PSYC1001 Revision Notes. History of Psychology

Transcription

1 PSYC1001 Revision Notes History of Psychology - Psychology: study of mental process, brain and behavior, and the relations between them o Mind: individual sensations, perceptions, memories, thoughts etc. - Braitenberg vehicle: a thought experiment concept in which the motion of a vehicle is directly controlled by sensors, but the resulting behavior may seem complex and even intelligent what is intelligence? - Psychology: looking at intelligence o Experiments, observations, tests ways to gain insight in the mental states o Twin studies, nature versus nurture insight in the role of genes and environment o Neuro-imaging, electrophysiological measurements ways to look at a brain in action o Why psychology: allows us to describe behavior, understand and explain behavior, predict future behavior, control and influence behavior - Approaches to psychology o Social: cultural, interpersonal o Individual: individual differences, perception and cognition, behavior o Biochemical: behavior, brain systems, neurochemical - Why study history of psychology o History can be biased: eg. accounts of WWII differ on the east and west sides of the Berlin Wall o Why did a field develop in a certain direction? o Zeitgeist (the spirit of the times): what ideas are suited to the current times - Wilhelm Wundt establishes 1 st psychological laboratory in Leipzig in 1870: considered start of scientific psychology, but not the start of all psychology, psychology starts even earlier - Trepanning: as far back as 6500 BC o Skulls with holes found in Inca, Peru, they were hypothesized to have survived the operation o Hippocrates work On Wounds in the Head recommends and describes methods of trepanation o Use: to fix something wrong with their behavior is the soul in the brain? o Still practiced in modern times, eg. Gusii-man - Ancient Egypt: soul was thought to be in the heart, not the brain, all organs were removed during mummification except the heart, and the brain was discarded, not even stored

2 - Edwin Smith papyrus o Thought to be written by Imhotep, a famous Egyptian doctor (this is debatable) o Oldest known surgical treatise on trauma o Suggested that specific functions are localized in the brain through observations of soldiers with head wounds (cerebral localization) - Discovery of the ventricles: further thinking about localization of functions o Herophilus of Chalcedon, ~300 BC: 2 lateral ventricles (#1, #2), 1 central (#3),one below (#4, discovered later) o 3 cell doctrine: #1 was for collection of information from senses, #2 was for cognition and thinking, #3 was for memory - Phrenology o Franz Josef Gall ( ) and his student, Spurzheim ( ) o Idea that the brain was comprised of separate organs, each localized and responsible for a basic psychological trait o Believed that development of specific brain areas resulted in skull prominences, so bumps on the head could be used to determine a person s personality and intelligence o Jean Pierre Fluorens ( ): tested phrenology by using localized lesions of the brain in rabbits and pigeons - Phineas Gage o Tamping rod through frontal lobe in a railroad construction accident o Changes in behavior after the accident, from hard-working and professional to gross and profane - Lobotomy - Broca ( ) o Patient Tan had a stroke of the left hemisphere, could accurately comprehend language but only say Tan o Showed that expression of language was localized to a small region of the left frontal lobe (Broca s area) - Wernicke ( ) o Presented cases where patients had lesions of superior posterior part of the left hemisphere and had trouble comprehending language o Added evidence to show the presence of highly specialized areas in the brain - Plasticity: A girl with an entire lobe removed was still functional how much of the brain do we actually need? o The brain has specialized areas but it is still a network - Neuro-imaging: is it modern day phrenology? Identifying highly specialized areas doesn t tell us much about how the brain works - How do we gain consciousness? o Nature (most knowledge is present at birth) vs nurture (learning)

3 o Nativism (certain skills and truths are genetically determined, hard-wired into the brain at birth, we primarily acquire knowledge through reason) vs empiricism (the brain has inborn capabilities for learning from the environment but does not contain content, we acquire knowledge through the senses): the argument of how dependent we are on experience when acquiring knowledge o Body, mind or both Dualism: the view that the mind and body exist as separate entities Interactionism: argues that the mind and body are separate, but that there is causal interaction between the two Monism materialism: the belief that nothing exists apart from the material world, consciousness is the function of the brain (reductionism: reducing one thing to another) Monism subjective idealism: the belief that physical objects and events are reducible to mental objects, properties, events, ultimately only mental objects and the mind exist - Willian Molyneux s problem (1688) to John Locke: whether a man who has been born blind and who had learnt to distinguish and name a globe and cube by touch, would be able to distinguish and name these objects simply by sight, once he had been enabled to see o Hubel and Wisel: researched critical learning period for sight o Project Prakash: Fixing eyesight in children with congenital sight problems have problems with image parsing (eg. seeing a line drawing and associating it with the object depicted), but this problem disappears in a few months, suggesting that the visual system needs dynamic information to begin parsing the world - Empiricism: tabula rasa (blank slate) o Aristotle ( BC), believed in knowledge through perception o Although Aristotle was a pupil of Plato, who believed in rationalism - Nativism: rationalism o The view that regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge o Rationalists believe that reality has an intrinsically logical structure; our concepts and knowledge are gained through reason and independently of sense experience o Plato s cave: describes a gathering of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall on which they watch shadows projected on the wall from things passing in front of a fire behind them, and they give names to these shadows, use as an allegory in which the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall do not make up reality at all, for he can perceive the true form of reality, upon returning to the cave, the philosopher is the only one who is right, while the others

4 are ignorant persons who insist that changing shadows are the most real thing (used to show that knowledge is acquired through reason and not senses, hence this is under rationalism) o Plato s triangle: the Platonic form is the ideal triangle with perfectly drawn lines, we classify physical shapes that we experience as inexact representations of geometrically perfect regular figures, instead of exact representations of irregular figures - Empiricism o John Locke ( ) (British): Nothing is in the mind which was not first in the senses, one is born without innate ideas o Rooting reflex: Hanging a baby on a clothesline causes the baby to grip the string seemingly by reflex - An otter using stones to break mussels open o Is this learnt or instinctual? - Materialist: Ludwig Feuerbach ( ) o You are what you eat - Subjective idealist: Bishop George Berkeley ( ) (British) o Objects cannot exist without being perceived o Philosophical thought experiment: if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? - Dualism, interactionist: Rene Descartes (mainland Europe) o Where do the mind and body interact in interactionism? In the pineal gland (not really nope) o Nativist: Cogito ergo sum / I think therefore I am - Another nativist: Emmanuel Kant (mainland European) - Modern day nativist: Noam Chomsky o Language is universal: adopt a baby into another country, the baby grows up speaking that language perfectly indicating that language is an innate faculty; that we are born with a set of rules about language known as the Universal Grammar, Language is an innate faculty of the human mind o Critical period of language acquisition (critical age hypothesis) Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron, was found roaming the woods in 1799, behaved like a wild animal, was taken in by Doctor Jean Marc Itard, who taught the deaf to speak, but failed to learn more than a few words Genie spent 11 years harnessed to an infant s potty seat and deprived of social interaction (and thus of language), even after 7 years of rehabilitation, she lacked linguistic competence - Before Wilheim Wundt, there was Weber and Fechner - Weber ( ) o Weber s law (1834): the change in a stimulus that will be just noticeable is a constant ratio of the original stimulus (originally derived from lifting

5 weight); the resolution of perception diminishes for stimuli of greater magnitude o Eg. if 5g is the noticeable difference between 100 and 105g, then the noticeable difference for 1000g must be 1050g - Gustav Theodor Fechner ( ) o Weber s law is also known as Weber-Fechner law o Father of psychophysics o Focus on sensory systems; we are a product of evolution in a physical environment so our brain, as a product of this product, should obey physical rules - Demarcation: what is scientific and what is unscientific? - Scientific method o Fact, observation o Theory o Hypothesis o Test or experiment o Complications in scientific method: Clever Hans shows the importance of blinding and subliminal perception (stimulus is registered and processed without subject s awareness) Research has shown that subliminal messages can affect mood and bias memory retrieval but cannot trigger complex behavior James Vicary s research: he flashed the messages drink coke and eat popcorn between frames, resulting in rise in coke sales and popcorn and then bans on subliminal advertising (but he later confessed it was a fraud) Republican ad for 2000 Bush campaign shows Al Gore then RATS appears for a frame o Popper and Kuhn: different views of scientific method - Karl Popper ( ): o Book: The Logic of Scientific Discovery o Falsifiability or refutability: a hypothesis must be potentially able to be proven to be false o Popper s swans: the hypothesis all swans are white is a good one because it can be tested o Claimed that Sigmund Feud s theories are pseudoscience due to lack of falsifiability o Popper s view of scientific method: all science is based on hypotheses that must be tested to destruction, sound evidence which does not fit with the hypothesis must logically cause it to be rejected - Thomas Kuhn ( ): o Book: The structure of scientific revolutions o Disagreed with Popper in that there is no obvious science/non-science demarcation

6 o Claimed that progress happens in paradigm shifts, paradigms are part of a world view and can be changed only if anomalies show up that are hard to explain by the current paradigm o Kuhn s revolution: Old theory is well established, many followers, politically powerful, well understood, many anomalies, new theory has few followers, untested, new concepts/techniques, accounts for anomalies, asks new questions o Kuhn s view of scientific method: normal science is the situation when scientists work on various topics within a central paradigm, wrong results are considered to be due to error on the part of the researcher, paradigm shift happens only when conflicting evidence increases t a crisis point and a new consensus view is arrived at - Revolutions in psychology: changes in zeitgeist, often based on big discoveries o However, key players may not change, eg. B. F. Skinner - Introspection (Wilheim Wundt) o Interested in how mind/brain works o Main questions: Search of primitive experiences that constitute thought, consciousness What are the building blocks of our conscience experience Introspection as a technique to look into the brain Auditory sensations, visual (color, form), tactile (pressure, temperature, pain), time The brain puts them together (synthesis or apperception) - Structuralism (USA): Edward Titchener ( ) o Student of Wundt o Based on introspection (having a good look at your own conscious experience in search for the basic elements that built up this experience, can be very subjective) o Structuralism seeks to analyze the adult mind in terms of the simplest definable components and then to find how these components fit together to form more complex experiences as well as how they correlate to physical events o Employs introspection, self-reports of sensations, views, feelings, emotions etc. o Had very strict guidelines for the reporting of an introspective analysis, eg. when a subject was presented with an object he had to report the characteristics of that pencil but could not report the name of the object o Movements that took issue with structuralism: functionalism, Gestalt psychology - Functionalism (USA): William James ( ) o Book: Principles of Psychology

7 o Problem with Structuralism: the stream of consciousness, you cannot divide current thoughts to analyze them because there is a continuous arrival of new thoughts that must interfere o Structure not as important as the function; what you use it for - Gestalt psychology (Europe): Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Kohler o The whole is other than the sum of its parts (not more than ) Eg. subjective contours in optical illusions o Tries to understand the laws of our mind to acquire and maintain meaningful perceptions in an apparently chaotic world o Central principle: the mind forms a global whole with self-organizing tendencies, this whole has a reality of its own, independent of the parts o Perceptions are the products of complex interactions among various stimuli o Gestalt laws = organizing principle Similarity: things which share visual characteristics will be seen as belonging together Proximity: things which are closer together will be seen as belonging together Closure: we tend to see complete figures even when part of the information is missing Continuation: we tend to see in continuous lines - Other movements: behaviorism, psychodynamic theories o Based on animal research: easy access, good subjects, easy to work with, do not have thoughts interfering with tasks, no complaints o Learning: any process through which experience at one time can alter an individual s behavior at a future time, can be learning by reinforcement or punishment - Behaviorism: o Ivan Pavlov (Russia): Pavlov s dog, classic conditioning o John Watson (USA): Little Albert and conditioned emotional response (child heard a loud noise and saw a rat at the same time, was conditioned to fear the rat) the behavior of a person is the product of all one has learned in the past o Edward Lee Thorndike: operant conditioning (about learning, stimulusresponse) Thorndike s puzzle box: animal in box learns to open the puzzle box, time required to escape decreases with successive trials (but the actual results were not so neat) o Skinner: operant conditioning, birds can respond to words by conditioning them to perform a specific action upon seeing that words o Barnabus the rat: can learn to solve a puzzle box, but has to learn many actions separately (eg. climb spiral ramp, lower a bridge etc.) is this actually proof of learning complex behavior? Problem with behaviorism

8 o 2 nd problem with behaviorism: Garcia and colleagues, rats were placed into a special chamber for a relatively long time while exposed to low level X-ray radiation, to keep them healthy, the chamber had water bottles containing saccharin-flavored water, the rats got sick from doses of X-rays and stopped drinking the sweetened water, the rats needed no practice to avoid the water, they learned only after ONE trial, unlike in classic conditioning - Sigmund Freud: psycho-analytic approaches, parallel movement to behaviorism - Cognitive revolution ( ): o Information theory (Broadbent) o Human Problem Solver (Newell and Simon) o Psycholinguistics (Chomsky) o Cognitive Psychology (Neisser) o 7 +/- 2 (Miller) - Emergence of cognitive science o 3 main influences: research on human performance under pressure of WWII (information theory by Broadbent, Miller), developments in computer science especially artificial intelligence (Alan Newell and Herbert Simon), developments in linguistics (Noam Chomsky) o Important conference on 11 Sept 1956 at MIT, Neisser wrote a book on the findings called Cognitive Psychology - Cognitive neuroscience: o Newest movement (zeitgeist) o Neuroscience and cognitive science (psychology) together o Focus on neurobiological or neurophysiological substrates that underlie cognition and mental processes o Measurements: (f)mri, MEG (magnetoencephalography), TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation), PET - History of mental health: from trepanning, demons and supernatural forces to evidence-based treatment/therapy in health and clinical psychology o Trepanning: thought to be for getting rid of evil spirits, continued even after the Neolithic period o Hebrew, Persians: headaches were seen as punishment from God o Egyptians: had forms of therapy (music, dancing, painting) for mental illness o Strange ideas, eg. Greeks and Egyptians: thought that conversion disorder (hysteria) was caused by a wandering uterus o Hippocrates: thought that mental illness had its cause in natural occurrences in the human body pathological problems in the brain Thought that it had to do with 4 essential fluids (humors) in the body; blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile Illnesses were due to imbalances in the humors Blood letting (done all over the world)