Psych 240 1st EditionExam # 1 Study Guide Lectures: 1 - 8Exam #1 Review SheetPsychology 240Lecture 1: History & methodology – Jan. 7, 20151. Introspectionism (Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener): look inside to see what’s going ona. Problems:i. Difficult to verify – how do we know they’re not lyingii. Private events, not publiciii. End product, not the process itself2. Behaviorism: psychology is the “science of behavior”a. Ignore the mind (unobservable) – just stimulus to responsei. Ivan Pavlov – classical conditioning w/ dogsii. John Watson – extreme: there was nothing in thoughtiii. B.F. “Fred” Skinner – if you consistently reinforce an action then the response will followb. Emphasis on what can be directly observedi. Stimuliii. Responsesiii. Reinforcements/rewardsiv. Rats in mazesc. Problems:i. Can’t account for the diversity of human behavior1) Example: languageo We can hear a sentence that we have never heard before and still understand it despite the fact we have not been conditioned to learn itii. Limiting science to the observable is a bad idea1) No one has ever seen an electron but it doesn’t mean they don’t exist3. Cognitivism: infer what’s going on inside the boxa. Computational view of mind: mainstream underlying assumption that the mind is somehow like a computer programb. Information Processing – similar to a computeri. Takes in info, processes it, and creates a reaction4. Interpreting Graphsa. Dependent variables: what you measure/analyzei. Usually represented on the y-axisii. E.g. reaction time, accuracy, brain activityb. Independent variables: what you manipulate to see how we affect the dependent variablei. Usually represented on the x-axisii. E.g. number of items to be memorizediii. Amount of alcohol ingestediv. Passage of timec. Main effects: when changing the independent variable has an effect on the dependent variablei. Occurs whenever you don’t have a horizontal line so anything other than a horizontal line = main effectd. Interactions: two or more independent variables INTERACT1) when the effect of one independent variable is different depending on the effect of the other independent variableii. Parallel lines indicate there is no interactioniii. Lines that are not parallel indicate interaction5. Mental Chronometry: the study of how long it takes to perform mental processesa. Until the mid-1800’s, people thought that the nervous system conducted impulses at the speed of light and the mental processes were instantaneousb. Stimulus  processing  more processing  responsei. Each stage: 1) RECEIVES information from the previous stage2) TRANSFORMS the information3) SENDS information to the next stage6. Simple Reaction Time (detection task): press the button when you see a red or green lighta. This task involves perceiving the stimulus and then executing the responseb. All that the subject has to do is detect the stimulus then press the key7. Choice Reaction Time (decision task): press left button for red light; right button for green lighta. There are multiple possible stimuli and responses, and you have to decide which response to make based on which stimulus is presentedb. Need both detection and decision8. Donder’s Subtraction Method and Problems: using the detection and decision task, you can collect reaction times for both simple choice/decision tasksa. Donder’s idea was to estimate the amount of time required by the decision phase by subtracting the two reaction timesi. Ie.) Simple RT = 197msec Choice RT = 285msecResults: detection = choice – detection = 285msec – 197msec = 88msec1. this gives us an objective measure of some completely unobservable processesb. Problems: necessary assumptionsi. Assumption of Pure Insertion: all stages remain the same when the new one is added1) Problem: adding the decision stage may influence another stage (like detection)ii. Assumption of Additivity: the durations of all stages add together to yield the reaction time1) Problem: stages might operate in parallel  underestimate decision timeiii. Assumption of Knowledge of Stages1) Problem: you probably don’t know the stages and it is imperative that you do or the logic won’t worko Stimulus detectionmemory lookupdecisionresponse Despite making sense, the order of these stages would not work with Donder’s Theoryc. Why it’s importanti. There are similar assumptions in modern research and similar criticisms applyii. Contributions1) The idea that you can measure mental processes2) The choice reaction procedure9. Problem with confirming evidence is that it is weak. We can never truly prove that a hypothesis is true. In order to prove something right we need to prove all other hypotheses wrong10. Eliminating Alternative explanations: allows us to affirm the correct hypothesis and disprove all others (Huppert and Piercy did this)11. Huppert & Piercy Amnesia Experimentsa. Experiment 1 (1997)i. Examine the memory performance of patients w/ Korsakoff’s syndrome (disease that affects chronic alcoholics)ii. They gave 5 Korsakoff’s amnesiacs and 5 control patients a series of tests for memory for pictures1) Both groups were given 20 pictures to memorize. Later they were shown 40 pictures,20 old and 20 new, and had to distinguish btwn the new pics and the ones shown previouslyiii. Results: the controls were 93% accurate, Korsakoff’s amnesiacs were 75% accurateb. Proposed Hypotheses that explain the resultsi. Encoding: having trouble getting memories into fuel tankii. Storage: hole in fuel tankiii. Retrieval: get the fuel in the tank and it stays in there but it can’t get to the engine (clogged)c. Falsifying Storage Explanation (but not storage and retrieval)i. Experiment 2: allow Korsakoff’s subjects to spend up to 8 times longer studying the pictures. Controls studied them for one second only. Patients studied them for 4-8sec. This way, both groups scored 80% correct when first tested (after 10min). Basically, they were trying to makethe initial encoding (what gets written to memory) the same for the two groups1) Results: After 1 day and 7 days, the accuracy was still the sameo This tells us the problem was encoding b/c once you compensate for that problem, they are equivalent to the control subjects. Rate of forgetting is thesame in the two groups. This is exactly what you’d expect if they just have an encoding problemo One might wonder whether patients still forgot faster but just