PSYC 213 Chapter 1: PSYC 213 - Chapter 1 Notes

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 213
• Professor: Signy Sheldon

Document Summary

Minority report, futuristic movie thriller: precogs - mutated individuals with pre-cognition abilities- can see the future and that way stop murders, even before people decide to kill. Scientific psychology usually seeks to refine the common-sense assumptions of folk psychology, an umbrella term for various assumptions and theories based on the everyday behavior of ourselves and others. The new oxford american dictionary define cognition as the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understand through thought, experience, and the sense. The foundation of cognitive psychology is the idea that the world contains information that can be processed by humans, and is encountered by them everyday in countless ways. Amount of information provided by event is quantified in bits (binary digit), which is the most basic unit of information. Every event that occurs in a situation with two equally likely outcomes (tossing a coin, or a yes/no question) provides one bit of information.