Byrne 

Animal behaviour. The discipline of ethology studies animal behaviour in natural surroundings, and has provided considerable insight into the organisation of feeding, reproductive and social systems in many species. Although caution is needed against overly simplistic explanations of the complexities of human social behaviour in terms of animal studies, it can be argued that there are genuine parallels between some aspects of human and animal social behaviour. This would particularly be the case with animals who are our close relatives, such as chimpanzees. Many neuroscientistis study non-human nervous systems, whilst others concentrate on patterns of learning and task performance which may have parallels in human performance. In general, the approach of extrapolating from the behaviour of one species to that of another is called comparative psychology. 

Collecting, classification. This kind of approach is exemplified by the work of Charles Darwin, and provided the data he used as the basis for his theory of evolution. It basically involves travelling to different locations, collecting as many examples/instances as possible of different species (plants, animals, insects). The next step is to try to find ways of logically grouping the resulting samples in some kind of systematic classification. Animal Studies\n(incorporates 'studies of non-humans', ethology, comparative studies of animal behaviour, field observation). An obvious first question here might be 'why are studies of animal behaviour being presented in a course to do with human psychology'? The basic argument is that, with care, studies of animals can provide insight into at least some aspects of human behaviour and experience. As the discussion in the perspective evolutionary psychology argued, our evolutionary background hasn't just resulted in the particular form of our bodies, but our behaviour and experience as well (or at least some aspects of them). Comparative psychology. This approach involves comparing humans with other species, looking for common factors, for example mating patterns or aggression. Much comparative psychology has involved laboratory studies of creatures such as rats and pigeons, looking in particular at the learning of behaviours. Ethology\nThis approach, in contrast with comparative psychology, avoids laboratory work, as it aims to study animals in their natural environment, based on field observation, carefully observing different aspects and sequences of behaviour. Ethologists place particular emphasis on an extensive observational phase, before attempts are made to analyse the data. For example, studies of non-verbal communication in animals have provided insights into human gestures and expressive movements. Ethologists would, of course, acknowledge that many human gestures are culturally-specific, and probably not directly related to our evolutionary/biological heritage. Nonetheless, they would point to certain aspects of human expressions which seem to arise in most or all human societies, and which seem to have relatively clear links with animal behaviours. Ethical issues in animal research (and psychology in general)\nWith research on animals, we come to the very important topic of the ethics involved – the possible mistreatment of animals that can occur with those approaches which involve painful and/or damaging intervention in the animal's natural life.\nThe strongest argument in favour of animal research involving pain is the potential value of the research, much of which would never be allowed to be done on humans. An example might be Seligman's work on learned helplessness, which involved repeated electric shocks to dogs (one dog died as a result of the experiments). Are the resulting insights (e.g. into institutionalisation, and how to counter it) valuable enough to outweigh the possible distress to animals? To place this in context, it might be argued that the current carnivorous practices of the majority of the human race result in much greater suffering, and on a vastly greater scale, than carefully-regulated animal research. (The average battery chicken would probably cluck with joy at the thought of living in a nice, cushy animal research laboratory). However, many psychologists now feel very uneasy about humanity's easy assumption of the right to inflict suffering on other species, simply because they are less evolved than us (there might be a complaint or two if an advanced race of aliens used the same argument towards us). \nIt is interesting to see how viewpoints on this have changed over time – in the 19th century, it was thought by some scientists that animals couldn't feel pain, that their cries and other responses (to stimuli which would invoke pain in humans) were not correlated with actual feeling. This is hardly an argument that would be used today though it is perhaps instructive to reflect that it was only at the end of the 20th century that many medical practitioners were persuaded that human infants feel pain. It remains to be seen whether future generations will view our current attitudes to animal research in the ways we now look back at those 19th century scientists. \nPsychology as a whole is constantly reflecting on and evolving its ethical practices – current practice is clearly explained in the BPS ethical guidelines Ethical issues are more important to psychological research than most other sciences, because its primary research is on humans themselves, as opposed to electrons, molecules, plants etc. Ethical considerations therefore occupy a prime place with any of the research methods discussed in DSE 212, and you are encouraged to pay careful attention to this aspect with the research you will conduct yourself as part of the course. 

The 'cognitive revolution', and the decline of behaviourism (1956-1967). The shift within psychology from an emphasis on observable behaviour to mental processes occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. For the first half of the twentieth century, psychological research was dominated by Behaviourist principles. Behaviourists initially ruled out considering any 'mental events' occurring between stimulus and response. When psychologists such as Tolman in 1932 described experimental animals as showing 'purpose' in their behaviour, and Bartlett spoke of 'remembering', the 'empty mind', the radical version of behaviourism began to run into problems.\nWithin a decade, applied psychological research began to investigate cognitive functions like attention, vigilance and decision making during the Second World War. The rapid development of computer technology (for instance, Alan Turing's Colossus computer designed to decode German Enigma codes at Bletchley Park) during the war, and information theory shortly after, provided additional impetus to those psychologists who were interested in how humans processed information, rather than just observable behaviour. \nInformation theory was developed by Claude Shannon during his time working at Bell Labs in the USA. He published the major part of his 'Mathematical theory of communication' in 1948. The main aim of information theory was to predict the capacity needed on any one network to transmit different types of information. Shannon defined information as something that contains unpredictable news – the predictable is not information (and so does not need to be transmitted). For instance, consider the sentence 'only infrmatn esentil to understandn mst b tranmitd”. English speakers can read it easily because the regularities in English make some information in sentences so predictable that it is redundant. Information depends on uncertainty – what is certain is redundant. Shannon also argued that symbols (e.g. words, icons, mathematical equations) are used to transmit information between people. Once the information is coded into the appropriate symbols, it is transmitted (e.g. spoken, drawn, written) and decoded at the other end. To decode these symbols, the receiver must match them against his or her own body of information to extract the data. In September of 1956, the twenty-seven-year-old Noam Chomsky delivered a paper entitled 'Three Models for the Description of Language' as part of a three-day MIT symposium on information theory. This contained contained the germ of Chomsky's cognitive approach to language. Allen Newell and Herbert Simon also presented work on problem solving with a 'logic machine,' and there were papers on signal detection and human information processing. This symposium – and these papers in particular – have been considered by some to mark the launch of the study of cognitive science. Although the battle was essentially played out between traditional linguists and supporters of Chomsky's model of generative linguistics, it had implications well beyond linguistics. This was because traditional structural linguistic theories were grounded in behaviourism and learning theory, while Chomsky's work directly challenged both the intellectual and political underpinnings of traditional structural approaches to grammar, and by implication, Behaviourism. At the same time, George Miller's work on the 'magic' number seven (the supposed limit of short term memory) began work on 'chunking' and memory from an information processing perspective.Chomsky's savage review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1957) appeared in the influential journal Language in 1959. In a letter to Robert Barsky, the author of Noam Chomsky: A life of dissent, Chomsky explains that: It wasn't Skinner's crazy variety of behaviorism that interested me particularly, but the way it was being used in Quinean empiricism and 'naturalization of philosophy,' a gross error in my opinion. That was important, Skinner was not. The latter was bound to collapse shortly under the weight of repeated failures. (31 March, 1995). \n\nCognitive psychology has grown rapidly since the events of the late 1950s. Ulric Neisser's 1967 textbook, Cognitive Psychology, gave a new legitimacy to the field, with its six chapters on perception and attention and four chapters on language, memory, and thought. Following Neisser's work, another important event was the beginning of the Journal Cognitive Psychology in 1970. This journal has done much to give definition to the field. Of course, just as cognitive psychology didn't begin in 1956, but can trace its roots much earlier, so Behaviourism didn't stop being an influential approach in psychology at the same time. Quite apart from the lasting legacy of experimental methodology, behavioural research is still widely conducted in psychology departments today, although radical behaviourism is largely dismissed.\nIt should also be noted that some psychologists have claimed that a second cognitive revolution occurred in the 1990s, with the rise in prominence of models of situated cognition, distributed cognition, and socio-cultural and social constructionist approaches that stress the role of artefacts or tools and social interaction, as well as meaning in cognitive processes – and hence the importance of language in human interactions. \n\nSources: Barsky, R. (1997) Noam Chomsky: A life of dissent. Available electronically at: http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/chomsky/Baars, B.J. (1986). The Cognitive Revolution in Psychology, New York, The Guilford Press Written by: Course Team 

Evolution. The theory of evolution is an explanatory framework for the diversity and form of organisms in the natural world. Darwin developed the theory in the nineteenth century. He argued that the many species observed by naturalists could have all diverged from a common ancestor by the gradual accumulation of small hereditary differences, each of which increased the bearer's chances of survival and reproduction in their immediate environment. This was in sharp distinction to the traditional orthodoxy, which held the each species had been separately created, perfect and immutable, by God. Darwin's theory, as he formulated it, was incomplete, as he had no grasp of how variations were passed from one generation to the next. \nThe synthesis of Darwin's hypotheses with the new and independently discovered science of genetics did not happen until the twentieth century, but once done it established Darwinian evolution as the foundation stone of biology. It is often alleged that evolution is just a theory, since it can never be directly observed, but this is not in fact the case. Most bacteria today show resistance to one or more types of anti-biotic drug. This is because they have evolved under our very eyes since anti-biotics were invented some fifty years ago. When a new anti-biotic is introduced in a particular area, the subsequent changes in the genetic makeup of the local bacteria populations give us an insight into evolution in action. The debate in biology today about evolution largely concerns how much of the development of organisms can be explained by adaptation to the environment, and how much of it arises as a byproduct of other factors. This debate is particularly difficult to resolve when it comes to the application of evolutionary analysis to the behaviour of contemporary humans.