12 Questions
What is the main focus of structuralism?
Studying the structure of the mind and its perceptions
What is the primary purpose of conscious attention according to the text?
To monitor our interactions with the environment
What is the main focus of functionalism?
Understanding what people do and why they do it
What is the main focus of behaviorism?
Focusing only on the relation between observable behavior and environmental events
What is the main focus of associationism?
Examining how elements of the mind become associated with one another
What is the main focus of pragmatism?
Validating knowledge by its usefulness
What is the primary purpose of attending to signals over the short and long term?
To control and plan for future actions based on past memories and present sensations
What is the main focus of Signal-Detection Theory (SDT)?
Explaining how people detect and respond to rare but important stimuli
What is the difference between vigilance and search?
Vigilance refers to attending to a field of stimulation over a prolonged period, while search refers to scanning the environment for particular features
What is the key difference between feature search and conjunctive search?
All of the above
What does the Feature-Integration Theory explain?
Why it is relatively easy to conduct feature searches and relatively difficult to conduct conjunction searches
According to the Similarity Theory, what makes a search task more difficult?
The similarity between the target and distractors, and the similarity among distractors
Study Notes
Attention and Consciousness
- Attention helps us control and plan for our future actions based on information from monitoring and past memories
- Attention is the process of actively selecting and processing a limited amount of information from all available sensory information, memories, and cognitive processes
Signal-Detection Theory (SDT)
- A framework to explain how people pick out important stimuli from irrelevant, distracting stimuli
- Often used to measure sensitivity to a target's presence
Vigilance
- A person's ability to attend to a field of stimulation over a prolonged period
- Needed in settings where a stimulus occurs rarely but requires immediate action when it does occur
Search
- Actively looking for something in the environment when unsure where it will appear
- Diverted by distracters, non-target stimuli that divert attention away from the target stimulus
- Two types of search:
- Feature Search: looking for one feature that makes the search object different from others
- Conjunctive Search: combining two or more features to find the stimulus
Feature-Integration Theory
- Explains why feature searches are easier than conjunction searches
- Feature searches can be done in parallel, while conjunction searches require combining features
Similarity Theory
- The more similar the target and distracters are, the more difficult it is to find the target
- Difficulty of search tasks depends on how different distracters are from each other, not on the number of features to be integrated
Schools of Thought in Psychology
- Structuralism: understand the structure of the mind and its perceptions into their constituent components
- Introspection: conscious observations of one's own thinking processes
- Functionalism: understand what people do and why they do it, studying the processes of how and why the mind works
- Pragmatism: knowledge is validated by its usefulness
- Behaviorism: focuses on the relation between observable behavior and environmental events or stimuli
- Associationism: examines how elements of the mind become associated with one another to result in learning
Learn about the main schools of thought in psychology such as Structuralism, Introspection, Functionalism, Pragmatism, and Behaviorism. Understand how these theories shape our understanding of the mind and human behavior.
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