PSY4604_ History and the System of Psychology Unit 2 chapter 8
How did Brentano only argues that it's possible to indirectly observe our own consciousness?
Brentano only argues that it's possible to indirectly observe our own consciousness. To observe past experiences. So once you have processed an image, once you have seen an image and then recognized it, then you might be able to introspect about that process. But you could not observe it as it's happening. Because once you try to observe it as it's happening, that's when you interrupt it and you replace with a different mental process.
Wilhelm Wundt
german physiologist who founded psychology as a formal science; opened first psychology research laboratory in 1879
How did Brentano classify the means of studying the mind
he separated them into three methodologies The first is a form of introspection called direct inner observation, which entails observing one's mental acts as they occur. ~indirect inner observation, which entails internally perceiving mental acts that occurred in the past. Recalling these acts does not change them, because they had previously occurred intact and meaningfully, and the act of recall does not change that fact, that is, it cannot change the past ~third technique involved objective observation, which meant to observe the externalized mental acts of other people. That is, the outward behavior of another person reflects his or her intentional mental acts
According to Brentano what is the problem with direct inner observation
if observing the object of study was to necessarily change it, then we could not really be studying the object in an objective way. And that's the problem with direct inner observation as Brentano is putting it
What is intentional eliminativism
intentional eliminativism.: The suggestion that intentions do not exist
T OR F : For Brentano, the defining characteristic of the mind was intentionality. Mental phenomena are intentional because they contain meaning, unlike physical phenomena, which Kant had defined as "things-in-themselves" (and thus, Brentano's theory is a form of dualism).
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T OR F : Rather than instructing subjects to analyze their experiences into the simplest possible elements, Brentano emphasized intact, meaningful experiences
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T or F : Donders called this the simple reaction time, because all that it required was for the subject to detect the presence of the stimulus and then respond quickly
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T or F : Donders reasoned that it was due to perceptual processing, requiring a discrimination between the two possible stimuli. In the simple task, no discrimination is required; if a stimulus is present, press the key. Now, the subject must determine which stimulus is present before pressing the key. The extra time associated with this perceptual discrimination is the reason why the response latencies were longer. The difference in reaction times between these trials and the simple reaction times was called discrimination time.
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T or F : Friedrich became the first person ever to receive a psychology PhD, and Hall was the first American to do so!
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T or F : a Dutch physiologist named Franciscus Cornelis Donders (born 1818) created the subtractive method of measuring cognitive processes, and thus pioneered the field of mental chronometry, or the measurement of the duration of mental events.
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T or f : Immediate experience, more important for the psychologist, was comprised, of perception, apperception and creative synthesis.
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T or f : Wundt argued that there were aspects of the mind not accessible to direct study and immediate experience, and could only be studied indirectly as mediate experiences. These consist of higher mental processes, including "such things as language, culture, religion, and all of the complex and uniquely human activities
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T or f : Wundt further subdivided the nature of conscious experiences into two major types. The first was called immediate experience, which was the level of experience that could be directly studied using his experimental techniques
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T or f ; Donders' technique was called the subtractive method because it measured the duration of the cognitive processes by subtracting one reaction time from another.
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T or f: at the close of the 19th century, other psychologists developed a very different approach. Opposing the reductionism of structuralist psychology, Franz Brentano (born 1838) adopted the method of phenomenological introspection.
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To r f : Wundt published his work on these topics in a massive volume called Fölkerpsychologie, or Cultural Psychology.
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t o r f: another one of Titchener's goal was to somehow scientifically study individual sensations and the processes by which they come together and cohere and become that big picture perception.
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t or F : the most important thing in the mind is this thing called the will. The will is the active part of the mind. It is the agent in the mind that performs all of the actions that mind performs. So perception, attention, memory, anything where we are processing information and thinking about things. Remembering it and imagining it, so on and so forth. These behaviors are governed by the will
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t or F: What happens between the moment that stimulus is registered in their eyes, between that point and then what happens when they recognize what it is? This is the distinction between sensation and perception
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t or f : Introspection means to look inward. So to observe our own consciousness.
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t or f : The act of presentation is an intentional act and it exists only with the object that it refers to, which would be the mental representation of the person's face that you are thinking about. It's pretty abstract.
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t or f : The idea that introspective analysis could be used to break down the mind into component structures and basic units was taken up by one of Wundt's students Edward Bradford Titchener
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t or f : The only thing of interest to Titchener was the sensation, for this was the building block of consciousness. Any and all aspects of the human mind and behavior, including emotion, could be reduced down to the level of a sensation
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t or f : The second nature of conscious experiences was mediate experience, which relates to the kind of knowledge we obtain via indirect means, such as through instruments of one sort or another.
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t or f : This is a highly reductionist theory of the mind, arguing that all of the high-level processes, including the functions that Wundt argued could not be studied experimentally such as language and culture, could be understood at the smallest possible level of analysis.
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t or f : Wilhelm Wundt rejected views of materialism, that studying the brain and studying the nervous system as the physiologists were doing is really not enough to understand psychology. We have to somehow understand the mind as well.
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t or f : Wilhelm Wundt school of thought is called voluntarism
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t or f : introspection business is inherently subjective And it is highly susceptible to bias
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t or f : phenomenology is an introspective way of studying the mind. But it is not taught in a reductionist or analytical approach to the mind. Rather, it is a more holistic view. It's a rejection of reductionism because the phenomenologist argue that it is not possible to break the mind down into any sort of fundamental unit, that it makes no sense
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t or f mental chronometry is the measurement of the duration of mental events.
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t or f: . Titchener believed The whole of the mind could be understood using introspection. and that is an example of reductionism.
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t or f: Brentano says that consciousness is intentional
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t or f: But Brentano actually considered Direct inner observation to be a big problem, that it doesn't work. Because trying to directly observe your own consciousness necessarily changes your own consciousness.
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t or f: Consciousness only exists and therefore meaning only exists when we have both of them together the mental act and the mental representation
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t or f: Guys like Lotze and Helmholtz they considered themselves to be physiologists and they considered psychology to be too metaphysical to be truly scientific.
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t or f: Kant called the noumenal world, things under themselves
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t or f: Mass practice as it turns out, is superior for things like motor skills.
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t or f: So all mental acts are intentional acts because they all have objects. They cannot exist without an object. Likewise, those mental objects, those mental representations cannot exist without a mental act that brings them into existence.
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t or f: That the objects are doing their own thing independent of the observation of them. And that observation doesn't change or interfere with what's happening, so therefore the observations that are made are truly objective.
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t or f: Titchener was not Wundt first student, but he was perhaps one of his most significant students. He developed his own school of thought that he called structuralism. And after he got his degree, he came to the United States and was one of the first, but not the first, to setup a psychology lab in the United States at Cornell University in New York.
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t or f: Titchener's goal structuralism is about identifying the basic structure of consciousness.
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t or f: Titchener's goal wants to understand perhaps what we might call the unit of thought.
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t or f: Wilhelm Wundt is considered the first true experimental psychologist
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t or f: Wundt actually doesn't believe that he can apply these experimental techniques to all of consciousness, because he subdivides consciousness into two types of experience
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t or f: Wundt is significant because he develops experimental techniques for studying the mind
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t or f: Wundt's approach to mediate experiences was to study the way they are manifest in linguistic patterns, cultural universals, and literature. Hence the methods included comparative linguistics, cultural anthropology, and analysis of literature and myths.
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t or f: Wundtis thinking wasThat humans have an active mind and that that mind is somehow separate from the body
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t or f: free floating state of desire which is not possible in Brentano's view
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t or f: perception might be the one stage of these three stages that is slightly passive
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t or f: phenomenology is a rejection of Titchener's view of trying to break the mind down into some basic, meaningless, elemental structure.
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t or f: the only way to understand meaning is to understand Wesensschau, which is mapping out all of the connections that a particular person has to a particular image. And that's really a big part of what phenomenology is.
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t or f; The modern philosopher Daniel Dennett (born 1942) defined the intentional stance as a position most people take when observing the behavior of others (Dennett, 1987). That is, we take an intentional stance and behave as if other people possessed intentions. But this belief in the intentionality of others does not make it real; there is no guarantee that other people's behavior is truly intentional.
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to r f: Wilhelm Wundt was influenced by both Leibniz and Kant. And both of them, especially Kant, were dualists. They were also rationalists and they opposed the passive mind empiricism
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t or f: immediate experience is subdivided into three stages or processes if so what are they ?
t -The first is perception, where we bring information in from the outside world. And just as Kant did, this is seen as a top-down process. -Apperception is Wundt's word that is equivalent to what is called "attention". So, think about the idea that when you are perceiving -the third step of creative synthesis. Which means that after you have attended to some information you connect it to other ideas that you already have. You related it to information that you already know. You store it in memory. And our memories are stored as networks where ideas are connected to other ideas. And Wundt called this creative synthesis
t or f : for Husserl phenomenology was also a scientific means for studying the data of conscious experience. Using the introspection technique, subjects could both describe, or analyze, their experiences, ala Titchener's studies, or they could report on the fullness of their experience, and all of the meaning that they extracted from a stimulus.
t : for Husserl phenomenology was also a scientific means for studying the data of conscious experience. Using the introspection technique, subjects could both describe, or analyze, their experiences, ala Titchener's studies, or they could report on the fullness of their experience, and all of the meaning that they extracted from a stimulus.
t or f: Wundt essentially trained the entire first generation of experimental psychologists because his lab was the first, his lab was the only place to go for a period of time, to receive any training in experimental psychology
t: Wundt essentially trained the entire first generation of experimental psychologists because his lab was the first, his lab was the only place to go for a period of time, to receive any training in experimental psychology
t or f: distributive practice is breaking it up into smaller bits and spreading it out over time.
t: distributive practice is breaking it up into smaller bits and spreading it out over time. distributive practice is breaking it up into smaller bits and spreading it out over time. So if you had a 25 word list you might break it into 5 groups of 5 words. And individually memorize each smaller group of 5.
t or f : it was Husserl who formalized the school of thought called phenomenology
t: it was Husserl who formalized the school of thought called phenomenology
what is the Wesensschau:
the Wesensschau is an idea by Husserl. which is the true essence of your experience
What is intentionality?
the quality of being directed toward an object
what did Wilhelm Wundt To understand the processes of what the will does? So he focuses on many of these kinds of cognitive processes or willful process. Perception, attention, mental chronometry
to understand the processes of what the will does? So he focuses on many of these kinds of cognitive processes or willful process. Perception, attention, mental chronometry
Periphery in Germany
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Phenomenology
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Titchener
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What does the Wesensschau, represent:
- the true essence, or meaning, of one's conscious experience. The empiricists argued that beauty was extracted from experience, that only with enough experience with viewing both beautiful and ugly objects would be come to know about the essence of beauty and be able to recognize it when we see it, because of how it relates to the whole context of our conscious experience
what is mediate experience and how is it studied ? what are some examples
-Deeper working in the human mind such as why are there gender roles, why do most culture have a right of passage from children to adulthood in cultures. -Wundt argued that it could be studied using what he calls "cultural psychology". -Studying mythology and religion.
Define reductionism and explain how Titchener's structuralism is an example of it.
-Reductionism is an approach to complex systems that aims to simplify them to their smallest possible unit, under the assumption that all of the complexity can be understood by understanding the basic processes. -Titchener believe it was possible to break down (analyze) the mind into its fundamental units, and that to understand and study these fundamental units would then allow us to understand what consciousness (the mind) was
what are the two subdivides of consciousness experiences by , Wundt
-immediate experience. And this is the kind of consciousness that can be studied scientifically, using his experimental techniques. Immediate experience is the kind of experience that we have when we are just simply immediately aware of our surroundings and thinking about all of this information and thinking about our memories, which is memories of things we have perceived in the past. -mediate experience: A mediate experience is sort of a second hand form of knowledge. Whereas immediate experiences are immediate, first hand awareness of what's happening around us and in our conscious experience. Mediate experience is sort of a higher, or what you might call a deeper level of consciousness that we are not directly aware of
According to Wundt, what is the difference between immediate and mediate experience
1-Immediate experience is what happens when we perceive and pay attention to our surroundings. It involves perception, apperception (attention), and creative synthesis. This type of experience can be studied experimentally, using the methods of mental chronometry and internal perception 2-Mediate experience is the higher level of consciousness that underlies our understanding of the abstract. It can only be understood by using the methods of cultural anthropology, and literary/mythological analysis.
how long did it take the subject and Wundt experiment to switch that spotlight from their ears to their eyes.
1/10th of a second.
what is a the stimulus error
Calling a box a box - Titchener thought it was more complex than that - sets of lines and color hues etc.
what is Chronometry?
Chronometry means the measurement of time
what are the three intentional acts?
Presentation, judging, and desire.
Describe Brentano's three methods for studying consciousness
Direct inner observation was the method employed by Titchener. According to Brentano, it entailed "looking at yourself looking at an image". As a result, you are not really studying the immediate experience of looking at an image because you alter your immediate experience as soon as you try and observe it. Thus, Brentano argued that this method was not a valid way to study immediate experience, because the act of internal observation changes the object of observation. -A second method was indirect inner observation, which entailed imagining or remembering yourself looking at an image, and thus recreating the experience. -The third method was objective observation, which involved observing the behavior of subjects, and then inferring the conscious events that gave rise to those behaviors.
What accounted for the extra processing time?
Donders argued it was the response selection time. The idea is that once the perceptual discrimination process is completed and the subject has determined whether the shock was on the left or right foot, s/he now have to make yet another decision, corresponding to which key to press, introducing additional latency to the response.
Voluntarism
Hoover believed that individuals should help each other not rely on the gov't. There was alot of voluntarism but it wasn't enough to overcome the economic Depression
during the cow experiment what did Titchener expecting the subjects to say?
I want you to report on the sensations
Define intentional realism and intentional eliminativism
Intentional realism is the theory that intentions are real (i.e., that other people have intentions and are not mindless robots). This idea is consistent with folk psychology and the intentional stance. -Intentional eliminativism is a form of materialist monism that states that intentions are not real, and that behavior is automatic and reflexive.
what is the CVC trigram what is used for ?
It stands for consonant vowel consonant trigram. A 3-letter words consisting of a consonant vowel and consonant. used to study memory. created by Ebbinghaus. usually three letters that are nonsense.
What is meaning?
Meaning is to have something that refers to something else.
What is phenomenology?
One's conscious experience of the world (what a person hears, thinks, feels), which is seen as being psychologically more important than the world itself
who discovered mental set and what is a mental set
Oswald Kulpe, he studied the problem solving -It is the continued use of a particular strategy to approach another problem.
what is Reductionism
Reductionism is any approach in science that attempts to breakdown something that is very complex, into something that is very simple. Chop it up into simple bits so that we can understand the whole complexity by understanding the simple parts. And that the simple parts will tell us about how the whole thing works.
what is saving time when using the CVC TRIGRAM?
Savings time is how much time you save when you relearn the list. let's say on day 1 he has a list of 25 CVC trigrams and it takes him an hour to memorize it. If he picks up the same list two days later, maybe it takes him a half hour to re-memorize the whole list. He is not necessarily going to remember the whole list two days later, but he might remember some of the words. So now he picks up the list again and keeps studying it until he is able to remember the list again and it takes him thirty minutes compared to initial one hour. So he has saved 30 minutes off of his original time. So that is what the savings time is.
T OR F: . Mass practice is when you study the entire list all at once. So if you had 25 words to memorize, you would sit down with the entire list and try to memorize the whole thing all at once
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T or f : Müller, was the first to propose an interference theory of forgetting, suggesting that new information brought into the mind since the time of learning conflicts with the older information, making it harder to access those memories
T : Müller, was the first to propose an interference theory of forgetting, suggesting that new information brought into the mind since the time of learning conflicts with the older information, making it harder to access those memories
WHAT IS THE LEARNING CURVE IN REGARDS TO SAVING TIME?
The learning curve is how much time does it take to learn such a long list and how many do you remember as a function of time again
What is wrong with direct inner observation
The problem with this technique is that observing one's mental acts necessarily changes them. For example, when feeling an emotion such as anger, the act of observing the anger changes it, weakens. Also when observing the mental act of anger, suddenly the current mental act is no longer the anger, but a different one called ideation, or presentation, which means thinking about something. The content of this new mental act is the emotion one had previously experienced. By observing the anger, you are no longer angry, but the mental act associated with the emotion has become a mental object that one is analyzing, not feeling
what was Wilhelm Wundt saying in this stsatement " Contradicted by the fact of consciousness itself, which cannot possibly be derived from any physical qualities of matter"
What he is saying here is just that the entire experience of thought, the entire experience of being conscious, is completely immaterial
who was He was not a physiologist and his influences were more dualist in nature
Wilhelm Wundt
Explain how Külpe's findings were at odds with the theories of Wundt and Titchener.
Wundt and Titchener would have considered problem solving to be part of immediate experience and should have been accessible to internal perception (introspection). Because Kulpe's discovery of "imageless thought" demonstrated that during problem solving, participants could not introspect about the processes used to arrive at the solution, this demonstrated that Wundt and Titchener were wrong.
what is act psychology about describing the various intentional acts of consciousness that are directed towards our mental representations of things.
act psychology is about describing the various intentional acts of consciousness that are directed towards our mental representations of things.
what is a A tachistoscope, or a t-scope
a device that is designed to present a stimulus extremely rapidly, so that you only see it for just a fraction of a second, flashing before your eyes.
what is the existential act?
come into existence the moment I direct a mental act upon them. This is why this is called act psychology
Levels of consciousness
conscious, preconscious, unconscious
what is Direct inner observation
observation is important and the only way to directly observe it is to observe your own, because consciousness is private. That's called direct inner observation by Brentano's classification.
folk psychology
our informal beliefs about other people and their behavior
