Theoretical Psychology notes ALL lectures Radboud

Theoretical psychology
Lecture 1 – 26/01/2020

From phrenology to scientific theory
Famous psychologists in history;
- Wilhelm Wundt; first psychological laboratory in Leipzig (1879) and first psychological
journal.
- Lightner Witmer; founder of clinical psychology and first clinical journal.
- Mary Calkins; designed technique of paired associations of memory and first female APA
president.
- Helen Thompson; first studies of differences between men and women with experimental
methods.
- William James; first bestseller of psychology about integration of psychological knowledge.
- Robert Woodworth; wrote bestseller Experimental Psychology.

Pre-scientific approaches
Theories of the human mind have been designed since the Greeks;
- Aristotle; mental processes proceed by way of associations.
 All senses come together in common sense, which is eventually used for thinking,
memory and other mental processes.
 He saw the brain as a blank slate; people are born without build-in mental content.
 Sensoristic and atomistic; all mental content is due to sensory input, elementary
sensations are the building blocks of the more complex contents of the brain.
- Law of contiguity; if two things repeatedly occur together, then the occurrence of one thing
will remember us of the other.
 Hebb’s law; if neurons fire together, synaptic changes occur. -> evidence of long-
term potentiation in the hippocampus of rabbits.
 Aristotle and Locke; learning, memory, attention, perception and will work the same
in different content-domains.
- Association is now connectionism!
 David Rumelhart & James McClelland; use computer simulations to test whether
theoretical assumptions really explain the findings.
- Franz Josef Gall; phrenology -> brain has domain-specific functions -> vertical faculties.
 Different memory functions for different content domains.
 Each domain-specific function has a specific location in the brain; locationalism.
 When a function is well-developed, it occupies more space in the brain -> lead to
bumps on the skull, development can be assessed by determining the size of the
bump on the skull.
 All brain functions are double-sided.

Four types of pseudo-science;
1. Physiognomy; persons character is reflected by features in the face.
2. Mesmerism; magnetic forces which work at the distance, which may cure mental disorders.
3. Mental healing; mental illnesses can be cured by establishing erect thinking.
4. Spiritualism; belief that particular persons (medium) may establish contact with spirits that
are dead.
 Debate between William James and James Cattell
 James Randi; medium is very clever in hiding that he gets the answers from “the
spirits of the dead” by you. -> cold reading.

Neuroanatomy, time and psychophysics

, Controversy over holism vs. localization (Flourens vs. Gall)
- Flourens attempted to create evidence for his ideas with experiments.
- Performed lesions on rabbits and pigeons;
 Lesions to brainstem; loss of vital functions
 Lesions to cerebellum; loss of motor coordination
 Lesions to cerebral cortex; loss of higher mental functions but not of specialisations.
- Functions are distributed across the hole cerebral cortex; holism.
 Patients were pigeons and rabbits, so unclear if this also held for the cortex of
humans.

Broca’s discovery; localization of language aspects in the brain of humans.
- Patient Leborge; damage to left inferior frontal cortex causes speech production difficulties.
Wernicke’s language model; association model of language in the brain.
- Posterior part of the brain – Wernicke’s area – stores auditory images of words.
- Broca and Wernicke are connected, so motor image and auditory image in the brain
integrate.
- Concept images are sensory images of the object that the word refers to; colour, shape etc.
-> embodied cognition; many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are
shaped by aspects of the entire body of the organism.
 Wernicke; these concepts are distributed in different areas of the brain
 With the concept images in mind, you can activate the word
- Broca’s aphasia; comprehension is spared but difficulty in pronounciation.
- Wernicke’s aphasia; difficulty understanding speech, but speech production is spared.
- Based on sensoristic, atomistic and associative factors.

Conduction of nerve impulses takes time; van Helmholtz and Müller
- Helmholtz measured speech of nerve impulses
Speed of mental processes;
- Donders; participant A has to utter a syllable and participant B has to repeat it
- Determining duration of mental processes;
A. Simple reaction; press a button when a stimulus is presented, perception-action
task.
B. Choice; choosing between two options, perception-recognition-choice-action task.
C. Go/no-go; press a button when the right stimulus is presented, perception-
recognition-action.
- C – A = recognition duration, B – C = choice duration; mental processing takes time and can
be measured.

Sternberg’s additive factors method; identify mental stages of processing.
- Clarity of a stage (low vs. high resolution stimuli) should influence additional stages (choice).
- Number of choices also influences choice process.

Weber; psychophysics
- Just noticeable differences forms a constant ratio
- Fechner; Weber’s observation implies a logarithmic relation between stimulus intensity and
psychological quantities.
 Difference between high and lower number corresponds psychologically in a
different way; S = k log R
- Stimuli need to have a certain minimal strength to be observational.

Modularity of the mind