Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Focus on organisation
Top-down structure imposed on bottom-up information. If vision
was bottom-up there would be no optical illusions
• Max Wertheimer (1880-1943)
Holistic approach
“Sum is greater than it’s part”
Focus on optical illusions
• Psychodynamics: Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Medical training, clinical approach
Conscious/unconscious distinction, sexuality, dreams, repression
Ideas based on client observation
Main aim is to bring the unconscious into consciousness and then to
encourage the growth of a healthy ego by: free association, dream
analysis, interpretation, analysis of resistance, transference
• Cognitively impenetrable- Vision works whether you want it to or not.
• Behaviourism- Stimulus response and learned behaviour
• Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) experimented with dogs and trained them to salivate at
the ring of a bell.
• Edward Thorndike (1874-1949)
Studies of animal behaviour
Rejection of structuralism
• Thomas Watson and B.F. Skinner
Rejection of mind
Behaviour is determined
• Zombie argument- We respond to stimuli and all other thoughts are by products.
• John Watson (1878-1958) was the first person to earn a Ph.D. in psychology
from Chicago
His department required students to consider rat “consciousness” and their
behaviour.
He thought this was ridiculous and claimed “you cannot define
consciousness any more than you can define a “soul”
Argued that consciousness cannot be seen, measured, or located making
the study of consciousness unscientific.
Proposed a psychology that studied only behaviour.
• B.F. Skinner: realised that people are active participants in their environment
Stimuli could be reinforcers to learn new behaviours
Skinner box- Button or bar press (response) would result in food
(reinforcer)
• Behaviourism became the only acceptable form of psychology in North America.
• Non-behaviourists were denied faculty positions and struggled to have their works
published. Europe maintained a pluralistic view.
• During the cognitive revolution behaviourism was criticized because of its
refutation of mind and over reliance on animal behaviour.
• Wolfgang Kohler (1920’s) worked with chimps (Sultan) and showed insight and
un-reinforced behaviour.
• Edward Tolman (1935, 1938) is writing about “intervening variables” and
“mental maps” in mice and men.
• Clark Hull (1937) asks, “But what of consciousness”
• Cognitive revolution arises from independent perspectives:
Dissatisfaction with behaviourism
Behaviourism ignored the evolution of function
Reliance on animals instead of humans
• Events surrounding WWII:
Vast number of head wounds
The development of the digital computer
Rise in cybernetics
A meeting of like minded people in 1948
• WWII also encouraged emergent topics such as:
Gibson: Visual perception and “optic flow”
Broadbent: Attention and information overflow.
• Post war research introduced cognitive topics:
Miller: Cognitive capacity and limitations
Milgram: Social conformity and violence.
• Rise in neurophysiology, robotics, and computers:
Karl Lashley: Memory and brain damage in rats
Norbert Wiener: Applied math, robotic guns
Claude Shannon: Information as binary decisions
Warren McCulloch: Neurons as binary mechanisms
Alan Turing: Code Breaking Computers
• Biological psychology:
Physiological psychology- Neural mechanisms behind behaviour.
Cognitive neuroscience- Neural mechanisms behind psychological
phenomena, such as thoughts, emotions
Comparative- Behaviour of animals/animal-human distinction
Behavioural genetics- Role of genes on human and animal behaviour
• Clinical psychology:
Behavioural analysis- Behavioural modification.
Personality- Social and genetic components
Neuropsychology- Neural/physiological abnormality
• Social psychology:
Beliefs and attitudes
Social influence: Genes and culture
Persuasion and conformity
Aggression and attraction
• Developmental psychology:
Language acquisition
Personality change and development
Logical thinking and reasoning skills
Making friends and forming relationships
Intelligence and special educational needs.