Psyc 217 midterm review Lecture 1& Lecture 2 Compare/contrast several different ways of learning knowledge 1. Authority: trust those we think know better a. Advantages i. Fast, efficient, cheap, necessary b. Disadvantages i. Who to trust ii. When to trust 2. Intuition: Trust our gut feeling or folk wisdom a. Advantages: i. Fast, efficient, feels 'right' b. Disadvantages i. Subject to bias/distortion ii. Highlight confirming evidence iii. Discount disconfirming evidence *Intuition is powerful, but it's unclear when to trust intuition 3. Scientific method (skepticism+Empiricism) a. 2 basic ingredients for science i. Claim: Theory/Idea ii. Test against reality: Data/Ovservation Describe the cycle of science Refine Idea / Theory I 1 Interpret data Design a test Collect data Principles of sciences · Universalism: Agreement about what constitutes data/observation . Communality: Shared research methods and data (or openness) . Disinterestedness: Motivation for research should be a quest for truth · Skepticism: Organized criticism by experts Practice developing research ideas and design tests of those ideas What does a good theory look like? · Falsifiable: Might be proven wrong · Predict: Consistent with past observations, but also predict future observations
· Evolves: Revised or discarded when contradictory evidence emerges · Risky: Can easily be proven wrong 4 goals of psychological research: Example: "I wonder about the relationship between children seeing TV violence and behavior" 1.Description : what is the current status of TV violence? Children's behavior? "Average child will see 2fifi,fififi violent acts on TV by age 18" 2.Prediction: What is the relationship? Who is most at risk? "Children who watch the most hours of violent TV are most likely to be identified as 'bullies' by their teachers. " 3.Finding causes: Does watching violent TV cause children to be bullies? Or, do bullies choose to watch violent TV "We randmonly assigned participants to watch a film clip that either contained or did not contain violent content." 4.Explanation: Why doesn't watching violent TV cause children to be bullies? "We assessed how long violent concepts were active in participants' minds using a lexical decision task" Basic research: . Focus: theories of behavior · not immediately useful in everyday life · Theories inspired by real-world psychological functioning Applied research: · Focus: maximizing human happiness and psychological functioning . More immediately useful in everyday life · Borrows from theories developed through basic research Marr's 3 levels of analysis · Computational: What does the psychological system do? Why? What is the value of this response? . Representational: What mental representations are involved and what mental processes operate on these representations? · Implementational: What neural structures underlie representations and processes? Lecture3
Compare &contrast ideas, theories, hypotheses, and predictions · Idea: Unorganized principles or thoughts o Misrememberings are common · Theory: Organized set of principles o Fuzzy Trace Theory · 61 page tome Two types of memory · Verbatim · Gist memory · Hypothesis: Statement of relationship between two things(variables) Derived, or taken from, theories o Examples: When cognitive resources are overwhelmed, we lose fragile verbatim memory but retain gist memory