Week 1 Notes - Dr. Charbonnier PDF

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Dr. Charbonnier...

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PSY 325: The Psychology of Learning and Memory Week 1, Lecture Notes ● Learning: the process by which changes in behavior arise as a result of experience interacting with the world. ● Memory: the record of our past experiences, which we get through learning ○ hippocampus= essential in memory ● Ways to improve memory and learning: ○ Pay attention ○ Imagery ○ Use multiple senses ○ Sleep well ○ Relax ○ Create associations ○ Practice ○ Reduce overload ○ Try a rhyme ○ Re-create learning event ● Early approaches- philosophical, Aristotle and Plato ○ Then Leibniz, Locke, and Descartes ○ More recently- Pavlov, James, and Darwin ● Philosophical Traditions ○ Nativist: humans are shaped by inherited nature ■ Leibniz, Darwin, Galton, Descartes, and Plato ○ Empiricist: humans are shaped by experience ■ Aristotle, Locke, James, Pavolv, and Thorndike ○ People now believe in both, but do not know to what extent ● Descartes: dualism- immaterial soul and mechanical body ● Aristotle: rules of association ○ Contiguity, frequency, and similarity ● James: experience links ideas in the mind ● Evolution: the theory that species can change over time, and that all existing species are descendants of common ancestors ● Natural Selection: the notion that heritable traits that provide reproductive advantages become more common in population, leading over time to exchanges in existing species and evolution of new species ● Francis Galton- bell curve and eugenics ● Experimental Psych- Ebbinghaus ○ Empirical research- experimental and quantitative ○ Used himself as a test-subject ○ Studied lists of nonsense words (trigrams)

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■ Simple, effective design ■ Learn, delay, and test for memory ■ DV= savings ○ Exponential forgetting curve ■ Time, practice, and spacing events shown Experimental Psych- Pavlov ○ Associations ○ Dog and salvation- doorbell before food led to saliva ○ classical/pavlovian conditioning ○ Frequency- learning curve, contiguity- extinguished, similarity- generalized Experimental Psych- Thorndike ○ Cats in puzzle box and pully to escape ○ Behaviors that opened box= frequent ○ Law of Effect: positive behaviors are repeated, negative behaviors are not Freudian psychoanalysis was most popular before behaviorism Behaviorists ○ John watson- behavior (stimulus and response) ○ Clark Hull- quantitative ○ B.F. Skinner- experiments (Ex: Skinner Box) Principles: focus on behavior (observable), empiricism, evolutionary perspective, quantitative, and law of effect ○ Does not need to know what is happening in the mind Cognitive Approach ○ W.K., Estes, Gordon, Bower, George Miller Principles: mental processing, computer metaphor, evolutionary perspective, modeling/simulation, intrinsic motivation ○ Can’t ignore mental world, mind is not id/ego/superego Miller digit span (7+- 2 items) Gorden Bower- reinterpreted learning curve ○ Moment of insight...