PSYCH 202 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Tabula Rasa, Wilhelm Wundt

• School: UW-Madison
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYCH 202
• Professor: Jeffrey B.Henriques I I I

Document Summary

Psychology: the scientific study of the mind and behavior. Mind: the private inner experience of perceptions, thoughts, memories, and feelings. Behavior: observable actions of human being and nonhuman animals. Nativism: certain kinds of knowledge are innate or inborn. Aristotle thought that the child"s brain was a blank slate of which experiences were written. Physiology: the study of biological processes, especially in the human body. Believed that scientific psychology should focus on analyzing consciousness: a person"s subjective experience of the world and the mind. Structuralism: the analysis of the basic elements that constitute the mind. Involves breaking down consciousness into elemental sensations and feelings. Introspection: the subjective observation of one"s own experience. William james disagreed with wundt in that consciousness could be broken down into separate elements. Thought it was a flowing stream that could only be understood in its entirety. Functionalism: the study of how mental processes enable people to adapt to their environments.