Internal Assesment:Loftus and Palmer

In this study Loftus and Palmer are attempting to demonstrate that memory is not a factual recording of an event and that memories can become distorted by other information which occurs after the event.

Many of the early studies of memory (e.g. Bartlett 1932) demonstrated how memories are not accurate records of our experiences. It seems that we try to fit past events into our existing representations of the world, making the memory more coherent or make more sense for us.

Much research has documented how difficult it is for people to estimate numerical details such as time, speed and distance. Judgement of speed is especially difficult, with witnesses of traffic accidents varying in their estimations as to how fast a vehicle was actually travelling.

Elizabeth Loftus is a leading figure in the field of eyewitness testimony research. She has demonstrated through the use of leading questions how it is possible to distort a person’s memory of an event.

The study actually consists of two laboratory experiments. They are both examples of an independent measures design. The independent variable in both of the experiments is the verb used. The dependent variable in the first experiment is the participant’s speed estimate and the dependent variable in the second experiment is whether the participant believed they saw glass.

Loftus and Palmer argue that two kinds of information go into a person's memory of a complex event. The first is the information obtained from perceiving the event, and the second is the other information supplied to us after the event. Over time, information from these two sources may be integrated in such a way that we are unable to tell from which source some specific detail is recalled. All we have is one 'memory'. This argument is called the reconstructive hypothesis.

http://www.holah.co.uk/study/loftus/

Placebo Effect

The placebo effect is like a simulated medical improvement in health that does not attribute to any real surgery or medication. This means that it is a lie or a sham, this is something that doctor made to patients being just how the consumer's belief that it will work. H. K. Beecher's discovered the placebo effect. He made a study and discovered that the 35% of approximately 1,082 patients. The research was effective because the studied patients revealed that most of the patient that had the conditions like pain, depression, heart ailments were one of the most successfull

one's to determine. In Beecher's studies they analyzed that people that drank pill containing no active ingredients improved their own situation just by thinking that the pills were doing something to there body.

But these type of studies had problems, Kiene and Kienle determined that no evidence of the placebo effect was cited by him, this was ment to say that the placebo effect is just some false impressions, and that the patients were clinically

improved do to Spontaneous improvement, etc. Based in what I have learned on placebo effect and the studies of H.K. Beecher, I learned that people can be just psychological cured by just thinking that they are going to be alright. In this studies we could see that people tend to improve their own health by false testimonies or pills that have no active ingredients. I think that the placebo effect is a effective type of curing the health of people by not using any type of medications. This means that this test was all true, and that people by just thinking can improve their own medical treatment.

Gender and Cultural differences

The psychologists Agneta Herlitz and Jenny Rehnman were asking themselves is the gender influence the ability to remember things in everyday bases. With some experiments they made, it said that the women had a favoring side, and this is because of episodic memory, and a type of long term memory. In their investigations it said that women were better in verbal episodic memory, and man only remembered the symbols, or nonlinguistic information. In conclusion and observation of their experiment they have discovered that the women are better looking for eye expression, and they form of recognizing things. Many other psychologist also say that people vary in difference according to memory, but they said that the cultural differences also vary. They had made many investigation asking people what are the first memory they have made, and the cultural differences can be seen. They said that people from the United States would have a much earlier memory, than the asian culture.

Alzheimer's Disease

This picture is a comic that represents an old man with Alzheimer's disease.

In this picture you can see the brain of a person, and where does the Alzheimer's disease affects.

This picture you can see the difference between a normal brain, and a old person brain with Alzheimer's disease

The alzheimer's disease is some type of of disorder that commonly affect the old peole. This disease affect people in a daily life operations.Usually the alzheimer disease starts at aproximately at the age of 60, as you get older this disease affect more parts of the brain then when it started. I have learned that many of the people that get this disease are old people, but the people that live with them like the family are also affected in a big way. Unfortunately I learned that people who have this disease don't have any cure to stop this disease from making an expansion. Some of the symptoms that come at the bigging of this disease is the difficulty to remember new thing. His language starts to change, because of the loss of words that come up to his brain. When the disease is more andvanced the person start losing the capacity of remembering family, and don't recognize them at all. As I learned more about this disease, I kept understanding that this disease is something in your brain that over time when you are getting older, and you get this disease one of the most fundamental things that you do is the confusion between things. When old people has this disease, they can no longer be a normal person, because they can't do the same things as they do before like for example drive. For an old man with Alzheimer's disease cannot drive because is to much danger for him, and the people that is around. People with this disease keep forgetting things they knew in the past, or they have just learned.

Articles

Some Short-term Memories Die Suddenly , No Fading

Weiwei Zhang, a postdoctoral scholar, and Steve Luck, a professor of psychology,conducted a pair of tests, both of which could separately measure two things: the accuracy of a short-term memory and the probability that the memory still existed. The first test was to show them 3 squares with colors, flashing for one tenth of a second. Then after 10 seconds they are shown a spectrum of colors with the 3 colors that appeared before, only that now they are colorless and one of them is highlighted. They ask you to select a color in the spectrum that has a highlighted square's original color. The closer they click to the color, the more accurate. The second test is similar , its difference is that instead of colors there shapes.They concluded , that either they had memory or not regardless to the closeness of the choosed colors , and the probabilty that the memories lie on 4 to 10 seconds , and the memories didnt fade away slowly . This can be important in real life because it would provide away to help us avoid the confusion that might occur if we tried to make decisions on the basis of weak, inaccurate memories.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090429091806.htm

New Understanding of How We Remember Traumatic Events

Neuroscientists and researchers at the University of Queensland discovered a theory that explains why it is so hard for us to forget traumatic events.The experiment consisted of many studies, lead by the Queensland Brain Institute.Dr. Louise Faber and some of her collages have demonstrated that people do not want to remember traumatic events with such detail so they have said that the formation of the emotional memories occur in the presence of a hormone that is known as the stress hormone. Stress hormones rise in the body during any neuroendocrine reaction such as surgery and they remain high to as long as 72 hours after which all these hormones return back to their normal level, the last being cortisol. It makes your heart beat faster.This treatment can now be used for people with anxiety disorders and post traumatic stress disorder.In real life we can use this experiment like to know how the long term memory of traumatic events works, and like if we have an traumatic accident we know what to do.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081028103111.htm

The Language Of Emotion: Ad Slogans In Native Tongues Connect To Consumers' Emotions

Authors Stefano Puntoni, Bart de Langhe, and Stijn van Osselaer were the ones that conducted this experiment . They tested different slogans with participants and found differences in how the messages were perceived. "Our findings show that, in general, messages expressed in consumers' native languages tend to be perceived as more emotional than messages expressed in their second language," the researchers write.The authors believe this effect is not due to differences in languages or participants' difficulty in understanding ad copy written in foreign languages.This research can apply to real life because and example is my fiend she cant express her self when she is angry in english she has to saw everything in spanish.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081215111433.htm

How does memory work?

1)Explain the concept of sensory memory?
The concept of sensory memory means that you have the ability to retain a brief image of a sensory stimulus, by this is when you see an object and then it disappear, you may still have a image of the object.

2)Give an example of sensory memory?
One example of this is for example you see a Ferrari, and in a moment the car goes away, you will still have the image of that Ferrari that you saw.

3)What is the capacity of our sensory memory?
The capacity of the sensory memory can get a lot of things at a time, but it can go fairly quickly from the memory. They are two types the Iconic Memory that can go in less then 1 second, and the Echoic memory that can go in less than 4 seconds.

4) Describe the concept of short-term memory?
The concept of short term memory is when your brain is able to hold a small amount of info in your memory that can be used in a short period of time. This means that short-term memory is used in daily bases, this is when you store infromation in your memory of a simple view, and it has the capacity and can decay over a short period of time

5)What is the "magic number" as it relates to short-term memory and who conducted the experiment which established this measurement?
The magic number is the capacity to us to remeber, and this is up to 7, plus or minus 2. This was conducted in 1956 by a psychologist named George A. Miller.

6) What is chunking?
The term "chunking"means getting pieces of information to make a better use of the short term memory. This is by recoding the pieces of info to make a better image of the memory recorded. This means that memory organizes items into manegable units.

7)What has been determined to be the ideal size of "chunks" for both letters and numbers?
It has been determined to be ideal size of chunk in small pieces of memory. By this it means that 3 is the ideal number of chunking in a number or letter.

8)Which mode of encoding does short-term memory mostly rely on, acoustic or visual?
Acoustic encoding

9)Explain the duration and capacity of long-term memory
The capacity of the long term memory is unlimited because its impossible to calculate whats the limit for us to store memories . The duration is meant to be for a lifetime , they never leave your brain once they entered the long term memory.

10)Explain in detail the Atkinson-Shiffrin Model of memory.
This is a psychological model proposed in 1968 by Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin as a proposal for the structure of memory.This structure has three stages.

Sensory Memory: The information enters the human information processing system via a variety of channels associated with the different senses. Perceptual systems operate on this information to create perceptions.

Short Term Memory:Information that is attended to arrives in another temporary store called short-term or working memory. The more recent term "working memory" is intended to convey the idea that information here is available for further processing.

Long term memory: Long-term memory is the relatively permanent memory store in which you hold information even when you are no longer attending to it. Information held in LTM is not represented as patterns of neural activity.

11)Identify three criticisms or limitations of the Atkinson-Shiffrin Model of memory.
The Atkinson - Shiffrin model is much too linear, and does not accommodate for the subdivisions of STM and LTM memory stores . In the case of sensory memory, the model does not acknowledge the asynchronous of the neural activity.
This model somehow deals with the forms of memory in the model, but it does not take into account which information is presented can then be seen as some form of a power check that could not be disrupted,

12)Explain the Levels of Processing Model of memory.
This theory rejects the idea of the dual store of memory . It propose that the information can be process in a lo t of ways .

13)What is maintenance rehearsal - give an example.
Is the process of repeatedly verbalizing or thinking about a piece of information. An example is like when you need the number of some place and they give it to you so you repeat it out loud again and again to remember that number .

14)What is elaborative rehearsal - give an example.
Is relating new material to material that is already familiar so it can be more easy to remember. An example might be relating a string of numbers to a phone number to memorize it more easy.

15)Who developed the Levels of Processing Model and the concepts of maintenance and elaborative rehearsal?
Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart developed it

Memory

In this video you can see a series of event, that lead you up to the knowledge, of what it is called the memory. The memory is something important that every person needs to have a normal life. The memory is not only used to remember date of important events, names of people. Memory is used to remember things that you have seen or heard, even things that you don't remember you have seen. All this events are recorded in you brain. There are different type of memory that your brain contains like: explicit memory, feature memory, autobiographical memory. In this video you learn how people have seen things and had put it into their memory. When you are a small children, your memory is not very good, but still you can remember now some drastic events or important events that may have occur during your first years. There are many things that can change the memory path, this can be by medical issues. Some psychological doctors give to their patient pills that can make their memory change. Some people after certain age they loose the sense of memory, this normally occurs to the old people. People after the age of 60-70 start losing their sense of memory.

The Stroop Effect

The stroop effect is originated by psychologist named John Ridley Stroop. He had an interest for conflicting processes. This was the study of interference of serial verbal reactions. J.R. Stroop made two important experiments which changed how people looked at attention and perception. The idea came to J.R. Stroop after a work done by J.M. Catell in 1885. They said that the color of letter took longer to read than the corresponding word. J.R. Stroop was looking for the effect of each dimensions by trying to name another dimension. The first important experiment made from J.R. Stroop was that he looked for people that read the written colors of the words independently with the same color they are reading. The readers were asked to say the color of the letter. This was the first test that he made. Then he made the second experiment, the purpose for this experiment was that if the word said "yellow", and the word was in red, the people tested would normally have read "red" instead of "yellow". This was all timed, J.R. Stroop noticed that people reading the word with the same color is faster than reading the word with a different color. This showed that people read and see at the same time to make it much faster. Stroop also noticed that people that are reading the word with different color takes more time, because they have to think more. They said that people before looking throught the word or color, they can already predict what is the name, it said that they don't even finish reading the word before they say it.

Picture from:

http://www.google.hn/imgres?imgurl=http://rlv.zcache.com/the_stroop_test_tee_monsieur_tshirt-p235993670112994599tdf9_210.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.zazzle.co.uk/stroop%2Bgifts&usg=__

The myth of multitasking

1. Why is multitasking considered by many psychologists to be a myth?
Many psychologist considered multitasking a myth, because it is probably impossible to make more than 1 thing at a time. It is impossible to focus your attention in different things. Many people think that they are really doing multitasking, but what the psychologists have determined is that people don't really multitask, but what they really do is jump from one task to another.

2. To what does the term "response selection bottleneck" refer?
The term "response selection bottleneck" refers when the brain is forced to respond to several stimuli at once, in a result task-switching leads to time lost as the brain determines which task to perform. In other words the brain loses time switching from task to task, trying to do all the task at once.

3. David Meyer has found that multitasking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline. Why is this important?
The psychologist David Meyer said that people can learn to task switch if they keep practicing, he also said that people can be much faster in making several task at a time. This is important because he says that when people are doing several task at a time produces stress hormones, and adrenaline, and this can cause long-term health problems, and the loss of short-term memory.

4. Explain what Russell Podrack found regarding multitasking.
Russell Podrack discovered that multitasking adversely affects how you learn. He said that even if you learn while multitasking, the learning is not to good, and more specialized. His experiments says that people use different areas of the brain for learning, and storing new information when they are distracted.

5. What does the author conclude could happen to our culture as a result of increased multitasking?
That multitasking can help but really you are not learining nothing. The author says that attention rationed out among many competing tasks, their culture may gain in information, but it will surely weaken in wisdom.

Bambuti Pygmies

The bambuti tribe are from a region in Africa called Congo. There form of speaking comes from a Nilo Saharan phylum, but they have a lot of languages that they all understand. The bambuti tribe is one of the oldest from the region of Africa. The bambuti tribe is recognized for the small body they have. They are approximately 30,000 little people. The bambuti live in a community with groups, they have a house for every family unit. They ar every little people, and no scientist know why do their body are so small. This little people are also called hunter-gatherers, which means that they are always hunting to survive. They know many things, and they are specialized in forest. The bambuti didn't have any form of goverment. They also don't have any type of religios form, they sometimes said that the forest was their god, because it gave things to them. Collin Turnbull was a famous person from his time. He investigated the bambuti tribe, and their form of knowledge. What Collin Turnbull did was that he observed how the pygmies din't have the knowledge of what they see. He made an experiment with a bambuti pygmie, his experiment consisted on looking far away objects, the little pygmy thought that it was an ant, but really it was just a bull. When Collin Turnbull saw that this little pygmy thought that he thought it was an ant, he started to see that they didn't have the knowledge enought to know that far away object look smaller than what they really are. This study is important for the study of perception because, if you look a thing far away, is not the same as looking it closer, this was the experiment that Turnbull made with the bambuti tribe. The perception from the little people was not the same as the perception from the normal modern person.

Colin Turnbull

Colin Turnbull was an enlgish man, born in London. His family was an upper class, with a lot of riches. He studied in the University of Oxford in England. He lived with his gay partner Joe Towles. They worked together for thirty year working in the resaerch from the african tribes. Later on Joe Towles died from aids. Turnbull studied philosophy, politics and music. After the world war 2 he studied anthropology, specialized in the African field. Turnbull got a big interest in the african tribes, after making a trip by motorcycle in East Africa, there was we he first saw the pygmies tribes. He had made many trips to africa with a total of 6 trips. After his first apperance to africa he retured again but this time working for Royal Anthropological Institute. He had been working for a lot of Universities, and museum. Turnbull had a lot of poscicion over the years becoming Assistant Curator of African Ethnology in the American Museum. He had also worked in Canada as a geologist in gold mine. He had written a lot of scripts for radio, and television. He also made documentary in many canadian television about his work with the pygmies tribes.Turnbull las poscition was in the George Washington University, were he taught writing, fieldwork, farming, and making music. He left the University 10 years after he died in 1994.

What factors influence our perception

What are the external factors that influence our perception?
The external factors that influence our perception can be the people that are around us, and the enviroment in which we are located. This is one of the most common external factors that can change how you view things. The enviroment can influence a lot because for example if you are living in a very high enviroment, that you have all the things that you need, it is diffrent from the perception that a person that doesn't have nothing, and is doing the possible to get things. The people that are around us can influence a lot because, they may persuate you to do thing that you don't want to do. Like for example a person that likes to drink alcohol, and tries to persuate a person that hates it to drink it, it might change the perception by the person that doesn't like it.

What are the internal factors that influence our perception?
The internal factors that can influence our perception are the dreams, the amount of intelligence that each person have. Nobody have the same type of thinking, and that is why each people internally can have different thinking. The influence from the dreams change the perception because, if you have it in your brain, and you think every time that same thing, you start to see the difference. And the amount of intelligence can also influence your perception because if you are not as intelligence as other people it is logical that you don't like the same things. Like for example a person that has a lot of knowledge, and that they like math has a very different type of perception from a person that is not good at all from math.

5 things I feel positively:

-Soccer: I like it because I have passion for this sport.

-Eat food: I like to eat food, and it also helps me relax

-Hear music: I like because I can choose the music for the mood that I am.

-Sleep: I like to sleep because it helps me get energy, and it also helps me to relax.

-Watch TV: this is like a hobby, when I am not doing nothing I normally watch TV.

5 things I feel negatively:

-Foul: I don't like when people hit me or let me fall while I am playing.

-People starring: I don't like when people stare to me.

-Playing roughtly: I don't like when people play very rought while playing soccer.

-Eat to much: I hate when I eat more than I need, and then my stomach hearts a lot.

-People that don't know how to drive: I hate people that are bad to drive, and that they don't know when to respect the signs.

Is perception reality?

Every people in the world have a different type of reality. So that means that people have different type of PERCEPTION in reality. The perception in reality is what makes a person unique. Many people have many ideas of their own, and that is why they have different point of view for the same event. One example that makes this real is like a person loves soccer, see soccer, play soccer, think every time about soccer, but another person maybe hates soccer because they say that it is rought, and bad. This is why the perception of the first person that lives soccer is not the same as the one who hates soccer. This means that yes! perception is reality in many type of way. People have different type of thinking, and they also have different type of knowlege. Another example is that a person may have the perception of loving math, but they are bad in it, As the different in a person who is really good in math, but they hated it. As you can see they have really different type of perception no matter if they are good or bad in it. Different think in many ways some can have the same idea but different tastes.

Picture from:
http://haacked.com/archive/2007/10/05/perception-vs-reality-regarding-the-.net-framework-source-code.aspx

Why I study psychology?

I am studying psychology because I like psychology, and the things that I learned last year was very interesting. Psychology is important because it studies the human brain, and the things that occur in it. Psychology is the study of the functions that the human brain gives, and how it reacts. Psychology may help me because it is very helpfull for me to understand what the human brain is capable to do, and it functions that it may give.