CORRECT Answers
What was going on around "The mind can't study itself"
cognitive psychology in the
early 1800s?
Determined we CAN study the mind.
What was going on around
Donders: study on reaction time of decision making
cognitive psychology in the late
Ebbinghaus: study on time course of forgetting
1800s?
Wundt: analytic introspection
Cognitive psychologist in the late
1800s studying reaction time of
decision making. FIRST COGNITIVE
PSYC STUDY!
First task: detection--how long it takes
to press a button after a light comes
Who was Donders? What did he on
study and find? Second task: discrimination--how long
it takes to press one of two buttons
after two different lights come on
Determined that it took extra time to
react to stimuli when two were present
vs one. Argued he was measuring how
long it took to make a decision.
Rise of behaviorism: focused solely on observable behaviors and
environmental stimuli as primary determinants of human actions.
What was going on around "If a behavior is rewarded, that behavior is repeated"
cognitive psychology in the Watson: rejected the concepts of analytic introspection because
early 1900s? he thought it is too subjective/variable
Tolman: originally a behaviorist, but his rat "cognitive map" study
refuted traditional view of behaviorism
, Tolman was a behaviorist. He
performed a study on rats where they
were grouped into 2. The first group
would always turn right for reward
while the other started at diff locations
Who was Tolman? What did he
but the reward was always in the same
study and find?
spot. The second group learned faster,
which refuted behaviorism, showing
that animals could learn complex
spatial relationships without explicit
reinforcement.
The branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of
What is cognitive psychology?
the mind
-experimental psychology (reaction time),
How do we study cognition? -cognitive neuropsychology (study after damage)
-computer modeling
Dendrites: receives signal, many, short,
active current, passive drift of charge
Soma/Cell Body: passes signal, longer,
singular, active charge
Axon: active charge in unmyelinated
sections
Myelin Sheath: wrapped around bits of
What are the main parts of a the axon, speeds up signal, passive
neuron? current
Nodes of Ranvier: follow myelinated
sections to turn action potential back
into active signal
Axon terminals: receive action
potential
Synapse: release neurotransmitters,
passing signal to the next neuron
1. Neurons receive a signal that is in either a chemical form
or a physical form.
2. Sodium diffuses down through the dendrites and cell
How is information transferred in body (passive diffusion, not active).
the nervous system? 3. The electrical signal is activated and travels quickly down the
axon to the axon terminals.
4. This causes the release of neurotransmitters at the
synapse and the process starts all over in the next neuron.
Information is primarily represented by the encoding of
neurons/firing rate of neurons, meaning the frequency at which
individual nerve cells generate electrical impulses (action
How is information represented
potentials), with different patterns of firing rates across
in the nervous system?
populations of neurons encoding specific information about a
stimulus or event
Firing rate + specific neurons encode specific stimuli
What is neuropsychology? Study of how brain injury/illness affects psychology