IA Loftus and Palmer

This experiment was conducted by two scientists named Loftus and Palmer.  This to psychologists had an extreme uneasiness because they knew that memory was not an accurate way to store past events.  They knew that memory could be distorted with the most minimum event.  So the aim of this experiment was to investigate how information supplied after an event, influences a witness’ memory for that event.  This means that they wanted to investigate if something as simple as an adjective could distort somebody’s memory.  They did this by showing a group of 45 students of the University of Washington.  They showed the students seven video clips of car crashes.  These videos were the ones used to driver classes to show them what could happen in the roads.  The clips ranged between 5 and 30 seconds of duration.  After each clip the scientists asked to answer some question but certainly guess the speed of the cars involved in the collision.   They separated the group of 45 kids into 5 groups of 8 persons.  They made a different question to each group, but the basic question was “About how fast were the cars going when they ***** each other?  Each group had a different word; these words were smashed, collided, bumped, hit, and contacted.  The independent variable was the different words that described the incident, and the dependent variable was the estimated speed that the students gave.  The entire experiment lasted about an hour and a half to two hours.  The results of the experiment were these ones:

Verb               Mean Estimate of Speed (mph)

Smashed                     40.8

Collided                      39.3

Bumped                      38.1

Hit                              34.0

Contacted                   31.8

As the results show the experiment proved that in deed the change of one word can distort an eyewitness memory.  Loftus and Palmer gave two explanations for these results in the first experiment.

1.       “Firstly, they argue that the results could be due to a distortion in the memory of the participant.  The memory of how fast the cars were traveling could have been distorted by the verbal label which had been used to characterize the intensity of the crash.”

2.      “Secondly, they argue that the results could be due to response-bias factors, in which case the participant is not sure of the exact speed and therefore adjusts his or her estimate to fit in with the expectations of the questioner.” (Loftus and Palmer)

Sex Differences in Memory and Cultural Differnces in Memory

Gender Differences

The difference in memory of the genders does exist.  Women have an episodic memory more efficient than men.  They have advantages that beat one another, but both have specific strengths, different but at last are strengths.  Let’s say there is a man and a women trapped in a forest, the man would find his way back faster because he has a better short and long term memory.  Evolution has developed this, women have a better memory to remember women faces and this has been proved to be truth.  The truth is that women have better memory to remember faces.

Cultural Differences

When was your first memory? Probably when you were at the age of 4.  Many psychologists had a question; does the difference of cultures make a difference in your memory?  Well the truth is that it does have difference and it happens to be that the culture that has the best memory are the Maoris, they got a better memory that Caucasians and Koreans and many other cultures.

The Placebo Effect

The placebo effect for me is a way to completely full the subject.  In my opinion when you give a placebo to the subject, the brain has a reaction because it is fooled and it reacts as if it really received the medicine.  So in my opinion when you receive a real medicine your body does a big part, so this may mean that most medicines have no real effect.  This again shows the strength of the human body.  The problem with placebos is that with the minimum disagreement with the medicine and the placebo effect will not occur, because the brain will not be fooled and will not let go the chemicals that make the chemical reaction that will make you feel better.  I also think that if the medicine companies would put four or six placebos in the bottle of pills and nobody would notice it because you are expecting to receive the real medicine, and when you expect it, and do not even imagine that placebos could be in the bottle but it will always make you feel better if your body can handle the sickness that is tormenting you in that precise moment.  If they told me to take a pill and I feel that it did not work I would only think that the medicine did not had effect on me, but I would never guess that I took a placebo.  The placebo effect is real but, at the same time is an illusion because it occurs but it doesn’t occur.

Alzheimer

The Alzheimer´s disease is for me the worst sickness that any human can have, because it is carving you little by little until there is no part of your memory left.  With the video that we see in class I learned that it is not sure if you are going to have it or not but the truth is that when you have Alzheimer´s disease you lose your independence because you lose your ability to understand the world until you become an old baby.  The worst part of this disease is that there is no cure for it what makes it lethal in the worst way possible but with no suffering in a physic way but it kills you in the mental way.  I imagine that is horrible to remember something one day and when you notice that some chunks of your memory are missing and when you know that you have it and that that is the cause for your problems.  The poor old men and women lose their ability to reason until they do some stupid things and actions like placing a toy in the plate of the food and this is because of their ability to reason where things go.  I can imagine the suffering of a person that is very close to someone with that disease because they lose the person that they have known for a life time and is incredible.  The sons and daughters and wives and husbands go through too much suffering because it gets to a point where that person stops to be himself and that person gets lost in the memory of the disease!

Memory

In this video I learned a lot of things about memory. For example babies go developing year with year their thinking abilities.  The most amazing thing of memory is that our mind forgets things that are not as useful as others because if we remembered everything our brain would be charged with too much information.  This is also incredible because I learned that babies have a peculiar way of thinking different from the adult humans.  For example for the babies, you are older if you are bigger so if they see a man who is very big they are going to think that he is very old.  Diseases like Alzheimer’s are horrible in people and I would not wish that for any people that I know in this world.  It’s incredible how amazing the memory of the Homo sapiens is.  Also the man who has problems with his memory in the video, I feel so bad for him because I can notice that he would be happier if he could have his whole memory.  For the humans memory is the most useful tool that we can use in learning and millions of other tasks, our life are based on memory.

3 articles

part I

The experiment was conducted by the Dr. Faber.  This experiment talked about the amygdale and how it controlled the strong emotions in our life.  She said that the strong memories of events of strong feelings are quick snapshots.  She said that in moments of extreme emotion the brain let’s go a hormone that combined with the electric pathways makes a strong feeling.  This may go on real life because this can explain traumas and why they last for an entire life time.  This may help psychologists help people forget of the trauma.

Part II

Weiwei Zang and Steve Luck were the psychologists that conducted this experiment.  The experiment was based on two experiments.  The first one they showed a image with 3 squares with 3 different colors, and then 10 seconds after that they showed a spiral with the entire set of colors and then they showed the 3 squares but colorless and one highlighted and they asked the man or woman to click on the spiral where the color that approached the most to the color of the highlighted box.  They showed that “The memories are not like flashlights that get progressively weaker as the battery runs low,” Luck said. “They are more like a laptop computer that continues working at the same speed until it suddenly shuts down.”  This may relate to real life because it shows how short term memory works and that we can do some tasks with it.

Part III

In this experiment that was conducted by Keith Paine and Elizabeth Korrigan they wanted to show that memories could not been forget intentionally.  Well in their experiment they showed that and they argued that because of emotional feelings it was impossible for them to forget something intentionally.  This is important for people in common day life because if something bad happens to you cannot forget it intentionally because every time you remember it you are recalling it.

15 Questions

1. Sensory memory is the first level of memory, sensory memory retains the brief impression of a sensory stimulus after the stimulus itself has ended.
2. When you remember a needle that they put to you in the hospital! You remember the pain.
3. First, it is a high capacity form of memory registration of visual data. Second, information in the sensory memory is un-interpreted. Third, sensory memory is short; visual information, for example, fades away in less than a second. 
4. Short term memory are memories that you remember for a short period of time and after that you forget of them.
5.  18
6. A term referring to the process of taking individual units of information (chunks) and grouping them into larger units.
7. The magic number is between 4 and 2.
8. Acoustic
9. As long-term memory is subject to fading in the natural forgetting process, several recalls/retrievals of memory may be needed for long-term memories to last for years, dependent also on the depth of processing.
10. The Atkinson-Shiffrin model also known as the Multi-store model an advantage of the multi store model is that it can chunk information into smaller models of memory Multi-memory model and the Modal model is a psychological model proposed in 1968 by Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin as a proposal for the structure of memory. It proposed that human memory involves a sequence of three stages: Sensory Memory, Short Term Memory and Long Term Memory.11. 
12. Describes memory recall of stimuli as a function of the depth of mental processing. A stimulus’ mental processing depth is determined by connections with preexisting memory, time spent processing the stimulus, cognitive effort, and sensory input mode.
13. Maintenance rehearsal is a type of rehearsal proposed by Craik and Lockhart (1972) in their Levels of Processing Model of memory. Maintenance rehearsal involves rote repetition of an item's auditory representation. Lyrics of a song!
14. In contrast to maintenance rehearsal, which involves simple rote repetition, elaborative rehearsal involves deep sematic processing of a to-be-remembered item resulting in the production of durable memories. 
15.  

This experiment was first conducted by John Ridley Stroop.  He could see that people took longer to name the name of the color if it was inked with another color.  Psychologists all around the world were fascinated with this experiment and some famous scientists have cited this work over seven hundred times.  This experiment consists in placing the name of some colors and has somebody say the name of each color.  Then there is a second round in which the color of the name of the color has a color different than the color it is naming.  He noticed that people took longer to name in the second round. These results occur because your brain can identify faster the color and then it reads so your brain needs to cancel the first option and then choose the second choice.  This is showed with a longer time of reading the word. This is an experiment that shows that multitasking does not exist and that your brain can only take one thing at a time.  First, your brain takes the color of the font then, it reads and processes the words so you can understand them as words and then understand what color you need to say.

5 Questions

1. You cannot multitask, you think you can but what you are really doing is changing of task rapidly.



2. This term means that your brain can only focus on one thing so when you think you can think on both things at the same time, you are wrong.


3. This is important because the only thing it does is get you stressed and tired after you spend many time working and you have done almost nothing.


4. He found that people are less effective than if they just focused on one thing at once.


5. All the people would be dumber than before.

The pygmies

The Bambuti pygmies were some little black men who lived their entire life in a mountain with many trees. The sight in their tribe was very short! They could not see more than seven feet away from them. They had lived since many years there. They were not used to what we would call normal people. An investigator called Collin Turnbull went to investigate this tribe. He was amazed with the discoveries he made. He was a lot of time with the men of this tribe to try to understand them. One day he took one of the men that belong to this tribe to the outer world. The man that Turnbull took outside of their tribe was disliked with the fact that the place that they were now did not have trees. During the entire trip the man was disliked with this, after a few moments Turnbull watched some bulls far away. The man said that those were bugs, but Turnbull showed him that those were real bulls. At first the Bambuti pygmy thought that this was witchcraft. After a few moments of the incident Turnbull told this poor man that perspective exists and that when things are very far away they will look very small, but once you get closer to the object you will see the real size of the object. He discovered something important for perception because they perceived in a way their world because they are taught to perceive the way they perceived. This means that we perceive everything because of the way that we have been taught.

Colin Turnbull was born on November 23, 1924 and he died on July 28, 1994. He was a famous British and American anthropologist who researched the Mambuti Tribe. This were some little men and women most of them; African American. They had never had contact with advanced society; they had lived in a very dense forest, so they had never seen more than tan feet beyond them. So when this Colin Turnbull arrived to their tribe they were surprised and did know how to react but he was teaching them some things of the outside world. When Turnbull took one of the indigenous to the valley he was freaked out when he saw some bulls far away and he thought that those were bugs but Turnbull took him where the bulls were so as they got closer to them he watched how the bulls were getting bigger. At first he thought it was witchcraft but after that Turnbull explained of perspective. He said that he did not like this place because it did not have trees. This was because he was used to a place with trees and now that he was with no trees he was feeling strange or in other words, not comfortable.

Everyone has a different perception

Everyone in the world have a different perception, no matter if they are twins or parents or even friends because nobody has lived what you have lived. Many people may think similarly to you but, no person in the earth will have the exact same ideals that you. You may have a girlfriend that may say that you both think exactly the same way but, that is not true because she may have past relationships and you don’t. She may have had a boyfriend that was untruthful with her soy she may not believe totally on you and because you have not experienced that you may believe her completely. If you see that a close friend of you has a bad experience with a snake, then you might not like snakes after that. Everything that happens to you changes your perception even though you do not notice it. Another example that you have is a clear one; school. When you are in school you observe with which persons you can mess around and what persons you should avoid. With your friends you know until what point you can do the jokes and until what point they are going to get mad.




Things I like                                     Things I don’t like

Play soccer                                           Study

Watch TV                                             Read

Sleep                                                     Play Bascketball

Play Fifa 10 and Call of Duty              School work

Paintball                                                 English Class

Perception is Reality

Perception is reality because what you feel is your reality because the only thing that we sure that exists is your mind because everything that you see or feel you see it or feel it because your brain tells you that it is there. So what you perceive is what is going on in your body, for example if you feel dizzy is because something is wrong in your body. When you feel dizzy you take a pill or something so your dizziness goes away. Sometimes you can trick your brain so it perceives things that are not correct for example optical illusions are images that trick your eyes so you see something and you watch it as something different of what it really is. If you perceive danger your brain is designed to keep you alive so the first option is going to have is to go away but sometimes you may not be in real danger but your reality is going to be that you are in deed in danger. So it has been proved that your reality is what you really perceive because you are going to take decisions depending on your perception of a situation.

What role does phsychology plays in my life?

 

Phsychology plays an important role in my life because I like to understand the way people behave.  You get to know how the human brain works and how it reacts in different circumstances.  You get to know old phsychologists and what they did to help phsychology.  I also like to do experiments and the see the results to understand better why people take there choices and how they take their choices.