Psych 240 Exam 1 - Polk Questions With 100% Correct!!

Introspectionism - Looking inside, it's the first thing you try when you want to know what's going on in your own head (reliable observations about what's going on in your head to figure out how things work) - dominant approach in late 1800's Wilhelm Wundt & Edward Titchener - Categorized thoughts in terms of introspectionism (organ, # of sensations) Problems with Introspectionism - 1. Is it reliable? Inner head thoughts can't be replicated or validated because it was just his thoughts so we don't know if they are accurate/verified - need data that another person can reproduce. 2. It's a private/personal/subjective experience. 3. We ourselves don't have access to everything in our heads, we aren't aware of the mechanisms that cause thoughts and realizations. Behaviorism - Since we can't look inside our heads, we focus on the stimulus and response it causes, and make an association between the two so someone else can do the same experiment. Ivan Pavlov - Interested in digestion and Nobel Prize in physiology (salivation of dogs) John Watson - Most extreme behaviorist - not only can we NOT see in the black box, but there isn't much going on in there (all thought is just stimulus response) - thought is a sub vocal speech, don't have to worry about memory or other difficult terminology. B.F. "Fred" Skinner - Moved psychology to be rigorous science that other people could replicate and results could be verified, emphasis on what anyone and everyone can observe - tried to explain all of human behavior in terms of stimulus response behaviors and which ones change based on reinforcement Problems with Behaviorism - 1. Ignores what goes on in the black box 2. Can't account for diversity of human behavior - language isn't just a response, it's learned3. We can't directly observe all data, there are other theories that have extreme explanatory power (ex. memory can't be directly observed, but plays a huge role) Cognitivism - We recognize we can't look at what's going on in there but we can hypothesize about the mechanisms and test the predictions of what stimuli lead to what responses - see if results happen the way we predict Much of human behavior can be understood in terms of how people think - synthesis of behaviorism and gestaltism Computational view of mind & Information processing - Key feature/historical moment of cognitivism - maybe human mind is like information processing computer, can do so much more/is more general - taking information in and doing computation on its own, then spitting out results (some people are hard core materialists saying that we are machines, other don't take metaphor as seriously) Dependent Variables - The changing variable (what is being measured/analyzed - the output) as a result of manipulating independent variable Ex. reaction time, accuracy, brain activity Independent Variables - The manipulated variable (what you manipulate/the stimuli that causes the result) Main Effects and Interactions - Changing an independent variable affects the dependent variable - graphically it could affect the slope (the dependent variable is changing because of your manipulation) Graphically: If there's a horizontal line it means there is no main effect** Interaction occurs when the effect of one variable has depends on another independent variable Graphically: If the independent variable lines are parallel, there is no interaction**