Themes, perspectives and methods that you can link your evidence to.
application of psychology to everyday life;
determinism; opposite to free-will (e.g. Raine suggests that lack of processing in the frontal lobe
would determine that you become a murderer, but you have choices in life (free-will)
ecological validity;
ethics; (consent, deception, debriefing, protection, confidentiality, rules of observational research,
giving advice, colleagues, animal research, bad uses that findings are put to (e.g. eugenicists in
Gould))
ethnocentric bias; - believing that your people are the best and your standards are the best.
individual (disposition) and situational explanations;
nature and nurture;
psychometrics; tests that give a number indicating level of performance
qualitative and quantitative measures;
reductionism;
reliability and validity;
usefulness of psychological research;
experimental method; IV DV controlling everything else.
laboratory experiments/apparatus;
controls;
samples/sampling;
case studies;
observation studies;
self report measures; (i.e. questionnaire or interview)
longitudinal studies;
snapshot studies; (opposite to longitudinal, most studies are snapshot)
generalisations – study one specific group of people and then generalise the results to other
populations.
Approaches in psychology:
• cognitive; memory, perception – treats the brain like a computer ignores human emotion –
social psychology
• developmental/ children;
• physiological; biology meets psychology
• social; how other people affect your behaviour
• individual differences (gender, developmental, culture) / abnormality.
Section B takes 1hr so
a) 15 mins
b) 30mins
c) 15 mins
Environmental cognition
a Describe what psychologists have discovered about environmental cognition. [10]
b Evaluate what psychologists have discovered about environmental cognition. [16]
c When prospective students visited a local university one of their main complaints was that they kept
getting lost. Suggest ways in which a psychologist could help the university improve the maps that
they provide for students. Give reasons for your answer. [8]
Plan part b first
Elements of cognitive maps (Lynch):
 Paths: routes along which people travel, for example, roads and footpaths.
 Edges: boundaries or non-travelled lines, for example, shores of lakes, edges of
cliffs, building walls.
 Districts: moderately sized areas that city residents perceive as having a particular


character, for example, the West End.
Nodes: well-known points that people travel to and from, often at the juncture of
pathways, for example, major road junctions, bus stations.
Landmarks: easily-viewed elements which can be used as reference features, for
example on a grand scale, a tall building such as a church spire, or on a smaller
scale a statue.
Cognitive psychology does tend to ignore human emotions. Reductionist in approach – doesn’t take into
account social aspects of memory, such as places you have visited with friends, etc. Emotional
associations. Freud would talk about repression, trying to forget unpleasant associations and in the
psychology of everyday life spoke about how we unconsciously wander to areas for hidden reasons, such as
the chance to encounter an attractive member of the opposite sex. [compares and contrasts with Freud]
Maguire, E.A., Gadian, D.G., Johnsrude, 1.S., Good, C.D., Ashburner, J.,
Frackowiak, R.S. and Frith, C.D. (2000) Navigation-related structural changes
in the hippocampi of taxi drivers. Proceedings of the Notional Academy of
Sciences, USA, 97, 4398-403
Direction of causality – is it that your hippocampus grows as you learn the map of
London or is it that taxi-drivers with a large hippocampus choose and remain in the job of
being a taxi-driver as they find it easier to find their way. This means we cannot be
certain that the hippocampus can grow in order to take account of experiences. However,
the study does support the role of the hippocampus in finding your way around. Further
evidence comes from physiological animal studies, where animals with lesions to their
hippocampus have found it difficult to remember where food is buried or how to navigate
a maze. The role of the hippocampus has been supported by the findings of human
studies, such as the study of patient HM, who had a damaged hippocampus and could not
lay down new memories (anterograde amnesia). [Incidentally forgetting old memories is
called retrograde amnesia].
You could evaluate the physiological studies in terms of reductionism, or how objective
they are (a good thing), and other problems of research involving lesions, such as damage
to connections that serve other parts of the brain.
Route-learning in a computer-simulated environment
Tlauka and Wilson (1994).
Aim: To test whether participants would perform a route-learning task more
efficiently in an environment with landmarks compared to one without.
Highly reductionist (most cues were not present apart from the landmark), but well
controlled. Lacks ecological validity. Computer not real to life, basic graphics. Validity
– the landmarks were things such as a vase of flowers – not meaningful landmarks
chosen by the participant.
Moar (1978). Housewives from Glasgow and Cambridge were asked to give distance
estimates between different cities in the UK. – might not generalise to other populations
such as long-distance lorry-drivers!
Errors made in cognitive maps
These studies that involve the participants drawing maps and then inferring from their
efforts that the errors in their drawings give clues as to how they store their cognitive
maps lack validity as they confound the participants drawing ability with their mental
representation.
Choose the three issues you find easiest to describe and illustrate with one or two studies
for each issue.
Describe the studies in a)
For part c
c When prospective students visited a local university one of their main complaints was that they kept
getting lost. Suggest ways in which a psychologist could help the university improve the maps that
they provide for students. Give reasons for your answer. [8]
Suggestion – print map in orientation determined by the position of entrance – place
entrance at bottom. Landmarks included. Tall tower clearly shown. Colour code.
Evidence – (see web-site)
Reasons – people find it easier if the orientation of the map is in the same direction of
travel. Landmarks are used for orientation. When lost look for what you can see above
the other buildings, such as tall tower.