Articles on Memory

The Language of Emotions
This study was conducted by profesors Stefano Puntoni, Bart de Langhe, and Stjin van Osselaer. It talks about how messages attarct more the attention of people if they are written in their native languages. This emotional trigger that is pulled with messages in their native language is due to their personal memories, or the language contaext in which this memories are related to the message. The message may have a word in it that incounsciously triggers a memories in which the word(s) had a significant meaning for them. People ususally have more memories related to their native languages then their foreign languages, and this is why a message in their own laguage will have a stronger effect. In terms of marketing it is advised that the messages sent through advertisement are in the peoples native languages. Companies who need to sell may use this study to get advice about their publicity.

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

Some Short-Term Memories Die Suddenly
This study was conducted by Weiwei Zhang and Steve Luck. It basically proves that short-term memories dont fade away gradually, but the instantly disapear over a certain short period of time, usually seconds. these profesors gave out two test to twelve participants, one test was with squares, and different color fills, the person had to remember the colors of the square after some time. The second test was similar but it used colors.  “The memories are not like flashlights that get progressively weaker as the battery runs low, They are more like a laptop computer that continues working at the same speed until it suddenly shuts down.” Steve Luck. It will be important in life to avoid confusion when trying to make decisions based on weak, inaccurate memories.

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

The Memories You Want to Forget are The Hardest to Lose
The author of this study is called Keith Payne, a professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Science and Elizabeth Corrigan a student. This study proved that the graphical negative images we see, are more permanent than reading negative words. They asked 218 participants to react to photographs instead of text. With this study they found out that people can not forget emotional events as esasily as unsignificant events, and that pleasant and unpleasant memories are hard to intentionally forget. Payne said that if there is enough powerful motivation to forget this memory it can be done. this willl help in the real life, to erase those traumatic memories that shape our personality.

The Placebo Effect

A Placebo is a know as a pharmacological inert substnce that produces and effect similar to what is expected from a pharacological active substance. Also know as fake surgeries and therapies. H.K. Beecher, a psychologist who studied these placebos, and their effects, wrote even a book called " The Powerful Placebo". he identified that a big percentage of the patients who submitted to placebo surgeries or treatments were satisfactorily relieved from their pains or defects. Although Beechers experiments had many faults. First he did not report all his findings, he only reported the improvements on patients with placebo treatments, but did not report when the patiants deteriorated. He did not report that forty percent of the time that placebos were applied, the patient deteriorated. Later a research group discovered that the placebos used in various experiemtns was no effective at all. They compared two grouos, one that was given placebos, and other that was not given medicine at all, and found out that both groups had the exact same results. I think that placebos may be effective some times but not always, it can depend on the patient. If the patient truly believes he can be healed with this treatment, it may actually work. if a patient has a negative view of his treatment, and believes he has no cure, no placebo will work, and real treatments will still take time to cure them. 

Eye-Witness Reports

Loftus and Palmer (1974)

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 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. 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.

Difference in Memories

The difference in memory, referring to gender does exist.  It has been proven that women have a better episodic memory than men. Although men have a better memory when it comes to thing for its own survival, like exiting the woods, men have a better memory. Women’s memory gets better when it comes to using verbal abilities, but decrease when they have to use their visuospatial abilities. This means that women have a much better hearing memory, than a visual memory. There are also environmental factors that can affect the results, like education. If a person is educated he or she may have a better short or long term memory, and have studied techniques to remember a new event. Do to the results of this experiment it is proven that females have a superior episodic memory than males.

There are differences in memory regarding cultures. It has been proved through studies; Caucasians tend to have better memory than Americans because of what their cultures focus on, and last the Asians. The memory of each culture also depends on their mother. On different cultures mothers interact more with their children. If a mother continuously asks the child about his memories, the child will eventually get a better memory.

Alzeihmer's Disease

 I learned that Alzeihmer is an unstopable, and uncurable disease, that gradually eats up your brain, till it kills you. i feel very sorry for the people you have this, and do not wish for me or any of my family members to get it because I now understand that it is really hard to live with this disease, and to see a relative live with it. This disease is more common on elderly people, and as the people get older we see the Alzeimer get more intense. Currentl there is no cure for this disease, and the number of people affected is big and will continue growing. Currently 5 million Americans suffer from Alzeihmer, and it is estimated if a cure is not found, that by 2050 the number will increase to 13.4 million Americans. There are some activities that you can perform in order to delay the disease or tu reduce the intensity of it, but it will not stop it. Such activities include games, and social interaction. Maintaining a healthy diet and doing regular exercise mught also lower the risk of getting Alzeihmers. I would really like for a cure to be invented becuase I think that elderly people deserve to enjoy their last years on Earth, and not live in a institution, were they are taken away their freedom, and many priviledges that life offers them. I think that doctors should be more concerned about this disease, because a large number of people already have it, and if they dont begin to pay attention to it the poeple affected will be more and more each day.

How does Memory Work

1. Explain the concept of sensory memory.
Sensory Memory is the ability to retain impressions of sensory information after the original stimulus has ceased. there are two types : Ionic and Echoic memory.

2. Give an example of sensory memory.
Echoic Memory: sensory memory related to hearing, it last less than four seconds.

3. What is the capacity of our sensory memory?
The capacity of sensory memory is very short it last about four seconds.

4. Describe the concept of short-term memory.
The capacity of holding a small amount of information in mind in an active readily available state, for 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 capacity of the sensory or short term memory is measured in seconds, the is an estimate that this capacity is seven, plus or minus two units. This is known as the Miller Law.

6. What is chunking?
Chunking is a strategy for making more efficient use of short-term memory by recoding information or organizing items into familiar manageable units.

7. What has been determined to be the ideal size of "chunks" for both letters and numbers?
the ideal size has been referred as two, three, and six as the ideal size of "chunks" for both letters and numbers.

8. Which mode of encoding does short-term memory mostly rely on, acoustic or visual?
Short-term memory is believed to rely more on acoustic coding than visual coding.

9. Explain the duration and capacity of long-term memory.
Long-term memoey can las as little as day or as long as decades. The capacity of the long term memory acn be decades and then begin to fade over time. it can store lts of information for lots of time.

10. Explain in detail the Atkinson-Shiffrin Model of memory.
This model is a proposal of the memory structure, it proposes that human memory iinvolves a sequence of three stages, Sensory Memory: retain information in a sort of unprocessed way trough a stimulus for less than a second, Short-Term Memory: allows us to remember information long enough to use it, Long-term memory: provides the lasting retention of information.
11. Identify three criticisms or limitations of the Atkinson-Shiffrin Model of memory.
Something that is criticized of this model is the it does not include any subdivision in the stages of memory, because it has a linear structure. The model does not acknowledge the asynchronous of the neural activity.
This model deals with the forms of memory, but it does not take into account which information is presented can then be seen as a form of a power check that could not be disrupted.
12.Explain the Levels of Processing Model of memory.

13. What is maintenance rehearsal - give an example.
Maintenance rehearsal is a type of rehearsal proposed by Craik and Lockhart  in their Levels of Processing Model of memory. Maintenance rehearsal involves rote repetition of an item's auditory representation. Different to elaborative rehearsal, this type of rehearsal does not lead to stronger or more durable memories.


14. What is elaborative rehearsal - give an example.
Elaborative rehearsal is a type of rehearsal proposed by Craik and Lockhart  in their Levels of Processing model of memory. Elaborative rehearsal involves deep sematic processing of a to-be-remembered item resulting in the production of durable memories.
For example, if you were presented with a list of digits for later recall (4968214), grouping the digits together to form a phone number transforms the stimuli from a meaningless string of digits to something that has meaning.


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

How Does Our Memory Work?

The brain interacts with your physical environment. Cells of your brain record things that give you memory. Autobiographical memories are the most important memories because they are about us.

We gain the ability to time travel through our minds at the age of 9. We begin to day dream, remember, and distinguish time periods, like day weeks and months.  We later develop Abstract thought which is the ability to plan ahead. Your memory system helps you survive, and develop, you language and problem solving. Your memory reaches its fullest power at the age of 25, by the age of 27 it begins to fade, by the age of 40 it is partially gone, and later one you can lose it completely.  Memory loss can be devastating. Events cannot be deleted by will, and this causes negative effects because the events you may want to delete can be traumatizing. The emotions you feel when you remember something makes this memory a lot stronger. 

Post-traumatic stress:  may happen when you have an encounter with death, it is almost impossible to make it fade away, because the memory will stay fresh. A certain drug exists that may help you erase this memory but this is not good because memory shapes your character and your identity. Without memories you wouldn’t be yourself.

The Myth of Multitasking

1. Multi tasking is considered to be a myth because it can’t be done. It is proven that people can’t do two things at the same time, like multitask. What really happens is that after performing one act people move on to the other act, then move back to the first act, or could jump to another act, and begin moving back and forth between the tasks they are trying to perform. This is not considered multi-tasking.


2. The term response selection bottleneck refers to the brain being for to respond to several stimuli at once. By performing this, people loose time since the brain determines which task to perform.

3. The release of stress hormones and adrenaline may damage your health. It is also extremely uncomfortable. The stress hormone can also cause loss of short term memory. Now that we have knowledge of the disadvantage of multi-tasking, we can start lowering our use of it.

4. Russell Podrack found that multi-tasking affect the way you learn. When you multitask you do not receive the information efficiently. While multi-tasking you do not learn well, but if not you use a part of the brain called hippocampus, a region of the brain used to store and recall information.

5. The author concludes that if we continue multi-tasking frequently, we may never gain wisdom in the subject and perhaps we may lower are IQ.

BaMbuti Pygmies

The Bambuti are pygmy hunter-gatherers, and are one of the oldest indigenous people of the Congo region of Africa. The Bambuti are made up of bands which are small in size, from 15 to 60 people. The Bambuti population is 30,000 to 40,000 people total. There are four distinct cultures, within the Bambuti. The Efé, which speak the language of their neighboring Bantu tribe, the Sua, who speak the language of their neighboring Budu, the Mbuti, who speak the language of the neighboring Bila, and a small subgroup of the Aka who speak the language of the neighboring Mangbetu tribe. The majority of the Aka migrated to the western Congo basin thousands of years ago.The Bambuti culture is incomplete without music and dance.They are skilled musicians.Storytelling is a well-developed form of art,highly respected by all members of the society.The Bambuti practise a form of singing called the Yodeling.

Colin Turnbull

Colin Turnbull was borned in London and studied philosophy and politics in Oxford. He later graduated from the Banaras Hindu university in india witha degree on indian Religion and Philosophy. he then traveled to the republic of Congo to study the BaMbuti pygmies with Newton Beal an ohio school teacher he met in India.

He went to school at the Westminster School. When he ended his studies he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve during World War 2. After Turnbull's experience with the pygmies he became one of the most famous intelectuals of 1960 and 1970. Through his trips in africa he fell in love with an african american named Joe Towles. for 30 years the lived as an open gay couple in New York city and then in Virginia until towels died of AIDS in 1988. After turnbull's lost he gave awaay most of his money and lived as a Buddhist monk tutored by Dalai Lama's older brother, until his death from AIDS in 1994.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Turnbull

http://www.colinturnbull.com/

http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/pqrst/turnbull_colin.html

What causes Perception?

Perception can be caused by internal and external factors. Internal factories are things inside your body, and external factors are factors that affect you from the outside. The internal factors that can influence perception are many. Memories have a lot of influence because it reminds us about the good and bad things that we have gone through and reminds us not to do bad things again. Personality can influence because the person we are inside knows what to do or not and what is expected of us. Knowledge has influence on perception because we have learned things that teach us about mistakes commited in the past or dangerous things.

External factors have a great influence in perception. We may decide what to do depending on what is going on around us.The things we see happening can determine our actions. For example if we see a car crash in a certain street we will be cautious when passing through that street, because we dont know what happanaed in the past car crash.

Things I like:

I like cars

I like adrenaline

I like soccer

I like Age of War

I like the psychology class

Thing I dont like

I dont like working in psychology

I dont like feet

"Perception is reality"

This quote refers that people may have different visualization of the same objects, because of an experience or a memory they may have with this certain person, place or object. this also refers to the different ways you can see an object, in different angles, this may give an image of a totally different object. Many people dont have the ability to percept objects in different ways. Perception alters the way I see the world, because optical illusions are present in very day life, and i am able to see different things in the same object. I can also percept things that happen to me, and find another way to interpret them

Why study psychology?

I think psychology is important to study because you learn about behaviors of yourself and other people, and how our body, specially our brain controls what we do and how we do it. It also teaches us about our behavior, and how certain behaviors are triggered and how to handle with them.