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

AP PSA Announcement

My favorite PSA was done by Tyler, Corry and Nick. I enjoyed their video because besides being entertaining, it was informative and incorporated outside sources such as a movie clip to display their information. The clip clearly explained programs to enhance the years during adolescence and old age. They were charismatic and traveled to different places around Ashwaubenon to show real places that provide learning programs to grow. I more clearly understood the concrete opperational stage after watching thier PSA. I could understand their voices in the video and they kept their information light and to the point.

Challenging Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

Jean Piaget is known for his psychological work with cognitive development throughout the years of a person's life. Today in class Mrs. VanStraten (Mrs. Wollersheim's mother, I apologize for the spelling) came to class and gave us a kindergarden lesson with shapes. We used Piaget's concepts of schemas, assimilaion, and accomodation to sort and find similarities between various sizes and colors of shapes. We knew that round shapes were considered circles. (schema) We then went on to assimilate that squares can still be squares dispite size differences and further accomodated that squares and rectangles both share four sides, but rectangles have two longer sides than squares do thus showing the difference between shapes.

The lesson was very interesting because I realized the way that Mrs. Van Straten taught us shapes must have been very similar to the way I learned to differenciate a circle from a square. To test Piaget's stages of cognitive development I put his theories to the test on the two children I baby-sit. Maxx is a five-year-old pre-kindergarden student and Maddy is an eight-year-old in second grade. According to Piaget, Maxx would fall into the preoperational stage while Maddy would be in the concrete opperational stage. To test Piaget's theories I asked Maxx and Maddy at different times to identify the shapes and colors of the rectangles, squares, triangles and circles. Maxx knew the difference between the colors and shapes but did not take much more interest in them. When Maddy came home from school I asked her to identify the shapes as well and she knew them all easily. When I asked the kids to pick up the shapes, Maxx started picking up all of the shapes with no particular order or method while Maddy sorted each of the shapes by shape, size, and color. I found that Maddy took a logical approach in sorting the shapes in a sequence that made sense to her while Maxx did not come up with a system to put the shapes together. I believe that Piaget's development stages conicide with the ages of each developmental group. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw33CBsEmR4&feature=related explains Piaget's theories by going through each cognitive stage. Maxx's preoperational stage portrays his lack of concrete logic and egocentrism while Maddy being in the concrete operational stage is able to understand chage and can think logically think through math proplems and sequences.

Ice Cube Addiction

       This week pretending to have a drug addiction (with ice cubes) was more difficult than I thought. Putting ice cubes in some drinks were more socially acceptable than others.( i.e. water versus tea) I believe this relates to social situations as well. People who have drug addictions tend to hang around other people with drug addictions because exposing your addiction isn't as socially unacceptable to people who also have the addiction. It was not only hard hiding the addiction, it was also hard keeping the addiction. Not being able to access ice from school made pre-planning necessary. I believe people with addictions also come to stress when their drugs are not on hand. I was able to lie to my parents when I recieved wierd looks for putting ice in my milk and tea. They noticed I was acting differently and my mom even yelled at me for taking a water bottle to school. (She didn't know it was filled with ice.) I have a cold and my mom attributed the germs to the water bottle I brought to school and told me that I shouldn't bring it again. My parents did not assume I was on drugs because I did not have obvious signs of an addiction. Ice cubes are relatively simple and do not cause nearly the amount of effects drugs can cause. I liked the experiment because it was interesting how people would hide their bracelets and how people shared and traded ice cubes like street drugs. Drugs can be categorized as depressants, stimulants, and hallucigens. I believe ice cubes would fall under the stimulant category if given one because they make drinks cold and coldness sends a wake-up call to the brain. True drug addictions can cause permanant brain damage as well as depression, anxiety, and death. After learning the effects of drugs on the brain, I believe that if I would have any addiction, ice cubes would be the best bet.

Neurotransmitters Treating Violence?

     This week I came to terms with the complex messinging system of the body: the nervous system. The nervous system is split between the peripheral nervous system and the central nervous system. (The peripheral divides down into sub-groups) but the main focus of this blog is to address neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are special chemical messages that travel accross the synapse to binding receptor sites to pass along messages to various body parts and the brain. There are many different types of neurotransmitters that affect different hormones and feelings ie. Serotonin. I stumbled accross the article http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/you-illuminated/201201/treating-violence-new-antidotes which talks about different drugs used to target neurotransmitters like GABA (an inhibitory neurotransmitter) to reduce the physical acts of violence on aggressive psyciatric patients.
   This article explains how drugs like Haldol and lithium have been around for a few decades and have been used to help lessen agressive patients but serious side effects such as loss in cognation have resulted. Now scientists are discovering which neurotransmitters to target with newly formed drugs to produce the same result in aggression, but provide a safer method to do it. We know that the neurotransmitter serotonin affects a person's mood and an undersupply can lead to depression and aggression. A medication called Zomig is used to lessen the effects of migranes. Zomig was also part of a study to see if it would be an acceptable drug to use in lessening feelings of aggression. By specifically targeting Serotonin 1B receptors, Zomig acts as an agonist and allows more Serotonin to be released causing positive feelings to arise. Zomig still needs clinical tests done to see any and all possible side effects but it can be a positive step forward in treating aggression. Psychology is universal and has many applications in medicine.