Unit 1 · Introduction to Psychology — remediated module

Introduction to Psychology — Unit 1: Introduction

Lecture 1: Introduction (video)

Prof. John Gabrieli’s introductory lecture (~50 minutes). The video is hosted by MIT OpenCourseWare / the Internet Archive; this page adds what the original module never offered: captions, a transcript, and a text description of the visual demonstrations.

Watch or listen

Status of the captions on this page. The caption text comes from MIT OpenCourseWare’s official human transcript for this lecture; cue timings were aligned to the video automatically (method and caveats in the captions status section below). Caption accuracy against the audio has not been verified; see evaluation status.

Lecture 1: Introduction — 9.00SC Introduction to Psychology, Fall 2011 (Prof. John Gabrieli). Video: MIT OpenCourseWare / Internet Archive, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 US. Captions: text from the publisher’s official transcript; timings machine-aligned (status note above).

If the embedded player does not load in your environment, the video is available directly:

Chapters

Chapter boundaries are taken from the original module page. If the embedded player is unavailable, the buttons do nothing; use the direct links above instead.

What happens on screen (text description)

The lecture is a filmed classroom session in which the visual demonstrations carry information that no transcript can convey. This section describes what viewers see, chapter by chapter, and links to the HTML slide deck, which reproduces the on-screen content as text with long descriptions. This is a text alternative, not a recorded audio description.

  1. Goals of the Course (0:27–4:53). The lecturer at the chalkboard; no demo visuals.
  2. Vision, Memory, Attention (4:53–20:09). Projected slides with classic visual illusions: the Müller-Lyer lines, the Ebbinghaus circles, Shepard’s “Terror Subterra” corridor, Adelson’s checker-shadow, and a series of lightness illusions. Then an in-class experiment: two groups receive different verbal labels (“trained seal act” vs. “costume ball”) for the same ambiguous sketch, see it briefly, and answer ten yes/no memory questions — showing how suggestion shaped what was remembered. A selective-attention video (people passing a basketball) is played; most viewers miss a person in a gorilla suit. See slides 8–14 and 16–23.
  3. Hearing, Learning, Memory (20:09–29:58). The McGurk effect: a video plays the syllable “BA” dubbed onto lips saying “GA”; nearly everyone hears “DA.” See slides 25–26.
  4. The Power and Peril of Automaticity (29:58–37:09). Reading demonstrations (“ONE WAY NOT DO ENTER,” “PARIS IN THE THE SPRING”), a count-the-F’s sentence, and the Stroop task with color-word sets — all shown as projected slides. See slides 35–41.
  5. How We Feel vs. How We Act (37:09–49:30). Affective forecasting (tenure, lottery, accident examples), then two bar charts from Kawakami et al. (Science, 2009) comparing predicted vs. actual responses to racist comments. The chart data are available as tables: distress chart data and partner-choice chart data. See slides 43–51.

Captions status

Caption text
From MIT OpenCourseWare’s official transcript for this lecture (human-made, publisher-provided). Not machine transcription.
Cue timings
The publisher transcript contains no timings. Cue boundaries were aligned automatically against the word-timing skeleton of YouTube’s automatic captions for the same video, then reviewed; the build report (captions-build-report.json) records the method and statistics.
Accuracy vs. the audio
Not verified. A machine speech-to-text check was considered and dropped, because it would need an AI speech model (see evaluation/METHODS). A human spot-check protocol is provided in evaluation/METHODS but has not been run. This page does not claim the captions are verified accurate.
Audio description
Not recorded. The visual-only information is provided as the text description above and in the slide deck. Recorded audio description is listed as future work.

What the original module offered

In the audited original, this session page’s video lived in a JavaScript popup with a Flash-era player (“Flash and JavaScript are required for this feature”), no captions, no transcript, and only two download links per video — all identically named, all pointing to the same full-lecture file. See the issue log (I-01 to I-09) in the case study evidence.