psych 355 uw exam 1 UPDATED ACTUAL
Questions and CORRECT Answers
Birth of cognitive psychology - CORRECT ANSWER - 70 years ago
- 1950-1960s radical shifts in approaches to the study of cognition
Behaviorism - CORRECT ANSWER a psychological movement characterized by its focus on
outwardly observable behavior
Information-processing approach - CORRECT ANSWER focusing on the rules and algorithms that
encode, store, transform and apply information
Behavioral neuroscience - CORRECT ANSWER used animal models to understand neural
mechanisms underpinning normal and abnormal psychological processes
Emotion in cog psych - CORRECT ANSWER - problematic for cognitive psychology since it was
difficult to make objective measurements
- difficult for researchers to ensure that any emotional event or stimulus gave rise to the same changes in
each experiment participant
- cognition and emotion may be intertwined
- brain areas involved in emotion are not always different form those the subserve cognitive functions
Daniel Kahneman and Nobel Prize - CORRECT ANSWER - awarded the nobel prize in economics
- work on judgement and decision making altered assumptions about how people make economic
decisions
Cognitive maps/representations - CORRECT ANSWER mental representations of locations within
an individual's environment
Franciscus Donders - CORRECT ANSWER - set up the first cognitive experiment (1868)
,- two conditions:
- condition 1: press a button as fast as you can when you see the stimulus
- condition 2: press the right button as fast as you can when you see the stimulus on the right, and the left
button for stimuli on the left
- cognitive subtraction
Subtraction method - CORRECT ANSWER In functional magnetic imaging, brain activity is
measured in two conditions: one with and one without the involvement of the mental process of interest.
Subtracting the two conditions shows regions of brain specifically activated by that process.
Hermann von Helmholtz - CORRECT ANSWER - believed that the mind must actively engage in
relatively automatic unconscious inference
- UNCONSCIOUS INFERENCE: the mind makes "best guesses" in order to turn sensory impulses into
percepts of the external world
Hermann Ebbinghaus - CORRECT ANSWER - the first person to study memory scientifically and
systematically; used nonsense syllables and recorded how many times he had to study a list to remember
it well
- THE FORGETTING CURVE: estimate of the rate at which information fades from memory
Ernst Weber - CORRECT ANSWER - changes in external stimulation lead to changes in what the
mind perceives
- JUST NOTICEABLE DIFFERENCE: the minimum perceptual difference between two stimuli needed
for the difference to be detected
- Weber's law: the precise formula specifying the relationship between a physical aspect of the
environment and the mind's ability to perceive it
Alan Turing - CORRECT ANSWER English mathematician who conceived of the Turing machine
and broke German codes during World War II (1912-1954)
-
, Gustav Fechner - CORRECT ANSWER overarching attempt to reveal laws governing the
relationship between intensity of external stimulation and perceptual experience
- Fechner's law: the principle that intensity of subjective experience of a stimulus increases in proportion
to the stimulus' measurable intensity
- established field of psychophysics
Savings method - CORRECT ANSWER - ebbinghaus, measure percentage of time saved from
original list at different delays
Edward Tolman - CORRECT ANSWER researched rats' use of "cognitive maps"
John Watson - CORRECT ANSWER founder of behaviorism; generalization; applied classical
conditioning skills to advertising; most famous for Little Albert experiment, where he first trained Albert
to be afraid of rats and then to generalize his fear to all small, white animals
Wilhelm Wundt - CORRECT ANSWER german physiologist who founded psychology as a formal
science; opened first psychology research laboratory in 1879
- psychology became a science in 1879
Structuralism - CORRECT ANSWER an early school of psychology that used introspection to
explore the elemental structure of the human mind
Noam Chomsky - CORRECT ANSWER language development; disagreed with Skinner about
language acquisition, stated there is an infinite # of sentences in a language, humans have an innate native
ability to develop language
- argued that children not only learn language through imitation and reinforcement
- children say things they have never heard and can not be imitating
- children say things that are incorrect and have not been rewarded for
- language is determined by an inborn biological program
Questions and CORRECT Answers
Birth of cognitive psychology - CORRECT ANSWER - 70 years ago
- 1950-1960s radical shifts in approaches to the study of cognition
Behaviorism - CORRECT ANSWER a psychological movement characterized by its focus on
outwardly observable behavior
Information-processing approach - CORRECT ANSWER focusing on the rules and algorithms that
encode, store, transform and apply information
Behavioral neuroscience - CORRECT ANSWER used animal models to understand neural
mechanisms underpinning normal and abnormal psychological processes
Emotion in cog psych - CORRECT ANSWER - problematic for cognitive psychology since it was
difficult to make objective measurements
- difficult for researchers to ensure that any emotional event or stimulus gave rise to the same changes in
each experiment participant
- cognition and emotion may be intertwined
- brain areas involved in emotion are not always different form those the subserve cognitive functions
Daniel Kahneman and Nobel Prize - CORRECT ANSWER - awarded the nobel prize in economics
- work on judgement and decision making altered assumptions about how people make economic
decisions
Cognitive maps/representations - CORRECT ANSWER mental representations of locations within
an individual's environment
Franciscus Donders - CORRECT ANSWER - set up the first cognitive experiment (1868)
,- two conditions:
- condition 1: press a button as fast as you can when you see the stimulus
- condition 2: press the right button as fast as you can when you see the stimulus on the right, and the left
button for stimuli on the left
- cognitive subtraction
Subtraction method - CORRECT ANSWER In functional magnetic imaging, brain activity is
measured in two conditions: one with and one without the involvement of the mental process of interest.
Subtracting the two conditions shows regions of brain specifically activated by that process.
Hermann von Helmholtz - CORRECT ANSWER - believed that the mind must actively engage in
relatively automatic unconscious inference
- UNCONSCIOUS INFERENCE: the mind makes "best guesses" in order to turn sensory impulses into
percepts of the external world
Hermann Ebbinghaus - CORRECT ANSWER - the first person to study memory scientifically and
systematically; used nonsense syllables and recorded how many times he had to study a list to remember
it well
- THE FORGETTING CURVE: estimate of the rate at which information fades from memory
Ernst Weber - CORRECT ANSWER - changes in external stimulation lead to changes in what the
mind perceives
- JUST NOTICEABLE DIFFERENCE: the minimum perceptual difference between two stimuli needed
for the difference to be detected
- Weber's law: the precise formula specifying the relationship between a physical aspect of the
environment and the mind's ability to perceive it
Alan Turing - CORRECT ANSWER English mathematician who conceived of the Turing machine
and broke German codes during World War II (1912-1954)
-
, Gustav Fechner - CORRECT ANSWER overarching attempt to reveal laws governing the
relationship between intensity of external stimulation and perceptual experience
- Fechner's law: the principle that intensity of subjective experience of a stimulus increases in proportion
to the stimulus' measurable intensity
- established field of psychophysics
Savings method - CORRECT ANSWER - ebbinghaus, measure percentage of time saved from
original list at different delays
Edward Tolman - CORRECT ANSWER researched rats' use of "cognitive maps"
John Watson - CORRECT ANSWER founder of behaviorism; generalization; applied classical
conditioning skills to advertising; most famous for Little Albert experiment, where he first trained Albert
to be afraid of rats and then to generalize his fear to all small, white animals
Wilhelm Wundt - CORRECT ANSWER german physiologist who founded psychology as a formal
science; opened first psychology research laboratory in 1879
- psychology became a science in 1879
Structuralism - CORRECT ANSWER an early school of psychology that used introspection to
explore the elemental structure of the human mind
Noam Chomsky - CORRECT ANSWER language development; disagreed with Skinner about
language acquisition, stated there is an infinite # of sentences in a language, humans have an innate native
ability to develop language
- argued that children not only learn language through imitation and reinforcement
- children say things they have never heard and can not be imitating
- children say things that are incorrect and have not been rewarded for
- language is determined by an inborn biological program
