PSY 211 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Wilhelm Wundt, Unobservable, Cognitive Psychology
Document Summary
Cognition - mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses. Specific topics: perception, attention, memory, language, knowledge, thinking. So much of our actions, thoughts, and feelings depend on knowledge. Information you bring from your knowledge to apply to things. Wilhelm wundt: advocated introspection as a means of discovering the basic structures of the mind. Unfalsifiable - can"t introspect on unconscious processes, no evidence. Introspect - conscious reflection on what your mind is doing, how we think our mind is working is actually not how it works. Operant conditioning - behaviors are rewarded increase in frequency. Pavlov: makes first english-language report of classical conditioning. Classical conditioning - nervous system detects pairings of neutral stimuli with significant stimuli. Concepts such as id, ego, and superego are rejected as untestable fantasies. Methodological behaviorism - we cannot observe mental processes. Introspection was a failure, the mind cannot study itself.
