PSYC 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Confounding, Mental Chronometry, Normal Distribution

• School: UConn
• Department: Psychological Sciences
• Course: PSYC 1100
• Professor: Eric Lundquist

Document Summary

Behavior = the actions or reactions of persons or things in response to external or internal stimuli. To aid in understanding underlying mental processes. Studied through explicit measures, brain imaging, animal models, reaction time. Reaction time: the time elapsing between the beginning of the application of a stimulus and the beginning of an organism"s reaction to it. See stimulus, process stimulus, send response, then initiate action. Either simple (when there is only one possible response) or choice (when there are multiple responses to choose) Hypothesis = a statement that explains or makes generalizations about a set of facts or principles, usually forming a basis for possible experiments to confirm its viability. Independent variable = the variable in which an experimenter deliberately manipulates in order to observe its relationship with some other quantity (variable), or which defines the distinct conditions in an experiment. Deliberately manipulated, something to change from trial to trial.