PSYC 213 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Folk Psychology, Ethology, Metacognition

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 213
• Professor: Jelena Ristic

Document Summary

Folk psychology: a set of assumptions and theories based on everyday behaviours of ourselves and others: scientific psychology seeks to refine this common sense folk psychology. Cognitive concepts: awareness, intelligence, intuition, personal acquaintance, recognition, skill, and understanding. The subject matter of cognitive psychology is information-processing. Information theory: the information provided by a particular event is inversely related to its probability of occurrence: information reduces uncertainty for the receiver, less probable = more informative. People respond more slowly to less likely signals. When the number of possible stimuli is small, there"s little uncertainty as to which signal will occur: therefore, the information produced by a stimulus is small, response time (rt) increases with the number of possible stimulus alternatives. Limitations: amount of time it takes for information to flow through the nervous system (ns), amount of visual information that a person can transmit at once.