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Phycology and Cognitive Sciences - Coggle Diagram
Phycology and Cognitive Sciences
Types Of Learning
Associative
Classical Conditioning
2 stimuli repeatedly paired > becomes associated > same response.
Conditioned Stimulus (CS): Previously neutral > associated with UCS > Produces a CR.
Conditioned Response (CR): The learned response to a CS.
Unconditioned Response (UCR): The original response to UCS.
Unconditioned Stimulus (UCS): It automatically produces a response.
Generalisation: reacting to similarities
Once conditioned to a stimuli, a response can be produced to a similar CS.
Discrimination: Reacting to differences
Can be conditioned to tell the difference between similar stimuli.
Instrumental Conditioning (operant conditioning)
Learning by seeing how actions affect the environment.
Law of effect: random responses followed br positive consequences.
Reinforcement: positive consequences increases probability of behaviour.
Punishment: negative consequences decrease probability of behaviour.
Reinforcement schedule: reward given after fined period.
Complex Learning
More advanced forms of learning, and intelligence, are dependent on " organisms ability to mentally represent aspects of the world and then operate on these mental representations rather than on the world itself".
Insightful Learning
Mental trial and error: The animal form a mental representation of the problem, manipulates components of the problem until it finds a solution, and then applies it to the real world.
Non-Associative
Habituation
When the stimulus become familiar, response decreases.
Advantage: Narrows the range of stimuli that raises alarm
Disadvantage: Change in familiar stimuli.
Sensitisation
A progressive amplification in the response after repeated exposure.
All learning involves the creation of mental representations.
Association between between stimuli.
Association between behaviour and consequences.
Stimulus
Any object or event that elicits a sensory or behavioural response in any organism.
Meaning
It is a relatively permanent change in behaviour that occurs as the result of experience.
Memory
Varieties
Explicit or Declarative
Episodic memory e.g. facts
Semantic/generic memory e.g. knowing something like water is wet.
Implicit
It is an unnoticed “leftover” from life events that changes how someone now acts and thinks.
Failings
Inadequate encoding
Forgetting
Interference (from new learning)
Retrieval failure e.g. tip-of-the-tongue effect.
Retrieval
Types
Recall
Recognition
Order of Learning
Primary effect: Earlier items are more likely to get recalled. They get more attention than later ones.
Recency effect: Final items are more likely to get recalled. They don't get overwritten by newly arriving items.
Both effects can be manipulated in experiments.
Storage
The ‘record’ in long-term memory – once it’s encoded and transferred – is called a memory trace or engram.
It takes time foe a record to become a memory > memory consolidation.
Acquisition
Comprises incidental as well as intentional learning.
Involves some sort of translation process > memory encoding.
Memory acquisition happens in stages - temporary > permanent.
Working memory vs. long term memory
Memory needed for instant access is held in the working memory, the rest is stored in long-term memory.
The biggest difference is storage capacity: enormous for long-term memory, extremely limited for working memory.
Working memory holds around 7 items (± 1 or 2), and the capacity is a measure of intelligence.
Memory requires mental engagement with the item to be stored, not just mere exposure. Short-term, so-called maintenance rehearsal is enough.
‘Deep processing’ of information will facilitate better memory storage than ‘shallow processing’.
Meaning
Memory is the brain’s ability to take in information, store it, and recall it at a later time.
Developing the Senses
Speech Perception
Sensitivity to ambient language at 4 days old.
Can distinguish between syllables at 4 months old.
At 6 months old they are better than adults at recognising contrasts in language.
Infants as young as 1 month are sensitive to all acoustic
information used in speech perception.
Smell, Taste, Touch and Feel
Newborns have preferences for certain smells and tastes that they’ve probably acquired in the womb (via the amniotic fluid).
Infants around 3 days of age prefer the smell off human milk to that of formula, no matter whether they’ve been breastfed or not (indicating an innate preference).
Slightly older infants prefer the smell of their mum to that of others.
Touch and feel is one of the better-developed senses in newborns. Pain is felt similarly if not felt more strongly.
Learning and Memory
At just a few hours old, babies can be instrumentally conditioned
3-month-olds can remember skills they have learnt
Can remember sensations from before birth
Children arrive in the world well-prepared to develop
Hearing
Hearing is well developed before birth > preference are learned in the womb.
By 4 months infants begin to localise sounds.
Infants have adult-like hearing at about 18months old.
Vision
Infants are born near sighted > soon actively looking around.
Infants are attracted to
Areas of high contrast
Complex patterns
Curves
Possibly faces
Infants have adult like vision at about 6 months old.
Social Development
Temperment
Meaning
Mood-related personality characteristics
introvert vs. extrovert
A good fit between temperament and environment is key to healthy development.
Siblings may be different, while identical twins tend to be more similar.
Gender Identity
Meaning
The acquisition of behaviours and characteristics that a culture
considers appropriate to one’s sex.
Theories
Social Learning
Children learn to be one gender by observing the sex-typed behaviour of same-sex adults.
Reward and punishment for gender-appropriate and gender-inappropriate behaviour further refines the development.
Culture reinforces particular behaviours.
Boys and girls are treated differently.
Social-learning theory treats sex-typed behaviour like any other learned behaviour, making sex-typing neither inevitable nor unmodifiable.
Cognitive Development
I’m a girl [boy]; therefore I want to do girl [boy] things.
The motive is to behave consistently with one’s gender identity – not to obtain external rewards - that prompts children to behave sex-appropriately.
However, children show preference for “appropriate” activities before gender constancy is in place.
Psychoanalytic
Children identify with the same-sex parent and their gender typical behaviour.
Gender Schema
Schemata are embedded in daily practices, and it’s difficult to find a way around .it
Children learn to judge themselves according to the schema.
Culture emphasises gender above all else, it is “the lens through which all other aspects of culture are viewed".
This is not un-modifiable. If the culture becomes less sex-typed children will become less sex typed in their behaviour.
Gender schema: “[a] set of beliefs about gender”
Attachment
Style 2 - Insecurely Attached 'avoidant'
20% of American infants
Avoids interaction with returning mother
Will allow stranger to comfort them
Often indifferent to mother leaving
Style 3 - Insecurely Attached 'ambivalent'
10% of American infants
Resistant to mother’s attention
Not comforted by mother’s return
Generally inconsistent behaviour
May cry to be held, then struggle to be put down
Style 1 - Securely Attached
60-65% of American infants
Interacts with mother when she returns
Happy to play with stranger
Upset when mother leaves
Stranger can’t console infant
How?
Sensitive responsiveness is key
Prompt response to crying
Being affectionate
Tailoring responses to baby’s needs
Style 4 - Insecurely Attached 'disorganised'
10-15 % of American infants
Behaviour is inconsistent/unpredictable
May seem disoriented, emotionless or depressed
Often seen in infants with abusive carers
Meaning
It is an infant’s tendency to seek closeness to particular
people and to feel more secure in their presence
Cognitive Development
Information processing theories
Mental development is mainly seen as the result of maturational changes in basic components of a child's mind.
Based on the idea that humans process the information they receive, rather than merely responding to stimuli.
The mind as a computer, which analyses information from the environment.
As children grow, their brains likewise mature, leading to advances in their ability to process and respond to the information they receive through their senses.
The theory emphasises a continuous pattern of development, in contrast to Piaget’s distinctive stages.
Sociocultural cultures
Culture shapes development.
Reasoning emerges through practical activity in a social environment and children learn through the lens of their culture.
Piaget
Inquiring Scientists
Children aren’t passive.
They experiment with the world to understand it.
Construct schemas (organised patterns of thought or behaviour).
A child then either responds to a new event in a way that is consistent with an existing schema (assimilation).
Or a child modifies an existing schema or forms an entirely new schema to deal with a new object or event (accommodation).
Stages of Development
Sensorimotor stage
First two years of life
Children experience the world through movement and senses.
They are extremely egocentric, they cannot perceive the world from others' viewpoints.
They lack object permanence until 10 months
They begin to develop concept of self as separate from world.
Preoperational stage
"Magical thinking", rather than logical, predominates.
Thinking tends to be egocentric
Lots of motor skills acquired.
Animism Features
Ages 2-7.
A child at that stage does not understand conservation.
Concrete operational stage
Children are no longer egocentric.
Achieve conservation.
Ages 7-11.
Children begin to think logically but are very concrete in their thinking and they have a capacity for logical operations.
Formal operational stage
Age 12 onwards.
Logical thinking extended to abstract.
Tests hypotheses systematically.
Begins to think about hypotheticals.
Schemas
Schemas are the basic building blocks of such cognitive models, and enable us to form a mental representation of the world.
It can be defined as a cohesive, repeatable action sequence possessing component actions that are tightly interconnected and governed by a core meaning
Wadsworth (2004) suggests that schemata be thought of as 'index cards' filed in the brain, each one telling an individual how to react to incoming stimuli or information
In more simple terms Piaget called the schema the basic building block of intelligent behaviour – a way of organizing knowledge. Indeed, it is useful to think of schemas as "units” of knowledge, each relating to one aspect of the world, including objects, actions and abstract (i.e. theoretical) concepts.
Theory of mind
It is the ability to attribute mental states - beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc. - to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions that are different from one's own.
Assimilation and Accommodation
Children not only assimilate objects to fit their needs, i.e. their existing mental representations, but also modify some of their mental structures to accommodate the demands of the environment.
e.g. small children putting absolutely everything in their mouth = assimilation, learning how to move things towards the mouth to put absolutely everything in the mouth = accommodation.
Both are adaptation processes in response to the environment.
Trying to keep the balance between assimilating and accommodating brings on intellectual growth – and the progression from one stage to the next.
Attention
Orienting - Preparing the body for stimulus
Once we have become aware of a stimulus, we need to first adjust our ‘sensory machinery’ to facilitate optimal input.
Attention orients us toward the stimulus so we can gain more and better information.
Types
Visual
The Eye
To perceive visually, we have to reorient our sensory receptors
until the object of interest falls on the fovea, the most sensitive region of the retina.
Most of the attention is devoted here, and this only a small percentage of the visual field - so very little attention is given to the majority of a scene > spotlight metaphor
Information
Visual scanning alternates between fixations (300 ms long stationary periods) and even briefer periods of saccades (fast, ‘jumpy’ eye movements, approx. 20 ms).
Vision is essentially suppressed during saccades, visual information is acquired during fixation periods.
Organising
Separating the visual world into figure and groud.
Grouping objects e.g. Law of proximity and Law of similarity
Change blindness is also called inattentional blindness.
Central
Multi-tasking
Our attention resources are limited.
There is a limited capacity in that there is an upper limit in the
amount of information the organism can deal with in any one moment.
The amount of attentional resources we give to a task is flexible.
Automaticity
Learning new tasks requires lots of attention.
Repeated practise can lead to activities becoming automatic > this requires much less energy.
fast
few or no demands on attention
Unavailable to consciousness
Unavoidable
Automatic tasks don't interfere with other tasks.
Auditory
Organisms are able to multi-task but there are limits.
Remembering information
Generally speaking, we are consciously unaware of unattended information. We remember little, if anything, about it.
However, research now suggests that the unattended message is not completely lost, and particularly not already at a lower level of perceptual system - e.g. you hear your name in a non-attended message. Unattended messages are minimised but not eliminated.
Not all auditory information can be retained - we are selective.
Attention is multimodal - it can shift within a modality or between modalities.
Meaning
We can perceive our environment only when we pay attention and it helps to select crucial aspects of our environment.
Emotion
Variations and Development of Emotions
Emotional Development
Learning Emotions: Building Blocks
1) new knowledge
2) new skills
3) good socialisation with parents
4) experience
5) biological maturation
Learning to Regulate Emotions
At a very young age caregiver has to provide regulation before they learn to self-regulate.
It takes till age 4;0 until children understand that they can diminish their fear by fleeing or from removing the scary object.
Learning to Understand Others Emotions
Infants dislike when parents voice differs from their facial expression.
With theory of mind come the understanding of different emotions.
Learning to Feel and Express
Some emotional reactions may be learned by observation, usually from people they trust.
Newborns can express feeling ‘interested’, ‘distressed’, ‘disgusted’ and ‘contented’.
Gender-specific reinforcement of certain emotions.
Variation in Emotions
Gender Differences
Research shows that women and men differ more in the expression of emotion than in the subjective experience of emotions.
Universal Vs Culture Specific
The subjective experience of emotion might differ between cultures depending on whether it is a collectivist or individualist culture.
Basic facial expressions are universal, but certain aspects are learned and follow culture-specific display rules. That's where misunderstanding between cultures can happen.
Components of Emotion
Emotions Vs Moods
Emotions can be clearly categorised, while moods are often conceptualised as only varying along dimensions of pleasantness and arousal level.
Emotions create a readiness to act and are complex.
Emotions are briefer than moods and typically have a clearer object or target than moods.
The 6 Components
Component 2: Felling (affective state)
While appraisal may be unconscious, the feeling components of an emotion are by definition conscious.
These feelings are thought to guide behaviour, decision making and information processing.
Component 3: Thought - Action Tendencies
Thought - action tendencies are the urges that accompany feelings.
Negative - Triggers narrow and specific thought - action tendencies.
Positive - Triggers broad thought - action tendencies, more open to possibilities.
Component 1: Cognitive Appraisal
It is largely responsible for differentiating emotions.
Many Appraisal patterns are universal.
Appraisal can happen consciously or unconsciously.
Component 4: Internal Bodily Changes
It is fairly specific to negative emotions e.g. heartrate.
Often result from activation of the sympathetic division of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS), which prepares the body for emergency action.
Positive emotions might have more of an undoing effect when it comes to bodily changes e.g. relief.
Component 6: Response
There is almost no emotion without some sort of emotion regulation.
Strategies of regulation can be cognitive or behavioural and may include reappraisal of the situation, distraction, disengagement, taking action, suppressing facial expression, ect.
The ability to regulate emotions is a predictor for social success.
Component 5: Facial Expressions
Facial expression may jumpstart the whole emotion process > facial feedback hypothesis > direct connection between expressed and experienced emotion.
Certain facial expressions seem universal in their meaning and may have biological roots.
Social Phycology
The Situation
Bystander Effect
The presence of others might stop or delay individuals acting because:
a) a situation is defined as a non-emergency through pluralistic ignorance
b) it diffuses responsibility for acting.
To stop:
Minimize pluralistic ignorance and diffusion of ignorance.
Compliance
People tend to comply even to a blatantly wrong answer.
Just one dissenter is enough to break compliance.
Factors that increase obedience
Surveillance: More obedient when experimenter was in the room.
Buffers: Physical involvement in punishment reduced obedience
No Role Models: More likely to disobey if they saw someone else disobey.
Emerging situations: Experiment began relatively gently, then escalated.
Deindividuation
The crowd is always intellectually inferior to the isolated individual.
Certain group situations can minimize people’s personal identities and sense of accountability, and so in turn produce aggressive or at least unusual behaviour.
Important factors are group size and anonymity.
Institutional Norms
When placed in an institutional setting, people can become “institutionalised".
Begin to take on the “appropriate” behaviours of their role.
This suggests that an individual’s behaviour is guided by the situation, rather than their character.
Influence of others
Social Inhibition: an audience doesn't help.
Arousal: facilitating dominant response.
social facilitation: an audience helps.
Attention: presence of others may be distracting.
Your performance can be influenced by those around you.
The Person
Stereotypes
Primacy effect
We try and find an appropriate stereotype as soon as possible, and it is hard to overwrite ‘first impressions’.
Inferences through stereotypes
Stereotypes help us make judgements that go beyond available information.
Activation
Stereotypes can become overlearned and automatic.
Self-fulfilling prophecy
Beliefs can become reality because they impact on our actions
Stereotype is activated
Shapes how you behave with others
Your behaviour elicits certain behaviours from others
“Confirming” your stereotype
Meaning
They are central schemas at play when interacting with others.
Matching people to pre-existing categories is faster.
Breaking down stereotypes
Individuation is assessing an individual’s personal qualities on a person-by-person basis.
Attitudes
Meaning
Feelings and opinions, rather than rational thinking.
It is favourable or unfavourable evaluations of and reactions to objects, people, situations, or other aspects of the world
Attitudes may predict how people will behave.
The ABC model of attitudes
Attitude: his involves a person’s feelings / emotions about an object.
Behaviour: The way the attitude we have influences how we act or behave.
Cognitive: his involves a person’s belief / knowledge about an attitude object.
Intelligence
Wechsler adult intelligence scale
tests verbal and performance, suitable for adults.
These tests may be culturally or gender bias.
Stanford-Binet intelligence scale
Binet tested reasoning and problem-solving. It compares mental age (MA) and chronological age (CA).
Gardner’s multiple intelligences
Linguistic
Musical
Logical-mathematical
Spatial
Bodily-kinesthetic
Intrapersonal
Interpersonal
Early intelligence tests
Based on exceptional sensory or perceptual skills.
Emotional Intelligence
Understanding and controlling your emotions is vital to health and success in life.
Four components of emotional intelligence:
Accurate perception and expression of emotions
Ability to access and generate emotions
Attributing emotions correctly
Emotional regulation
Meaning
A label for what intelligence tests measure.
'Intelligence’ is a prime example of a concept heavily relying on correlation data.
The ability to learn from experience, to think in abstract terms, and deal effectively with one’s environment.
Genetics and intelligence
While environment has an effect IQ might be strongly hereditary.
Personality
Behaviourist Theories
Environmental conditions shape behaviour through learning <~> A person's behaviour shapes the environment.
Personality is the of the individual's unique reinforcement story.
They put an emphasis on the importance of environmental determinants of behaviour.
Behaviourists are still optimistic that changing the environment can change behaviour.
Cognitive Theories
External determinants of behaviour: reinforcement and punishment <~> Internal determinants of behaviour: beliefs, thoughts and expectations.
Reciprocal determinism: Interaction between behaviour and environment.
Bandura suggests most behaviour occurs in the absence of external rewards or punishment.
Behaviour stems from the internal process of of self-regulation and self-control.
Different personalities reflect difference in the way individuals mentally represent information.
Psychoanalytic Theories
Anna Freud (daughter) - Defence Mechanisms
Supressing urges creates unwanted feelings - and this, is turn, mat lead to defence mechanisms emerging. In Freuds' view this is the ego dealing with the demands of the Id and the superego.
Defence mechanisms are a normal reaction unless they become a dominant mode of responding to problems. The Freuds assume this is how neuroses, anxiety states, phobias, obsessions and hysteria develop.
Repression - Pushing unpleasant memories into the unconscious.
Regression - Reverting back to behaviour from an earlier stage of development.
Displacement - Redirecting unacceptable feelings from the 'original' onto an easier target.
Sublimation - Replacing socially unacceptable impulses with socially more acceptable behaviour.
Reaction Formation - Acting in the exact opposite way to impulses that are unacceptable.
Projection - Attributing own unacceptable feelings or thoughts to someone else.
Rationalisation - Finding (false) excuses for own unacceptable feelings, thoughts or behaviours.
Post-Freud
Carl Jung's collective unconscious.
Harry Stack Sullivan's interpersonal experiences (significant other)
Rorschach's projective test.
Freud
Psychoanalytic view
Preconscious - Information we could bring to awareness.
Unconscious - A storehouse of information, wishes and inaccessible memories.
Conscious - Current awareness.
Structure of personality
He believed that behaviour is determined be forces beyond our control, and that personality divided into three major systems.
Id - The most primitive part, following the pleasure principle.
Ego - The executive of the personality, follows the reality principle.
Superego - Judges what is right and wrong, internalises the values and morals of society.
Each part develops in series across childhood.
Humanist Theories
Human always strive to grow and develop their potential. Physiological, safety love, esteem, self-actualization.
Trait Theories
The Big 5 - (OCEAN)
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Openness to experience
Agreeableness
Neuroticism
Questionnaires are the most common tool to 'measure' traits.
Lexical Hypothesis
There was found to be 4,500 adjectives describing personality that were then organised into groups.
Factor Analysis - People rate themselves and others.
Cattell found 16 factors - Eysenck found 2 but lather added a third.
Introverted - Extroverted
Emotional instability - stability (neuroticism)
Psychoticism - the level of aggressiveness and interpersonal hostility.
Traits
Traits are habitual patterns of behaviour, thought and emotion.
Assigning people traits helps to understand why people differ in personality.
They are seen as relatively stable across the lifespan.
People differ on each trait.
Theorists tend to believe traits are innate.
Other Explanations
Evolutionary pressures
Genetics
Neurochemistry
Meaning
It is the distinctive and characteristics patterns of thought, emotion, and the behaviour that make up an individual's personal style of interacting with the physical and social environment.
Nature Vs Nurture
View 2, 1800s
People are shaped by their genes > They have innate abilities.
Now
Both views are seen as important.
View 1, 1600s
People are shaped by experiences through their senses > no built in representation.