October 29, 2024

·      What question about the reading for today did I prepare before class?

o   What gave him the idea to use dogs, a bell, and food?

·      What key ideas did I hear in seminar today?

o   two personalities: inside and outside the lab

§   Outside: sentimental, impractical, absentminded

§   Inside: efficient, punctual, perfectionist, detail-oriented

·       Organized his lab in a certain way

·       New workers required to replicate experiments in order to learn while providing reliability checks

o   Pavlov introduced this idea in his Nobel Prize speech, and then spent
the rest of his life studying it

§  Making a dog salivate when a bell was rung

o   Strongest and quickest conditioning occurred when time interval between the US and CS was smaller

o   If the CS came before the US, no reflexes were produced

o   Made systematic observations of his mental state on his deathbed

§  basically, predicted his death was imminent

o   Influenced no mentalistic American psychologists who called themselvesbehaviorists

§  They focused more on psychology as a science of behavior rather than a science of the
mind

·      What substantive ideas or comments did I contribute in seminar today?

o   Talked about the personalities and how I can relate

·      What did I learn today that contributed to my understanding of psychology?

o   Argued that unconditioned reflexes come from connections between sensory and motor nerves in the spinal cord and lower brain

§   Reflexes occurred when nerve pathways in the cortex became part of the conduction of the message, connecting stimuli with responses in new ways

·      Different areas of the cortex respond to certain stimuli

·       More similar = closer in the cortex