Important Psychologists Units 1-7

Ivan Pavlov

Russian psychologist who established classical conditioning with dogs. Pavlov paired meat powder with stimuli, such as the ringing of a bell, and he conditioned his dogs to salivate at the sound of the stimuli.

Paul Broca

A French physician who reported that after damage to a specific area of the left frontal lobe a person would struggle to speak words while still being able to sign familiar songs and comprehend speech. The part of the brain that's responsible for coordinating muscles involved in speech was named after him because he was the first to identify it.

B.F. Skinner

A behaviorist who believed that the best way to understand behavior is to look at the causes of an action and its consequences. He called this approach operant conditioning. Skinner studied operant conditioning by performing experiments using animals in a 'Skinner Box', where he altered behavior with reinforcement or punishment.

Elizabeth Loftus

A psychologist who's research on memory construction and the misinformation effect created doubts about the accuracy of eye-witness testimony. Stated that memory is reconstructed, not replayed. This is why witnesses often don't remember situations correctly. Memory breaks down into parts for storage, then brings them back and reconstructs models.

Jean Piaget

According to cognitive psychologist Jean Piaget, children progress through a series of four key stages of cognitive development. Piaget developed a stage theory of intellectual development that included four distinct stages: the sensorimotor stage, from birth to age 2; the preoperational stage, from age 2 to about age 7; the concrete operational stage, from age 7 to 11; and the formal operational stage, which begins in adolescence and spans into adulthood.

William James

American psychologist and philosopher. William James is the principal figure in the establishment and development of functionalism. Wrote "The Principles of Psychology".

Ernst Hilgard

American psychologist who became famous for his research on hypnosis. He is specifically known for his work in finding a hidden observer in the brain while hypnosis is taking place. His theory asserts that several distinct states of consciousness can be present during hypnosis, such that certain actions may become dissociated from the conscious mind.

Robert Rescoria

American psychologist who experimentally demonstrated the involvement of cognitive processes in classical conditioning. The Rescorla-Wagner Model of Pavlovian conditioning assumes that learning is determined by the lack of compatibility between what is expected to happen and what actually happens.

Roger Sperry

An American Psychobiologist who, like Gazzaniga, studied split brain patients. He showed that left and right hemispheres of the brain have different functions. While studying the effects of epilepsy, Sperry discovered that cutting the corpus collosum could reduce or eliminate seizures.

Albert Bandura

Bandura contributed to the learning branch of psychology by conducting the Bobo Doll experiment, which showed imitation of aggressive behavior. He is best known for his Social Learning Theory, which states learning happens by observing others and modeling their behaviors. Social Learning occurs from a combination of environmental and psychological factors, according to Bandura.

G. Stanley Hall

Can easily be called the "father of adolescence". Hall is best known for his scholarship that shaped adolescent themes in psychology, education, and popular culture. He also aimed to utilize scientific findings on what children know and when they learn it as a way of understanding the history of and the means of progress in human life.

Carl Rogers

Carl Rogers was a highly-influential humanistic psychologist and psychotherapist who developed a personality theory that emphasized the importance of self-actualizing tendency in shaping human personalities. Rogers wanted people to live to their full potential.

Edward Tolman

Cognitive Behaviorist who believed that animals had the ability to learn things that they could use later in a variety of ways. This point of view was in opposition to the idea that learning occurs as an automatic response to environmental stimuli. Tolman is well-known for his theory on Latent Learning, which states that learning occurs even if there is no reward. He demonstrated this in an experiment where rats were trained to run a maze without a reward. After a few days, a reward was introduced. The day after the reward was introduced, the rats began to run the maze faster. This showed that the rats developed a mental map of the maze when they were going through it without a reward. Upon introducing the reward, the rats demonstrated their learning by being able to run the maze faster in order to get the reward.

Charles Darwin

Darwin, a naturalist, was the originator of the evolutionary theory and natural selection. His theory was that evolutionary change occurs through variation between individuals; some variants give the individual a higher probability of survival.

Dorothea Dix

Dorothea Dix was an American activist who successfully pressured lawmakers to fund and construct asylums for the mentally ill. She convinced the US Congress that mentally ill people were not criminals.

Gustav Fechner

Early German psychologist who was credited with founding psychophysics- a field that undertook the measurement and correlation of brain states with sensory experience. Fechner had an insight that the connection between the mind and the body can be found in a statement of quantitative relation between mental sensation and material stimulus.

Edward Thorndike

Edward was president of the American Psychology Association. He studied animal intelligence, and is perhaps best-known for the theory he called the law of effect, which emerged from his research on how cats learn to escape from puzzle boxes. According to the law of effect, responses that are immediately followed by a satisfactory outcome become more strongly associated with the situation and are therefore more likely to occur again in the future. Conversely, responses followed by negative outcomes become more weakly associated and less likely to reoccur in the future.

Margaret Floy Washburn

First female to be awarded a PhD in psychology. She was the second president of the American Psychological Association. Washburn is best known for her work in animal psychology and the basic psychological processes of sensation and perception. She also integrated the experimental method of introspection with an emphasis on motor processes.

Mary Whiton Calkins

First woman president of the American Psychological Association. Calkins was denied her doctorate from Harvard. Specialized in "self-psychology" and invented the paired-associate technique, which required a subject to learn pairs of items by forming associations between them.

Sigmund Freud

Freud is known as the father of psychoanalysis - people could be cured by making their conscious thoughts unconscious. He believed that "talk therapy" was helpful because simply talking about problems helped to alleviate them. Freud also believed that the human mind was structured into two main parts: the conscious and the unconscious mind.

John Garcia

Garcia was a professor at multiple universities, and an assistant professor as well. He started doing tests on rats for taste experiments, and how rats react to toxic tastes/smells in the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Lab. Garcia had an impact on psychology by defining what we know now by the term 'Conditioned taste aversion.' This can be viewed as a survival mechanism due to the fact that people/animals can decipher whether the food about to be eaten are poisonous or not; which essentially can avoid sickness or death.

Carl Wernicke

German neuroanatomist, pathologist, and psychiatrist who was one of the first to conceive of brain function as dependent on neural pathways that connected different regions of the brain. An area of the brain that's involved in language comprehension and expression was named for him because he discovered it.

Ernst Weber

German physiologist best known for "Weber's Law". Weber's Law is related to the Just Noticeable Difference, which is the minimum difference in stimulation that a person can detect 50 percent of the time. Ernst Weber noted that for people to really perceive a difference, the stimuli must differ by a constant "proportion" not a constant "amount".

Noam Chomsky

Psychologist/linguist that specialized in language development. Chomsky stated that there is an infinite number of sentences in a language. He also stated that humans have an inborn native ability to develop language. Chomsky argued that children have a natural ability for acquiring languages that is aided by a nurturing environment.

Wolfgang Kohler

Gestalt psychologist that first demonstrated a cognitive theory of learning called insight learning (the abrupt realization of a problem's solution), through his chimpanzee experiments. He noticed the solution process wasn't slow, but sudden and reflective. In his experiment, Kohler hung a piece of fruit just out of reach of each chimp. He then provided the chimps with either two sticks or three boxes, then waited and watched. Kohler noticed that after the chimps realized they could not simply reach or jump up to retrieve the fruit, they stopped and thought about how they might solve the problem. Then after a few moments, the chimps stood up and proceeded to solve the problem. In the first scenario, the problem was solved by placing the smaller stick into the longer stick to create one very long stick that could be used to knock down the hanging fruit. In the second scenario, the chimps would solve the problem by stacking the boxes on top of each other, which allowed them to climb up to the top of the stack of boxes and reach the fruit.

John B. Watson

John Watson, who established the school of behaviorism, was an early behaviorist who's famous for his "Little Albert" experiment, which experimented on fear conditioning. John B. Watson largely popularized behaviorism after the books he wrote about it and the experiment that he conducted.

Michael Gazzaniga

Michael Gazzaniga is a leading psychologist and researcher in cognitive neuroscience, investigating how the brain underlies the mind. A major focus of his research has been the study of patients who have undergone split-brain surgery, with which he has pinpointed where in the brain various functions are located.

Torsten Wiesel (and David Hubel)

Nobel prize winning neuroscientist who, with David Hubel, demonstrated the importance of "feature detector" neurons- groups of neurons in the visual cortex that respond to different types of visual stimuli, in visual perception.

David Hubel (and Torsten Weisel)

Nobel prize winning neuroscientist who, with Torsten Weisel, demonstrated the importance of "feature detector" neurons- groups of neurons in the visual cortex that respond to different types of visual stimuli, in visual perception.

Wilhelm Wundt

Physiologist and experimental psychologist known as one of the fathers of psychology. Wilhelm Wundt conducted the first psychology experiments in the first psychology laboratory. Wundt was associated with structuralism, which involves describing the structures that compose the mind. He believed that psychology was the science of conscious experience and that trained observers could accurately describe thoughts, feelings, and emotions through a process known as introspection.

George A. Miller

Psychologist who developed the digit span test. He concluded that the capacity of Short Term Memory is about seven items or pieces of informaiton, plus or minus two or from five to nine bits of information. Made famous the phrase: "the magical number 7, plus or minus 2" when describing human memory.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Spent lots of time being his own test subject, trying to memorize nonsense syllables in order to see which methods of memorization would work the best. Through this process, he discovered a number of trends about how the human mind retains new information.The first of these trends is known as the spacing effect. When Ebbinghaus tried to memorize syllables, he found that he was better able to do this through distributed practice, meaning that he could retain more information when he studied it a little bit at a time every day rather than when he tried to memorize a large amount of information in one day. Another trend with memorization identified by Ebbinghaus is the serial position effect. This effect can work in one of two ways. When a list of syllables is first presented, it is more likely that the last few syllables will be remembered the best immediately after first exposure. If rehearsal of the list is allowed and an attempt to recall the list is made at a later time, the first few syllables on the list will be remembered best.