【托福听力备考】托福TPO1听力文本——Lecture 1

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2024年2月13日发(作者：)

【托福听力备考】托福TPO1听力文本——Lecture 1

众所周知，托福TPO材料是备考托福听力最好的材料。相信众多备考托福的同学也一直在练习这套材料，那么在以下内容中我们就为大家带来托福TPO听力练习的文本，希望能为大家的备考带来帮助。

Lecture 1 Psychology

Narrator：Listen to part of a psychology lecture. The professor is

discussing behaviorism.

Professor：Now, many people consider John Watson to be the founder of

behaviorism. And like other behaviorists, he believed that psychologists should

study only the behaviors they can observe and measure. They’re not interested

in

mental processes. While a person could describe his thoughts, no one else can

see or hear them to verify the accuracy of his report. But one thing you can

observe is muscular habits. What Watson did was to observe muscular habits

because he viewed them as a manifestation of thinking. One kind of habits that

he studied are laryngeal habits.

Watson thought laryngeal habits . . . you know, from larynx, in other

words, related to the voice box . . . he thought those habits were an expression

of thinking. He argued that for very young children, thinking is really talking

out loud to oneself because they talk out loud even if they’re not trying to

communicate with someone in particular. As the individual matures, that overt

talking to oneself becomes covert talking to oneself, but thinking still shows

up as a laryngeal habit. One of the bits of evidence that supports this is that

when people are trying to solve a problem, they, um, typically have increased

muscular activity in the throat region. That is, if you put electrodes on the

throat and measure muscle potential—muscle activity—you discover that when

people are thinking, like if they’re diligently trying to solve a problem, that

there is muscular activity in the throat region.

So, Watson made the argument that problem solving, or thinking, can be

defined as a set of behaviors—a set of responses—and in this case the response

he observed was the throat activity. That’s what he means when he calls it a

laryngeal habit. Now, as I am thinking about what I am going to be saying, my

muscles in my throat are responding. So, thinking can be measured as muscle

activity. Now, the motor theory . . . yes?

Student： Professor Blake, um, did he happen to look at people who sign? I

mean deaf people?

Professor：Uh, he did indeed, um, and to jump ahead, what one finds in deaf

individuals who use sign language when they’re given problems of various kinds,

they have muscular changes in their hands when they are trying to solve a

problem . . . muscle changes in the hand, just like the muscular changes going

on in the throat region for speaking individuals.

So, for Watson, thinking is identical with the activity of muscles. A

related concept of thinking was developed by William James. It’s called

ideomotor action.

Ideomotor action is an activity that occurs without our noticing it,

without our being aware of it. I’ll give you one simple example. If you think

of

locations, there tends to be eye movement that occurs with your thinking about

that location. In particular, from where we’re sitting, imagine that you’re

asked to think of our university library. Well, if you close your eyes and think

of the library, and if you’re sitting directly facing me, then according to this

notion, your eyeballs will move slightly to the left, to your left, ‘cause the

library’s in that general direction.

James and others said that this is an idea leading to a motor action, and

that’s why it’s called “ideomotor action”—an idea leads to motor activity.

If

you wish to impress your friends and relatives, you can change this simple

process into a magic trick. Ask people to do something such as I’ve just

described: think of something on their left; think of something on their right.

You get them to think about two things on either side with their eyes closed,

and you watch their eyes very carefully. And if you do that, you’ll discover

that you can see rather clearly the eye movement—that is, you can see the

movement of the eyeballs. Now, then you say, think of either one and I’ll tell

which you’re thinking of.

OK. Well, Watson makes the assumption that muscular activity is equivalent

to thinking. But given everything we’ve been talking about here, one has to ask:

are there alternatives to this motor theory—this claim that muscular activities

are equivalent to thinking? Is there anything else that might account for this

change in muscular activity, other than saying that it is thinking? And the

answer is clearly yes. Is there any way to answer the question definitively? I

think the answer is no.

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