Please read the chapter assigned for this week.
(Reading Schedule:
After reading the chapter, please respond to the following questions:
Of the various aspects of History & Systems presented in the chapter, which did you find the most interesting? Why? Which did you find least interesting? Why? What are three things you read about in the chapter that you think will be the most useful for you in understanding History & Systems? Why? What are some topics in earlier chapters that relate or fit in with this chapter? How so?
Please make sure you use the terms, terminology and concepts you have learned so far in the class. It should be apparent from reading your post that you are a college student well underway in a course in psychology.
Make a list of key terms and concepts you used in your post.
Let me know if you have any questions.
--Dr. M
After reading the chapter, the most interesting topic I found was Bartlett’s concepts on memory. Bartlett focused on the schema. Schemata were hypothetical mental structures that represent knowledge. Schemata influence our current and future perceptions on life and memory. Bartlett noticed that subjects tended to remember things that were more toward the beginning and end of a sequence. The items in the middle were not remembered as well. Also things that were similar were remembered more often than ones that were not similar in ways. I really didn’t find anything to particularly uninteresting in this chapter. All the material seemed important to know to understand the other concepts
The 3 things I feel that are important form this chapter are; artificial intelligence, dichotic listening, and selective filter. Artificial intelligence is the study of whether machines can be said to act with some degree of intelligence. This is important because we used technology highly in today’s world and understanding how such things work in important. Many of the machines today work or have a system that acts like a human brain, so AI helps us understand how our brains work. Dichotic listening and selective filtering are important in helping us understand how the mind choices to store things. They both explain how the brain picks and choose what information to store into long term or short term memory. Dichotic listening is a procedure in research on selective attention in which a person wearing headphones hears one message in one ear and a second message in the other ear. Selective filtering is a model of selective attention emphasizing our tendency to separate information on the basis of physical characteristics then focus on one message, while filtering out other ones.
Terms: Artificial intelligence, dichotic listening, selective filter
The thing I found most interesting from the chapter was the section on personality psychology. This was an idiographic approach to psychology. This is a detailed analysis of the unique individual and examined ways of determining how an individual differs from another. On the other hand, an approach that analyzes how behaviors act in general is described as nomothetic. Personality psychology has both principles. It examines general traits (nomothetic) and measures the degree to which an individual has them (idiographic). Allport did much of the early work on personality psychology. He established traits as the basic unit of personality. This was a particular pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving that was characteristic of a person and a means of distinguishing that persona from others. Cardinal traits were traits that were dominant in a person. A cardinal trait was dominant enough that it could distinguish one person from another solely on that trait’s description. For example, if you had a quiet friend or a funny uncle. Central traits are the dozen or so traits that are not as obvious as cardinal traits but would still be used to describe a person. Secondary traits are less obvious and can only be seen in a few behaviors. To accurately measure an individual’s personality, Allport insisted that a case study be used. A case study is an in-depth analysis of a person.
The thing I found least interesting from the chapter was the section about artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) was a field of cognitive psychology that examined whether machines could act with a degree of intelligence. There are two main categories in this field. The first category studies human intelligence and attempts to write computer programs that simulate human cognitive processes. Simon and Newell were two scientists in this field that developed the Logic Theorist and the General Problem Solver. The Logic Theorist was an example of an algorithm. The Logic Theorist solved problems through formal knowledge. This is similar to an algorithm, which is a set of rules guaranteed to produce a solution by working systematically through all possible steps. The General Problem Solver had the ability to solve a broader range of problems. A heuristic, much like the GPS, was a creative strategy that didn’t guarantee a solution but was much more efficient than an algorithm. The heuristic used by GPS was called a means-end analysis. It did this by examining the current state and the goal state, then assessing the difference. It then attempted to reduce this difference with a behavior. The second category of AI was developing computer programs that would most efficiently complete tasks regardless of how humans would go about it. This led to the question of whether or not computers could “think”. Someone who believed that computers had the ability to “think” due to the rules and processes that humans programmed into them were said to be strong AI. To test this, Turing invented a test. The Turing test asks a computer and a human a set of questions. The answers are then given to a person who tries to decide which answers are from a human and which are from a computer. Someone with a weak AI would argue that computers can only manipulate symbols and lack the ability to understand. Searle, a weak AI, composed something called the Chinese Room problem. If you were sitting in a room with a book of translated Chinese symbols and you were asked a question in Chinese, you could translate it, write your own response, and put it back into Chinese for the other person. This wouldn’t mean that you understand Chinese, just that you could manipulate the symbols.
The three things that are most important for understanding the information theory, artificial intelligence, and the alternative fields that stemmed from cognitive psychology. The information theory worked to describe the flow of information through the system. A bit was used to describe the amount of information between two equally likely alternatives. Miller took special interest in the information theory and developed it further. His most famous research occurred in his descriptions of the limits on our immediate memory. He termed the information currently being held in our immediate memory a chunk. We can reorganize the data in our memory so we can fit more into our chunks by recoding. Work through dichotic listening (subjects receive two different channels of information at the same time via headphones) introduced the idea of selective filter. This occurred when we extracted the message from one source of information, then select the other to spend more memory detailing.
TERMS: nomethetic, idographic, Allport, trait, cardinal trait, central trait, secondary trait, case study, artificial intelligence, algorithm, heuristic, means-end analysis, Turing test, strong AI, weak AI, Chinese Room problem, chunk, recoding, dichotic listening, selective filter
One thing was interesting was reading about the artificial intelligence movement. Reading about Turing and his Turing Test, which is when a questioner can’t tell the difference between a human and a computer, was interesting because it is something we try to meet every week. (Although I’m inclined to think that a computer’s blog would have less personality than a human, although I’m sure that it could have personality programmed into it…)
Least interesting was learning about Karl Lashely’s serial order problem, which was the problem of explaining sequences of behavioral events in neurological terms. While I recognize that this was a moderately big thing in psychology, because it discredited the current behaviorist view, I just didn’t find reading about it very interesting.
Most important to learning about the history of psychology was reading about Fredrick C. Bartlett, who did work with memory. He said that research should focus more on the memorizer and less on the stimuli, which surprised me that this wasn’t happening from the beginning. He developed the term schemata, or at least the contemporary definition for it, which is the active organization of past reactions or experiences into meaningful wholes. He developed a series of memory tasks which were similar to eyewitness memory studies in that they showed how unreliable memory can be.
Also important was learning about some of the external influences on cognitive psychology. This is how someone came up with the computer metaphor which is that the computer takes information for the environment, processes it internally and gives output, like a brain. It also brought us the information theory which talks about the amount of information (a bit) that would enable a decision to be made between two equally as likely alternatives. Lastly it talked about Grammar which is the application of a hierarchical set of rules which result in language. And Linguistic universals which are common principles shared by all language.
George A Miller came up with chunk memory, which is information that is in immediate memory, and said that it could hold seven plus or minus two inside each chunk. He recognized the ability for humans to reorganize data, therefore squeezing in more information, and called this recoding.
Donald Broadbent came up with dichotic listening, which is using multiple communication channels at once. As well as the selective filter which is when confronted with two streams of information at one time they are separated and only one is taken in.
Most important was a man named Neisser who wrote a book that was the first major summary of lab research in cognitive psychology. He also gave the name cognitive psychology. He also led a big movement of ecological validity, which was the everyday ability to cognitively adapt to the environment.
A lot of the material from the behavioral chapter was mentioned in this chapter, and applied because it was talking about the switch from behavioral psychology to cognitive, and there was a switch in beliefs and emphasis in the field of psychology. It also talked about some linguistic ideas from Ebbinhaus, and discrediting, or looking at his area of study in a different way.
Terms used: schemata, serial order problem, computer metaphor, information theory, grammar, linguistic universals, chunk, recoding, dichotic listening, selective filter, cognitive psychology, Turing test
I found the idea of AI and Turing tests to be most interesting because we are using computers, AI, and technology to help unlock the human mind. Simon and Newell create the Logical Theorist and then the General Problem Solver. They were created using algorithms and heuristics. An algorithm is a set of rules guaranteed to produce an eventual solution to a problem by exhaustively working through all possible solutions. A heuristic is a creative rule of thumb that, while not guaranteeing to produce a problem solution, is likely to produce one and will be more efficient than an algorithm, (means-ends analysis). The use of Turing tests was to see if an individual could distinguish between a computer and a human in separate rooms by asking a series of questions.
I did not find Bartletts memory research very interesting. He provided 5 cards in a specific sequence and had participants wait 30 minutes before asking questions about them. His studies show what modern studies of eyewitness testimony show today, lack of accuracy, addition of items not actually seen, and how leading questions and damage the effect of memory.
I think Piaget and developmental psychology will help me most understand the history of psych. Piaget used genetic epistemology or an interest in understanding the growth and development of knowledge within an individual to determine how we think as we age. This helps us by allowing us to look at the past of an individual and focus on particular points to see how they could have been mentally damaged or tramautized.
Terms: AI, Turing Tests, Algorithm, Heuristic, Bartlett, Piaget, Developmental
Bartlett’s views on memory were pretty informative. He believed that when memorizing, the memorizer actively organizes the material into meaningful wholes called schemata. He defined them as “active organisations of past reactions, or of past experiences, which must always be supposed to be operating in any well-adapted organic response.” For example, from our experiences, we create a schema about a certain thing, like death, this schema will influence our current and future perceptions of death and affect our memories of the experiences.
Bartlett’s construction of memory and his experiment with that I found to be quite interesting. He had participants read a story and then recall it after different amounts of time, from days to weeks to months to years. The story they read didn’t make a lot of sense and was very vague and random, so when they would recall the story, many of them would construct their own passages/stories and meanings depending on their own schemas about the theme.
Lashley’s serial order problem was interesting because it raised the question of how we memorize things in a more complex form. Things like learning and memorizing how to play songs on a violin and where to put your fingers occur too rapidly to be solely based on elements that are chained together to form a contiguous link.
Noam chomsky’s grammar and linguistic universals were very important to psychology, and to the rest of history. The rules of grammar allow the individual to generate a virtually infinite number of grammatical sentences while enabling the person to immediately identify nongrammatical sentences. Also the ability to use grammar is instinctively human and separates us from non-humans. He believed that all languages shared common principals which he called linguistic universals and that the human brain is structured to be able to understand them automatically.
Linguistic universals, grammar, schemata, Bartlett, Chomsky, lashley, serial order problem
Cognitive Dissonance was coined by Leon Festinger and it is an important concept in Social Psychology. It says that people are motivated by thoughts, feelings, and actions. When two thoughts or actions come into conflict with each other a state of emotional or cognitive discomfort occurs. People will then take the steps necessary to bring a consistent state back. His work with this concept brought experiments into social psychology and the one that i found most interesting was with the participants who were asked to lie for money and those who received more had more seeming justification for the lie so they kept the view that their original experiment was boring (even though they were told to lie and say it was interesting). Paid less, however, did not see the payment as proper justification so they actually changed their view of the experiment to that it was interesting.
Nomothetic approaches to deal with humans in generally, but it is also important to deal with individuals and differences between, this approach is Idiographinc and this approach is attributed to Gordon Allport. In studying the individual he brought to life the importance of the Case Study, where we study one aspect or individual to help us in draw conclusions about personality.
Nomothetic, Idiographic, Gordon Allport, Case Study, Personality, Cognitive Dissonance, Leon Festinger, Social Psychology
What I found really interesting in this chapter was about Gordon Allport and his concepts on an individuals personality. Allport was the champion of the idiographic ideal that everyone had a unique personality and could be studied individually. I'm also learning about him in another class and he has really given psychologists a reason to study traits. According to Allport, the basic unit of personality was the trait or a particular pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving or the characteristic of a person. He also described 3 varieties of traits. The first one was a cardinal trait in which were attributes that were dominant in a person that could be easily described from others. Ex: need for power. The second is a central trait in which an individual can be describes by many attributes making up ones personality. Lastly, is secondary traits in which are less noticable characteristics that only close members or friends could identify. These are very important terms in psychology and not only did he come up with these, he also came up with the case study, or an in-depth analysis of a person to study personality. Now case studies are done over a variety of groups, not one individual, and they are very important for collecting research.
One thing that I didn't find not necessarily interesting but confusing was Hebbs cell assembly and phase sequences. He referred to cell assembly as the basic unit of neurons that become associated with each other when activated with one another. Phase sequences are higher levels of organization with several cell assemblies. Reading about this cell and synapse stuff bores me a lot and I found it even hard to read even about Hebb synapses and how they change? I'm just a little confused with this whole section on Hebb.
The three most important things that relate to this class would have to be artificial intelligence considering testing has been done due to machines especially in our present and future to come. The second thing important for understanding in psychology is learning about George Miller and how he contributed chunk (info. held in immediate memory) and recoding (ability to recognize data) into psychology. Lastly, I believe Allport contributed greatly to psychology and his case studies are found today and used for current research.
Terms: trait, cardinal traits, central traits, secondary traits, case study, chunk, recoding, idiographic approach
One of the interesting things in this chapter was the evaluating of cognitive psychology. B.F. Skinner was one of the leading behaviorists of the second half of the twentieth century. Cog psych grew in 1967. Changes were then created by Neisser. Nieisser stated that laboratory tradition in cog psych they failed to yield enough useful information about info processing int he real world. he referred to as ecological validity, And that was about it. I feel like in these chapters if they would not spread out the main subjects into many chapters then a more thourough and concise deffinition could be made for most of these terms and ideas.
The next topic was Artificial intelligence. This primarily because it was next after the start of the cognitive theory section. AI researches search in two different main fields. human intelligence, like problem solving. and though not stated i'm assuming the second group would be technology. Simon and Newell used this with their creation of the LT and GPS. they said that an algorithm is a set of rules guaranteed to produce a solution by working systematically. and a Heuristic is a more creative strategy.
Two sections i did not care to read was The roots of modern cognitive psychology and Bartlett. Mainly because i did not care to but here is some info on them incase this is on the last test. Cog psych was credited to researchers such as Piaget, and Barltett. Bartlett was into memory study. Bartlett challenged Ebbinghaus tradition with an emphasis on the effects of rote repetition and memorization. Bartlett defined the schema (info into groups) as active organization. People with different experience and from different cultures will have different schemata about death.
Terms: Bartlett, Cog psych, Schema, Rote Repetition, Memorization.Simon, Newell, Neisser.
more on cognitive psychology. cognitive science was an interdisciplinary field that includes cog psych, linguistics, computer scienc, cultural anthropology and epitemology. George miller traced the origins of cognitive science to a 1956 syposium.
Skinner objected to the creation of hypothetical mental mechanisms. the second criticism is the metaphor, with its human-as-machine implication. cog psych influences other subdisciplines. in social psychology there is research on social cognition.
developmental psych, piaget simple demonstratoins of complex cognitive phenomena.
cog psych gained movement from problems that developed within the behaviorists/associationst tradition.
One topic that I found interesting in Chapter 14 is about artificial intelligence. In the chapter artificial intelligence is defined as the field that attempts to examine whether machines can act with some degree of intelligence. Logic Theorist (LT) was created to solve problems in formal logic and General Problem Solver (GPS) was created to solve a broader range of problems. LT focuses on algorithms which is a set of rules guaranteed to produce a solution by working through all the possible steps systematically. GPS is a heuristic and requires a more creative strategy that does not guarantee a solution, but it more efficient than an algorithm. I found this to be interesting because technology is so advanced today it often goes unrecognized how far it has truly evolved.
One topic that I found less interesting was about Jean Piaget. This section focused on his life, findings, and accomplishments. His findings led to the theory of cognitive development. Piaget believed that children did not just know less than adults, but they also thought totally different. He created experiments with infants and hypothesized that they were learning cause and effects by observing their tendency to systematically repeat their actions and from this, came object permanence. I found this to be interesting the first time I learned it, but reading about it again is not quite as thrilling. I took developmental psychology and a lot of time was focused on Piaget, making his less interesting to read about now.
Three topics that are important to understand from this chapter are cognitive dissonance, cognitive development, and artificial intelligence. Cognitive dissonance was developed by Leon Festinger and he developed one of the more important social psychology theories of the twentieth century. The theory of cognitive dissonance was created from experiments with extreme precision and extensive attention to detail. This is important to understand because it is one of the most important movements in Psychology. Cognitive Development is important to understand because it involves many different theories that have developed throughout history. It’s especially important to understand these as Psychology majors. Artificial intelligence is the third topic that I believe would be helpful to understand. It is important because Psychology has come a far way and it’s important to understand where it originated. Algorithms and general problem solving techniques are also still being used today.
Some topics from Chapter 14 that relate to previous chapters are personality psychology and research. Personality psychology is mentioned in Chapter 12 when Henry Murray is mentioned and his colleague Gordon Allport. Allport is mentioned more in Chapter 14 because he used many of the same terms Hugo Munsterberg used to describe the ideographic approach. This approach focuses on a scientific strategy that concentrates on unique, individual takes. Research is mentioned in almost the entire chapter we have studied thus far. Beginning with Descartes and moving on to the four main areas generally studied in Psychology, mentioned in Chapter 14. The first one involves the study of the relationship between brain and behavior, which is now called neuroscience. The second area is social psychology and how behavior is influenced by social factors. The third area is personality psychology which is the study of individual differences in various personal traits. The last area is developmental psychology which is the study of how behavior changes as we age.
Terms: Artificial intelligence, Logic Theorist, General Problem Solver, Logic Theorist, General Problem Solver, algorithms, heuristics, Jean Piaget, cognitive development, cause and effect, object permanence, cognitive dissonance, Leon Festinger, social psychology, personality psychology, Gordon Allport, Henry Murray, Hugo Munsterberg, research, neuroscience
Something I found interesting from the chapter is serial order problem. This term was proposed by Karl Lashley and is the problem of explaining sequences of behavioral events in neurological terms. Examples range from finger movements used in playing the violin, to the memorization of a list of words, to the production of language in sentences. I thought this was interesting because it looks into how we act/behave when we take part in certain tasks. We participate in tasks like these every day and we don’t even think about how we do them. Our brains are very complex and Lashley believed this also when he argued that the brain was a more complex system that exercised organizational control over patterns of behavior.
Something that was less interesting from the chapter was the concept of recoding introduced by George Miller. Recoding is simply a process of reorganizing information to increase the amount of information per chunk. Chunk refers to the information being held in immediate memory. These two things are related to the fact that we as humans have the ability to reorganize data and because of this we can fit more information in our brains. When we build up these larger chunks of information we have more information stored than before. The reason I found this to be less interesting was because it was pretty basic. It wasn’t too exciting of a topic even though it involves an essential function of the brain, memory.
Three things from that chapter that I believe to be important in understanding the history of psychology are cognitive science, selective filter, and traits. Cognitive science is the field that includes cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, cultural anthropology, and epistemology. These are all very important in understanding psychology as well as the history of psychology. This field has assisted in answering many questions and will continue to do so in the future. Selective filter, which was proposed by Donald Broadbent, is when there are two streams of information that we are presented with and our limited capacity system separates the information on the basis of physical characteristics, enabling us to filter out one message and select the other for attention and further processing. I think this is important in understanding the history of psychology because we cannot remember and store everything that we learn and hear whether it is in class or in the real world. We select the things that are most interesting to us and we remember those things better than others. We are able to filter out the information that we don’t want to know as much. Finally, traits are important in understanding the history of psychology. According to Gordon Allport, traits are the basic unit of an individual’s personality. The reason I think this is important is because psychology involves studying people’s behaviors and how they act in different situations/environments and traits are an essential part of this. There are different kinds of traits: Cardinal traits which are not possessed by everyone, and are attributes that were dominant in a person to the point where describing a person’s cardinal trait would identify that person to others; central traits are those that provide a reasonable accurate summary description of an individual; and secondary traits are the less obvious ones that appear only in a few certain behaviors and usually only known by people who are close to that individual.
One topic I thought that fit into this chapter that came from a previous chapter was complex idea. Complex ideas were combinations of simple ideas. I think this relates to chunks and recoding because when we are participating in recoding, we are using complex thoughts or ideas, which help us to increase the amount of information in each chunk. Another term that fits into this chapter is individual differences. I thought that this related to the idea of traits. Each person has their own individual traits which makes them different from everyone else. Individual differences refer to variation among members of a particular species and differentiated one person from another. These two concepts fit hand in hand.
Terms used: Karl Lashley, serial order problem, recoding, chunk, George Miller, cognitive science, selective filter, traits, Donald Broadbent, Gordon Allport, Cardinal traits, secondary traits, central traits, complex idea, individual differences
One thing I found interesting in this chapter is the theory of cognitive dissonance. Leon Festinger who was a social psychologist created it. This theory states that people want to stay consistent with their thoughts and feelings. If people have two thoughts going on that are inconsistent with each other they will try to correct it so they can go back to a state of consistency. Festinger did several tests over this in which he deceived participants in his studies. This brought up a lot of questions of ethics in psychological testing. Social psychology got a bad reputation as being a study that deceives participants in the studies for it. Festinger ended up leaving the field because he found people’s problems with his deceiving to be annoying. He thought deceiving to the extreme was wrong, but telling a small lie to a participant was not a big deal.
Bartlett’s idea of schemata was also interesting to me. Schemata are organized wholes that humans for in their heads from material they know. This is a more active process than practicing and repeating something. The schemata are created from past experiences we have had throughout our life and the associations we make from these experiences. He used memory tests to support his theories. One was using five different military men’s faces and asking subjects to recall what each face looked like in order. This study showed how inaccurate people can be when recalling information, which is similar to eyewitness testimony studies. He also used a memory test by having British people read a Native American story. He found they had difficulty remembering it, and often changed parts of the story to make more sense to them in British cultural terms.
I did not find Miller to be a very interesting topic. It started to get too mathematical for me. He worked with bits of information. A chunk was information what was held in the immediate memory. He also came up with recoding, which allows someone to fit more information into a chunk by reorganizing the data. One way he studied cognitive psychology was through dichotic listening. Participants would listen to two sets of information, one through each ear, at the same time. If a person was trying to listen to one message, they were unable to recall information from the other message.
I think ecological validity is important to know, because it it what helped to change the focus from experimental psychology to a psychology that could be applied to everyday people and how to make their lives better. Also the two different approaches to science called nomothetic and idiographic are important because they are the two different types of research of humans that can be done. Nomothetic look at humans in a general sense and what affects all of them. Idiographic looks at unique humans on an individual basis. Personality psychology has both of these features, as it looks at the uniquely different personalities of all humans, but find ways in which different humans can share general characteristics.
Behaviorism is related to this topic because it was the opposite of cognitive psychology, which looked at mental processes in a more complex way. Lashley also worked to prove associationism wrong, saying that the brain had a much more complex system than just associated several things with each other.
As I read this chapter it was interesting to read about the development of cognitive psychology as defined as, well, there really was no simply given definition…not even in the definition bit of the book. It is quite simply put, the psychology that researches cognition. Closely tied with cognitive psychology was cognitive science which is an interdisciplinary field that includes cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, cultural anthropology, and epistemology. What all these fields have in common is that they are all interested in learning about the nature of knowledge, its components, its sources, its development, and its deployment. So basically it is meta-knowledge, or trying to gain knowledge about knowledge. This is a very interesting thought, the knowledge of knowledge. And yet it is important to understand. Some important tests concerning this were the Turing test and the Chinese Room problem. The Turing test asked individuals to see if they could discriminate the answers between a human and a machine. According to these researchers if there was no significant difference between the two then computers can think just like humans. The Chinese room problem sought to define what actual understanding was. If you give a person a book with all Chinese symbols in it with definitions and could compose a response to a native Chinese speaker then did you actually understand Chinese? For this scientist, Searle, he said no, but that true learning involved a much deeper level of understanding rather than simply being able to manipulate symbols according to a set of rules. Both of these systems dealth with artificial intelligence, which was a attempt to see whether machines can act with true intelligence. Watch out though, this is how the Terminator got started. Some ways to try and get machines to act intelligently was the use of algorithms, a set of rules guaranteed to produce a solution by working systematically through all possible steps, and heuristics, a ‘rule of thumb’ that doesn’t guarantee a solution, it is more effective than an algorithm because it uses a more creative ‘thought process’ that takes shortcuts. Both of these would then be run through means-ends analysis. This analysis dealt with assessing a current state of operations with the ultimate goal state in mind and then measuring the differences between the two, making adjustments to reduce the difference, with the ultimate goal being to have the current state = the goal state. This was all wildly interesting.
Another area of interest was looking at all the other areas of research that were related to psychology in some way. One of the main people to look at in this time is Jean Piaget and his creation of developmental psychology. Surprisingly he was one of the first to look at how we developed throughout our lives, from birth to death. He made observations such as an understanding of conservation of matter that younger children did not understand but eventually grasped as the understood this along with object permanence, knowing that what is out of sight is still there, although it cannot be seen. The way in which he studied children was through genetic epistemology, or how different developmental processes, that change with age, and how these hypothetical mental structures that he called schemata developed within an individual. He was also on board with the cognitive psychologists in his belief that children were active formulators of their knowledge rather than passive recipients of their experiences. By the way, schemata are defined as information that has actively been organized into meaningful wholes, ideas, or constructs. Other important research areas included Social psychology and Leon Festinger and his theory of cognitive dissonance. This theory stated that people are motivated to be consistent in their thoughts, feelings, and actions. Whenever people have 2 or more thoughts that are inconsistent with each other then cognitive dissonance will occure which is a state of emotional and thought discomfort. Whenever, people experience this they are motivated to reduce it and return to a state of internal consistency. I loved his example of the intelligent person who smokes. The last area of additional research was that of personality psychology. Gordon Alllport was the man who initially brought this to a science. Initially psychology had taken a nomothetic approach, which is describing principles that presumably affect all of mankind. What personality psychology did was changed that to an idiographic approach, which was a scientific strategy that concentrates on the unique individual. This then led to case studies, which are in-depth analysis of an individual person.
The least interesting aspect of these chapters was the fact that the brain was compared to the simple model of the computer. It was cool how other areas of research were being tied into psychology, like the introduction of computers and programming. However, by simply reducing the aspects of the mind to a computer-like system I feel as though we are selling the human mind short. There is no possible way that we can ever hope to explain the human mind and, therefore, we do a huge injustice to it by simply reducing it to such a simple model. I do understand the correlation between the mind and computers but there is so much beneath the surface that has yet to be discovered. Although psychologists at the time used this to defend the mind as an information processor I can’t help but feel as though they are still buying heavily into the idea of behaviorism, in that outside forces are always affecting us.
The first item that is useful for understanding history and systems is the idea of cognitive science. This idea stated that there were several fields of science that were all looking for the same basic thing. They were different in their specific goals but they were all working towards one end; in this case it was to gain knowledge about knowledge. The second idea that assists in understanding history and systems is that memory had finally become better understood and made into a computer model, though it is not perfect. Memory and learning are very closely tied and when you study one you are basically the same things. This demonstrates that when you study one specific item there are other closely related items. When there is a breakthrough in memory, for example, then you can apply it to learning in an academic setting to make things easier for students to remember. This practical usage of psychology is what makes it successful in America. The third and final thing that helps us understand history and systems was the brilliant man Jean Piaget and all of his workings. I am currently enrolled in a Developmental Psychology class and a lot of what we learn is based off of this man’s work. He died over 30 years ago and yet we still heavily use his teachings and research. However, what this drives me to think is why hasn’t his methods been challenged and tested on a more thorough level. I mean really, it’s been 30 years, certainly there are some advances or even just additions that we can make over that time period to come to a better, fuller understanding of developmental psychology.
Some items in this chapter that related to previous chapters included the change from behaviorism to cognitive psychology. The behaviorists took America by storm in the mid 20th centuy, but it did not spread to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, the rest of the world kept its head on straight and looked at psychology as a whole; rather than getting wrapped up into one individual component of it like Behaviorism. When America did decide that it wanted to look at multiple aspect of psychology Behaviorism quietly took a back seat, not thrown out as irrelevant, but now to be on par with all other aspects of psychology. Being there were two different schools of thought they argued over fundamental aspects and eventually come to a conclusion by looking at the one with the most followers; this is a paradigm. Once one major train of thought has been established during which the paradigm guides research designed to provide empirical support for it; this is known as a period of normal science. It also took a look at memory, and people had been doing this for a very long time; all the way back to Tolman and his cognitive maps. True, he was looking at rats and learning, but there was certainly a component of memory involved.
Terms
Schemata, serial order problem, information theory, bit, grammar, paradigm, normal science, chunk, recoding, selective filter, TOTE unit, ecological validity, cognitive science, AI, algorithm, heuristic, means-ends analysis, Turing test, Chinese room problem, cell assembly, phase sequences, Hebb synapses, cognitive dissonance, nomothetic, idiographie, case study, Jean Piaget, genetic epistemology
I really liked Bartlett’s memory study called the method of repeated reproduction. He had people read a short, odd story then asked them to recall as much of the story as they could. He asked them at different intervals of time also which showed that the longer they went the less accurate the story was. He also noticed that the people tweaked the story to make it work for their own culture and to make it make sense to them. This is really interesting to me. I know this happens a lot.
I found the part of the chapter about linguistics a little bit dull. This was in the part of the chapter about external influences of psychology. Chomsky studied language. This seems a little like common sense to me but, it basically is that grammar is why we understand words. See they thought maybe it was operant or classical conditioning which was the key to why we understand language. They realized thought that language is understood much too quickly for it to be conditioned. Linguistic universals were common principals and structures in language that the human brain was able to understand.
I found the part of the chapter about personality to be interesting. Allport was the main guy who did most of the work for personality psychology in the beginning. There are two forms, Idiographic, and nomothetic. Idiographic is a detailed analysis of each unique individual, it studies individual differences in people. Nomothetic is based on behaviors. So Nomothitic is the behavior and the idiographic is the degree at which they are integrated into the person’s personality. Cardinal traits are the main part of a persons personality and central traits are supporting characteristics that would be used to describe a person.
The part about the Turing test wasn’t as interesting to me as other parts of the chapter. I have heard about it in another class. It is when the questioner can’t tell the difference between the computer and a real human. Artificial intelligence was studied to see if machines actually had intelligence or not. This reminds me a lot of the recent jeopardy game that was played against a computer.
TERMS: method of repeated reproduction, linguistics, Chomsky, grammar, classical, operant conditioning, linguistic universals ,Allport, Personality psychology, nomothetic, Idiographic, cardinal traits, central traits, Turing test,
The most interesting section in chapter 14 to me was Bartlett on Memory. He thought much deeper than the average researcher did back then in proposing that when we do research on memory, there should be more focus on the attributes of the individual being researched rather than what they are memorizing. He also provided evidence to back up his claims by developing an experiment. His experiment was pretty much set up so that the subjects were given plenty of time to study the pictures he gave them, then 30 minutes away from them while having conversations that had nothing to do with the experiment. Mission was to get their mind off of whatever their focus was SUPPOSED to be to see how well they remembered what they studied. Although this was a very creative idea, some called out his "experiment" and said it was more of a "controlled demonstration". As the section goes on to talk about him and what he did it shows that he was a very persistent experimentalist that was always coming up with new experiments to back up the claims and hypothesis he came up with.
The section on Artificial Intelligence was the least interesting to me. It was interesting awhile ago when the topic was first introduced to me, but now it's not because I don't believe in it. A machine is only as smart as the creators make it to be, so it is "borrowing" (lack of a better term) the intelligence of the creators. Since I already had my position on the topic before reading about it in this book, it was almost one of those sections that made me want to just skip right over it. If they make a machine that can do something like sense when you're in a bad mood by looking at you or something then I may second guess my position, but until then I'm sticking with what I believe.
The Evolution of Psychology, Brain & Behavior, and Personality Psychology sections I feel would be the best sections to discuss to develop a better understanding of the history of psychology and how it came about and has grown to what it is today. I believe this because all three pretty much start with what people who don't understand the ins and outs of psychology as a whole stereotype it to be (mind reading and behavior).
Behaviorism and Mental Testing are two areas in the earlier chapters that would fit in pretty well inside of chapter 14, because this chapter discusses behavior and also personality which is a product of both Mentality and Behavior.
The section that I found most interesting in Chapter 14 was Frederick Bartlett on memory. I found it interesting because of how he questioned Ebbinghaus' research. Bartlett thought that research on memory should focus more on the attributes of the memorizer and less on the nature of the stimulus materials. He said that the memorizer makes what the memories meaningful and are referred to as schemata. He devined schemata as active organisations of past reactons, or of past experiences, which must always be supposed to be operating in any well-adapted organic response. He developed a series of memory tasks to prove his theory. He used the pictures of sailors on post cards method. I found this intersting because it makes me realize today how I use my memory and I use it more like this than what Ebbinghaus proposed. I did not find the section on influences external to psychology interseting because it wasn't about psychology. The development of computer science was one of the things that were used as metaphors relating to human behavior.
The three things that I feel are most important to the history of psychology in the chapter are Bartlett and memory, the evolution of cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence. I feel that Bartlett is important to the history of pscyhology because of his research on memory and his contributions to how we can study memory. I feel that the evolution of psychology is important to the history of psychology because it shows how cognitive psychology has changed over time. After Neisser's book, Cognitive Psychology, the demand for cognitive psychologists skyrocketed. Cognitive psychology became widely interacted into the psychology mainstream. Cognitive science was rooted out of this evolution as well. Lastly I feel that AI is important because it is our world today. Without artificial intelligence we would not have an army worth a damn, we would not have computers, etc. Algorithms and rules are set to allow machines to act with intellgence.
Some ways that this chapter relates back to old chapters is by comparing Ebbinghaus and Bartlett. Ebbinhaus took an approach to memory based more on the test and Bartlett focused more on the memorizer. Each contrasts the other. Another way that this chapter relates to previous chapters is by the changing demand in cognitive psychology and how it evolved over time.
terms: Bartlett, Ebbinghaus, schemata, sailor model, external influences, evolution of cognitive psychology, cognitive psychology, Neissner and "Cognitive Psychology", cognitive science, Artificial Intelligence, algorithm
Cognitive psychology mainly started in Europe while american psychologists were having a field day with behaviorism.
Frederick Bartlett- wrote a cognitive book: Remembering: A study in Experimental and Social Psychology. but was not taken very well in the US. However, today it is considere just has important as Ebbinghaus's. Bartlett was all about memory- he believed that we actively oranges material into meaningful wholes that he referred to as SCHEMATA (active organizations pf past reactions, or of past experiences, which must always be supported to be operating in any well-adapted organize response"
The book gives the example that our schema will related to the concept of death dn. in turn it will influence our current and future perceptions of death and affect our memory of these experiences.
THe cognitive movement gained speed from the problems problems that developed with behaviorist tradition- Lashley showed that associationist principles could not explain the problem of serial order, and behaviorism seemed incapable of explaining language behavior.
Cognitive psych really blew up in the 70s, with a psychologist Neissser arguing that cognitive psych was too lab heavy, and vouched for ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY (research with relevance for the every day cognitive activities of people trying to adapt to their environment). He believed that we must make a greater effort to understand cognition s it occurs in the ordinary environment and in the context of natural purposeful activity. A commitment to the study of variables that are ecologically important rather than those that are easily manageable"
So by the 80s and 90s, cognitive research reached eyewitness memory and long term recall of topics learned in school. COGNITIVE SCIENCE (interdisciplinary field that inclues cog psych, linguistics, computer science, cultural anthropology and epistemology) developed. Cognitive Scientists study things like artificial intelligence, which is the field that attempts to examine whether machines can act with some degree of intelligence.
BF skinner was Cognitive Psych's biggest critic, saying that the creation of hypothetical mental mechanisms which all the easily could be reified into "explanatory fictions"
terms: schemata, cognitive science, skinner, bartlett, ecological validity
This chapter focused on cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology started developing gradually in the 1950's 1960's and 1970's. It developed momentum and support from problems that were developed withing the traditions of the behavorists and associantionists. It continued to grow rapidly after the production of Ulric Neisser's Cognitive Psychology in 1967. In 1970, Neisser also pushed for more research in cognitive psychology. He wanted more ecological validity. Which is research with relevance for the everyday cognitive activities of people trying to adapt to their environment. One interesting topic that I found in this chapter was Frederick Bartlett. He studied a variety of things but his big focus was on memory. He completed his research of memory while still in Cambridge University for his doctoral thesis. He raised many questions in his research. One of his arguments was that research on memory should focus more on the attributes of the memorizer and less on the nature of the stimulus materials. Also, he believed that the memorizer actively organizes the material into schmeata. Schemata are active organisations of past reactions. He was more interested in the attitudes and interests of the memorizer that the nature of the stimulus itself. He has two important experiments. One a series of five postcards and one was that used the method of repeated reproduction.
terms- ecological validity, Ulric Neisser, Frederick Bartlett,
Bartlett's area in this chapter interested me also because I'm a person that thinks deep on a lot of things I encounter. As a Psychology major it's always interesting to see other psychologist that thought back then like you do now.