PSYC 1100 General Psychology I
Fall 2026
UConn Storrs Campus MCHU 102
sec 035 TUE THU 5:00-5:50
sec 050 MON WED 3:35-4:25
sec 080 MON WED 4:40-5:30
with lab sections 036L-092L
Eric Lundquist

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• 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.)

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.]