-Wundt (1874) declared that psychology should be a science modelled after physics and chemistry.

- Psychology’s subject matter should be consciousness and its methods should be scientifically rigorous.
- Leipzig became the place to study psychology
- Graduates of Wundt’s program set up research labs across Europe and North America.
- 23 new laboratories were established in North America between 1883 and 1893.
- Wundt convinced scholars from physiology and philosophy to view questions of the mind as worthy of the independent discipline of
psychology, not just as stepchild of their respective disciplines.
- Many young scholars came to Leipzig to study under Wundt.
- Wundt’s students, trained in the scientific study of the mind, dispersed across Germany and America.
- The first research lab in the U.S. was established by G. Stanley Hall (1846–1924) (who studied under Wundt briefly) at Johns Hopkins
University.
- Between 1883 and 1893, 24 new psychological laboratories sprang up in the U.S. and Canada.
- While psychology was born in Germany, its period of largest growth began in the United States.
- One off the first intellectual battles in the field (Wertheimer, 2012) was between Titchener in the Structuralism corner and James in the
Functionalism corner.
- Structuralists believed that psychology should be about analyzing consciousness into its basic elements, just as physicists were studying
how matter was made up of basic particles. Their work focused on sensation and perception and relied on introspection, a process by which a
person makes careful, systematic self-observations of one’s own conscious experience.
- Functionalists thought that psychology should be about investigating the function or purpose of consciousness, rather than its structure.
James argued that by analyzing consciousness into its “elements,” the structuralists missed the flow or stream of consciousness itself. Their
work focused on topics like mental testing developmental patterns and sex differences.
- These topics played a role in attracting the first women into the field of psychology
- Psychology began to chart a very different path from the work of Titchener and colleagues on systematic observation.
- John B. Watson (1878–1958) founded the behaviourist school of thought whose basic tenet was: Only observable behaviour should be
studied in scientific psychology.
-Behaviour, according to Watson, refers to an observable or overt response or activity of an organism.
-Watson’s ideas radically changed the landscape of psychology; they gave up consciousness and have a science of behaviour.
- B.F. Skinner (1904–1990): Environmental factors determine behaviour.
- Responses that lead to positive outcomes tend to be repeated.
- Responses that lead to negative outcomes tend not to be repeated.
- Principles still widely used in factories, schools, prisons, mental hospitals.
- Humanism = people are not passive recipients of experience, at the mercy of their heritage or circumstance.
- Independent variable (IV) = variable manipulated
- Dependent variable (DV) = variable affected by manipulation
- Measures of central tendency are used to describe the typical or average score in a distribution.
- The mean is the arithmetic average and is therefore sensitive to extreme scores.
- The median is the score that falls exactly in the centre of the distribution.
- The mode is the most frequently occurring score.
- The mean is the generally the most useful measure, but it is sensitive to extreme scores, which can make it misleading if the distribution is
skewed.
- Variability = how much scores in a distribution vary from each other and from the mean.
- Standard deviation = numerical depiction of variability
- High variability in data set = high standard deviation / Low variability in data set = low standard deviation
- Normal distribution = symmetrical, bell-shaped curve that represents the pattern in which many human characteristics are dispersed in the
population
- A correlation exists when two variables are related to each other.
- Replication is the repetition of a study to see whether the earlier results are duplicated.
- Cerebrum - Occipital—where the primary visual cortex is located. Parietal— where the primary somatosensory cortex is located.
- Temporal—where the primary auditory cortex is located.
- Frontal—where the primary motor cortex and executive control system is located.
- Endocrine- Pituitary―the master gland that secretes substances influencing the operation of all the other glands, as well as growth
hormone and oxytocin.
- Thyroid gland―controls metabolic rate. Adrenal glands―control salt and carbohydrate metabolism.
- Pancreas―secretes insulin to control sugar metabolism.
- Gonads―secrete sex hormones involved in the development of secondary sex characteristics and reproduction.
- Hindbrain: located at the lower end of the brain, where the spinal cord joins the brainstem.
- The medulla is in charge of circulation, breathing, muscle tone, and regulating reflexes. The pons is important in sleep and arousal.
- The cerebellum is critical in the coordination of movement and equilibrium. Your cerebellum is what affords you the ability to hold your
arms out to your sides while simultaneously bringing your finger to your nose during a roadside test for drunk driving. Recent discoveries
suggest that the cerebellum may be involved in many other functions, including perception, recognition, and recall of emotions, and various
language processing tasks.
• Midbrain: lies between the hindbrain and the forebrain and is involved in sensory functions such as locating
where things are in space. It contains structures important for voluntary movement (Parkinson’s disease is due to
degeneration of the substantial nigra, a structure in the midbrain).
• Reticular activating system is found in both the hind and midbrain, and is important in sleep and arousal as well
as breathing and pain perception.
• Forebrain is the largest and most complex region of the brain. It includes:

• Thalamus—the way station for all incoming sensory information before it is passed on to appropriate higher
brain regions.
• Hypothalamus—the regulator of basic biological needs such as hunger, thirst, sex drive, temperature regulation.
Communicates with and influences all major subdivisions of the CNS.
• Limbic system—a loosely connected network of structures involved in emotion, motivation, memory, and other
aspects of behaviour.
• Cerebrum—the largest and most complex portion of the human brain. The convoluted outer layer of the
cerebrum is the cerebral cortex, responsible for complex mental activities such as learning, remembering, thinking, and
consciousness.
- Sensation is the stimulation of sense organs―for example, absorbing energy from light by the eyes.
- Perception is the selection, organization, and interpretation of sensory input―translating the sensory input into something meaningful.
- Psychophysics is the study of how physical stimuli are translated into our psychological experience of those stimuli.
- Synesthesia is a condition where perceptual or cognitive activities, such as listening to music or reading, during which the senses become
paired―for example, words and colour or sounds and visions or emotional experiences.
- Psychophysics―the study of how physical stimuli are translated into psychological experience
- Sensation begins with a detectable stimulus
- Signal detection theory holds that the detection of sensory information is influenced by two things: 1. noise in the system (irrelevant
stimuli in the environment that elicit neural activity) 2. decision-making processes.
- Signal detection theory emphasized factors other than stimulus intensity influencing detectability (in contrast to Fechner’s ideas).
- Researchers have demonstrated that perception can occur without awareness—for example, subliminal messages in ads—but these effects
have been shown to be of limited impact and short duration.
- Prolonged stimulation may lead to sensory adaptation, or a decline in sensitivity to the stimulus. For example, the pool is only cold at first,
but not after 15 or 20 minutes.
- Retina is a piece of neural tissue that lines the back of the eye. It absorbs light, processes images, and sends information to the brain.
- Fovea: tiny spot in centre of optic disc containing only cones. This is where visual acuity is greatest.
- Optic disk is a hole in the retina where the optic nerve leaves the eye and axons from the retina to the brain converge. If an image falls on
this hole, it can’t be seen. This is called the blind spot.
- The visual receptor cells in the axon: rods (for black and white and low-light vision)
- cones (for colour and daylight vision).
-Adaptation, or becoming more or less sensitive to light as needed, occurs in part due to chemical changes in the rods and cones.
- A significant amount of complex information processing occurs in the retina itself before visual signals are sent to the brain. Receptive
fields are the collection of rod and cone receptors that funnel signals to a particular visual cell in the retina.
- Binocular cues include retinal disparity (objects within about 7.5 metres or 25 feet project images to slightly different locations on the left
and right retinas; thus each eye sees a slightly different view of the object) and convergence, feeling the eyes converge toward each other as
they focus on a target.
- Monocular cues may involve motion parallax (having images of objects at different distances moving across the retina at different rates), as
well as feeling the accommodation or change in the shape of the lens as the eye focuses.
- Other monocular cues are pictorial depth cues, cues about distance that can be given in a flat picture
- Beta: normal waking thought, alert problem solving. Alpha: deep relaxation, mind blank, meditation Theta: light sleep. Delta: deep sleep
- Circadian rhythms: 24-hour biological cycles
- Acetylcholine is associated with nicotine
- Structural encoding is shallow, superficial processing of the physical structure of the stimulus (e.g., were the letters capitalized or lowercase
or how long the word is).
- Phonemic encoding involves naming or saying (even silently in one’s own head) the words.
- Semantic encoding focuses on the meaning of verbal information (e.g., what the objects or actions represent).
-Dual-coding theory posits that imagery forms a second form of memory code, and that by having semantic and visual codes, recall is
improved significantly.
- Sensory memory is information preserved in its original sensory form for a brief time
- Short-term memory refers to the limited-capacity store that can maintain unrehearsed information for approximately 20 seconds.
- While most researchers agree that LTM has an unlimited capacity―that is, our memory store never gets FULL―much debate remains over
whether storage is permanent.
- Schemas are organized clusters of knowledge about a particular object generated from previous experience. People tend to remember
details consistent with their schemas, and sometimes extreme outliers or details that violate their schemas.
- Semantic networks are made up of nodes representing concepts that are joined together by pathways that connect associated concepts—for
example, thinking of butter makes bread easier to remember.
- Research indicates that forgetting may be related to encoding, storage, or retrieval processes.
- Much forgetting may only look like forgetting; it may have never been inserted into memory in the first place―pseudoforgetting, usually
due to lack of attention so that encoding does not occur. Ineffective encoding occurs when you encode on a superficial level―for example,
when studying you encode what you are reading on a phonemic rather than a semantic level.
- Decay theory proposes that forgetting occurs because memory traces fade with time.
-Interference theory points to the negative impact of competing information on retention and holds that people forget information because
of competition from other material.
- Proactive interference occurs when previously learned information interferes with the retention of new information, while retroactive
interference occurs when new information impairs the retention for previously learned information.
- Transience is the simple weakening of a memory over time. This is what we tend to think of most often when we think about memory
failure.
- Absentmindedness refers to a memory failure that is often due to a failure to pay attention because we are perhaps preoccupied with other
things: losing your keys, misplacing your flash drive.
- Blocking is an often temporary problem that occurs when we fail to retrieve an item of information such as someone’s name when we meet
them. Of course, this is similar to what we have referred to as the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.
- With misattribution, we assign a memory to the wrong source, such as the example we gave above about this week’s exam in psychology,
or was it sociology?
- In the sin of suggestibility, our memory is distorted because of, for example, misleading questions.
- The sin of bias refers to inaccuracy due to the effect of our current knowledge on our reconstruction of the past.
- The sin of persistence involves unwanted memories or recollections that you cannot forget―memories that haunt you.
- the hippocampus and adjacent areas in the brain are thought to play an especially central role in memory. The hippocampus appears to be
responsible for the initial consolidation of memories, which are then stored in diverse and widely distributed areas of the cortex
- Language is defined as consisting of symbols that convey meaning, plus rules for combining those symbols, that can be used to generate an
infinite variety of messages.
- Language is symbolic; that is, people use spoken sounds and written words to represent objects, actions, events, and ideas.
- It is semantic, or meaningful.
-It is generative; that is, a limited number of symbols can be combined in an infinite number of ways to generate novel messages.
- It is structured; there are rules that govern arrangement of words into phrases and sentences.
- Basic sounds are combined into units with meaning, which are combined into words, which are combined into phrases, which are combined
into sentences.
- Phonemes are the smallest units of speech. Research indicates that there are about 100 possible phonemes, but most languages use between
20 and 80; English uses about 40.
- Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language, consisting of root words, prefixes, and suffixes. “S” has meaning beyond
being a letter (pluralization).
- Semantics refer to the meaning of words and word combinations. Learning semantics involves learning the variety of objects and actions to
which words refer.
- Syntax is a system of rules for arranging words into sentences. Different languages have different rules (e.g., whether the verb or the
subject first in a sentence).
- Infant vocalizations are initially similar across languages, involving all phonemes. Infants cry, coo, and make repetitive babbling
vocalizations of all phonemes.
- By the age of six months, the babbling sounds begin to resemble those of the infant’s surrounding language.
- By the time an infant is 12 months of age, the first word is typically spoken, usually dada, mama, papa, etc. This is similar across cultures.
- While few words are spoken (expressive language) at this stage, research indicates that very young children may actually understand
(receptive language) more language than they can produce.
- Toddlers often make errors using new words:
- Overextensions occur when a child incorrectly uses a word to describe a wider set of objects or actions than it is meant to—for example,
using the word “ball” for anything round.
- Underextensions occur when a child incorrectly uses a word to describe a narrower set of objects or actions than it is meant to—for
example, using the word “doll” only for a favourite doll.
- Common barriers to problem-solving include:
- Getting bogged down in irrelevant information
- Functional fixedness, which is the tendency to perceive an item only in terms of its most common use.
- Being stuck in a mental set, which exists when people persist in using problem-solving strategies that have worked in the past.
- Assuming unnecessary constraints on the problem, as in the 9-dot problem and the matchstick problem depicted in the text
- Risky decision-making involves making choices under conditions of uncertainty.
- Expected value involves what you stand to gain; subjective utility and subjective probability help explain why people engage in activities
that violate expected value.
- Subjective utility represents what an outcome is personally worth to an individual; for example, insurance and sense of security.
- Subjective probability involves personal estimates of probabilities, which are often inaccurate.
- Cosmides and Tooby argue that human decision-making emerged to solve adaptive problems such as finding food, shelter, and mates and
dealing with allies and enemies.
- Consistent with this theory, many reasoning errors disappear when problems are presented in ways that resemble the type of input humans
would have processed in ancient times.
-Gigerenzer (2000) argues that humans do not have the time, resources, or capacities to gather all the necessary information, consider all
alternatives, calculate all probabilities and risks, and then make the statistically optimal decision. Instead, they use the fast and frugal route,
making quick, one-reason decisions that yield inferences that are often just accurate.