Ebbinghaus's Forgetting Curve

     My favorite course in high school was AP Art History. To me, it was not always about the AP or about the tests, but it was about learning art for the sake of learning. From Renaissance wonders to intriguing modern art, the material in art history was always fun to learn. To this very day, I can still tell you about all of the works of art I have learned. Why? Because I have been to numerous museums, from the MOMA to the MET to the National Gallery in Washington D.C. In essence, I rehearsed what I learned by revisiting it and relearning the art when I went to museums. 

    What would happen had I not relearned all of the material and not visited those museums? Would I still remember all of that art? According to Hermann Ebbinghaus, after learning lists of nonsense syllables, he found that memory for novel information fades quickly, then levels out. Had I not rehearsed my art skills, I would lose most of knowledge of the art over the course of a few months/first year. However, after that year span, my knowledge of art would remain the same over the rest of my life. Without an ability to forget, we would be overwhelmed by out-of-date and irrelevant information. Our memory can fail us through forgetting (absent-mindedness, transience, and blocking), through distortion (misattribution, suggestibility, and bias), and through intrusion (persistence of unwanted memories). What we encode (whether automatically or through effortful processing) is only a very limited portion of the sensory stimuli around us. And as we age, our encoding grows slower and less efficient. Without encoding, information does not enter our long-term memory store and cannot be retrieved.

    Now here comes the real question. When I am done with this psych course, will there be instances, like in AP Art History, where I will revisit and relearn the ideas I learn in Psych class? The question remains a mystery.  

 

Wuddup Gangstas

Hey guys. Remember all that information we learned the night before the test? When we crammed? Well, we should have used some spacing effect because I am forgetting a lot of stuff we've learned. I think it's because I just learned the things for the sake of getting a good grade on the test, I didn't effortfully process everything I was learning, thus making it easier to forget. BUT! There is a solution! Marijuana. Smoke lots of it and you'll remember everything you've ever learned. I'm only joking...drugs are bad. What we all need to do is start now and review every night. Rehearsal and relearning is the key. Look back over those old tests and learn those definitions people, we need to make Mrs. Perl look good.

Peace out and grind on.

Midterm Studying :(

Studying for midterms is a major drag. There is so much information, and you really have to look it all over again, or else you will miss something. But luckily, when you do look it over, it is part of relearning, the easiest type of retrieval. So basically, the first time I tried to memorize the Bill of Rights in US History, it took some time, perhaps 10 minutes. But when I looked at the Bill of Rights again while I was studying, I was not able to recall all 10 parts right away. However, I was indeed able to look over the 10 parts again, and this time it only took me 5 minutes to memorize them.

Within my mid-term studying, I use retrieval cues that I had used while studying for my tests during the year. So when remembering the steps to writing a DBQ essay in history, I use the mnemonic "PERSIA." PERSIA stands for political, economic, religious, social, intellectual, and artistic. These are the categories by which to remember how to go about inserting outside knowledge into DBQ essays.

But as I know from last year, once I get into those midterms I have major retrieval failure. First off, there are all those terms I want to insert into my essays, but I cannot quite remember the term. I know what I want to say, but the associations in my head are not quite strong enough, and the tip of the tongue phenomenon prevents me from being able to get that information onto the paper (What was the name of that guy from Kentucky? He lived in a log cabin; big time abolitionist; 16th President of USA. Can't remember...).

And retrieval failure also comes in the form of proactive and retroactive interference. Since I am studying so much for all these finals, and I am having to go back and look at earlier things while still trying to remember the newer things, my mind gets confused. So on the test, I have proactive failure when the old material prevents me from remembering the new material, and I have retroactive failure when the new material prevents me from remembering the old material (Who was the 1st President of the USA - was it Grant or Washington?)

Midterms are evil. Can't wait until Thursday.

Oddities of my brain; Video Witnesses

I was very fascinated with the lengthy discussion in the book about the repression antics, sexual abuse, and testimonies. The idea of repression is quite an interesting one. The act of consciously blocking a memory from surfacing would seem like a feasible act, at least to me. I, as I'm sure many of you have realized, have quite a strange working brain that is obviously stretched to its limits from an overload of responsibilities and a severe lack of sleep. I often find myself repressing memories and thoughts that I do not like or make me feel uncomfortable. I am able to stop a memory or feelings in its track, preventing it from surfacing and blocking that period of time from my memory. 

The research that the book was proposing though about how traumatic events cannot be repressed made me stop and think for a second. I had to look back in my mind at previous attempts I had made to repressed more traumatic events and the success rate I had with it. I realized that, like the textbook had said, it's not really possible to totally repress traumatic events. What happened with me was that my mind was confused. It knew that something had happened, sometimes even what, but because of my repression attempts, I was confused on the validity of what had happened. I couldn't and can't be sure if what I was remembering had actually happened. This was different from the less traumatic events that I can totally erase from my conscious memory. 

Thinking about my own mind, as unusual as I think it might be, made me think about others, specifically the thoughts of witnesses used in court cases. If I could so easily manipulate my own mind and displace and even place memories, could others as well? What would this mean in a murder trial? Could a memory of the murderer be a figment of someone's imagination, manipulated into their mind? Or would it be possible that an accomplice repressed, or erased per se, the memories that would incriminate his friend. I've long maintained that the best liar is one who can lie to himself, for if he is lying to himself, it's not a lie he's saying, but the truth. That is, the lie he is saying is what he believes is true and it is therefore not a lie to him. This would allow someone to "beat" a lie detector and honestly swear to tell the truth in court. It made me think, should we continue to have eyewitness accounts allowed in court. 

An underlying theme of Skyfall, the latest James Bond film, is the modern debate of human agents versus technology. Q, the tech head, says that "I can do more damage on my laptop sitting in my pajamas before my first cup of Earl Grey than you can do in a year in the field...[But] every now and then a trigger needs to be pulled." His message was that the rest of intelligence can be done through the latest technology with minor support from actual agents. The antagonist of the film, Silva, upon bringing Bond to his base, says that if Bond wants to do anything, be it steal billions from a stock market or take out a country, he just needs to click the button. Why can evidence and court cases not be the same. London has over 10,000 cameras watching its streets as part of an over invested attempt at having "eyes at every corner." Although the project was said to have been a fail, the cameras still track all. Across our country as well we have cameras constantly monitoring us. Every ATM, grocery store, and even school has cameras trained on our every movement, watching all of our actions. Why can we not just use those as the testimony? The video footage is far more reliable than human memory and cannot be changed. 

Mnemonic Devices

Mnemonic devices are very helpful. They help us remember certain things when they are tough to remember. One very famous example of a mnemonic device is the order of operations. It can be remembered by the sentence, "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally," or simply the abbreviation, PEMDAS. Taking the first letter of each word can help us remember the order of operations which is, parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. Another interesting mnemonic device is the method of loci. This is when you go through a certain area and mentally mark different parts of that area with different labels in order to help you remember what you need to do. For example, a public speaker may mentally note the different corners of a room with different labels in order to help him remember the points that he needs to speak about. Mnemonic devices can be very useful to teenagers like us who need to remember and memorize a great amount of material for tests and classes.

Chunking Expanded

     I know Addess posted a blog regarding chunking, but I wanted to expand on it and bring in some real life examples. George Miller proposed a hypothesis regarding the magic number 7. He concluded that humans tend to really only remember about 7 items at a time before they begin to forget anything added to a respective list. The idea of chunking deals with short term memory being limited as opposed to your long term memory. If you chunk the numbers together, or simply group them, you may be able to remember a lot more. Say for example I created an experiment where I told the class to memorize the following numbers: 81419952012. Most people wouldn't have a terrible time memorizing them, though many people would certainly forget a few. Now what if I told you to break up the numbers into segments. It is easier to remember 814, 1995, 2012 than memorizing it all as a whole. Another reason you may (or lets say me in this case) not have such difficult memorizing these numbers is because of the self-reference effect. 814 is associated with August 14, my birthday, and I was born in 1995. This year is 2012, making it easy to memorize that. When things begin to have connections to me personally, it becomes much easier to remember it.
     The Guinness World Records officially recognizes Lu Chao as the world record holder with 67,890 decimal places memorized in the number pi (as in 3.14159 etc.). How can memorize so many digits. While Lu Chao is clearly a genius that has a great memory, he probably also utilizes chunking and makes associations to group the numbers. This was probably very helpful in memorizing all of those digits. All in all, chunking is very helpful in memorizing data.

synesthesia

Earlier this year we all learned what synesthesia was. Just in case anyone forgot it is a phenomenon where multiple senses are joined. The book makes it seem like this rare disorder that only very few people have but while surfing the web i found out otherwise. It is true that in the true sense of the word it is rare but it is closer to the average person than we think. Jinhyun Jeon designed cutlery that is supposed to revolutionize the way we taste foods. He uses oddly shaped cutlery made with starenge materials. By experiencing different colors textures and temperatures while eating different foods we will actually have different experiences; by changing even one of those things the food will actually taste differently. This happens because our sense of taste is a very complex sense. We are use to experiencing every food in a certain way so changing the way we eat each food will change the way we taste the food because everyone is a little synesthetic. Every body's taste is combined to other senses. It is not so rare like we think.

i recommend everyone check this site out 

 

http://www.dezeen.com/2012/11/18/tableware-as-sensorial-stimuli-cutlery-by-jinhyun-jeon/

Automatic Processing vs. Effortful Processing

       Encoding is one step to memory; it is when we take the information in. Automatic processing is when we effortlessly process things without conscious thought. We automatically process information about space like how the classroom is set up, about time like when we know approximately what time it is usually, frequency like when we realize later how many times something happened; for example, I am likely to remember later how many times I passed someone in the hallway automatically if I rarely hardly ever see them. The last type of things we automatically process are bits of well learned information like driving a car; we are not focusing on how we drive, we just drive.
       Effortful processing is when we are aware/conscious of what we are processing. Visual processing is when we are only looking at visual information. This is the hardest form of processing to remember later. Acoustic processing is when we are only hearing something. Semantic processing is when we remember things better when they are of more meaning to us. The self-reference effect says that we remember things more clearly when they are similar to us because then they are of more meaning to us (semantic). You need to remember the following principal: the more meaning something has to you, the longer and better you will remember it.

The "Heisman Moment"

There are very few things that I consider to be less exhilirating than watching a psychology video about memory, but for this one, I took notes that I would like to share with the rest of the class:

• Memory is the essential feature that enables uas as humans to exist 
• Learning - the acquisition of knowledge --> everything learning is memory
• Three levels of memory
• 1) Sensory Memory
• 2) Short-term memory
• 3) Long-term memory
• Most memory is stored in the hippocampus

I'm not going to bore you with the rest of my notes... Wait! I forgot one last point I took while watching the video:

Heisman Predictions

• Manti Te'o - LB/Notre Dame
• Collin Klein - QB/Kansas St.
• Johnny Manziel - QB/Texas A & M

There you have it, folks! Kampf strikes again with another spot on prediction of the heisman trophy winner. But wait, I will now correlate my most important bullet point I took on the video with psychology and memory. You see, throughout the year I come home every saturday night and check the college football scores and stats of the day, and I always make sure to pay extra attention to any players that could be potential heisman winners. So, when I get home when saturday night and see that Johnny Football, a freshman no less, has defeated the seemingly invincible Alabama Crimson Tide, I am shell-shocked and at that moment I knew he was going to win. Every winner of the heisman must have that "Heisman Moment" or what we call in psychological terms flashbulb memory. That one play or game that stands out due to an emotional significance that most other games do not have, and that game against the Tide had its major emotional effect and probably single-handedly won Johnny Manziel the heisman trophy. So, as I sit watching the film, and deciding who I should pick as the heisman winner, I was not sure until one of the psychology dudes said that an event that is emotional we will remember more, and, at that point, I knew that Johnny Football was the unequivocal front-runner.

Chunking

Around the same time everybody did the 7A assignment, I noticed that students were particularly interested with the term "chunking." And by interested, I mean obsessed: some students loved it so much, they thought that it was included on the Units 5 and 6 test we took this week. Chunking is organizing items into familiar, manageable units. Chunking often occurs automatically, and so we take it for granted. For instance, if you're studying for a vocabulary test, you may find yourself remembering words based on similar spellings and definitions that your brain can group together. A personal example would be when I'm studying for an APUSH test. My notes are divided into slides, so I may find myself chunking the information into different sections of my notes or different time periods. It's an interesting memory technique, and I'm glad we got to delve into it a bit this week.

Learned Helplessness

When it comes to Unit 6, there's A LOT to learn and discuss. But within all the talks of operant and classical conditioning, one topic that really interests me is the idea of learned helplessness. What's learned helplessness? According to HaRav Dovid Meir, learned helplessness is the hopelessness and passive resignation an animal or human learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events. The classic example is when you (unethically?) take a test subject--a dog, per se--and place it in an enclosed environment. The dog is able to escape, but each time it tries to escape, it's shocked. After a few tries, you choose to let the dog escape without a shock. But each time the dog sees the chance to escape, even if you don't shock it, it may run as far away as possible and cower in fear. Can I apply this to real life? I'm sure I can. When you're a Freshman, and your Seniors include the likes of Avi Goldstein and Sam Rapp, you sort of learn to instinctively hide in a corner and cower in fear when a Senior nonchalantly walks through the hallway with a crowbar and/or a lead pipe. A Freshman's reaction to such a Senior class can definitely be described as learned helplessness.

video games

When talking about observational learning, more specifically, antisocial behavior both you (Mrs. Perl) and the book put video games in a terrible light. Yes, you said the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth but you only gave half the story. There are many positive things that can come out of video games. Here are my top ten.
1. improved dexterity- doctors who played video games were faster and less likely to make mistakes
2. education- students remember a helk of a lot more when taught by video games than by regular classroom settings
3. physiotherapy- many games nowadays have the players moving, this helps balance and speed
4. lowers stress- studies show that gamers have lower stress levels and that nongamers have lower stress levels after playing video games
5. multitasking- gamers can multitask a lot better, they can focus on 6 things while the average person has a max of about 4
6. eye sight- playing for a few hour a day will actually improve a persons eyesight
7. relationships- people who play together develop and improve their relationship (even marriage)
8. pain relief- because people are distracted they are not feeling as much pain (violent games increase pain tolerance as well)
9. increased IQ- gamers are better at spotting details and managing events (infants will develop a thicker cortex of they play video games
10. reaction time- gamers have a much higher reaction time because many games force people to think and act quickly
I could relate each one to something we learned in psychology but I will eave that up to you guys :) (some are easier than others)

Wouldn't it be nice to have more Little Alberts?

I'm sure that Little Albert (as opposed to the fat one) was a cute kid in the lab. I can picture him looking around with wide eyes at the strangers surrounding him, searching for his mom's hand and instead finding Watson's. The look of assurance that Little Albert's mother, telling him to go along with the nice scientist, must have given Little Albert the courage to go along with Watson. Courage that he would need soon against what was to become a fearsome, furry rabbit. From this experiment the world learned about generalization, an important psychological rule.

There has been an ongoing debate about the usage of stem cells in health research. The argument goes that using them will lead to donations of eggs, specifically embryonic cells. With those cells, opponents say that scientists will basically just be raising a baby in a tube and then killing it. Advocates of the research claim that the research will lead to monumental discoveries for the health of human kind. They say that saving the lives of millions, perhaps even billions, at the cost of an egg that would anyway not be used is worth it.

Ethical debates abound in the field of science regarding the testing of lives subjects, be it human or animal. I think that, assuming the person is not drastically, physically harmed, the study should be allowed to be conducted. The advancement of the human race, and the helping of millions, should not be given up at the cost of one subject.

Furthermore, if animals are grown for the purpose of being tested, then there should be no problem using them. Their only purpose in life is to be used to further the scientific field. They would not be alive if they could not be used.

Power to Animals

It is widely thought that "animals only act on instinct." I have heard this from numerous people (i.e.-my dad) all throughout my life. But, as we have proved through studies in Psych class, animals are much more advanced than they're given credit for. What most people might not know is that many animals have the capacity to learn. Whether this learning is instinctive or not, it adds a level of advancement to the demeaning opinion that is often relayed by humans.
So far we have examined classical and operant conditioning. In classical conditioning, animals can learn to have a conditioned response when impacted by a conditioned stimulus. At first - just like any human would act - a dog would not associate a tone with the coming of food. But after a the process of tone resulting in the coming of food, the dog learns to salivate just by hearing the tone.
And in operant conditioning, animals can learn operant behavior depending on the environment. Just as a human would learn to push a bar if it results in more food, so too can a mouse learn to push a bar to get more food.
Yes, humans are far superior to animals. But animals can indeed learn.That's not too shabby.

Mind Blown

This entire year has literally been mind blowing. I walk away from every class with my mind literally blown out of my head. Learning about classical and operant conditioning just strengthened that mind blowing. We don't think for ourselves. That's essentially the truth. We learn from a young age to associate things with reward and from there on out our responses come naturally. What happened to free will? According to Behaviorists who refuse to deal with Cognition, we don't really have free will. Our brain does everything for us, without us even wanted it to. But then I wonder, where are my thoughts coming from? There must be some external force that drives me to be me. Is it my soul? Let's learn about this!

Give a mouse a cookie...

I'm sure many of you heard about how Palestine was recently awarded nonmember observer state status(I think that's the correct terminology for their title now) in the UN. The vote was quite a win for Palestine, with a large majority voting yes to change its status. Britain, and several others, voted yes on condition that Palestinians would stop trying to advance it's status in the UN and return to peace talks with Israel. The successful attempt at advancing the Palestinian status reminded me of last year's similarly successful status advancement. It seems to me that the Palestinians are playing a smart game of using the UN's negative reinforcement against them. The UN attempts to placate the Palestinians by giving into their current demands, thereby stopping their pestering, for the moment at least. Their negative reinforcement is akin to that of a parent appeasing a child just to stop it from whining. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are receiving positive reinforcement. They are the child who gets what he wants when he whines. The Palestinians have learned, via operant conditioning, that if they push the UN will deliver. It will be interesting to see what will happen next year and to see if the behavior has been learned.