Chapter 1

Question 1

Nativism vs Empiricism

Answer 1

Nativism/nature: heredity, innate, hard-wired, built in

Empiricism/nurture: environment, experience, learned

Question 2

Philosophers associated with nativism vs empiricism

Answer 2

Nativism: Plato, Kant
Empiricism: Aristotle, Locke

Question 3

Nature vs nurture in modern-day psych (two types of psych used to conduct studies)

Answer 3

1. Developmental psych: where does our knowledge come from? (in relation to nature vs nuture) basically studies on infants to see if some knowledge is hardwired/ built in (Nature)
2. Evolutionary psych: if we share certain mental capacities with animals, suggests an evolutionary origin to those capacities

Question 4

Dualism vs Materialism

Answer 4

Dualism: the mind and body are two distinct things (Descartes)

Materialism: All mental phenomena are reducible to physical phenomena (Hobbes)

Question 5

Phrenology

Answer 5

analyzing “bumps” and contours on skull to understand mental faculties, theory posited that more the brain was sed, the larger the corresponding brain area and skull bump would become (method now discredited)

Question 6

Cognitive neuroscience

Answer 6

study that attempts to understand links between cognitive processes (mental activities) and neural activity (electrical/chem signals)

Question 7

Structuralism (1867, before func and behaviorism)

Answer 7

analysis of basic elements that constitute mind

experiments often used reaction time as insight, called mental chronometry

Question 8

Functionalism (1890 after structuralism, before behaviorism)

Answer 8

-study of how mental processes enable people to adapt to the environment
-influenced by evolutionary biology

Question 9

Behaviorism (1915 after structural and functionalism)

Answer 9

advocated that psychologists restrict themselves to the study of objectively observable behavior
-studied by stimulus–>response
aka
sensory input from environment–>action/behavior to stimulus

Question 10

Cognitive Revolution

Answer 10

shift in psych (1950s and 60s), moved field from focusing on observable behaviors (behaviorism) to mental processes (memory, problem solving, etc)

marked the “return of the mind”