The PsychSim5 Activities

Psychology’s Timeline

Purpose: To provide a more comprehensive synopsis of the origins of psychology, the early history of psychology as a discipline, and the major themes in twentieth century psychology.

Summary: This activity will take you on a tour through the history of psychology. You will learn how psychology grew out of philosophy and medical physiology, and will become acquainted with some of the pioneers of psychology as a scientific discipline.

Descriptive Statistics

Purpose: To describe the common measures of central tendency and variability and demonstrate their use in summarizing a data set.

Summary: This activity introduces you to the basic statistics that researchers use to summarize their sets of data. You will learn how to produce a distribution of scores and how to graph the distribution. After descriptions of the measures of central tendency (mode, median, and mean) and variability (range and standard deviation), you will be able to manipulate the scores in a distribution to see how each score affects the descriptive statistics for that distribution.

Hemispheric Specialization

Purpose: To explain how research on split-brain patients has helped us understand the special abilities of the two halves of the brain.

Summary: This activity describes what researchers have learned about the special abilities of the left and right sides of the brain. After a brief review of the way that information is carried from the main sensory channels to the brain, you will test the responses of a simulated “split-brain” patient to demonstrate that, for most right-handers, the main language center is located in the left hemisphere, while the right hemisphere is specialized for spatial tasks. Then you will carry out the same experiments with a simulated “normal” individual to