Psychology Perspectives and Theories Quiz

Lecture 1 - Learning Outcomes

• Students should be able to describe and differentiate mind-body dualism from mind-body monism.
• Students should be able to describe and differentiate Structuralism and Functionalism.
• Students should be able to describe and differentiate the Cognitive and Behavioral Perspectives of behavior.
• What we perceive depends on our perspective.

Learning Outcomes - Perspectives on Behavior

• Guides to understanding behavior
• Viewpoints to understanding behavior
• Different components are prioritized in each viewpoint
• Understanding the history and context for studying psychology.
• Psychology's intellectual roots: Monism and Dualism
• Early schools: Structuralism and Functionalism.
• Six Perspectives on Behavior.

Psychology's Intellectual Roots

• Monism: Mental activity and brain activity are inseparable. Mental events originate from physical events (e.g., chemical reactions in the brain producing emotions).
• Dualism: The idea that minds are one type of substance and matter is another.

Early Schools

• Structuralism: Breakdown of the mind into its basic elements (sensations). Used introspection to study sensations.
• Functionalism: Focused on the functions of consciousness (e.g., why we have memory). Influenced by Darwin's evolutionary theory and the importance of adaptation.

Lecture 2: The Brain

• Major regions of the brain and associated functions.
• Different methods of investigation for brain research.
• Brain structure mapping onto brain function.
• Development of general brain regions (overview).

Brain Structure (The Human Brain)

• Hindbrain: Transmitting information from the spinal cord to the brain, regulating life support functions, and maintaining balance.
• Midbrain: Transferring information between parts of the brain
• Forebrain: Cognitive processes, such as memory, language, planning, and reasoning.

Parts of the Cerebral Cortex

• Frontal lobe: Controls voluntary movement, reasoning, planning, problem-solving, and decision-making
• Temporal lobe: Important for memory, language comprehension, taste, and smell. Plays a role in emotional responses and facial recognition.
• Occipital lobe: Primarily responsible for visual processing (color, light, movement, and object recognition).
• Parietal lobe: Important for processing sensory information (touch, temperature, pain, and spatial awareness), and managing coordination of hand-eye movements.

Subcortical Structures in the Brain

• Amygdala: Emotion, Aggression, Memory.
• Hippocampus: Learning, Memory, Emotion.
• Hypothalamus: Basic biological functions such as hunger, thirst, temperature, sexual arousal.
• Cerebellum: Coordinated movement, language, and thinking.
• Medulla: Regulates vital functions (breathing and heart rate).
• Thalamus: Sensory information relay; memory.
• Spinal Cord: Transmitting signals between the brain and rest of the body.

Lecture 3: Perspectives on Perception

• What are Gestalt approaches to perception (discussed in class)?
• What are bottom-up models of perception (discussed in class)?
• What are bottom-up/top-down processes in perception?
• Differentiate between types of visual agnosia

Gestalt Principles of Perceptual Organization

• Proximity: Grouping together things that are close to each other.
• Similarity: Grouping things that look alike.
• Continuity: Grouping things that are on a continuous straight or curved line.
• Closure: Mentally filling in gaps in a figure to perceive a complete whole.
• Common Fate: Grouping together things that move in the same direction or have a common fate.

Bottom-up Processes; Template Matching

• Comparing incoming information to stored templates.
• A template that best matches the pattern will be identified.
• Issues: Lots of templates needed.

Bottom-up Processes; Featural Analysis

• Recognition of an object depends on recognizing its features.
• Components/parts are recognized to infer the whole
• Features that can be combined in different ways.
• Steps in recognition: Recognising features then recognising combinations of features and identifying the object.
• Issues: No widely accepted definition of a feature, if the same set of features could apply to every object the list of potential features could be huge.
• Examples include visual search.

Bottom-up Processes: Prototype Matching (Model)

• Matching incoming information to a stored representation or prototype.
• A precise match is not required.
• Accounts for adaptability in recognizing objects; flexibility over template matching.

Top-down Processes

• The “perceptual expectancy” or “conceptually driven"
• Using previous knowledge and expectations to interpret ambiguous information.
• (e.g. interpreting "THEY BHKE" as "THEY BIKE" based knowledge of words).
• Change blindness: Inability to notice significant changes that occur in visual environment.
• (e.g. letters are easier to perceive in the context of a word compared to an unfamiliar context or no context at all - Word Superiority Effect ).

Disruptions of Perception (NOT ON THE TEST)

• Visual agnosia: problems interpreting visual information.
• Apperceptive agnosia: difficulty with sensory processing and representation of visual objects.
• Associative agnosia: difficulty connecting visual information with prior knowledge.
• Examples include: problems with object recognition, problems with facial recognition (like prosopagnosia).

Lecture 4 - Attention

• Selective Attention
• Sensory neglect/hemineglect
• Divided attention

Models of Selective Attention (Filter Theory; Attenuation Theory; Late-Selection Theory)

• Filter Theory: All stimuli are processed physically. Attentional filter determines which information is processed further.
• Attenuation Theory: All stimuli are processed in terms of meaning. Important or meaningful stimuli are processed further.
• Late Selection Theory: All stimuli are processed fully for meaning. Attentional processes determine which stimuli are given more attention.

Disruptions of Attention: Sensory Neglect / Hemineglect

• Patients with parietal lobe damage may neglect or ignore one side of their visual or body space.
• Typical symptoms include issues with neglect or ignoring one side of their visual field (Left visual field often affected for example).

Lecture 5 - Working Memory

• Central Executive
• Phonological loop
• Visuospatial sketchpad

Lecture 6 - Long-Term Memory and Short-Term Memory

• Distinction between short-term memory and long-term memory using the serial position curve.
• Primacy effect: Better memory for items at the beginning of a list due to encoding into long term memory.
• Recency effect: Better memory for items at the end of a list due to the items still being in short-term memory.
• Short-term memory: Limited capacity place for holding information for short periods.
• Long-term memory: Large capacity place for holding information for longer periods (indefinitely).

Lecture 7 - Concepts and Categorization

• How do we organize our knowledge?
• How do we predict behaviour of new stimuli?
• Concept formation: How are concepts formed?
• Stereotyping (using concepts to categorize/predict behaviour of/about people).

Lecture 8 - Imagery and Memory

• The method of loci: Creating mental images of locations and associating items to be remembered with those locations.
• Pegword method: Using easily recalled words (e.g., one-bun, two-shoe) as pegs, and then creating vivid images linking these words, with the item to be remembered.

Lecture 9 - Language

• Structure of language(phonemes, morphemes, syntax, and semantics).
• Speech production and comprehension.
• Types of language.
• Language comprehension and production deficits.

Lecture 10 - Problem Solving and Creativity

• Different types of thinking
• Focused thinking
• Unfocused thinking
• Different types of problems (well-defined, ill-defined).
• Problem-solving techniques, such as means-ends analysis, working backward, reasoning by analogy, generate-and-test.

Test your knowledge on various psychological perspectives such as dualism, monism, and cognitive theories. Explore key concepts like structuralism, behaviorism, and the prototype and exemplar views of categorization. This quiz challenges you to differentiate between important ideas and understand their implications in psychology.