1 WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY?


Andreas Vesalius (that’s V-E-S-A-L-I-U-S), who lived between 1514 and 1564, continued Galen’s work and wrote a complete textbook about human anatomy based on his dissections of the body.


A hundred and fifty years later, in 1690, the British empiricist, John Locke, argued that our perception of the world depends entirely on our sensory experiences; but he added that we also have a mental faculty that allows us to reflect on what we experience. This theory was supported later by the work of the psychologist, Wundt, as we’ll see in a minute.


Let’s continue now to look at the physical study of the brain. The German physiologist, Franz Joseph Gall, who lived from 1758–1828, believed that different parts of the brain were responsible for producing particular behaviours. His theory that the shape of the skull reflected the personality of an individual, has been disproved; but his fundamental assumption that certain areas of the brain have specific functions is now supported by modern neuropsychology.


I’ll conclude by mentioning Wilhelm Wundt, who founded the first laboratory dedicated to psychological research in 1879. Wundt is important in the history of psychology because, in addition to researching the physical effects of stimuli on behaviour, he asked the subjects of his experiments to reflect on and report their experiences. This combination of scientific experimentation and introspection was a forerunner to modern approaches to psychotherapy.


Transcript ≤1.10 Lecture 5


-century learning theories, and affected generations of teachers and students.


In this morning’s lecture, I’m going to compare two types of conditioning, also known as behaviour modification; one was developed by Pavlov, and the other by Skinner. I’ve chosen Pavlov and Skinner because their research had an enormous influence on 20th


Pavlov, who was born in 1849, carried out experiments in a type of conditioning that we now call classical conditioning. Whereas Skinner, born in 1904, experimented with what he called operant conditioning. Now let’s compare the two.


associated with Pavlov’s research at the beginning of the 20th


First, we’ll look at classical conditioning, which is century. Has anyone ever heard of Pavlov’s


dogs? … Yes? Good. Well, his experiments are quite famous. Experimenting with dogs, Pavlov found that it was possible to train or condition them to produce a natural response to an artificial stimulus.


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Let me explain. As we know, the natural response to the natural stimulus, food, is to salivate. Now, during his experiments, Pavlov flashed a light every time the dogs were given food. Gradually, they learnt to associate food with a flashing light. Eventually, the dogs would salivate when the light was turned on, even without the food. In this way, Pavlov replaced the natural stimulus of food with the artificial stimulus of light. Pavlov called this a conditioned reflex.


Now let’s turn to the concept of operant conditioning. In Skinner’s most famous experiment, a rat was placed in a glass box (which we now call a Skinner box) where there was a lever. When the rat, by chance, hit the lever it was rewarded with food. Little by little, the rat learned that by hitting the lever it would get food. You could say it learnt to associate cause with effect. Skinner called this type of behaviour modification operant conditioning because the rat was active in producing the effect it wanted.


So, to sum up, both classical and operant conditioning can train animals to behave in a certain way. However, in classical conditioning, they have no control over their behaviour, whereas in operant conditioning, they can learn to behave in a way that will earn them a reward.


Exercise E


Allow students to uncover the opposite page or open their books. Give them plenty of time to compare their answers with the model notes. Feed back on the final question.


Exercise F


1 Ask students to work in pairs. Assign a set of notes to each pair. They must try to reconstruct the lecture orally – including the introduction – from the notes.


2 Put the pairs together in groups of four, with different topics. Each pair should give their lecture to another pair.


Closure


1 Work on any problems you noticed during the pairwork (Exercise F).


2 Refer back to the pictures at the top of the Course Book page. Students should now be able to name them with confidence.


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