PSYC 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: List Of Fables Characters, Psychophysics, Empiricism

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jill L Atkinson

Document Summary

The logic that people can describe the world through rules generated by observation, quantification, and the principle of parsimony. Applied to questions about perception, thinking and behaviour. Parsimony: accepting the simplest testable solution that accounts for all available evidence. The pursuit of truth through reason and logic. Believes human xp is built up of elemental sensations. Attempt to understand perception through dissecting it into its component sensations and then categorizing, cataloguing and exploring these sensations. Focuses not only on the elemental structure of processes, but rather their purpose (why we perceive things the way they are) in a stimulus and our sensation of the changes in stimulus magnitude. A phenomenon of interest only occurs if the cause is present, and is absent otherwise. Rationalism generates hypotheses that we can empirically test. Characteristics vary among individual members of a specie.