AP Psych Midterm: People to know

René Descartes

"Cogito ero sum" ; father of modern Rationalism; 17th century French philosopher; wrote Discourse on Method; believed mind and matter were completely separate-- external stimuli and innate behaviors

John Locke

"Tabula rasa"; believed that people are born with a clean slate, supporting nurture in the nature vs nurture debate.

Socrates

Athenian philosopher (ca. 470-399 B.C.E.) who shifted the emphasis of philosophical investigation from questions of natural science to ethics and human behavior.

Plato

Believed that the mind is separate from the body; suggested humans could approach understanding of perfect forms of truth, good, and beauty that he thought underlay nature

Ivan Pavlov

Classical condition; found that animals learn to associate two (at first) unrelated objects with each other; associative learning

Paul Broca

Discovered Broca's area, a lobe in the brain that is responsible for speech

Carl Wernicke

Discovered Wernicke's area, a part in the brain that is responsible for language comprehension

Ernest Weber

Discovered the principle that, to be perceived as different, two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum percentage (rather than by a constant amount.

Rosalind Cartwright

Dream theory- dreams help us solve problems.

Charles Darwin

Father of evolution; believed that species adapt to new environment and change over time. Natural selection.

John B. Watson

Father of humanistic behaviorism; emphasis on external behaviors of people and their reactions on a given situation; famous for Little Albert study in which baby was taught to fear a white rat.

Wilhelm Wundt

Father of psychology; founder of structuralism, the study of the brain's functions and relations to behavior.

Sigmund Freud

Father of unconscious psychology; psychoanalytic, personality; Contributions: id/ego/superego, reality and pleasure principles, ego ideal, defense mechanisms

David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel

Feature detectors in the eye

Margaret Floy Washburn

First female to be awarded a PhD in psychology; 2nd president of the APA (1921)

William James

Founder of behaviorism

Francis Bacon

Founder of modern science; studies focused on experience, common sense; developed scientific method

Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall

Gate Control Theory of Pain

Max Wertheimer

Gestalt psychologist; Argued against dividing human thought and behavior into discrete structures. Gestalt psychology tried to examine a person's total experience because the way we experience the world is more than just an accumulation of various perceptual experiences. Gestalt theorists demonstrated that the whole experience is often more than just the sum of the parts of the experience.

Abraham Maslow

Hierarchy of needs. Humans need basics before they can reach self-actualization. Sub-field of humanism.

Carl Rogers

Humanistic psychology; Contributions: founded client-centered therapy, theory that emphasizes the unique quality of humans especially their freedom and potential for personal growth, unconditional positive regard.

Edward Tichener

Like Wundt, Titchener believed that the main question of psychology was the nature of mental experience; typically presented a stimulus and asked his subject to analyze it into its separate features.

Philippe Pinel

One of the first reformers to advocate this position and call for providing more humane living conditions for the mentally ill

G. Stanley Hall

Opened first psychology lab in the US, and he founded and became the first president of the APA

Ewald Hering

Opponent processing theory of color vision

B.F. Skinner

Pioneer of operant conditioning who believed that everything we do is determined by our past history of rewards and punishments. he is famous for use of his operant conditioning apparatus which he used to study schedules of reinforcement on pigeons and rats.

Gustav Fechner

Psychophysics; one of the people who discovered absolute threshold and difference threshold.

J. Allan Hopson and R.W. McCarley

REM, dreaming and consciousness

Nicholas Spanos

Social influence theory of hypnosis (subject is so caught up in the hypnotized role that he/she ignores the cold)

Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga

Split-brain research

Mary Whinton Calkins

Studied psychology under William James; first woman to be president of APA ; studied memory; denied a PhD because she was a woman

William Dement

Studied the effects of the deprivation of REM sleep; REM rebound

Ernest Hilgard

The person associated with the dissociation theory of hypnosis.

Herman von Helmholtz

Theorist who both aided in the development of the trichromatic theory of color perception and Place theory of pitch perception.

Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk

Visual Cliff experiment in order to test for depth perception

Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman

Were the first to observe periods of rapid eye movements in sleeping infants in the early 1950s.

Franz Gall

phrenology; associated development of a trait with growth of its relevant part of the brain