William James

Founded the functionalistic school of psychology which stressed the role of consciousness and behavior in adapting to the environment

Thornlike

Law of Effect - a stimulus will tend to produce certain responses over time if an organism is rewarded for that response

puzzle box

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Ebbinghaus’ research showed that scientific methods could be applied to the study of the higher thought processes

Watson

radical behaviorism

stimulus and response

founded the behaviorist school

Pavlov

classical conditioning

Fixed variable

demonstrated that this learning process could be used to make an association between an environmental stimulus and a naturally occurring stimulus.

classical conditioning

proposed that behaviors could be learned via conditioned associations.

skinner

• devised an ingenious set of experiments in which rats could be conditioned to engage in certain behaviors based on either reinforcing that behavior (i.e., through a reward) or punishing that behavior.
• created operant conditioning

Noam Chomsky

• argued that behaviorism could never achieve its goals of explaining behavior through conditioning because people engage in novel behaviors that they have never had a chance to learn --> ex. language

Types of processing I

• Bottom-up
• Top-down

Bottom-up

• Processing that is determined directly by environmental stimuli rather than the individuals’s knowledge and expectations

Top-down

• Stimulus processing is determined by expectations, memory, and knowledge rather than directly by the stimulus

Types of processing II

• Serial
• Parallel

Serial

• Involves only one process occurring at any given moment; that process is completed before the next one starts

Parallel

• Two or more processes occurring simultaneously

Association

• Examines how events or ideas be associated with one another
• Contiguity, similarity, contrast

Stimulus:

physical conditions to which some experimental subject is being subjected

Response:

The behavior that the subject engages in

Function

• a mapping between a set of another
• take an input and produce its output

Mental imagery

the experience of seeing something with the ‘mind’s eye in the absence of real perceptual stimulation

Human factors:

• concerned with how people interact with physical systems, such as car consoles or machinery

Basic Research:

• research whose goal is to try to understand the world and it’s phenomena without regard to a specific end-use of this knowledge

Applied research

• research concerned with the end goal of developing a solution to a problem

Axon

• the long extension of a neuron that carries nerve impulses away from the body of the cell

Axon terminals

the hair-like ends of the axon

Release neurotransmitters to transmit signals to the next neuron or target cell.

Cell body

• the cell body of the neuron; it contains the nucleus (also called the soma)

Myelin sheath

Insulates and speeds up signal transmission along the axon

Nucleus

• Contains genetic information and controls cell functions

Axon

• Transmits electrical impulses away from the cell body

Schwann cell

• Produces myelin in the peripheral nervous system, aiding in signal conduction

Sensation

• The conversion of physical properties of the world or body into a neural code by the peripheral nervous system.
• Takes place in the sensory neurons

Perception

• The processing and interpretation of sensory information into a form that can meaningfully guide behavioral decisions.
• Takes place in the Brain.

Depth Perception

• the ability to see the world in 3 dimensions and detect distance.
• Vision only has a two-dimensional view.
• We interpret the information given to perceive depth.
• We take flat images and create a three-dimensional view. Optic illusions demonstrate this (perception) isn’t always accurate.

Broca’s area

• Can understand everything said
• The patient can only response in monosyllabic words
• located in the left hemisphere

Wernickes area

• Speaks fluently but nonsensically
• Not coherent, contains lexical and grammatical errors
• located in the left hemishoere

Left Hemisphere

• Language functions (speech, songs)
• Logical thought (writing, logic)

Righ Hemishpere

• Spatial-relation functions
• Perception of rhythm, abstract or intuitive thought

Phineas Gage

• suffered a serious accident when a metal bar penetrated his skull and traveled through much of his frontal cortex
• A brain injury could cause such specific impairments—and that it could affect something as seemingly intangible as personality—generated a great deal of interest at the time and served to galvanize the school of thought that different parts of the brain carried different functions.

Donders

• who was interested in understanding how individual mental responses might consist of component processes

3 choices (Donders)

• Detection condition
• Discrimination Condition
• Choice condition

Detection condition

the subject had to respond as quickly as possible to the stimulus by pushing a button

Discrimination condition

• participants were presented with two possible stimuli, such as left and right lightbulbs. They performed something that would now be called a go/no-go task: If one stimulus appeared (such as a left light turning on) they would respond by pressing the button; if the other stimulus appeared, they would not press the button.

choice condition

• two possible stimuli and two respective responses, such as responding with the right button for the right light and the left button for the left light.

covert attention

Attentional selection and processing of a location while eye fixation is maintained elsewhere

overt attention

• Selective attention of a location that is accompanied by eye fixation of the same region

Endogenous attentional

control occurs when we choose to pay attention to it. This can differ among individuals

Exogenous attentional control

occurs when some property of the environment drives us to pay attention to it. Like a really bright light or extremely high-volume sound. We pay attention to it whether we want to or not

Divided attention

• Engaging in multiple tasks at once
• Performance decreases
• Switching between tasks instead of focusing on multiple things at once is what some researchers argue multitasking is

Attention

• Highlights a part of one’s environment and blocks out other parts.
• Primes a person for a speedy reaction.
• Helps the learner to retain information.

Selective Attention

The process of directing your attention to the chosen stimuli

Information Reduction

• Our sensory organs have limited sensitivity.
• (Example: with vision, we have restricted wavelengths between 420 and 700).

Neural Level

• enhance and inhibit information. In vision, lateral inhibition enhances boundaries and contrasts.