Lecture: Introduction to Psychology

I went to a lecture in the course “Intro Psychology.” I went to the lecture hall, which was in the Computer Science Building. Although I was sleepy, when I entered the hall the loud music of Pink Floyd made me feel better and excited. Professor Mongrain was preparing her materials for lecture, and students were talking, eating, drinking, and some of them relaxing. At that time, the topic was “learning”, and she gave the students a lot of information about “conditioning.” There are several kinds of conditioning, and one of them is “classical conditioning” (CC). The most well-known example of this conditioning is “Pavlov’s experiments”. If you ring a bell every time you give food to your dog, the dog will salivate even though you just ring a bell without food. The next step of this conditioning is “Generalization.” This means that the dog tends to response to every bell sound as long as the sounds are similar. Then if you change the condition for a long time, the dog will not response to the previous condition any longer, and this is called “Extinction”. The other kind of conditioning is “operant conditioning.” The difference between operant and classical conditioning is that the controlling stimuli of operant conditioning come after the response.

She showed many visual materials, which were powerpoint, video clips and a movie, to help students understand. These efforts of the professor made me interested in the lecture. One more thing that I liked about this lecture was the atmosphere of the lecture. Because the students always asked questions and the professor answered very friendly, the lecture was very active. Therefore, I could feel that they interacted with each other.

She talked very fluently, and I could understand about 90% of her lecture and enjoy it. Also she is able to communicate nonverbally and with gestures with students.

I also talked with a student beside me, and asked about her major which was dance. She was very pleased with the professor, and she said to me that this course is one of her favorite courses.

Here is the website for Professor Myriam Mongrain's course, Introduction to Psychology:

http://www.psych.yorku.ca/mongrain/