say anything meaningful about cognition, methods: animal experiments, conditioning experiments. Proponents: ivan pavlov (classical conditioning), john watson, b. f. skinner: gestalt psychology. Goal: understand psychological phenomena as organized structured wholes (the whole is diff from the sum of its parts: the strx is important instead of just jumbling all the components in any which order, method: experiment, observation (most prevalent) Explain how children can produce novel sentences they never heard ("poverty of the stimulus") Development of first computers: his "colossus" helped break german "enigma" codes during wwii.