Forgetfulness

I feel as though my memory is not up to par but I learned that most information is forgotten within the first day of learning it. There are five key reasons why we as humans forget information. We could have encoding failure where our short-term memory does not encode information into long-term memory. Our memory can decay over time and our memories can degrade. We could have retrieval failure where our long-term memories are inaccessible. This is called the tip of the tongue phenomenon. (i.e. seeing someone's face but forgetting their name but you have a feeling that you know it) There is aslo a theory about motivated forgetting. We as people are motivated to forget painful, threatening, or embarassing memories. In class my group did a project to sense which is remembered more; a slideshow with pictures, or tangible objects one could feel. Our conclusion was that kids were close to half-and-half for each but more students remembered the objects they could feel. Each alternated between getting the movie first or the tangible objects first. This experiment could also be used to test proactive interference (old information interfering with new information) and retroactive interference (new innformation interfering with old information). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7isjhz1GpHg is a video of four ap psych students rapping about memory. Everyone learns and remembers in different ways and if song is a way that works for you, here you go!

Memory

Memory is something that everyone wants to maintain throughout their lifetime. Growing up paretns like to play the game "Memory" with their children to enhance memory skills young. I was never very good at this game though I felt as if I tried just as hard as other kids to remember where the matches were. This week in psych I think we explained why. I learned that memory can be affected by different factors and that people have short-term and long-term memory. I learned that some memories are automatic while others are take effort. Reading for understanding takes effort as does remembering where a handful of cards in a Memory game are. I learned that immediate,  brief, recordings are stored in sensory memory which is a temporary state. We then process information into a short-term memory where we encode through rehearsal. i.e. finding a memory card twice in the same spot after a turn has passed. Information goes into our long-term memory by experiences and connections that can be processed later. However, stages can be modified. Working memory is a second stage modification that picks-and-chooses what attention is drawn to in incoming stimuli and processes what it senses. I believe my problem as a child occured between my sensory memory and my working memory. According to http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep05/workout.aspx "In fact, working memory could be the basis for general intelligence and reasoning: Those who can hold many items in their mind may be well equipped to consider different angles of a complex problem simultaneously." I do not think I had a very good working memory because I found myself getting distracted from the game and my "pick-n-choose" method did not pick up the right information and therefore my memory of where i had chosen cards and what cards I chose did not implant itself in my mind.

Classical Conditioning

Ivan Pavlov was famous for hs classical conditioning experiements with learning and behaviorism. He noticed that when a dog was given food, the dog would salivate. To test learning ability, Pavlov paired feeding a dog wih a sound tone. After some time, the dog started salivating when he heard the sound tone. Pavlov's experiment lead him to create variables relating to the stimuli and responses he observed.  The natural reaction for the dog when given food was to salivate. Pavlov identifed this and called the response an unconditioned response (UR). The food given was the stimulus that triggered the salivating response so the food was called the unconditioned stimulus (US). Once the dog learned that a sound tone triggered food, the dog began salivating once the noise was heard. The learned response to the noise was called a conditioned response (CR). The tone was the learned and controlled stimulus that triggered a response and was called the conditioned stimulus (CS). Through Pavlov's work, many physchologists have realized that a process such as learning can be studied objectively. This site compares classical conditioning with operant conditioning with given examples. Operant conditioning is learning through consequences. One associates their own actions with positive and negative consequences, striving to recieve positive consequences. Try to see if you can distinguish between the two types of learning in the site listed below.


http://www.utexas.edu/courses/svinicki/ald320/CCOC.html