Wednesday September 8 Basic Characteristics of Science Science is based on careful observation along with logical reasoning o Measurement statistics experimentation Methods and results are publicly examined and challenged o Peer Review as a criterion of publication o Results should be replicated or obtained by others using the same techniques The Diversity of Psychology A multitude of topics divisions areas of study An Enormous Challenge o The American Psychological Association currently has 54 different The human brain is the most complex physical system ever encountered As your textbook author James W Kalat points out this complexity has the consequence that the answer to many psychological questions is it depends Philosophical Background Ancient Greeks o Speculated on the nature of mind and behavior The Age of enforced Dualism o Body and soul were separate entities o Enforced via penalty of death Descartes 1649 Hobbes 1651 o Limited the function of the soul to thought o Matter and energy exist nothing else i e no soul British Empiricists 1700 1850 o All knowledge is from experience Charles Darwin The Origin of Species 1859 o New species emerge as a result of the process of natural selection The Evolutionary Perspective The human mind evolved to solve problems faced during millions of years of animal evolution and hundreds of thousands of years of human revolution o Natural Selection operates on psychological functions as well as physical o Animals and humans share common behaviors o Many socially cooperative or uniquely human behaviors are also the result functions of natural selection Modularity and Complexity We will discuss some of these at various points in the semester Many of the mechanisms structures and processes for solving problems of living are modular operating as independent units o Damage to various areas of the brain often leads to specific deficits leaving other mental functions intact New mechanisms are added to old mechanisms Wednesday September 8 o The older mechanisms if still functional are retained o The newer mechanisms may regulate the older mechanisms or mediate o Thus there can be multiple layers of control in the brain for information conflicts among them processing and behavior Determinism the assumption that everything that happens has a cause or determinant in the observable world The belief that behavior is cause by a persons independent decisions is known as free will The Mind Brain Problem Kalat Dualism holds that the mind is separate from the brain but somehow controls the brain But How Does It Happen With either dualism or monism there is a tough question to answer o For dualism if the mind and brain are separate types of substances how do they interact o For monism how does mental experience emerge from brain activity Nature vs Nurture What in human behavior and mental life is genetically fixed An ergonomis would be most likely to try to create a better display for a car dashboard
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