Psychology
Chapter 10
Reasoning and intelligence
Reasoning: The process by which we use our memories in adaptive ways
Intelligence: our general capacity to reason
We reason by using our memories of previous experiences to make sense of present experiences or to plan the future.
To do so, we must perceive the similarities among various events we have experienced.
Fast and slow thinking
Cognitive processes could be placed on a continuum from automatic to effortful.
It is useful to think of any cognitive process as falling somewhere along this continuum.
When solving problems, people have two general ways of processing. (Dual-processing theories).
In many cases, when presented with a problem, you cannot shut of the ‘fast’ system, even if it may interfere with your arriving at the correct solution to a problem via the ‘slow’ system. (Like the stroop interference effect).
The ‘fast’ implicit system effortlessly produces impressions, feelings and intuitions that the ‘slow’ explicit system considers.
The effortful ‘slow’ system has potential control over the ‘fast’ system. (But when making routine decisions, the ‘fast’ system is in control. Like reading and making sense of language). The fast system even makes simple decisions, some of which are in contradiction to the correct solution that can only be derived by using the slow system.
Fast processing is not unique to humans. But no other species comes close to the effortful, explicit cognition displayed in Homo sapiens.
Analogies as foundation for reasoning
Two kinds of reasoning that depend quite explicitly on identifying similarities are:
Success on analogical reasoning problems in highly dependent on the similarity between objects.
Use of analogies in scientific reasoning
Scientist often attempt to understand and explain natural phenomena by thinking of analogies to other phenomena that are better understood.
Uses of analogies in judicial an political reasoning and persuasion
Analogies are a fundamental component of human thought and persuasion.
Such reasoning is useful to the degree that the structural relationships in the analogy hold true.
Analogical reasoning: Fast or Slow?
It depends.
When the similarity relations are very familiar, processing is fast and almost automatic.
When the analogies are not so simple, slow, effortful processing is needed to solve the problems.
Successful performance on challenging analogical reasoning problems is related to components of executive functions in both adults and children.
Some researches claim that a rudimentary form of analogical reasoning is available to infants.
Inductive reasoning and some biases in it
Inductive reasoning (or induction) is also called hypothesis construction.
(Because) the inferred proposition is at best and educated guess, not a logical necessity.
Your past observations of relationships have led you to induce a general rule.
Reasoning by use of analogies are examples of inductive reasoning.
Inductive reasoning is reasoning that is founded on perceived analogies or other similarities. The evidence from with one induces a conclusion is, ultimately, a set of past experiences that are in some way similar to one another or to the experience one is trying to explain or predict.
Thinking like a scientist
Scientific reasoning: generating hypotheses about how something in the world works, and hen systematically testing those hypotheses.
Scientific reasoning can improve with practice.
Scientific reasoning involves a high level of metacognition (the ability to think or to reflect upon what you know). It is a form of effortful thinking and develops over childhood and differs in individuals.
The availability bias
When we reason, we tend to rely too strongly on information that is readily available to us and ignore information that is less available.
The confirmation bias
People’s natural tendency is to try to confirm rather than disconfirm their current hypotheses. This is the confirmation bias.
The predictable-world bias
We are so strongly predisposed to find order in our world that we are inclined to ‘see’ or anticipate order even where it doesn’t exist.
The predictable word bias is a tendency to engage in inductive reasoning even in situations where such reasoning is pointless because the relationship in question is random.
Deductive reasoning: (or deduction) is the attempt to derive logically the consequences that must be true if certain premises are accepted as true.
Inductive reasoning is reasoned guesswork
Deductive reasoning is logical proof, assuming that the premises are true.
The concrete nature of deductive reasoning
Deductive problems: logic or content?
If people used formal logic to solve syllogisms, then it should not matter whether the statements in the problem are consistent with everyday experience, violate everyday experience or are nonsensical. All that should matter is the formal structure of the problem.
But! The content does matter!
The bias to use knowledge rather than formal logic in answering deductive reasoning questions can be construed as a bias to think inductively rather than deductively.
Our natural tendency is to reason by comparing the current information with our previous experience.
Part of the skill in solving problems that contradict our knowledge gained from past experiences lies in our ability or willingness to suppress that knowledge.
Humans evolved to be sensitive to being cheated when dealing with others and developed ‘cheater detectors’ that are limited to social contracts.
Deontic reasoning: reasoning about what one may, should or ought to do.
Elements of insight
Insight problems: problems that are specially designed to be unsolvable until one looks at them in a way that is different from the usual way.
Two examples of insight problems
The mutilated checkerboard problem.
The candle problem
Breaking out of a mental set: broadening perception and thought
Insight problems tend to be difficult because their solution depends on abandoning a well-established habit of perception or thought, referred to as a mental set, and then viewing the problem in a different way.
Functional fixedness: the failure to see an object as having a function other than its usual one.
Discovering a solution
Deliberate attention to aspects of the problem and materials that were not noticed before can lead to the sudden perception of a solution.
Functional fixedness and tools: a special case?
Functional fixedness is a common phenomenon.
It seems to be particularly prevalent when tools are used to solve problems.
From early age, people readily assume that tools are designed for an intended function → design stance
Given the central role of tools in human life and throughout human evolution, functional fixedness with respect to tools may be an adaptation.
Knowing what a tool is ‘for’ and using it exclusively for that purpose thus provides the user efficiency, although at the cost of some flexibility.
Unconscious mental processes may lead to insight
Research suggest that the mental capacities required for solving insight problems are different from those required for deductive reasoning.
People’s ability to solve insight problems (and not syllogisms) correlates positively with their creativity.
Working-memory capacity (with correlates positively with deductive reasoning) does not correlate with the ability to achieve insight in insight problems.
People solve insight problems the best if they take an incubation period (some time off from the problem, do something else and then return to the problem)
During incubation period the person is unconsciously reorganizing the material related to the problem while consciously doing and thinking about other things.
Incubation appears to facilitate insight, not deduction.
Deduction requires conscious attention. It is a form of effortful slow thinking.
Unconscious fast mental processes (which do not involve working memory) are more important for solving insight problems than for solving deductive reasoning problems.
For example, reaching insight by priming.
The value of a happy, playful frame of mind
People are better at solving insight problems if they are made to feel happy than if they are in a serious or somber mood.
A happy mood improves people’s performance on various test of creativity and on the ability to see whole patterns, rather than just parts, in test of visual perception.
Broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions.
Negative emotions tend to narrow one’s focus of perception and thought. Those emotions lead people to focus only on the specific emotion-evoking objects and to think only routine, well-learned ways of responding.
Positive emotions (like playfulness) broaden one’s scope of perception and thought and increase creativity. They are felt when there is no imminent danger and one’s immediate biological needs are relatively well satisfied. That is the time to think creatively and to come up with new ideas and ways of dealing with the world.
Play is a time when people regularly view objects and information in new ways.
Responses of unschooled non-westerners to western-style logic questions
The way people approach test, their understanding of what is expected of them, is culturally dependent.
The difference in reasoning may be one of preference more than of ability.
An east-west difference: focus on wholes versus parts
East Asians perceive and reason more holistically and less analytically than do westerners.
In perceptual test, East Asians tend to focus on and remember the whole scene and the interrelationship among objects, whereas westerners then to focus on and remember the more prominent individual objects of the scene as separate entities, abstracted from their background.
East Asians’ attention to background context, and interrelationships apparently helps them to reason differently in some ways from the way westerners do.
Intelligence: the variable capacity that underlies individual differences in reasoning, solving problems, and acquiring new knowledge.
A brief history of intelligence testing
The subjects are grouped into four categories.
The scoring system for every modern intelligence test uses results obtained from large samples of individuals who have already taken the test.
These results are uses as normative data to translate each individual’s raw score on an intelligence test into an IQ score.
The mean is 100.
The validity of intelligence tests as predictors of achievement
IQ scores do correlate moderately well with grades in school. The correlation coefficients in various studies range from 0.3 to 0.7
The relation between IQ and employment could be secondary to the fact that people with high IQ s perform better in school.
The strength of the correlation between IQ and Job performance depends on the type of job.
IQ scores also predict health and longevity.
The concept of general intelligence and attempts to explain it
General intelligence (g)
The positive manifold: people who scored high on any one test also, on average, tended to score high on all other tests.
Thus some common factor is measured by every mental test. This is g, general intelligence
General intelligence is the underlying ability that contributes to a person’s performance on all mental tests.
In their view, every mental test is partly a measure of g and partly a measure of some more specific ability that is unique to that test. The best measures of g are derived from averaging the scores on many diverse mental tests.
Fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence
General intelligence is not one factor but two.
Cattell based this theory largely on the factor analysis of scores on many different mental tests.
Measures of fluid and crystallized intelligence change differently with age.
Crystallized and fluid intelligence scores correlate positively.
Mental speed as a possible basis for g
Might some basic cognitive abilities underlie general intelligence?
Inspection time; the minimal time that subjects need to look at or listen to a pair of stimuli to detect the difference between them.
There is a correlation.
Executive functions as a possible basis for g
Executive functions (working memory, switching and inhibition) are, either together or separately, hypothesized to underlie g.
People with different levels of intellectual attainment differ in executive functions.
People who perform well on intelligence test are those who can control their mental resources in a way that allows for efficiency in problem solving.
Some psychologist consider fluid and executive functions to be essentially the same concept.
General intelligence as an evolutionary adaption for novelty
From an evolutionary perspective, it is reasonable to assume that general intelligence evolved in humans as a means of solving problems that are evolutionarily novel.
The answer to the nature-nurture question concerning IQ is it depends. It depends on just whose IQ you are comparing.
Nature, nurture and IQ differences
The environment and genes are both essential for any trait to develop.
How do nature and nurture interact to produce a particular pattern of development or of intelligence?
The concept of heritability
Heritability: the degree to which variation in a particular trait, within a particular population of individuals, stems from genetic differences as opposed to environmental differences.
It is quantified by a statistic called the heritability coefficient, which ranges from 0 (none of the differences in a trait are attributed to inheritance) to 1 (100 percent of the differences in a trait are attributed to inheritance).
Heritability does not say anything about how much of any trait is due to genetic factors, only what percentage of the difference in a trait within a specific population can be attributed to inheritance, on average.
The more variable environments are between people in a population, the lower heritability will be.
So it is relative.
Family studies of the heritability of intelligence
Comparing groups of people who differ in their degree of genetic relationship to see how much they differ in the trait in question.
Tightly controlled studies of adoptees and twins.
A common way to estimate the heritability of IQ is to compare the correlation in IQ scores of identical twins with that of fraternal twins.
Heritability = (r identical twins – r nonidentical twins) X 2
The heritability of intelligence is 0.52 so 52 percent of the difference in intelligence between people is attributed to genetics.
Another way to assess heritability if IQ is to study the IQ correlation of pairs of identical twins who were adopted at an early age into separate homes.
By using this method, the estimated heritability for IQ is 0,73
The studies suggest that genetic differences account for roughly 30 to 50 percent of the IQ variance among children and for considerably more than 50 percent of the IQ variance among adults in the population that were studied.
Heritability estimates of IQ vary with environmental factors for people in the same population.
Heritability increases with improved environmental conditions. Harmful environments have an especially strong impact on the development of certain traits, whereas average or above-average environments will have little influence beyond that contributed genetics.
Fluid ad crystallized intelligence separately indicate that the two are about equally heritable.
The short-lived influence of family environment
As long as unrelated siblings (raised together) are still children, their IQ does correlate positively with each other, but the correlation is lost completely by the time they reach adulthood.
Taking all the studies together, the average IQ correlation for genetically unrelated children living in the same family is 0.25 and the average for genetically unrelated adults who had been raised in the same family is -0.01 or essentially 0.
Other categories of children raised in the same family also decline as the children enter adulthood, but the greater the degree of genetic relationship, the smaller the decline.
Families have a moderately strong early influence on children’s IQ but the effect fades as the children become adults.
The advantage or disadvantage of being raised in a particular home disappears by early adulthood. Children who grow into adulthood increasingly choose their own environments and their genetic differences influence the kinds of environments they choose.
Effects of personality and live experiences on intelligence
Intelligence is maintained and strengthened through active, intellectual engagement with the world.
Openness to experience includes the characteristics of curiosity, independence of mind and broad interest. Openness appears to correlate at least as strongly with measures of fluid intelligence as with measures of crystallized intelligence.
Intellectual engagement does not just increase one’s store of knowledge, but also one’s capacity for mental gymnastics.
Engagement in intellectually challenging leisure-time activities can increase intellectual flexibility.
These effects are greater for older adults than for younger adults.
Origins of IQ differences between cultural groups
Comparison of racial or cultural groups routinely reveal average differences in IQ.
Why within-group heritability coefficients can’t be applied to between-group differences
The heritability of a trait within a group tells us nothing about differences between groups.
Evidence that black-white IQ differences are cultural in origin
In many countries, blacks and whites are not truly distinct races in a biological sense but, rather, in are different cultural groups.
The amount of genetic variation within each group is far greater than the average difference between them.
The social designation of black or white is most likely the critical variable in determining the black-white IQ difference.
Different types of minority status can have different effects on IQ
It is the sense that one is an outcast, and that standard routes to achievement are cut off, that oppresses caste like minorities and depresses their scholastic achievements and IQ s.
The historical increase in IQ
The average IQ score keeps rising.
This is called the Flynn effect.
The greatest increases are in the tests geared toward fluid intelligence.
The increase can be due mainly the changes in modern life.
Foundations for the study of psychology - a summary of chapter 1 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)
Psychology
Chapter 1
Foundations of the study of psychology
Psychology is the science of behaviour of the mind.
Behaviour is the observable action of a person or animal
Mind refers to an individual’s subjective experiences.
Dualism
René Descartes (1596-1650)
Important about him: the body is like a complicated machine, a machinal control of movements. Quite complex behaviours can occur trough purely machinal means.
Nonhuman animals have no souls.
Thought (Descartes defined as conscious deliberation and judgment) is ascribed to the soul.
Body and soul communicate through the pineal body.
Increased understanding of reflexes
The basic arrangement of the nervous system.
Some suggest that all human behaviour occurs through reflexes. → reflexology by I. M Sechenov (1863-1935) This inspired Pavlov.
The concept of localization of function in the brain
The idea that specific parts of the brain serve specific functions in the production of mental experience and behaviour.
Johannes Müller (1838-1965)
Different qualities of sensory experience come about because the nerves from different sense organs excite different parts of the brain. (We experience vison if this part of the brain is active).
Pierre Flourens (1824-1965)
Experiences on animals. Brain damage on different parts of the brain causes different deficits on animals abilities to move.
Paul Broca (1861-1965)
Publics effidence that people who suffer brain damage on specific parts of the brain lose the ability to speak, but do not lose other mental abilities
Methods of psychology - a summary of chapter 2 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 2
Methods of psychology
In psychology, the data are usually measures or descriptions of some form of behaviour produces by humans or other animals.
A fact (or observation) is an objective statement, usually based on direct observation, that reasonable observers agree is true. In psychology, facts are usually particular behaviours, or reliable patterns of behaviours, for persons or animals.
A theory is an idea, or conceptual model, that is designed to explain existing facts and make predictions about new facts that might be discovered.
Any prediction about new facts that is made from a theory is called a hypothesis.
Facts lead to theories, which leads to hypothesis, which are tested by experiments, which leads to new fact. It is a cycle of science.
Each of this dimensions can vary form the others, resulting in any possible combination.
Research design
Researches design a study to test a hypothesis, choosing the design that best fits the conditions the researcher wants to control.
Also in three basic types.
Genetics and evolutionary foundations of behaviour - a summary of chapter 3 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 3
Genetics and evolutionary foundations of behaviour
Adaption refers to modifications as a result of changed life circumstances.
Evolution is a long-term adaptive process.
How genes affect behavior
Genes are associated with behavior (they never produce or control behavior directly).
All the effects that genes have on behavior occur through their role in building and modifying the physical structures of the body. Those structures, interacting with the environment, produce behavior.
All genes that contribute to the body’s development are “for” behavior. Since all parts of the body are involved in behavior.
Genes provide the codes for proteins
Genes affect the body’s development (only) through their influence on the production of protein molecules.
Structural proteins; forms the structure of every cell of the body.
Enzymes; controls the rate of every chemical reaction in every cell.
Genes are components of extremely long molecules of a substance called DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid).
These molecules exist in the egg and sperm cells that join to from a new individual. And they replicate themselves during each cell division in the course of the body’s growth and development.
A replica of your whole DNA molecules exists in the nucleus of each of your body’s cells, where it serves to code for and regulate the production of protein molecules.
Each protein molecule consists of a long chain of smaller molecules. Those are amino acids.
A single protein molecule may contain from several hundred to many thousand amino acids in its chain.
There are a total of 20 distinct amino acids in every from of life on earth (and they can be arranged in countless sequences to from different protein molecules).
Some DNA serve as templates (as molds or patterns) for producing RNA. RNA severs as a template for producing protein molecules.
A gene is segment of a DNA molecule that contains the code that dictates the particular sequence of amino acids for a single type of protein.
A human being has between 20.000 and 25.000 genes.
Most of the DNA in human cells does not code for proteins.
Genes work only through interaction with the environment
The effects of genes are
.....read more Basic processes of learning - a summary of chapter 4 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 4
Basic processes of learning
To survive, animals must adapt to their environments.
Evolution by natural selection, is the slow long-term adaptive process that equips each species for life within a certain range of environmental conditions.
Environments changes and individuals must adapt to these changes over their lifetimes. Animals must learn.
Learning: any process through which experience at one time can alter an individual’s behavior at a future time.
Experience refers to any effects of the environment that are mediated by the individual’s sensory systems.
Behavior at a future time refers to any subsequent behavior that is not part of the individual’s immediate response to the sensory stimulation during the learning experience.
Classical conditioning
Classical conditioning is a learning processes that creates new reflexes.
A reflex is a simple, relatively automatic stimulus-response sequence mediated by the nervous system.
A stimulus results in a response.
To be considered a reflex, the response to a stimulus must be mediated by the nervous system. Because reflexes are mediated by the nervous system, they can be modified by experience.
Habituation: a decline in the magnitude of a reflexive response when the stimulus is repeated several times in succession. Not all reflexes undergo habituation.
Habituation is one of the simplest forms of learning. It does not produce a new stimulus-response sequence, but only weakens an already existing one.
Classical conditioning is a form of reflex learning that does produce a new stimulus-response sequence.
(First described by Ivan Pavlov)
Fundamentals of classical conditioning
The procedure and generality of classical conditioning
The stimulus (the bell sound by Pavlov) is a conditioned stimulus.
The response to the (condtionised stimulus, the bell) stimulus is a conditioned response.
The original stimulus (natural, before doing anything) is an unconditioned stimulus with an unconditioned response.
The procedure is called classical conditioning or Pavlovian conditioning
Pavlov concluded that, any environmental event that the animal could detect could become a conditioned stimulus of salivation. Of course classical conditioning is not limited to salivary responses.
Extinction of conditioned responses and recovery from extinction
Pavlov found that, without food, the bell elicited less and less salvation on each trial, and eventually none at all. This phenomenon is called extinction.
Extinction does not return the animal to the unconditioned state.
The mere passage of time following extinction can partially renew the conditioned response. This is called spontaneous recovery.
A single pairing of the conditioned stimulus with the unconditioned stimulus can fully renew the
The neural control of behavior - a summary of chapter 5 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 5
The neural control of behavior
Behavior is a product of the body’s machinery, especially the nervous system.
Neurons, the building blocks of the brain
The brain contains roughly 80 to 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons, and roughly 100 trillion synapses between neurons.
These are all more-or-less active, and their collective activity monitors our internal and external environments, creates all of our mental experiences, and controls all of our behavior.
The magic of this nervous system, lies in the organization of their multitudes.
Each neuron is itself a complex decision-making machine.
Each neuron receives information from multiple sources, integrates that information, and sends its response out to many other neurons or, in some cases, muscle cells or glands.
Three basic varieties of neurons, and structures common to them
The brain and spinal cord make up the central nervous system.
Extensions from the central nervous system, called nerves, make up the peripheral nervous system.
A neuron is a single cell of the nervous system
A nerve is a bundle of many neurons (or a bundle consisting of the axons of many neurons) within the peripheral nervous system.
Nerves connect the central nervous system to the body’s sensory organs, muscles and glands.
The central nervous system and peripheral nervous system are parts of an integrated whole.
Neurons come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes and serve countless specific functions.
They can be grouped into three categories according to their functions and their locations in the overall layout of the nervous system.
All neurons contain the same basic parts.
Mechanisms of motivation and emotion - a summary of chapter 6 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Introduction to psychology
Chapter 6
Mechanisms of motivation and emotion
Motivation: the entire constellation of factors, some inside the organism and some outside, that cause an individual to behave in a particular way at a particular time.
Motivational state, or drive.
An internal condition that orients an individual toward a specific category of goals that can change over time in a reversible way. (The drive an increase and decrease).
Different drives direct a person toward different goals.
Those are hypothetical constructs! We infer the existence from the animal’s behavior.
Motivated behavior is directed toward incentives, the sought-after objects or ends that exist in the external environment.
Incentives are also called reinforces.
Drives and incentives complement one another in the control of behavior. If one is weak, the other must be strong to motivate the goal-directed action.
They also influence each other’s strength. A strong drive can enhance the attractiveness of a particular object.
A strong incentive can strengthen a drive.
Varieties of drives
In general, drives motivate us toward goals that promote our survival and reproduction. Some drives promote survival by helping us maintain the internal bodily conditions that are essential for life.
Drives that help preserve homeostasis.
Homeostasis: the constancy of internal conditions that the body must actively maintain.
Maintaining homeostasis involves the organism’s outward behavior as well as its internal processes.
The basic physiological underpinning for some drives is a loss of homeostasis, which acts on the nervous system to induce behavior designed to correct the imbalance.
Limitations of homeostasis: regulatory and nonregulatory drives
Homeostasis is not enough for understanding many drives.
Two general classes of drives:
A functional classification of mammalian drives
Five categories of mammalian drives:
The psychology of vision - a summary of chapter 8 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 8 (in part)
The psychology of vision
The purpose of human vision is to identify meaningful objects and actions.
Your visual system has sorted all the points and graduations that are present in the reflected light into useful renditions of the objects. It has provided you’re with all the information you need to reach out and touch, or pick up, whichever object you want to use next.
Vision researchers generally conceive of object perception as a type of unconscious problem solving, in which sensory information provides clues that are analyzed using information that is already stored in the person’s head.
The detection and integration of stimulus features
Any object that we see can be thought of as consisting of a set of elementary stimulus features, including the various straight and curved lines that form the object’s contours, the brightness and color of the light that the object reflects and the object’s movement or lack of movements with respect to the background.
Feature detection in the visual cortex
Ganglion cells of the optic nerve run to the thalamus and form synapses with other neurons that carry their output to the primary visual area of the cerebral cortex.
Within the primary visual area, millions of neurons are involved in analyzing the sensory input.
Different neurons respond to different patterns.
Edge detectors: neurons that respond best to stimuli that contains a straight contour separating a black patch from a white patch.
Bar detectors: respond best to a narrow white bar against a black background, or a narrow black bar against a
white background.
Any edge detector or bar detector responds best to a particular orientation of the edge or bar.
Neurons in the primary visual cortex are sensitive not just to the orientation of visual stimuli, but also to other visual features, including color and rate of movement. (One neuron might respond best to a yellow bar on a blue background, tilted 15 degrees clockwise and moving slowly from left to right).
Taken as a whole, the neurons of the primary visual cortex and nearby areas seem to keep track of all the bits and pieces of visual information that would be available in a scene.
Because of their sensitivity to the elementary features of a scene, these neurons are referred to as feature detectors.
Treisman’s two-stage feature-integration theory of perception
The feature-integration theory.
Any perceived stimulus (even a simple one such as an X) consist of a number of distinct primitive sensory features, like color and the slant of its individual lines.
To perceive the stimulus as
Memory and attention - a summary of chapter 9 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 9
Memory and attention
Information-processing theories are built on a set of assumptions concerning how humans acquire, store and retrieve information.
Key assumptions:
The model we use to portray the mind as containing three types of memory stores.
Each store is characterized by its function, its capacity and its duration.
In addition to the stores, the model specifies a set of control processes.
Those govern the processing of information within stores and the movement of information from one store to another.
Sensory memory: the brief prolongation of sensory experience
This trace is called sensory memory.
A separate sensory-memory store is believed to exist for each sensory system (like vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste), but only those for vision and hearing have been studied extensively.
Each sensory store is presumed to hold, very briefly, all the sensory input that enters that sensory system, whether or not the person is paying attention to that input.
The function of the store, presumably, is to hold on to sensory information, in its original sensory form, long enough for it to be analyzed by unconscious mental processes and for a decision to be made about whether or not to bring that information into the short-term store.
Most of the information in our sensory store does not enter into our consciousness.
We become conscious only of those items that are transformed, by the selective process of attention, into working memory.
The short-term store: conscious perception and thought
Information in the sensory store that is attended to moves into the short-term store.
Each item fades quickly and is lost within seconds when it is no longer actively attended to or thought about.
This is conceived of as the major workplace of the mind (working memory).
Working memory has been used to refer to the process of storing and transforming information being held in the short-term store. It is the seat of conscious thought.
Information can enter the short-term store form both the sensory-memory store
.....read more Reasoning and intelligence - a summary of chapter 10 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 10
Reasoning and intelligence
Reasoning: The process by which we use our memories in adaptive ways
Intelligence: our general capacity to reason
We reason by using our memories of previous experiences to make sense of present experiences or to plan the future.
To do so, we must perceive the similarities among various events we have experienced.
Fast and slow thinking
Cognitive processes could be placed on a continuum from automatic to effortful.
It is useful to think of any cognitive process as falling somewhere along this continuum.
When solving problems, people have two general ways of processing. (Dual-processing theories).
In many cases, when presented with a problem, you cannot shut of the ‘fast’ system, even if it may interfere with your arriving at the correct solution to a problem via the ‘slow’ system. (Like the stroop interference effect).
The ‘fast’ implicit system effortlessly produces impressions, feelings and intuitions that the ‘slow’ explicit system considers.
The effortful ‘slow’ system has potential control over the ‘fast’ system. (But when making routine decisions, the ‘fast’ system is in control. Like reading and making sense of language). The fast system even makes simple decisions, some of which are in contradiction to the correct solution that can only be derived by using the slow system.
Fast processing is not unique to humans. But no other species comes close to the effortful, explicit cognition displayed in Homo sapiens.
Analogies as foundation for reasoning
Two kinds of reasoning that depend quite explicitly on identifying similarities are:
The development of body, thought and language - a summary of chapter 11 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 11
The development of body, thought and language
Prenatal development
Zygotic, embryonic and fetal phases
The prenatal period is conventionally divided into three phases:
By the end of the 12th week after conception, all the organs are formed, though not functioning well, and are in same proportion to each other as in a full-term newborn, just smaller.
The external genitalia begin to differentiate between males and females between the 9th weeks but are not fully formed until about the 12th week.
In the 8th week, the embryo begins to move and activity increases by 12 weeks.
Fetuses ‘behave’ and are able to perceive some stimuli.
By 6 months fetuses respond to their mothers’ heartbeat and sounds from outside the womb, including language.
The effects of experience during the prenatal period
Although embryos and fetuses are sheltered from the outside world they are nonetheless subject to the effects of experience.
Teratogens: environmental agents that cause harm during prenatal development.
Most teratogens are in the form of substances that get into the embryo’s or fetus’s system from the mother through the umbilical cord.
A teratogen’s potential effect on prenatal development depends on how early or late in pregnancy the exposure occurs. If
Social development - a summary of chapter 12 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 12
Social development
The natural human environment is a social environment.
Social development: the changing nature of our relationships with others over the course of life.
Human infants are completely dependent on caregivers for survival. But they are not passively dependent.
They enter the world biologically prepared to learn who their caregivers are and to elicit from them the help they need. By the time they are born, babies already prefer the voices of their own mother over other voices (and the smell of their own mother). Newborns signal distress through fussing and crying.
By the time they are three months old, they express clearly and effectively their emotions through their facial expressions. And they respond differentially to such expressions in others.
Though such actions, infants help build emotional bonds between themselves and those on whom they most directly depend, and then they use those caregivers as a base from which to explore the world.
Attachment: such emotional bonds.
Attachment to caregivers
Harlow’s monkeys raised with surrogate mothers
Providing adequate nutrition and other physical necessities is not enough. Infants also need close contact with comforting caregivers.
The form and functions of human infants’ attachment
Bowlby observed attachment behaviors in young humans, from 8 months to 3 years of age.
Children show distress when their mothers left them. Especially in an unfamiliar environment. They showed pleasure when reunited with their mothers, showed distress when approached by a stranger unless reassured or comforted by their mothers and where likely to explore an unfamiliar environment when in the presence of their mothers than when alone.
Bowlby contended that attachment is a universal human phenomenon with a biological foundation that derives from natural selection. Infants are potentially in danger when out of sight of caregivers, especially in a novel environment.
Attachment is strengthen at about the age 6 to 8 months, when infants begin to move around on their own.
The strange-situation measure of attachment quality
Mary Ainsworth developed the strange-situation test.
Infants in this test are:
Social psychology - a summary of chapter 13 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 13
Social psychology
Humans are naturally interested in assessing the personality characteristics and attitudes of other humans they encounter.
This drive has clear adaptive functions. Other people can help us or hurt us in our life endeavors. Understanding others helps us predict their behavior and decide how to interact with them.
The accuracy of judgments of others sometimes suffers from certain consistent mistakes, or biases.
These biases occur most often when we are not using our full mental recourses, or have only limited information with which to reason, or have unconscious motives for reaching particular conclusions.
Making attributions from observed behavior
Actions are directly observable, and thoughts are not. Judgments about the personalities of people we encounter are based largely on what we observe of their actions.
Any judgment about another person is, in essence, a claim about causation. It is an implicit claim that the person is caused in part by some more or less permanent characteristic of the person.
Any claim about causation is an attribution. A claim about the cause of someone’s behavior.
The logic of attributing behavior to the person or the situation.
To build a useful picture of a person on the basis of his or her actions, you must decide which actions imply something unique about the person and which actions would be expected of anyone under similar situations.
When behavior is clearly appropriate to the environmental situation, people commonly attribute the behavior to the situation.
Three questions in making an attribution
Social influences on behavior - a summary of chapter 14 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 14
Social influences on behavior
Human behavior is influenced powerful by the social environment in which it occurs.
We behave as we do not just because of who we are, but also because of the social situations in which we find ourselves.
Social pressure: the entire set of psychological forces that are exerted on us by others whether real or imagined.
We are most strongly influenced by those people who are physically or psychologically closed to us.
Social pressure arises from the ways we interpret and respond emotionally to the social situations around us.
It promotes our social acceptability and helps create order and predictability in social interactions.
Facilitating and interfering effects of an audience
Social facilitation: the enhancing effect of an audience on task performance.
Social interference: a decline in performance when observers are present.
Facilitation of ‘easy’ tasks, interference with ‘hard’ ones
The presence of others facilitates performance of dominant actions and interferes with performance of nondominant actions.
Dominant actions: actions that are so simple, speciestypical, or well learned that they can be produced automatically, with little consciously thought
Nondominant actins: actions that require considerable conscious thought or attention
The presence of an audience increases a person’s level of drive or arousal.
The arousal increases the person’s effort, which facilitates dominant tasks where the amount of effort determines the degree of success.
The arousal interferes with controlled, calm, conscious thought and attention and thereby worsens performance of nondominant actions.
Evaluation anxiety as a basis for social interference
The primary cause of social interference is evaluation anxiety.
Social interference increases when the observer are high in status or expertise and are present explicitly to evaluate. It also increases when subjects are made to feel unconfident and more anxious about their ability.
It decreases when subjects feel confident about their ability.
Choking under pressure: the working-memory explanation
‘Choking’ is especially likely to occur with tasks that make strong demands on working memory.
The worry takes space out of the memory span.
Choking on academic tests
Distracting and disturbing thoughts flood their minds and interfere with performance on tests.
With sufficient pressure, choking can even occur in students who normally do not suffer from tests anxiety. It occurs specifically with tests items that make the highest demands on working memory.
Stereotype threat as a special cause of choking
Stereotype threat: threat that test-takers experience when they
.....read more Personality - a summary of chapter 15 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 15
Personality
Personality refers to a person’s general style of interacting with the world, especially with other people.
The development during childhood of chronic patterns of behavior that differ from one individual to another.
The most central concept in personality psychology is the trait. This is a relatively stable predisposition to behave in a certain way.
This is considered to be part of the person, not the environment.
States (other than traits) of motivation and emotion are, defined as inner entities than can be inferred from observed behavior. Traits are enduring, but states are temporary.
A trait might be defined as an enduring attribute that describes one’s likelihood of entering temporarily into a particular state.
Traits are dimensions along which people differ by degree.
Trait theories: efficient systems for describing personalities
The goal of any trait theory of personality is to specify a manageable set of distinct personality dimensions that can be used to summarize the fundamental psychological differences among individuals.
Factor analyses as a tool for identifying an efficient set of traits
Factor analyses: a method of analyzing patterns of correlations in order to extract mathematically defined factors, which underlie and help make sense of those patterns.
Steps:
Factor analyses tells us that two dimensions of personality are relatively independent of each other.
Cattell’s pioneering use of factor analysis to develop trait theory
Cattell:
An infinite number of different personalities can be formed from a finite number of traits.
He identified 16 basic trait dimensions and made a questionnaire called the 16 PF questionnaire to measure them.
The five-factor model of personality
The five-factor model (or big five theory)
A person’s personality is most efficiently described in terms of his or her
Mental Disorders - a summary of chapter 16 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 16
Mental Disorders
Before clinicians can diagnose a psychological disorder, the must evaluate the behavior in terms of four themes, the four D’s.
The diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM)
Specifies criteria for deciding what is officially a ‘disorder’ and what is not.
It is a work in process.
What is a mental disorder?
Mental disorder has no really satisfying definition.
Categorizing and diagnosing metal disorders
Diagnosis: the process of assigning a label to a person’s mental disorder.
To be of value, any system of diagnosis must be reliable and valid.
The quest for reliability
The reliability of a diagnostic system: the extent to which different diagnosticians, all trained in the use of the system, reach the same conclusion when they independently diagnose the same individual.
To test alternative ways of diagnosing each disorder, they conducted field studies in which people who might have a particular disorder were diagnosed independently by a number of clinicians or researchers using each of several alternative diagnostic systems.
The systems that produced the greatest reliability were retained.
All the criteria are based on observable characteristics or self-descriptions by the person being diagnosed.
The Question of validity
The validity of a diagnostic system is an index of the extent to which the categories it identifies are clinically meaningful.
This is based on extensive research. To conduct the research needed to determine whether or not a diagnosis is valid, one must fists form a tentative, reliable diagnostic system.
The results of such studies may lead to new means of defining and diagnosing the disorder or to new subcategories of the disorder, leading to increased diagnostic validity.
Systems for classifying mental disorders:
The DSM
The Word Health Organization (WHO) has developed the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10)
Possible dangers in Labeling
Diagnosing and labeling may be essential for the scientific study of metal disorders, but labels
.....read more Treatment - a summary of chapter 17 of Psychology by Gray and Bjorklund (7th edition)Psychology
Chapter 17
Treatment
What to do with individuals with severe mental disorders? A brief history
A major chance in the treatment of people with severe mental disorders occurred in the 1950s, inspired by several factors;
A positive development: assertive community treatment
Since the 1970s, an increasing number of communities have developed outreach programs, often referred to as assertive community treatment (ACT) programs, and aimed at helping individuals with severe mental illness wherever they are in the community.
Each person with mental illness in need is assigned to a multidisciplinary treatment team. Someone on the team is available at any time of the day to respond to crises.
Each patient is visited at least twice a week by a team member, who checks on his or her health, sees if any services are needed, and offers counseling when that seems appropriate.
The team meets frequently with family members who are involved with the patient, to support them in their care for the patient.
Structure of the mental health system
Mental health professionals
Mental health professionals are those who have received special training and certification to work with people who have psychological problems or mental disorders.
The primary categories;
Relieve the disorder by directly altering bodily processes.
Drugs
Drugs for mental disorders are far from unmixed blessings.
They nearly always produce undesirable side effects.
Antipsychotic drugs
Used to treat schizophrenia and other disorders in which psychotic symptoms predominate.
Such drug reduce and in some cases abolish the hallucinations, delusions, and bizarre actions that characterize the active phase of schizophrenia and they reduce the need for hospitalization.
All antipsychotic drugs in use today decrease the activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine at certain synapses in the brain, which is believed to be responsible for the reduction in psychotic symptoms.
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