Questions on Lectures

If you can answer the following questions, you will probably do well on the lecture questions in the exam:

Week #1:

What is the definition of psychology?

What is a key difference between “behavior” and “mental processes”?

What does it mean for a field of study to be “scientific”?

What does the word “empirical” mean?

What are three levels of explanation that can be applied to the study of behavior? Give examples of each kind of explanation – for example, in explaining aggressive behavior (“What causes people to murder?”) or in explaining sexual orientation (“What causes some people to be heterosexual, some to be bisexual, and some to be homosexual?”).

What kinds of explanations to each of the following social sciences tend to use in explaining human behavior: anthropology, sociology, psychology?

What are the key beliefs or assumptions of the British associationist philosophers?

What does the phrase tabula rasa mean?

What was the conceptual point of John Locke’s famous thought experiment about a congenitally blind man given sight as an adult?

What is the nature-nurture debate, and what position would the British associationist philosophers take in this debate?

What is the notion of mind-body dualism proposed by Descartes? What is the mind-body problem?

According to Descartes, do animals have souls?

What was Descartes’ doctrine of innate ideas? What does the word “innate” mean?

What was the first experimental laboratory in psychology, and who established it? How old is psychology, as a scientific laboratory science?

How did Immanuel Kant’s notion of a priori ideas relate to the nature-nurture debate?

Week #2:

What are two key defining aspects of the scientific method?

What is a theory, and what are desirable characteristics of a scientific theory?

What is an operational definition? Give several examples.

What is the difference between subjective and behavioral measures?

What is a correlational study? Give several examples.

What is the correlation coefficient? What values can it take? What’s the difference between a negative and a positive correlation? What does it mean when a correlation is 1.0? What does it mean when a correlation is 0.0?

Why is it generally not possible to make cause-effect conclusions based on correlational results?

What are the two defining characteristics of an experiment?

Define the following terms: “independent variable,” “dependent variable,” “experimental condition,” “control condition,” “random assignment,” and “extraneous variables”

What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of correlational and experimental studies?

Give examples of when it is not possible to conduct an experiment, either for ethical or practical reasons.

What’s the difference between the words, “effect” and “affect”?

What is epidemiology?

What is structuralism?

What is behaviorism?

Week #3:

What is the Bell-Magendie Law?

What do the words “afferent” and “efferent” refer to?

What is a spinal reflex?

What is a “stimulus”?

What did Robert Whytt discover about nerves and muscles?

What is the approximate speed at which nerve impulses travel down nerves? Who was the first scientist to measure this speed?

What was Sherrington’s central observation about the time it takes for reflexes to occur in dogs whose brain was separated from their spinal cords? Based on his observations, Sherrington inferred the existence of synapses? What are synapses, and how did Sherrington infer their existence?

What is the difference between the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system?

What is the difference between the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system?

Give examples of behaviors that are voluntary and involuntary.

What are the four lobes of the cerebral cortex, where are they located, and what are some of the functions served by each lobe?

What is the technique of ablative surgery, which was first used to study the brain by Pierre Flourens? What were some basic facts that Flourens discovered about the function of the cerebral cortex, the cerebellum, and brain stem?

What does “localization of function” refer to? How do researchers demonstrate localization of function in the brain?

What is the technique of electrical brain stimulation, first used by Fritz and Hitzig? How did Fritz and Hitzig demonstrate the existence of the motor cortex in dogs?

What was Paul Broca’s important discovery? What is Broca’s area of the brain? Where is it located and what is its function?

Where is the somatosensory cortex located, and what is its function?

Where is the visual cortex located, and what happens when researchers electrically stimulate it?

Where is the auditory cortex located?

Where is Wernicke’s area of the brain, and what is its function?

What does “contra-lateral control” refer to?

What kind of cognitive deficits are associated with injuries to the left side of the brain, and what kinds of deficits are associated with injuries to the right side of the brain?

Week #4:

What is the Wada test, and how is it used to identify where the language centers are located in people’s brains?

What did Myers and Sperry demonstrate when they conducted landmark experiments in which they surgically split (cut the corpus callosum) cats’ brains and then trained them to do simple tasks?

What is the corpus callosum? What is the optic chiasm? More generally, trace the path that information takes from the receptors in the eyes (rods and cones), along the optic nerves, through the brain, to the visual cortex.

What do studies of human split-brain patients show? How are these studies related to Descartes’ famous mind-body problem?

Define the following parts of neurons (nerve cells): soma, axon, dendrites? What are the functions of these parts? What is myelin and what is its function?

What is the difference between the “action potential” and the “resting potential” of a neuron?

What is the “all-or-none law” on neuronal conduction?

What is the “refractory period,” and what implication does the refractory period have for how many times a second a nerve cell can fire?

What are “digital codes,” like those used in modern computers?

What is a “place code” and a “temporal code,” and give an example of each in the human nervous system.

What is the synapse? How do neurotransmitter substances transmit messages across synapses? What the difference between excitatory and inhibitory effects across synapses?

What are three main assumptions of Darwin’s theory of evolution?

What is “natural selection,” and what does the “selecting” in natural selection? What is “selected” in natural selection? What is the difference between natural selection and artificial selection? What is the “selfish gene” view of natural selection? What is “kin selection”?

What does the word “teleological” mean?

What “problems” did the nervous system evolve to solve? Stated differently, what are two main functions served by the nervous system?

What are three ways in which human life can be viewed as an information process? For three levels of information flow in human life – biological evolution, cultural evolution, and individual learning and memory – what are the codes (the way information is stored) and what is the information that is coded?