Psychology 110 Lecture 1 1-3-02

  1. Syllabus
  2. Why psychology is usually required in college degrees?
  3. Dichotomy of People - Push vs Pull
      1. Perceiving the world
    1. Consciousness
    2. Interpersonal Interaction
    3. Intelligence
  4. Health, Illness, and Treatment
  5. Success in a survey course
    1. Organize the information
    2. Understanding vs. memorization
    3. Active not passive studying
      1. Highlighting
      2. Notes
      3. Practice testing
    4. Test taking
  6. Sensation & Perception
  7. Testing based on book content, will cover other topics in more depth
    1. Historical Perspective
  8. Human nature subject of religion and philosophy, not science
    1. Other scientists drawn to explaining perceptual phenomenon
      1. Newton, physicist, color vision
      2. Hooke, biologist, motivation
      3. Pavlov, physiologist, learning
      4. Fechner & Weber, physiologists, perception
        1. Perception is the first psychology to be scientifically studied
  9. Psychophysics
  10. How physical stimuli relate to psychological experience
    1. Fechner studies thresholds, looking for minimum energy
      1. Finds instead a sigmoid instead of the expected step function
      2. The reason is noise, biological systems are noisy systems and must compensate
    2. Sensitive
      1. Brightness, candle at 30 mi
      2. Hearing, watch tick at 20 ft
      3. Taste, sugar tsp in 2 gal
      4. Smell, perfume drop in 6 rooms
      5. Touch, fly wing at 1 cm fall
    3. Fechner's law, sensory experience is proportional to the number of JNDs above threshold
      1. Perception is not same as energy
    4. Stevens later describes power law, non-linear
    5. Weber discovers JNDs. Weber's law there are constant proportions for each sense
      1. Brightness, 1/60
      2. Kinesthesis, 1/30
      3. Pain, 1/30
      4. Hearing, 1/10
      5. Pressure, 1/7
      6. Odor, 1/4
  11. TSD
    1. Uncertainty in perception
    2. Importance of criterion in perceptual experience
  12. Subliminal
    1. Dual threshold, perception and awareness
    2. Adaptation
      1. Changes over time and under JNDs can be missed while obvious to others not gradual
  13. Biological Detectors
    1. Sensory transducers
    2. Photo detectors, vision, pigments, sis- and trans- states
    3. Chemical detectors, ofaction, taste, chemicals in solution
    4. Energy, touch, pain, hearing, use mechanical amplification like corpuscles or hairs
  14. These meager methods are all that we know of the world, period
    1. Suggests a heck of a processing system behind them

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