experimentin pt 3 ;)

Hey everyone! So this is the blog I mentioned in the previous post about how I was going to demonstrate an experiment over memory. Now I'll basically give y'all a detailed write up of how my experiment went. :)

So my experiment was dealing with how people can create false memories even in short amounts of time. I took my friend Paige and asked her to listen to me as I read a list of words aloud to her. I told her to remember as much as she could so that once I was done, she could write down the ones that she did actually remember. I read the following words to her;

• thread
• pin
• eye
• injection
• syringe
• sewing
• sharp
• point
• hurt 
• knitting
• prick
• thimble
• haystack 
• pain

Immediately after I read these to her, Paige wrote down the following words

• thimble
• haystack
• pin
• eye
• sharp
• needle

I found it quite interesting by the words that she remembered. If y'all noticed, Paige wrote down the word "needle" which was not on the list. Kinda funny right? She formed what I mentioned before, a false memory. Her brain had words thrown at it and a general similarity of words could definitely by "needle".

I then asked her to do the same exact thing except this time with a long list of words;

• bed
• drowse
• awake
• nurse
• tired
• sick
• dream
• lawyer
• wake
• medicine
• snooze
• health
• snore
• hospital 
• rest
• dentist
• blanket
• physician 
• doze
• patient
• stethoscope
• slumber
• peace
• yawn
• surgeon 

Now after I read these words, Paige wrote down the following;

• drowse
• bed
• awake
• snooze
• wake
• clinic
• hospital 
• nurse
• stethoscope 

After her saying these words, I began to realize that it was harder for her to recall more words the longer she waited to write them down. Though I did realize that she remembered the word "stethoscope", which is very noticeable since it's the longest word in the list. 

I then proceeded to ask Paige if she had written down the word "aardvark" and she definitely looked at me like what the heck Courtney. Then I asked her if she wrote down either of the words "doctor" or "sleep" to see if she again formed a false memory. This time she didn't which I think is partly because there was twice the amount of words in the second list than the first list. 

Now we looked to see if she had written down either of the following words,

• pain (last item)
• thread (first item)
• sharp (middle item)
• point (middle item)

Paige remembered the word "sharp". This right here demonstrates the serial position effect, which is basically just being able to recall wither the first and last word or the middle words of a list.

Overall, Paige definitely found this task to be challenging because when you listen to a list, you try and start to remember but then you feel as though you get messed up trying to remember as they keep telling you words. I also did attempt this task and found it a lot more challenging than it seemed. 

xoxo, court ;)

memory :)

Hey guys! So I'm comin at ya early for next week because I'll be in the middle of the ocean and actually have something due during spring break.... :) So this is over memory and how the brain processes the two different types. So basically memory is our ability of encode, retain, recall, and store information and past experiences in the human brain (The Human Memory). Now like I said before, there are two different types of memories, explicit and implicit but with three different stages, short term, long term, and sensory.

Explicit memory refers to the knowledge or experiences that can be remembered and with this type comes with two types within explicit. There is episodic which is firsthand experiences we have had and there's semantic which is our knowledge of facts and concepts about the world. Now you're probably at this point like what the heck does that mean. So an example of both would be your high school graduation day or maybe your big 18th birthday would be a prime example of episodic and then simply knowing that 2 plus 2 is 4 or that the library has books within it. 

Implicit memory refers to the influence of experience on behavior, even if the individual is not aware of those influences and of course there are three different types of implicit memory, procedural, classical conditioning effects, and priming. Procedural memory is based on our often unexplainable knowledge of how to do things. For example, when we walk around, eat, or play video games, that's an example of procedural memory because it allows us to perform complex tasks even if we can't explain to others how we are doing it. There's no way to really teach someone how to walk other than just learning to actually do it. The second type I listed was classical conditioning which was what my last blog was over. It is demonstrated when a conditioned stimulus begins to create the same response as the unconditioned stimulus did before learning. Finally the last one listed is priming which is changes in behavior as a result of experiences that have happened frequently or recently. So an example of priming would be knowing the concept of kindness by presenting people with words that correlate with that and then people who are primed with the concept tend to act more kind. I'm not sure if that made sense to y'all, but feel free to look up some more on that ;)

Now like I said in the beginning, there are different stages of memory: sensory, short-term, and long-term memory. Basically when developing a memory it goes through these stages, but not always do all the things you retain make it through all three stages. 

Sensory memory is the brief storage and it only last for a very, very short period of time before it is passed on for more processing if it's not already forgotten. Most of the time, the information that goes into sensory memory is forgotten, but when we actually sit here and pay attention to some of the information and really try to remember it, it passes into short-term memory (STM). STM is the place where small amounts of information can be temporarily kept longer than sensory memory but not any longer than a minute. So a common an example that most people would think of when thinking about short-term memory would be Dory from Finding Nemo. She suffers from short-term memory loss as most of y'all probably know...lol :) Now last but not least, there's long-term memory. In order for this to be retained into memories, we have to want to remember by encoding and storing and then retrieving. 

So with this blog this week there's an experimental task and it's over the effects of creating a false memory. This blog I'll kind of give you a background of what exactly that means before my next post with the experiment. Many different psychologists have defined false memory so there isn't a very distinct definition, though there was one that I found pretty accurate in my opinion. M.K. Johnson said, "A false memory is a mental experience that is mistakenly taken to be a veridical representation of an event from one's personal past. Memories can be false in relatively minor ways and in major ways that have profound implications for oneself and others." So you're probably wondering what the heck causes anyone to falsify a memory. Factors that can falsify memories can include misinformation and misattribution of the original source of the information. Also, existing knowledge  and other memories can interfere with the formation of a new memory, causing the recollection of an event to be mistaken of entirely false (VeryWellMind). In my experiment, I tested the memory of my friend Paige to see if she would falsify anything, but y'all will see those results in my next blog!

Well that's just about all I got on the mems so stay tuned for my experimental blog coming up ;)


xoxo, court :)








Sources ;)

Mastin, Luke. “What Is Memory.” What Is Memory? - The Human Memory, Human-Memory.net, 2010, www.human-memory.net/intro_what.html.

Cherry, Kendra, and Steven Gans. “How Your Brain Can Create False Memories.” Verywell Mind, 18 May 2017, www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-false-memory-2795193.

learnin ;)

Hey y'all! So this week is all about learning and how our behavior is affected. First off, learning is the process by which life experience causes change in the behavior or thinking of an organism (Chapter 6). There are lots of different ways that researchers have studied the behavior of learning and how it takes a role on the brain. 

Ivan Pavlov focused on classical conditioning, a form of learning in which animals or people make a connection between two stimuli that have occurred together such that one predicts the other. So for example, Pavlov studied the anticipatory salivation in dogs. He first noticed the neutral stimulus which causes no response at all. He used a bell which demonstrated a neutral stimuli and it didn't create salvation from the dog. The next thing he found was the unconditioned stimulus which causes a response automatically without having to learn. In this instance, food is a natural biological reflex for salivation in dogs. The dog's salvation is called an unconditioned response because it happens naturally. Pavlov then paired these two conditions together and associated the bell with food to see if the dog would begin to salivate and it did. This turns the bell into a conditioned stimulus which now has a response of a conditioned response because this is acquired through learning. Now the dog will salivate to the ring of the bell because it learned from the conditioning that food is directly related to the ring.

So something that really stuck out to me in this chapter would have to be the fact that classical conditioning can be used in treatment for physical disorders. The example in this chapter was individuals with serious allergies took an effective allergy drug and then quickly drank an unusual drink. So after drinking the drink several times with the allergy drug, it eventually coincided together. The doctor then just made the patients drink the unusual drink on its own and they directly related it back to their symptoms of their allergies. Now after the drink being a neutral stimulus, it was now a medical effect in these patients because of its learned association with the drug that had the effect. I think that this is important because when you directly correlated something with another it can either give you a bad memory or good memory. 

A real world example that I have run across would actually be from a couple months ago. During our little ice break, my friends and I went up to San Antonio and on the drive back we passed Comanche and I really cringed and instantly was making sure I was going the speed limit. Now one weekend, my best friend Kourtney and I went up to College Station to visit her sister and whatnot. Well on the drive back I got a speeding ticket in Comanche. Therefore, 
unconditioned stimulus: getting a speeding ticket
conditioned stimulus: seeing the Comanche sign
unconditioned response: cringing and negative feelings
conditioned response: going the speed limit and be cautious

Well thats all I got on learning and how a certain study came about. I hope y'all had fun or somethin like that while reading this ;)




xoxo, court :)








Sources :)

Chapter 6 - Psychology Book :)