Week 1 Introduction to Psychology
Theories
- Materialism: Mental life emerges from the physical brain.
- Dualism (from Descartes): Mind and body are separate.
Neurons
- ~100B in human brain
- sensory neurons, motor neurons, interneurons
- Intensity decided by # of neurons firing, frequency of firing
- Antagonist (inhibitor) vs Agonist (booster)
Parts of Brain
- Subcortical Structures
- Medulla: autonomic functions like heart rate, blood pressure, swallowing etc.
- Cerebellum: body balance and muscle coordination.
- Hypothalamus: feeding, sex, thirst, appetites
- Cerebral Cortex
- Responsible for many higher order brain functions, differentiate human from other animals
- Corpus Callosum
- Major pathway to both sides of brain
- Permits data received on one side to be processed in both hemisphere
- Aids motor coordination of left and right
Brain Functions
- Lateralization: Certain part of the brain is specialized in some mental processes.
- Left: language, number, reasoning, logic
- Right: imagination, art, music, 3D forms
- Contralateral Organization: Sensory information is sent to opposite hemisphere. Certain hemisphere controls the motion for the opposite side.
Sigmond Freud
- Psychoanalytical Divisions of the Mind
- Id: primitive, instant gratification, unconscious
- Ego: rational, compromise between Id vs. Superego
- Superego: social rules, moral standards
- Psychosexual Stages
- Oral (birth - 1yr): weaning not correctly leads to eating too much as an adult later.
- Anal (1 - 3yrs): issue with toilet training leads to excessive cleaning
- Phallic (3 - 5 yrs): genital pleasure, lead to excessive masculinity in males or need for attention for females
- Latency (5 yrs - puberty): sexuality is repressed. Participate in hobbies, school, friendships.
- Genital (puberty on): sexual feelings re-emerge and are oriented towards others. Fixated adults have their energy tied up in earlier stages.
- Defense Mechanisms: Defend Ego from Id
- Displacement: Redirect energy and focus to more appropriate targets.
- Sublimation: Displacement to activities that are valued by society.
- Projection: Reduce anxiety by attributing unacceptable impulses to someone else
- Rationalization: Reasoning away anxiety-producing thoughts.
- Regression: Retreating to a mode of behavior characteristic of an earlier stage of development.
- Reaction Formation: Replacing threatening wishes and fantasies with their opposites.
- Failure to repress impulses lead to Hysteria, e.g blindness, deafness, panic attacks, gaps of memory etc.
B.F. Skinner
- Behaviorism: Emphasis on learning, Anti-Mentalism (scientific approach), No differences across species
- Habituation: People get used to things over time. An adaptive mechanism to keep us focusing on new objects and events.
- Classical Conditioning: The learning of an association between one stimulus and another. Sensitivity to a cue that an event is about to happen allows you to prepare for that event.
- Instrumental Conditioning: Learning what works and what doesn’t.
- Schedule of Reinforcement: Fixed vs Variable, Ratio vs. Interval
- Partial Reinforcement Effect: If you want a behavior lasts over time, reinforce it occasionally.
Week 2 Development and Language
Jean Piaget
- Theory of Cognitive Development
- Schemas: Frameworks that develop to help organize knowledge.
- Assimilation: Taking new information or experience to fit into existing schema.
- Accommodation: Schemas are changed or created to fit new information.
- Developmental Stage Theory
- Stage 1: Sensorimotor (age 0–2)
- Information gained through senses and motor actions
- Children perceive and manipulate but don’t reason.
- Lack of object permanence (objects exist regardless of one’s actions or perception)
- Stage 2: Preoperational (2–7)
- Symbolic thought emerge; Develop low-level of reasoning; Egocentrism
- Not able to see things from different perspective
- Stage 3: Concrete operational (7–12)
- Understanding of mental operations leading to increasingly logical thought; Less egocentric; Inability to reason abstractly
- Stage 4: Formal operational (12+)
- Abstract and scientific reasoning
Language
- Phonology
- Morphology
- Syntax
Language Development Timetable
- Birth to 4 months: Preference for melody of own language; Sensitive to all phonemes
- 7 months: Babbling words about objects, actions, properties
- 12 months: First words — objects, actions, properties; Some sensitivity to word order
- 18 months: Learning words faster; Two word sentences; Function morphemes (in, of, a, the)
- Past puberty: Learning is more difficult.
Week 3: Perception and Attention
Perception: The problem of perception is hard. Successful perception involves educated, unconscious guesses about the world.
Perception of brightness
Perception of objects
- Gestalt Principles: Proximity, Similarity, Closure, Good continuation, Common movement, Good form
Perception of depth
Attention: We attend to some things but not others. We miss a surprising amount of what happens.
Memory
- Implicit memory vs. Explicit memory
- Semantic vs. Episodic
- Recall vs. Recognition
- Memory Storage: Sensory Memory to Short Term Memory through attention; Short Term Memory to Long Term Memory through encoding/retrieval
- Average short term memory is 7+/-2 chunk of information
How to get things into long term memory?
- Depth of processing
- Mnemonics
- Understanding
How to get things out of memories?
- Retrieval cues
- The Compatibility Principle
- Searching strategies
Why do we forget things?
- Decay
- Interference
- Change of retrieval cues, e.g. move houses
- Forgetting through brain damage
- Retrograde amnesia: loss of memories prior to stroke or accident
- Anterograde amnesia: loss of capacity to form new memories
How do our memories become distorted?
- Expectations
- Leading questions
- Hypnosis
- Repressed memories: wipe out unpleasant memory
- Flashbulb memories: you remember the story because you talk about it often instead of what actually happened.
