Class 3 notes

Before Ebbinghaus

Aristotle (384-323 BC)

Proposed 3 laws of association

• Similarity
• Contiguity
• Opposites

.

Descartes (1596-a1650)

2 classes of behavior (dualism)

• Voluntary = free will
• Involuntary = reflexes

John Locke (1632-1704)

• No innate ideas (blank slate)
• Empiricism = ideas originate with sensory experience

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

• Hedonism determines voluntary behavior
• Pursue pleasure
• Avoid pain
• Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
• Combined 2 theories:
• Charles Lyell, the father of geology; dynamic view of Earth
• Thomas Malthus, an economist; struggle to succeed in business is the result of resource scarcity

Francis Galton (1822-1911)

2 major points:

• Intelligence is single factor. Evident in any task
• People vary in intelligence

George Romanes (1848-1894)

• Called himself a disciple & worshiper of Charles Darwin
• Sought to prove (using logic) Darwin’s concept of continuity between humans and animals
• Subjective vs. objective analyses
• Behavior is the ambassador of the mind
• Intelligence is the ability to learn
• Anecdotal evidence
• Analogous

Criticisms of anecdotal evidence

• Events witnessed by only 1 person
• Story embellishment over time
• Coincidence
• Bias to report behaviors that appear intelligent

Clever Hans, the horse

• Hans correctly answered mathematics questions by tapping his foot the correct number of time.
• He could even do fractions!
• September Commission appointed to investigate this genius horse (Pfungst, 1908)
• Was Hans receiving cues from his trainer?
• Commission that no cues were given
• One commission member not satisfied with conclusion
• Conducted test with two conditions:
• Experimenter aware of the correct answer
• Experimenter unaware of the correct answer
• Results:
• Hans was correct when experimenter was aware of answer, overestimated when experimenter was unaware

Ebbinghaus

• Hermann Ebbinghaus
• German psychologist
• Aimed to adapt Gustav T. Fechner’s psychophysical methods to the study of higher mental processes
• Quote: “Psychology has a long past but a short history”
• Education:
• University of Bonn, 1867-70, studied history and philology
• University of Bonn, 1873 Ph.D
• Career
• 1880, appointed as an assistant in Berlin
• 1886, Assistant professor at the Friedrich-Wilhelm University, Berlin
• 1890, founded the journal
• Zeitschrift fur Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane
• (Journal of the Psychology & Physiology of the Sense Organs).
• 1894, Professor at the University of Breslau
• 1909, died of pneumonia
• Approach
• influenced by British philosophers
• empiricists & associationists
• convinced that learning is based on association
• conducted scientific investigations on:
• how association is formed and
• how association is retained
• Accomplishments
• Devised a word-completion test which is still used in present-day intelligence tests
• Investigated color vision and mental capacity
• Firsts:
• 1st to publish an article on measuring the intelligence of school children
• 1st to study memory experimentally
• 1st to study memory as it occurred
• Being out of touch has its advantages. Didn’t know it couldn’t be done
• Procedure
• Used self as subject
• Careful controls
• list of words; one per card
• items kept in order
• used watch (metronome) to set the pace (1 per sec)
• when reached end of list, paused 15 seconds
• At first, used terms of sounds
• Later, used “nonsense words”
• CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant). BOK.
• CCC (consonant-consonant-consonant). BLV.
• Paradigm:
• Day 1: Learn list (16 to 20 items) by repeating list 8, 16, 24, 32, 42, 53, or 64 times
• Day 2: Wait 24 hours, then relearn list to perfect repetition
• Main score was the number of trials taken to relearn the list on Day 2
• Found: What people already knew
• Difficulty increases with length of list
• Frequent repetitions needed to learn word lists
• Serial position effect: first & last better than middle
• New findings
• Difficulty and amount learned are not linear. Difficult takes much longer
• Rapid forgetting of lists within first hour (not true of motor skills)
• Distributed practice is best (sessions spaced out over time)
• Within-list associations help. Adjacent associations are best
• Best strategy is overlearning

Baddeley

• Distributed practice is more efficient
• Not necessarily fastest
• One 1-hour session for 5 days week
• 11 weeks 55 hours
• Two 2-hour sessions for 5 days week
• 4 weeks 80 hours
• Most efficient schedule is one 1-hour session per day