Psychology chap 7

Working memory is used for things you are currently doing storing temporary information. It helps you think of a specific task by remembering the details temporally. It is very limited though and will only remember a certain amount. The two forms of long term memory are implicit and explicit memory. Implicit is the memorizing facts for example its not very detailed. Explicit is recalling personal memories in great detail such as a traumatic event in your life where you recall everything about it. Long term memory is stored in a way that it can be retrieved based on its importance. So that certain situations are associated with it and are therefore easily recalled when needed. Most of the time we recall long term memories by things that we associate with it. For example when I see Idaho States football field I associate it with state football playoffs which brings back memories of our good plays there. These associations are due to memory cues. The medial temporal lobes are commonly identified as responsible for the declarative memory. There is evidence for this in the case of H. M. He had a brain surgery that removed part of the medial temporal lobes and afterwards was no longer able to remember new things he only had a short working memory. The long term memory was not seemingly effected he still had memories of before the surgery but was unable to create new memories. We have sensory memory that lasts only a fraction of a second that ties closely with our senses. It is so brief under most circumstances we are not even aware that it is working. The serial position effect is how the order we learn is related to how well we remember. We tend to have good memory at the beginning then not as well through the middle but then progress again toward the end. Distraction is one of the major forms of interference with memory. This was proved in class when after presented with the words we were asked to do a math problem then asked to recall again. Once we took are mind off the words it was had to think of them again. Two mnemonic devices I use to recall things are associating words with actions and picturing it with my mind. For example my dad taught me to screw and unscrew by telling me righty tighty lefty loosey. With football I try to picture the playbook in my mind and recall all the routes that way. There are two types of false memories where its episodic but we recall it wrong. The other is a type of amnesia where we recall something but do not remember where we got the information.

Psychology chap 5

Transduction is where sensory receptors produce neural impulses when they get physical or chemical impulses.It transmits this information to the brain through the connecting neurons. Difference threshold is the noticeable difference between stimuli and the minimal amount of change needed for a person to notice the difference. The difference threshold will increase if stimulus becomes more intense. Our receptors for sound are activated by changes in air pressure produce sound waves that travel into our ears. That makes our eardrums vibrate and transfers it to the occicles. From there it vibrates the oval window which causes vibrations that create waves in ear fluid. Finally it causes hairs to bend that cause firing of neurons on the basilar membrane. Psychological dimensions of color are through addictive and subtractive color the evidence of this is in the rods and cones in our brain's occipital cortex. The concept of opposite colors are based on the McCollough effect. For example if a ganglion receives input from an L cone it creates the idea red and green are opposite. A hit is when a signal is presented and a person notices. A miss would be presented but not detecting it. A false alarm is when there is no signal but a person thinks they detect one. There are biases in experiments with these tests. For example if you tell someone only ten percent will be signals they will likely report few signals even if there are many based on what they are expecting. Light becomes neural signals in the occipital cortex. It is goes through the rods, which respond to low light levels seeing black or white, to the cones, which respond to high light level producing color, and finally to the primary visual cortex. The evidence of our being able to perceive color is based on subtractive and additive color mixing. Subtractive is the physical process that happens within the stimulus. Additive is where lights of a different wave length are percieved by the eye. We have depth perseption because of biocular and monocular cues. Biocular is how our view are different based on the distance of the object from our eyes. Monocular is the things you can see with just one eye. According to our book brain imaging studies have confirmed that brain regions in the upper pathway activate by tasks that require disisions about spacial relationships between objects. The lower regions though are activated by tasks involving identifying.

Chapter 6

The first thing we learn about in this chapter is classical conditioning. This is when we associate to things together even though only one may be responsible for the response. This can be a reason a person is addicted to drugs. They may have first experienced it when at a party and had a good time. So they now associate having a good time with the drug and think they cant have a good time without the drug. We then learn about extinction, when the conditioned response is weakened by presenting the conditioned stimulus without the unconditioned.There is evidence though that extinction doesn't eliminate the association it shows it with the dogs saliva experiment in the book. When presented with the bell and no food after extinction it still had reactions to it. Thornedike studied learning in animals by creating a box for a cat that when a lever was pressed it opened a exit. After a few times the cat was able to escape immediately after being placed in the box. Positive reinforcement encourages someone to do something again since they received something good out of it last time. Negative reinforcement occurs when people associate things with a negative result discouraging that kind of behavior. Expectations are a big factor in classical conditioning. People relate things with each other such as practicing to get better this is an example of classical conditioning. There are four different schedules for reinforcement. The first is a fixed interval where the reward is presented each time the task is done. The next is fixed ratio this is when the reward is presented every few times the task is done. Then we have variable interval where the reward is at different rates or different times. Finally we have variable ratio where it is based on the number of times the task is completed. Cognitive maps are a mental representation of an environment. The lab rats put in a maze showed this when one group was positively reinforced each time and the other after ten times through. The rats with no reinforcement continued to make the same number of mistakes while the reinforced gradually improved. Once the rats found reinforcement at the end after ten trials they soon made very few errors proving that they had been learning the maze but just had no motivation.