- By the 1920s a new definition of psychology had gained favor. Psychology was said to be the science of...
behavior
Correct...Watson published his influential book in 1913, and by 1920 many psychologists (in the U.S., anyway) defined psychology as the science of behavior.
- A cognitive psychologist is most likely to be interested in...
memory and perception
Yes...memory and perception are typical concerns of cognitive psychologists. Cognition is "thinking" or "human information processing" and involves all sorts of mental activities which can be studied directly or simulated on computers, such as memory, problem solving, perception, and language comprehension.
Operational definitions are...
definitions which tell how to collect data
Yes...operational definitions get their name from the fact that they specific measurement operations...they tell how to measure or detect something, which means they allow a scientist to collect data about something.
What does it mean to say a definition is valid?
it measures what you think it measures, as shown by using a different method to measure the same variable
Yes...validity refers to the ability of a particular measurement to give you useful information, to make a useful prediction about the subject of interest, for example. If SAT scores accurately predict school performance, then they are valid for that purpose. They may not be valid for another purpose, such as predicting income or job performance later in life. You always check the validity of a measure by attempting to measure the same thing in a different way, then comparing the results to see if the operations "converge" or agree.
What does it mean to say a definition is reliable?
you can measure the same thing again and get the same results
Yes, that is the meaning of reliability, in a nutshell.
Replication..
is essentially repetition of an experiment in all its details
Yes. Of course, nobody every COMPLETELY replicated anything...there are always some differences...so a failure to replicate might be due to some details that the researchers did not realize were important
But the basic idea of replication is to ATTEMPT to repeat a piece of research (whether observational or truly experimental) in all its details.
In observational research there are no...
experimental manipulations
Yes...the defining characteristic of observational research is that there is no active change produced "as an experiment," just data- collection of some kind.
the variable which is manipulated in an experiment
Yes...the independent variable is manipulated "independently" by the experimenter, to see what happens as a result.
A single-blind design should be sufficient to eliminate -------------------- as a confounded variable.
placebo effects
] Yes...because, in a single blind design, subjects in the experimental and control groups both have an equal "belief" in the treatment they are receiving, ideally, so belief (the root cause of the placebo effect) is not a point of difference between the groups. This removes the placebo effect as a potential confound (in other words, it insures that any differences observed between the groups, later, were not due to belief alone).
with a double blind design
Yes. Ideally, a double-blind design (which keeps the researcher or data-collector ignorant of which group a subject is in) prevents the subjects from being treated differently on that basis.
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