PSYC 1100 General Psychology I
Spring 2025
UConn Storrs Campus MCHU 102
sec 001 MON WED 3:35-4:25
sec 035 MON WED 4:40-5:30
with lab sections 002L-013L and 037L-048L
Eric Lundquist

Academic Misconduct in any form is in violation of the University of Connecticut Student Conduct Code and will not be tolerated. This includes, but is not limited to: copying or sharing answers on tests or assignments, plagiarism, having someone else do your academic work (including AI tools), and allowing someone else to pass off your work as their own. Depending on the act, a student could receive an F grade on the test/assignment, F grade for the course, or could be suspended or expelled from the university. The University's Student Conduct Code is at https://community.uconn.edu/the-student-code-preamble/; refer to https://community.uconn.edu/academic-misconduct/ for details on the University's policies concerning academic misconduct (plagiarism, cheating, etc.)

Other general University policies and information are available at the Office of the Provost's page of References for Syllabi Links https://provost.uconn.edu/faculty-and-staff-resources/syllabi-references/, including policies concerning such issues as Absences from Final Examinations, Class Attendance, Credit Hours, People with Disabilities, Discrimination, Harassment and Related Interpersonal Violence, The Student Code, Academic Misconduct Procedures for Instructors, and more. These should be considered part of every course's policies at UConn.

• INTRODUCTION
  The Science of Psychology (no text reading)
  • History, Philosophy, and Definitions of Psychology
  
  
• BIOLOGY
  Neural Bases of Behavior
  • neural basis: reflex, nerve impulse, action potential, communication by neurotransmitters
  • brain basis: nervous system structure, localization of function, disorders, lateralization
  
  EXAM 1 (with some introductory material on Learning included)
  
  

  ---

• BEHAVIOR
  Learning: The Changing Organism's Adaptation to the Changing World
  • classical and operant conditioning: concepts, procedures, and experimental phenomena
  • biological constraints: belongingness
  • cognitive learning: contingency in classical conditioning, learned helplessness, latent learning
  
  EXAM 2 (with some introductory material on Memory included)
  
  

  ---

• MIND
  Memory: Preserving the Past
  • types of memory: short-term/long-term, episodic/generic, explicit/implicit, declarative/procedural
  • encoding and retrieval
  
  Sensory Processes: Experiencing the World
  • light and sensory mechanisms in the eye
  • psychophysics
  
  Perception: Knowing the World
  • empiricist approach to depth perception: Helmholtz
  • nativist approach to form perception: Gestalt Psychology
  • ecological approach: Gibson
  
  EXAM 3 (FINAL EXAM)
  
  

The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century: Many of these names will become familiar through this class.

Some representative insightful comments from founding psychologists and other sources

William Perry's view of the intellectual and cognitive development of college-age students is not so much a "developmental psychology of college students" as it is an observation-based description of how their approach to knowledge (or their "epistemology") typically changes over four years, and as such, it may be of interest to you.

• For context, here are a few thoughts about what college is supposed to accomplish, from the idealistic to the cynical.

Learning styles in Wikipedia: In particular read the "criticisms" section; the rest is useful if you're unfamiliar with the concept but it just describes the whole unscientific idea.

• Nancekivell, Shaylene E., Shah, Priti, and Gelman, Susan A. (2019). Maybe They're Born With It, or Maybe It's Experience: Toward a Deeper Understanding of the Learning Style Myth. Journal of Educational Psychology, published online May 30, 2019. 2019 journal article about why people believe in the learning styles myth.
• American Psychological Association press release about 2019 article on learning styles myth
• Popular press (Newsweek) coverage of 2019 article on learning styles myth: CHILDREN AREN'T BORN WITH LEARNING STYLES, SCIENTISTS WARN PARENTS by KASHMIRA GANDER ON 5/30/19
• "Another nail in the coffin for learning styles" -- students did not benefit from studying according to their supposed learning style, by Christian Jarrett: earlier coverage of research debunking learning styles.
• Blog post: "Learning Styles: A Misguided Attempt to Highlight Individual Differences in Learners" by Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel: earlier coverage of research debunking learning styles.
• Kirschner, Paul A. (2017). Stop propagating the learning styles mythComputers & Education Volume 106, March 2017, Pages 166-171 (only abstract available without access): earlier coverage of research debunking learning styles.
• Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105-119. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6053.2009.01038.x: a major review and critique from 2008.

New Findings Inform the Laptop versus Longhand Note-Taking Debate, by Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel: A blog post commenting on the findings about notetaking and laptop use in class, and a failure to replicate the notetaking findings. References for those papers, and a newer one that qualifies the notetaking results, are here:

• laptop distraction paper: Sana, F., Weston, T., & Cepeda, N. J. (2013). Laptop multitasking hinders classroom learning for both users and nearby peers. Computers & Education, 62, 24-31.
• notetaking paper: Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science, 25, 1159-1168.
• failed replication: Morehead, K., Dunlosky, J., & Rawson, K. A. (2019) How much mightier is the pen than the keyboard for note-taking? A replication and extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014). Educational Psychology Review, 1-28.

Noam Chomsky quote from Language And Mind (1968) on the need for "making strange" the phenomena of psychology

Speech perception depends on context: play this video without looking at it just to hear the audio, then play it again while watching it. (Same thing on Kaltura.)

Slides on Definitions of Psychology in PDF format: Four definitions of psychology -- (1) the science of mind and behavior, 2) the science of experimental epistemology, 3) the science of knowing and experiencing, 4) the science of things that move around on their own; three important dates in the history of psychology; a timeline and four terms that are central to epistemology; the mind-body problem; what kinds of things are of interest to psychology. 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." Defining quotes from Watson and Neisser on their intentions for Behaviorist and Cognitive Psychology, respectively: John B. Watson (1913). Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it. First published in Psychological Review, 20, 158-177; first paragraph: Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. The behavior of man, with all of its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist's total scheme of investigation. Ulric Neisser (1967). Cognitive Psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. (p. 4). A definition of cognition from the textbook that coined the term "cognitive psychology": [T]he term "cognition" refers to all the processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations. Such terms as sensation, perception, imagery, retention, recall, problem solving, and thinking, among many others, refer to hypothetical stages or aspects of cognition.

A thing that moves around on its own: the robot called Big Dog from the Boston Dynamics robotics lab is designed to maneuver through a cluttered terrain with rocks, hills, snow, ice, and other impediments to locomotion. The computations that go into controlling and coordinating its legs, and perceiving its environment in order to do so appropriately, are of interest to psychology as well as to related fields such as artificial intelligence: the principles it uses are inspired by animate locomotion, and in turn help to develop theories about how animate locomotion works. Not to mention, Big Dog seems to take on a kind of psychological existence simply by moving around in a lifelike way; many video viewers were angered by the demonstration of how its little brother Spot regained its footing after a destabilizing kick, commenting that it was mean to kick the robot like that (click here to see Spot run). Once you've seen Spot run, you may also want to see Spot dance, along with Handle and Atlas (two of them).

• Kaltura versions of the same:
  BigDog Overview (Updated March 2010)
  See Spot Run
  Boston Dynamics Atlas Spot Handle Do You Love Me

A dog demonstrates that perceptions and actions are scaled to size.

The Venus Flytrap is pretty smart. See similar coverage of the Venus Flytrap in the New York Times, where it's called "a plant that can count" and "much smarter than [the roundworm] C. elegans", a widely studied simple animal having a nervous system of 302 neurons; the Venus Flytrap, being a plant, has zero neurons! [Try accessing through Google if blocked by paywall.]

Thigmotropism in Wikipedia: how plants' climbing and clinging behavior works based on their "sense" of touch.

Links cited in slides on definitions of psychology: These are collected together here in a more accessible format than the pdf of the slides.

Counting the neurons in the brain: Excerpts from a book review that describes the surprising "brain soup" procedure.

• Short TED Talk by Neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel on the "brain soup" technique she developed, and some of the implications of being able to count the number of neurons in brains.

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.
Here's the Kaltura version of the video, in case it's easier to view.

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.

Swearing as a Response to Pain: a 2009 report showing that swearing is effective for pain relief; the methodology is kind of fun. They hypothesize that swearing may activate strong emotional responses that can inhibit pain sensitivity (which would be an indirect way of inhibiting a withdrawal reflex): "[F]ear may cause amygdala activation of descending pain inhibitory systems that regulate the flow of incoming nociceptive [pain] signals. Therefore, perhaps swearing induces a negative emotion that, if not fear, may nevertheless be characterized as an immediate alarm reaction to present threat. The heart rate acceleration after swearing observed in this study is consistent with activation of the fight or flight response. However, the question as to which negative emotion swearing elicits, if not fear, is unclear. One possibility is aggression."

• Swearing as a Response to Pain_Effect of Daily Swearing Frequency: the 2011 follow-up study showing that swearing is less effective for pain relief in people who swear a lot anyway.
• Overview of the effect of swearing on pain experience in Wikipedia: for those with only about one minute's worth of interest in the topic.

Praying mantis sex from National Geographic on youtube, starting at about the 3:49 mark after a bit about naked mole rats. Pretty lurid narration for National Geographic, actually. It's an example of disinihition: 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. Another video makes this point, saying "A separate mini-brain in his tail kicks in, and actually speeds up his performance." It's more of a nerve cluster than a "mini-brain"—even the "brain" in the head is really a nerve ganglion, not technically a brain—and it "kicks in" because it's no longer being inhibited by signals from the head. 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 (copied from a sadly now-vanished website) seems like a decent account, or just go to Wikipedia's article on the mantis. I've seen estimates that around 25% of copulating males in the wild end up being eaten.

Disinhibition in humans due to alcohol: The original posting of this video had over a million views within a week of the events of the night of Sunday Oct 4, 2015 at the UConn Student Union, and became a nationally famous "news" story with clips being shown on network late night shows, and occasional coverage of the unfortunate ex-student's sad struggles in the years since. Demand soared for UConn's Bacon Jalapeno Mac'n'Cheese. It all resulted from alcohol's depressant effect on the pre-frontal cortex's inhibitory functions, which led to this guy acting on some normally suppressed obnoxious impulses. Don't let that happen to you, if you ever decide to try alcohol once you're 21.

Autonomic Nervous System: a diagram showing the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic branches and their functions. Here is a slightly modified version substituting a few brief summary statements for the accompanying text; both are useful.

NERVOUS SYSTEM OUTLINE: 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!

A Wired article and a New Scientist article about a woman who was found, at the age of 24, to have been born without a cerebellum.

• NPR story on Jonathan Keleher who was born without a cerebellum, suggesting a more general function for the cerebellum. This is a print version of the story but the audio is included and it is very worth listening to, to hear Jonathan's voice and what he says for himself.
  

  Research on Jonathan and people like him supports the idea that the cerebellum really has just one job: It takes clumsy actions or functions and makes them more refined. "It doesn't make things. It makes things better," Dr. Jeremy Schmahmann says.
  That's pretty straightforward when it comes to movement. The brain's motor cortex tells your legs to start walking. The cerebellum keeps your stride smooth and steady and balanced.
  "What we now understand is what that cerebellum is doing to movement, it's also doing to intellect and personality and emotional processing," Schmahmann says.
  Unless you don't have a cerebellum. Then, Schmahmann says, a person's thinking and emotions can become as clumsy as their movements.

• Clip from the 1994 film Ed Wood (about the famously terrible film director played here by Johnny Depp), in a scene where he and his friend the aging Dracula actor Bela Lugosi (played by Martin Landau) watch a TV host named Vampira, and Lugosi lusts after her and imagines hypnotizing her with Dracula's seductive hand gesture. Clearly that smoothly executed hand gesture requires a cerebellum to integrate those muscular movements (as well as being double-jointed and Hungarian). The same clip is here on Kaltura for convenience.

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!

Experiment on patients with either a damaged amygdala or hippocampus as described in lecture, but not in the textbook. (Here is the published paper -- purely optional, quite advanced, but readable if you're motivated.)

A summary of the basic terms in classical conditioning as used to describe the hippocampus / amygdala experiment above, consistent with the reading on pp. 195-201 about Learning (pp. 259-265 in 8th edition).

Take an MRI tour of a really great brain: from left to right, from front to back, from top to bottom.
Depending on your browser and plug-ins, these versions might be more browser-compatible and convenient: from left to right, from front to back, from top to bottom.
Here are the same videos on Kaltura: from left to right, from front to back, from top to bottom.
(And here's a special bonus scan of a really okay abdomen from front to back.)

Franz Joseph Gall and phrenology, along with some of his legitimate scientific achievements.

• Phrenological diagram in a more readable version, according to Franz Joseph Gall's disciple Johannes Spurzheim who increased the number of faculties from Gall's 27 to at least 35.
• History Of Phrenology: a comprehensive resource.
• Face-Reading story on CNN, 1998: Here's a transcript of a story that was broadcast on CNN in 1998 about the applications of something called "face-reading" in contemporary society. Is this any different than phrenology? Phrenology might have been MORE scientific, actually! Chilling, if you're about to look for a job... And if you're thinking, well, that was a long time ago, just realize the idea was exactly as laughable then as it is now.
• World's best phrenology client: okay not really his brain contours, obviously, but a fun picture.

The story of Phineas Gage's gruesome accident and (supposed) personality change 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; next time you're in the Boston area, stop in. The story of the daguerreotype image identified in July 2009 is recounted here. The second image, identified in 2010, is described here.

• This May 2014 article from Slate.com is probably the best treatment of the whole story -- the person, the accident, the history, the brain, and the use of the story in science. It's really good.