PSY270H1 Study Guide - Winter 2018, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - Wilhelm Wundt, Visual Field, Visual Cortex
PSY270H1
MIDTERM EXAM
STUDY GUIDE
Fall 2018
What is Cognition?
Slide 1:
Points to add: Cognition is sometimes used to describe animals (not exclusively people).
Slide 2:
Points to add: N/A
Slide 3:
Points to add: General rather than specific.
Slide 4;
Points to add: N/A
History of cognitive psychology:
Early Philosophers asked questions about the origins of human thought and knowledge. The
principles of scientific inquiry were first applied to the questions in the mid 1800’s.
1) Explanatory and falsifiable theories
2) Experiments
3) Public Observations – Replicable (can be observed by more than one person)
Structuralism (introspectionalism) was founded by Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) in Germany
He was inspired by the periodic table in chemistry wanted to identify the elements of thought
Trained students to introspect on and analyze the elements of their thought
This allowed him to employ replications.
Required replications: phenomenon were tested under a variety of conditions
The problem was that in this approach;
1) Not all cognitive processes are conscious. E.g; depth perception
2) For instance; the photo on slides where you see some circles as concave and others as
convex but you cant consciously explain why.
3) So introspection is not full proof
Also:
Observations are not public
What can you conclude if two people report different sensations?
They truly experience the stimulus differently
One is misreporting the sensation
One or both are lying.
And data needs to be objective so this is an issue.
Early experimentalists;
The first one: Donders
Developed an approach to study mental chronometry; the timing of cognitive processes
Used a reaction time task: Simple RT task: participants pushed a button as soon as they perceive
a light
Choice RT task: participants push different buttons depending on which side the light is on
Choice RT-Simple RT = decision time
Herman ebbinghaus;
Developed an approach to study forgetting and memory
Savings in relearning task:
Read nonsense syllables aloud and recorded how many repetitions were required to learn them.
He made the words nonsense because he didn’t want his prior knowledge to influence the
experiment
Repeated process with the same syllables after a delay (19min-31 days)
Calculated savings: (Initial repetitions) – (relearning repetitions) / (initial repetitions) *100
Savings curve plotted on slides and its remarkably consistent with what we later identified
forgetting looks like amongst large samples of people. It is called the exponential forgetting
curve
So these two early experimentalists measured behaviour in order to study the mind and this is
how they got around the publically observable problem.
Around the same time: there was a different approach to studying psychology was called
behaviourism
It focuses only on what is observable/behaviour.
Ivan Pavlov (1849 – 1936)
He developed classical conditioning
Allowed for the scientific study of how behaviour is modified by the environment – no need to
evoke mental states
Paired an unconditioned stimulus (e.g. food)
With a neutral/conditioned stimulus (e.g. ball0
The once neutral stimulus reliability acquired the same response as the unconditioned stimulus.
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PSY270H1 Full Course Notes
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Document Summary
Points to add: cognition is sometimes used to describe animals (not exclusively people). Early philosophers asked questions about the origins of human thought and knowledge. The principles of scientific inquiry were first applied to the questions in the mid 1800"s: explanatory and falsifiable theories, experiments, public observations replicable (can be observed by more than one person) Structuralism (introspectionalism) was founded by wilhelm wundt (1832-1920) in germany. He was inspired by the periodic table in chemistry wanted to identify the elements of thought. Trained students to introspect on and analyze the elements of their thought. Required replications: phenomenon were tested under a variety of conditions. The problem was that in this approach: not all cognitive processes are conscious. E. g; depth perception: for instance; the photo on slides where you see some circles as concave and others as convex but you cant consciously explain why, so introspection is not full proof. And data needs to be objective so this is an issue.
