Introductory Psychology Lecture Notes

Professor: John Gabrieli

Course Overview

• Focus on scientific understanding of human nature: how the mind and brain work.
• Explore how people feel, think, and act.
• Topics include perception, thought, emotion, personality, social interaction, development, mental health, and neuroscience.
• Reference text: "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" by Oliver Sacks.

Key Concepts

Role and Importance of Psychology

• Relevance: Psychology is fundamental as it explores human mind which drives all societal and scientific endeavors.
• Interpretation: Our mind interprets the world, impacting our perception and behavior.
• Psychological Laws: Visual system principles can create illusions—perception influenced by context and assumptions.

Perception and Illusions

• Line Length Illusion: Identical lines may appear different lengths due to surrounding context.
• Size Illusions: Enclosed objects (like monsters or tables) appear different sizes or shapes depending on perspective cues.
• Brightness Illusions: Same shades may look different based on context.
• Interactive Examples: Class participation examples demonstrate how expectations manipulate perception (e.g., number of steps, rotating mask).

Contextual Influence on Perception

• Expectation Effects: Participants differently perceive identical images based on pre-instructions (seal act vs costume ball).
• Ambiguous Stimuli Interpretation: “B” or “13” interpreted based on surrounding context.

Attention and Awareness

• Limited Attentional Resources: Example of counting passes among players; distraction leads to missing obvious elements (e.g., gorilla experiment).
• Audio-Visual Integration: McGurk effect—discrepant audio and visual stimuli create different perceived sounds.

Misconceptions and Knowledge

• Mental Maps: Incorrect spatial knowledge, e.g., San Diego vs. Reno, Philadelphia vs. Rome.
• Probability Misjudgment: Birthday paradox illustrates heuristic vs. calculable probability.
• Memory Fallibility: False memories from gist-based recall (e.g., “sweet” in word list).

Automaticity and Attention

• Automatic Processing: Overlooking errors due to automatic reading (e.g., “Paris in the the spring”).
• Color-Word Interference (Stroop Effect): Difficulty naming ink colors of conflicting words.

Predicting Happiness

• Over-Prediction of Impact: Tenure decisions, lottery winnings, and accidents (quadriplegia) show overestimation of long-term emotional impact.

Action vs. Values Gap

• Forecaster vs. Experiencer: Discrepancy between predicted and actual emotional responses/actions regarding racism witnessed in experiment.
• Difficulty in Action: Social pressure and complexity lead to inaction or mismatch between values and behavior.

Important Themes for Upcoming Classes

• Explore further intersections of psychological study with real-life implications, including biases, happiness, memory, perception, decision-making, and societal behavior.

Conclusion: Psychology provides insights into human behavior and mental processes, emphasizing the complexities of perception, memory, and social interaction.