PSYC 1100 sec 58-71
General Psychology I, Fall 2009
UConn Storrs Campus SCHN 55
MON WED 3:00-3:50
Eric Lundquist

SOME STUDY TIPS : Here I've tried to write down everything I would ever tell someone who wanted advice about studying or how to do better in class. It's pretty long (maybe nine pages) but I think it's all good advice that would apply to any class in college. Browse at your leisure and see if it's worthwhile. Let me know if you think of any questions I didn't address, or any suggestions you think would be better than mine. (Notice that some parts of it are out of date... not the advice though!)

Some Introductory notes: three important dates in the history of psychology; four defintions of psychology; a timeline and four terms that are central to epistemology

• Brief overview of psychology's history: A few pages from Bruce Goldstein's Cognitive Psychology textbook that provide a sketch of the history of psychology from its beginnings up through the Cognitive Revolution of the 1950's and 1960's, for those who would like a text reference to go along with the class discussion. For our purposes this excerpt really begins on p. 9, "The First Psychology Laboratories." The "imageless thought debate" is not mentioned explicitly but problems with introspection are summarized under "Watson Founds Behaviorism."

NERVOUS SYSTEM HANDOUT: an outline of what to know about the nervous system for this course. Here's a pdf version, in case the formatting is messed up in the Word version. And here's a web page version.
BRAIN CARTOON: need I say this?... you do NOT need to know this picture for the exam!

Quicktime movie of the action potential and neurotransmitters crossing the synapse as described in the text (with awesome music by They Might Be Giants). It may be helpful to move through the movie frame by frame to study the sequence of events and match it up to the lecture and text. Note that at the end of the sequence just before it repeats, an enzyme labeled AChE (for acetylcholinesterase) appears, to break down any neurotransmitter (apparently acetylcholine in this case) that remains in the synapse after the signal has been sent.

Fun facts about neurotoxins (PowerPoint slides): you don't need to memorize these cases, but you should be able to understand how each poison interferes with the neural mechanisms you know about now.

Praying mantis sex from National Geographic on youtube, starting at about the 3:50 mark after a bit about naked mole rats. Pretty lurid narration for National Geographic, actually. Another even more graphic portrayal that doesn't mention the nervous system so explicitly is here: Female praying mantis eats male after mating on youtube -- don't watch it unless you want to see decapitated bugs mating while leaking green stuff out of their necks. The male praying mantis performs copulatory movements reflexively and even more vigorously after the higher nerve centers responsible for inhibiting that reflex are removed, if the female bites the male's head off. This is actually a fairly uncommon phenomenon in the wild though it apparently happens quite often in captivity -- if you want to know more this seems like a decent account, or just go to Wikipedia's article on the mantis.

Some links related to Parkinson's Disease, if you're interested:

• Excerpt from the PBS NOVA program "Brain Transplant" from December 1992. The original show is an hour but I've cut it down to about 12 minutes here; if you're on campus the download actually may not take all that long. For a bit of necessary context that didn't make it into my short version, you should just be aware that "the operation in Sweden" they refer to is the implantation of dopamine-producing cells from aborted fetal brain tissue, into the patient's basal ganglia -- an operation that was not allowed in the US at the time due to the controversies raised by the issue of abortion. Currently a major focus of Parkinson's research is on the possibility of implanting neural stem cells which may be able to grow into dopamine-producing cells.
• The Case of the Frozen Addicts by J. William Langston and Jon Palfreman, an incredibly fascinating and scary book about several addicts suffering instant Parkinson-like rigidity caused by a synthetic heroin substitute in 1982, which led Langston to a major advance in understanding Parkinson's Disease.
• Awakenings by Oliver Sacks - The frozen addicts story may have reminded you of this collection of stories of patients being treated for dramatic Parkinson's Syndrome-like conditions; editions published after the 1990 movie have interesting appendices.
• Michael J. Fox's moving and persuasive testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Committee on Appropriations, from September 28, 1999; he's urging an increase in funding for research on Parkinson's Disease -- "the most curable neurological disorder." His conclusion is more realistic now than it's ever been, partly because of hopes raised by research on human embryonic stem cells. (I've described the non-transplant surgery he underwent to alleviate his symptoms here.)
• Research on human embryonic stem cells may be the most exciting current route for Parkinson's Disease research to pursue, but though it avoids some problems involved in fetal tissue research, it raises the specter of human cloning which some find frightening. Here are two chapters from a 2001 book discussing the ethical issues of research with human embryonic stem cells. Chapter 2 is the clearest description I've read of the actual science involved. Chapter 3 is a decent appraisal of the politics involved. I hope it's "fair use" to have this posted here because hardly anyone will see that book!

Phineas Gage's story is related here, with admirable restraint, for those who want to read the details. But all the links make interesting browsing. Phineas's damaged skull and his tamping iron are displayed at the Warren Anatomical Museum of the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University; read their FAQ, or stop in sometime when you're in Boston. The story of the daguerreotype image identified in July 2009 is recounted here.

Oscar Peterson plays My Romance (with Sam Jones, bass, and Bobby Durham, drums) from Exclusively For My Friends: The Lost Tapes, c. 1965-67. It's from before his 1993 stroke but it certainly is a stunning example of the kind of motor control it's possible to have over one's fingers. If you like that, then from the same album check out Gravy Waltz for fun, and It's Impossible for the shock value of hearing almost 2 1/2 minutes of soloing in sixteenth notes, invented spontaneously (starts at 3:48).

The sensory and motor homunculi as 3D models, at London's Natural History Museum.

Examples of aphasic speech:

• speech from a patient with Broca's (or non-fluent) aphasia: printed example; audio example
• speech from a patient with Wernicke's (or fluent) aphasia: printed example; audio example
• Doonesbury cartoon portraying aphasic speech

The cerebral localization clip from "Scrubs" is posted here, for those who believe things they see on TV.

An excerpt from "The Royal Tennenbaums" in which Bill Murray's character is a satirical take on the neurologist Oliver Sacks; see also this clip from near the end.

Some myths about handedness are debunked in this excerpt of a few pages from Right Hand, Left Hand by Chris McManus -- including the one that says left-handers die younger, and also the one I like to mention, which is that hooking of the hand while writing is an indication that language functions are carried out by the right hemisphere instead of the left. (More specifically, I've heard that right-handed writers who hook their hands are more likely to have language spread between both hemispheres, but that's equally unsupported.)

Inhibition in Extinction and Spontaneous Recovery: On this page of notes written for a class devoted to Learning Theory (PSYC 2500; "Mazur" is the author of the text for that class), you can see my brief description of the roles of excitatory and inhibitory associations in accounting for classical conditioning phenomena. (The other information on this page is related to the distinctions between classical and operant conditioning, though with some different detail than will be relevant to us.)

In school, we learned about "this scientist" who trained dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell... (my mouth tastes so bad all of a sudden... gaah...) [starts at 6:15]

• A further comment about scientists
• This has nothing to do with anything

Interesting analysis of the case of Pavlov's cat by Eddie Izzard, world's greatest transvestite comedian.

Cats learn things through positive reinforcement like how to get out of a puzzle box and how to speak English, and also seem to learn through punishments that they bring on themselves.

Squirrel Obstacle Course as an example of chaining: it's reasonable to assume the squirrel was first trained on the last step, and then each additinal segment of the path added in reverse order till they finally reached the beginning of the course. In that way, the nuts reinforced the jump from the platform, and through its proximity to the nuts the platform became a conditioned reinforcer for riding in the rocket. Then the rocket became a conditioned reinforcer for the step before that, all the way back to the beginning. End result: a chaing of simple behaviors linked together into a complex sequence.

Musical Canine Freestyle (a.k.a. Heelwork to Music in the UK): a completely preposterous example of both shaping (getting the animal to produce responses it wouldn't normally produce) and chaining (linking together a series of responses into a sequence). It's a real thing too; I first heard of it in this edition of Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird column in 1999 (those of us with dogs know exactly what "at-home dog-dancing" refers to):

The New York Times reported in November on the recent but growing competitive sport of "musical canine freestyle" (choreographed dancing with dogs), in which costumed owners and their matching-collared pooches move to tunes such as "The Yellow Rose of Texas" and "Get Happy." (Holding the dogs' paws, as in at-home dog-dancing, is forbidden.) The World Canine Freestyle Organization has a mailing list of 8000 aficionados.

Race a rat through this maze, by pausing the video on the maze overview and tracing through it on your own, and then hitting play to see if you can actually stay ahead of him when they show his whole run in the second half. I'm not saying it's hard, just that he's faster than you think - and the rat doesn't get the bird's eye view that you get either.

I Was Not A Lab Rat: B. F. Skinner's daugher, Deborah Skinner Buzan, is angry with idiots like Lauren Slater (author of the obnoxious Opening Skinner's Box - don't waste your time!) and others who persist in spreading rumors claiming that her father somehow mistreated her and set her on the road to insanity and suicide. Nice appreciation of the man and of the "Air Crib" he invented for her, which was NOT a "Skinner Box" in any way!

The late Henry Molaison, of Windsor Locks, CT

Topics and Reading Assignments

1. Neural Bases of Behavior (Ch. 3 pp. 79-82, 86-97, 100-111, 113-117; Ch. 2 pp. 46-49, 56-57, figure 2.1 p. 48 [ANS, hypothalamus]; Ch. 8 p. 302-308 [frontal lobe and memory; consciousness]
   • neural basis: reflex, nerve impulse, action potential, communication by neurotransmitters
   • brain basis: nervous system structure, localization of function, disorders, lateralization
2. Learning: The Changing Organism's Adaptation to the Changing World (Ch. 6 pp.195-225, 228-230); natural selection (ch. 2 pp. 41-43, 44-46)
   • classical and operant conditioning: concepts, procedures, and experimental phenomena
   • biological constraints: belongingness
   • cognitive learning: contingency in classical conditioning, learned helplessness, latent learning
3. Memory: Preserving the Past (Ch. 6 pp. 233-268); Generic and Semantic Memory (Ch. 7 pp. 278-280)
   • types of memory: short-term/long-term, episodic/generic, explicit/implicit, declarative/procedural
   • encoding and retrieval
4. Sensory Processes: Experiencing the World (Ch. 4 pp. 119-124, 127-129, 136-153); note figures 4.4 & 4.5 on (sound) waves; 4.12 & 4.13 on the eye; 4.20 on lateral inhibition; 4.21 on the visible spectrum; 4.24 on cone types; 4.28 on opponent processes in color vision
   • psychophysics
   • light and sensory mechanisms in the eye
5. Perception: Knowing the World (Ch. 5 pp. 155-179, 187-191)
   • empiricist approach to depth perception: Helmholtz
   • nativist approach to form perception: Gestalt Psychology
   • ecological approach: Gibson
6. Language (Ch. 9 pp. 313-353)
   • language structure
   • language learning in humans and animals
7. Thinking (Ch. 8 pp. 271-310)
   • reasoning; problem solving; imagery and representations

LECTURE:
Lecture is in SCHN 55 Monday and Wednesday from 3:00 till 3:50. You'd have to be crazy to miss lecture; for details take PSYC 1103.

LAB:
ATTENDANCE AT LAB SECTIONS IS MANDATORY FOR EVERY PSYC 1100 STUDENT. PSYC 1100 is a 3 credit class, corresponding to 3 meeting hours per week; 2 of those hours are lecture and the third is lab. LAB GRADES COUNT FOR 25% OF THE COURSE GRADE. This means that if you skip the lab you could score perfectly on all three exams and still only receive 150 out of 200 points for the course. Laboratory meetings for PSYC 1100 sections 58-71 are in WHETTEN GRADUATE CENTER (WGC) ROOM 300-C at the times stated below (and in the course schedule). All students should know their lab section number, meeting time, and teaching assistant's name. LABS BEGIN TUE 9/08/09.

 
LAB SEC.  DAY    TIME      TEACHING ASSISTANT
 
58        MON    2:00 PM   Heather Holly
59        THU    9:00 AM   Katherine O'Leary
60        TUE   12:00 PM   Chris Lee
61        TUE    1:00 PM   Saime Tek
62        THU   10:00 AM   Clark Calabrese
63        TUE    3:00 PM   Sergey Kornilov
64        TUE    4:00 PM   Sergey Kornilov
65        TUE    5:00 PM   Kate Zona
66        TUE    6:00 PM   Kate Zona
67        TUE    7:00 PM   Kate Zona
68        WED   10:00 AM   Anne-Lise Smith
69        WED   11:00 AM   Anne-Lise Smith
70        WED   12:00 PM   Anne-Lise Smith
71        TUE   11:00 AM   Chris Lee

EXPERIMENT PARTICIPANT POOL:
There is a large amount of ongoing psychological research in the department which depends mainly upon the participation of General Psychology students as subjects. Researchers include faculty, graduate students, and other undergraduate students. The traditional mechanism that has been in place for several decades nationwide is to allow introductory psychology students to earn part of their course credit through participation in experiments. Benefits to the science of Psychology are obvious; benefits to the student include exposure to research in specific areas of Psychology, insight into the general nature of psychological research, and opportunity to earn extra credit in this course (see details below). Information about experiments (time, place, duration, description, experimenter's name, etc.) is posted on the Participant Pool experiment sign-up page, which is also where you make appointments to participate in the studies you choose; there are instructions on the page for how to log in. Refer to the handout on experiment participation for more details of participation procedures. Specific policies for PSYC 1100 sec 58-71 are as follows:

Each 1/2 hour of experiment participation counts for 1 experiment participation credit. All experiments are at least 1 credit; some are only 1 but some may be more depending on the amount of time required to participate. Experiments this semester run from Tuesday September 8th through Wednesday December 9th. All experiment participation must be completed during that time, and any credit accounting errors must be detected and corrected absolutely no later than Friday December 11th. Credit totals will be posted on the Participant Pool web page on Monday December 14th.

5 experimental credits (2.5 hours) are REQUIRED of each student to maintain the grade they earn for the course. These credits count ONLY as points to be LOST from the final point total for the course, if they are not completed. For example, a student who earns 40 points on exam 1, 40 points on exam 2, 40 points on exam 3, and 40 points in lab has a total of 160 points; with 5 experimental credits the student maintains that score, but without the 5 credits the total score would drop to 155. All 5 credits must be earned; if only 4 credits are earned, the 5 points are still lost.

Up to 7 additional experimental credits (3.5 hours) may be earned as EXTRA CREDIT, once the required 5 credits have been completed; this is the only form of extra credit offered in this course. These extra credits count ONLY as points to be ADDED to the final point total for the course. For example, a student who earns 40 points on exam 1, 40 points on exam 2, 40 points on exam 3, and 40 points in lab and has completed the required 5 experimental credits has a total of 160 points; with 1 extra credit the total becomes 161, and with the maximum of 7 it becomes 167. Note that the difference between 160 points and 167 points out of 200 could be the difference between, say, a B and a B+ as a course grade. (Actual course letter grade cutoffs will be determined before adding any extra credits, so that no one is penalized for not earning extra credit.)

Participation in experiments is strictly voluntary. For students not wishing to participate in experiments an alternative assignment may be arranged, requiring about the same amount of time as the 5 experimental credits and playing the same role in grade calculation as described above for the 5 credit requirement. However, no extra credits may be earned until 5 experimental credits are completed.

Once you make an experiment appointment you MUST keep it, or cancel with at least 24 hours notice; the web page allows cancellations only until the 24-hour point is reached! If you miss TWO appointments with less than 24 hours notice, the system will automatically disqualify you from further participation in experiments: it won't allow you to sign up for any more experiments; you won't earn any more extra credits; and if you are lacking your five required credits you will have to complete the alternative assignment described above to avoid losing the associated points. (But really, keeping appointments is a fairly basic responsibility that you can probably manage okay!)

All questions about experiment participation procedures and issues should be addressed to Dr. Lindy Coldwell at the Psychology Center, Rm. 100 in the Psychology Building.