Test: Psychology- 3 - Humanities/Arts MCQ

As it became clear to Descartes that sensations travel to the brain and that bodily movements originate in the brain, he looked for a point of interaction between mind and body in the brain, settling on the pineal gland. In the process Descartes developed ‘Cartesian dualism’, which specifies a relationship of mutual interaction between mind and body via this organ.

Piaget argued that a child understands an object by acting on it either physically or mentally and thereby constructs knowledge. According to Piaget, infants develop cognitive structures or schemes, which are organized patterns of actions that reflect a particular way of interacting with the environment. Cognitive structures of older children, from about 7 years on, reflect abstract mental operations. These abstract operations, or internalized actions that are organized structures, allow older children to realize that quantities remain constant (are conserved) despite changes in appearance.

Although physical objects are attracted to each other via the force of gravity, Hume did not regard this as being the case for mental concepts or ideas. However, he did regard concepts as being associated through similarity, contiguity in place or time and causality (i.e. linking effects to causes).

Ebbinghaus limited himself to gathering facts about memory through systematic, careful observation, and did not offer any theory about how memory works. He did not found a school of psychology, had no disciples and worked alone. And yet he had a profound impact on psychology. His painstaking work, reported in his book On Memory (1885), stood the test of time as his findings were later replicated by others and many remain valid today. According to Roediger (1999), Ebbinghaus solved three important problems faced by psychologists in their work: 1. converting unobservable mental processes into observable behaviour; 2. measuring the behaviour reliably; and 3. showing how relevant variables affect the behaviour.

Herman von Helmholtz boasts a wide range of achievements. Indeed, you will still find his colour theory of vision in psychology textbooks. His work paved the way for others to investigate the psychological significance of the time taken to react to a stimulus (reaction time or response latency). This approach remains important in modern psychology.

In his Nobel Prize-winning work on digestion, Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) discovered that hungry dogs would salivate at the sight of the person who brought them their food. At first, he considered this ‘psychic secretion’ a nuisance, but soon he realized that it revealed a very basic form of learning. He went on to show that dogs could be trained, or conditioned, to salivate at the onset of an arbitrary stimulus (e.g. the sound of a bell) if it was immediately followed by food. Without intending to do so, Pavlov had provided psychology with a basic element, the stimulus–response association – also used by Watson as the foundation of behaviourism.

Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) published Principles of Physiological Psychology(1874), which is widely considered the first psychology textbook. In the preface Wundt wrote, ‘The work I here present to the public is an attempt to mark a new domain of science.’ Unlike his predecessors, Wundt called himself a psychologist and took a number of steps to promote this new domain of science. In 1879, Wundt established the first formal psychology research laboratory at the University of Leipzig in Germany. Wundt was profoundly influential, not to mention prolific – if you read his works at the rate of 60 pages a day, it would take two and a half years to finish them.

Each of these scholars worked outside a particular school of thought, and they are considered to be pioneers in the field. Ebbinghaus developed methods for studying human memory, Galton developed methods for measuring intelligence and set the stage for the measurement of individual differences, and Freud developed methods for observing personality and psychopathology. None of these people started a formal psychological laboratory.

Jean Piaget advanced the study of the origin of children’s knowledge. Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis; Francis Galton developed the idea of mental tests; B.F. Skinner developed radical behaviourism; John Watson developed behaviourism. Piaget's theories have also had a significant impact on developmental psychology, although his ideas have not been fully accepted without criticism. Piaget's observation that children think and reason differently than adults helped usher in a new era of research on the intellectual development of children,

Behaviourism is exclusively focused on objective, observable behaviour and therefore would be most likely to reject the method of introspection. Although flawed, psychoanalysis requires introspection to identify memories, experiences and symptoms that need to be addressed. Structuralism was founded by Wundt and was the basis for developing the method of introspection. Functionalism addresses what functions are served by the mind and mental processes. While functionalism moved away from structuralism by focusing on a “stream of consciousness” as opposed to distinct elements of consciousness, it did not reject the method of introspection outright.