Tag Archives: Cognitive Psychology

Do you see what I see?

I’ve always wondered how we know that someone else sees the same thing we see. On one hand, people don’t all see the same thing because their perception is different. On the other hand, people do see the same thing in the sense of being taught to identify objects the same way.

For example, a teacher holds up a crayon for a group of kids and tells them it’s red by saying “What color? (slight pause) Red.” This is done with various other stimuli over time, teaching the kids the color red, and reinforcing when they say “red.” When the prompt of the teacher providing the answer fades over time, the kids are able to respond to the question with the correct answer of “red.” This group of kids are taught the color red with the same stimuli, and are able to identify new stimuli when presented in an array of other colors. All the kids identify the same stimuli as being red when presented with the array.

This makes sense, but do people who are taught to identify red with different stimuli see red as something else? What if I took what I was taught to be blue and taught a group of kids learning their colors that it was pink?

While I’ve always wondered about this topic, and I recently experienced a situation which brought my question to life. I was working with a client who was trying to pull a red piece to a board game out of a clear bag for me. They had already pulled out the other colors and two of the red pieces, leaving one red piece and four green pieces. My client kept missing the red piece and for a moment I wondered if they had some sort of visual depth and motor dysfunction like apraxia. Next, they pulled out all the pieces, held their hand out to me and asked if the pieces were red and green. I asked them if the pieces all looked the same, to which they said yes,but they thought certain ones were red and others were green and then pointed them out to me. They were correct as they had pointed out the pieces I knew to be red and green. I asked them to look at some pictures and pulled up images typically used to test for red/green colorblindness.

Image result for how to test red green color blindness Image result for test red green color blindness duck

They reported not being able to see the images in the center of the circles at all. I told them what the picture in the center was and they still said no. I finally showed them one that was blue and red, and they reported being able to see the numbers in the middle, which they shouted out to me with joy.

Image result for test red green color blindness

After doing some research, people see color differently because of the cones in their eyes. Whoa! It’s like we talked about that in class or something… It is, however, way more complex than what we have covered. Those with typical color vision (trichromats) tend to prefer blue hues the most and yellow-green hues the least, but that is not always the case. There are also two categories of red-green dichromatic vision: protanopes and deuteranopes. Protanopes perceive red as a darker-yellows and deuteranopes perceive red as lighter-yellows, however they both prefer saturated yellows.

Eye Image result for cones in eye

https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S1364661315001990?token=8907E4F0BFC0230172EA3CE6C2EECD3EE053DAB15B5FBC985BDFA29E84A9DDACB267272010E7399F1796A3B41E5F16C3

While top-down processing works its magic by telling us what is what based off of what’s been taught and experienced, bottom-up processing tells us what we like and dislike when it comes to color based off what information is being processed through the cones in our eyes. So, while we are taught to identify something such as color the same way, we have the cones in our eyes and bottom-up processing to thank for making our preferences different and even unique.

Additional readings:

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/jlin.1996.6.2.223?casa_token=rJQxQUwHxaEAAAAA%3ARZ5wg-BqF_he5A8DMAxZDlJhwiSBo6Gj9w770lPAkedVN0HjbtrBF910WrWxU1H2YLU65S2O_xDKUDk

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.182.4318&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Anxiety and Problem Solving

Anxiety is defined by the Psychology Dictionary as a “mood state characterized by worry, apprehension, and somatic symptoms.” Everyone experiences it at some point in their life, and in varying forms and intensities. There is ongoing research within the fields of medicine and psychology on how to minimize the frequency and severity of anxiety within individuals who experience it regularly. You may be aware of some of these treatments; SSRIs and SNRIs, cognitive-behavioral, group, and exposure therapies, and so forth. However, you may not know of alternative forms of treatment and self-care that have been found to reduce anxiety in certain individuals.

I would like to show you a fascinating article from Psychology Today, which highlights a brain imaging study conducted by Duke University in 2017. Researchers assessed a group of 120 participants to find out which were most at-risk in terms of responding to anxiety triggers. They did so by exposing participants to stimuli designed to stimulate the brain areas most associated with threats and rewards. Threats cause activation in the amygdala, sometimes resulting in the fight-or-flight response, while the ventral striatum is responsible for regulating motivation and emotions related to reward. The researchers then asked participants to complete a problem-solving task; in this case, a simple math-based memory task, to stimulate activity in their brains’ dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DPC). The DPC is known to be the executive control center of the brain, meaning that it regulates the problem-solving procedures that enable us to overcome obstacles and reach solutions, otherwise known as “goal states.”

The study found that by completing the memory task, participants were consequently less responsive to the threat and reward stimuli usually provoked by stimulation of the amygdala and ventral striatum. In other words, occupying the participants’ prefrontal cortex with cognitive tasks seemed to deter their brains from amplifying the extreme threat and limited reward responses to anxiety. This reduction in symptoms allows for increased mental clarity, higher overall positivity, and (presumably) higher productivity in sufferers of anxiety. What excites me about studies like this is the potential for basic lifestyle choices and task management to be combined with other treatments to significantly decrease or eliminate symptoms of anxiety in its most severe forms. With the increasing knowledge of the brain, which areas are associated with specific functions, and how personal adaptations can lead to greater physiological wellness, I am optimistic about the future of mental health research and development.

Cognition is dependent on a lot of processes; memory, communication, learning, and much more. All of these tasks (and more) are assisted, to some degree, by problem-solving. As you saw with this study, problem-solving can serve to help with more than just overcoming obstacles and forming solutions. If you are interested in learning more about the processes through which we use rules such as algorithms and heuristics to simplify life in a complex world, check out this video from Crash Course (specifically 3:21-5:46):

References:

1. Main article: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/neuronarrative/201801/problem-solving-buffers-the-brain-against-anxiety

2. Definition of Anxiety: https://psychologydictionary.org/anxiety/

3. The original study: https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/29/1/70/4637600

Feature Nets and Word Recognition

This brain expanding meme, also known as Galaxy Brain, has been all over social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook since 2017 and it seems to only be gaining popularity as time progresses. The concept behind the meme is that the brain metaphorically “grows” as the variable that it is presented with becomes more intellectually involved. The irony of the meme and the information or variables that each image is paired with is what makes it so comical.

Using the conceptual foundations behind this ironic trend, I have created a meme to simplify the feature net model and represent the intricate layers of the hierarchical system of word recognition in the brain. According to Grainger and colleagues, the feature net model, originally known as the Pandemonium model, was created by Oliver Selfridge in 1959. Grainger, states that the hypothesis of which Selfridge based this work off of inferred that “letters are identified via their component features”. With this hypothesis, Selfridge was able to create a model that is still used today when discussing word recognition.

Even though the basics of Selfridge’s model are still used today, it has evolved with time and additional research. Recent research has discovered the simplest and possibly most important layer of this complex hierarchical chain of word and letter recognition called feature detectors. Grainger and his colleagues describe these feature detectors as, “the part of our word recognition system responsible for acknowledging and interpreting lines of varying curves and orientations”. This article discusses different research on these feature-based detectors and concludes that this additional layer to Selfridge’s original model is pertinent. Based on new research using a more psycho-physical approach to break down and dissect this complicated system, Grainger claims there is strong evidence that letters are identified by their varying features of lines and curves.

In addition to the first layer, we currently understand this process of word recognition in four basic components: feature detectors, letter detectors, bigram detectors, and word detectors. Moving up from feature detectors, letter detectors are the pieces of this model that string each feature into a letter. According to “How the Brain Works: Explaining Consciousness” by Ben Salzberg, this letter recognition occurs because of the firing of different neurons based on which ones are used more frequently and, therefore, have a higher starting activation level and fire more easily.

After these letters are recognized, the same process happens with the next step in our recognition system: bigram detectors. Bigram detectors connect the letters we previously recognized based on the frequency of firing and threshold levels just like letter detectors. However, just as Salzberg concludes in his article, these bigram detectors are based more on the typicality of our specific language. For instance, in English, “Q” rarely ever comes after “L”, so this neuron would have a much higher threshold and not fire as easily as “CL” would in this situation. Finally, bigram detectors are stringed together with word detectors, using the same neuron-firing principles to make a full word.

Even though this process is so complex, using so many different detectors and neurons at the same time, this happens unconsciously at a rapid speed each time we see a word. The way this complexity increases with each step is the very reason and explanation for the meme that I have created. It is a way to represent this process of word recognition in a manner that anyone who is familiar with the meme world and has knowledge of word recognition can understand.

Deaf-Hearing

In class the concept of blindsight was explored after reviewing an inattentional blindness experiment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo). Individuals with blindsight have damage to their primary visual cortex (V1) and identify as blind even with residual vision. While they have an absence of visual awareness, they demonstrate appropriate responses to certain visual stimuli (most often in response to fast-moving and/or high-contrast visual stimuli). The primary explanation for this event is that retinal information is projected to subcortical structures and then projected directly to extrastriate regions, ultimately diverting V1. The exact process of blindsight however is unknown.

Blindsight can be explored to gain understanding of the connection between sensory areas and sensory awareness, as well as illuminate the organization of visual areas of the brain. Similarly, the phenomena of “deaf-hearing” can also be used to understand the relationship of the auditory system and of auditory awareness. Like blindsight, it’s important to recognize that there are multitudes of people, myself included, who are legally deaf but do not have a total inability to hear. Many have profound or severe hearing losses, some that can hear certain frequencies and sounds better than others or may be completely deaf in those areas. Brogaard (2017) refers to this form of deaf-hearing to be type-2 deaf hearing, because there is still “an ability to behaviorally detect or discriminate aspects of sounds that are not consciously perceived” (p. 23).

https://tenor.com/view/hearing-aids-gif-11616321

In this particular article (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2016.1268680) a profoundly deaf individual, LS, was examined with and without his hearing aids (without the accommodation he reported being unable to hear any sounds) by completing five trials. LS’s conductive hearing (volume at which a sound must be played through the ear for it to be heard; how hearing aids assist an individual) averages 95 dB which makes it a profound loss. As with most deaf people he suffers from tinnitus (the perception of imagined noise in the ear- I occasionally experience this as a repetitive ringing or droning sound), but the symptom generally does not have a perceived relationship with deaf-hearing. He also experiences vision-sound synesthesia in which a perceived sound is heard in response to objects in his environment. For example, the motion of objects corresponds to imagined sound that he has always associated them with (i.e. the sound of birds chirping when seeing them even if they can’t physically be heard).

The trials featured a series of forced-choice paradigms to measure sound detection, localization, and content discrimination. Each trial featured a hearing aid condition and hearing aid off condition, where LS served as his own control when wearing his aids. In the source localization trials without his hearing aids LS performed by chance and does not have “unconscious hearing” when determining the presence or location of sounds. When discriminating sounds however he performed above chance in this forced-choice model which means he has the ability and awareness to detect auditory content. It’s important to note though that the tinnitus may have served as a mask during this scenario. Although LS could not detect or localize sounds, he was able to discriminate among auditory content which offers an impressive outcome. The nature of deaf-hearing is still unknown and subject to many possible mediating variables, but the existence of unaware consciousness is undeniable.

*At the top is LS’s audiogram and at the bottom is mine. I included both of these to serve for comparison of how different our hearing is from one another, yet we still experience similar symptoms as a result of being deaf.

As someone who is deaf with a cochlear implant, this article was fascinating to read and offered many explanations about things I’ve experienced but never consciously recognized. I often find myself having conversations with friends and will accidentally say something they said immediately prior. I never ‘hear’ what they say, but I somehow parrot them word-for-word. I also learned about vision-sound synesthesia which I never realized that I had. While I still have about 10% or less natural hearing left in my non-implanted ear, I don’t hear every sound around me or I’m sometimes too far away from the source to properly hear it. Despite these obstacles, I am so used to associating specific sights with specific sounds that I ‘hear’ the sounds despite the impossibility of being able to do so. The trials in the article are also remarkably similar to my audiologist mapping appointments (when I get my implant sound frequencies readjusted after a period of fluctuation) in which I have to sit in a soundproof booth and acknowledge beeps and words with my implant on and off.

It was difficult to find many articles about deaf-hearing and like blindsight the concept is not well understood. As someone who experiences deaf-hearing and similar symptoms, it would be fascinating to learn more about the phenomenon in the future and further discover the relationship between sensory areas and awareness processing in the brain.

If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, another older, associated article is (https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-9452(08)70837-2)

Can understanding the forgetting curve help you achieve a 4.0?

Imagine what your grades would be like if you could remember things more easily and ensure that all your study methods are working to their fullest potential? Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered the method of savings and the forgetting curve by testing his ability to memorize a list of syllables in a longitudinal study. An article from the Independent News of International Students explains why understanding Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve is essential for improving your memory and boosting your grades.

https://www.psychestudy.com/cognitive/memory/ebbinghaus-forgetting

The article begins by discussing the steepness of the forgetting curve, which means that as soon as we learn something, we quickly begin to forget the majority of that information. The article compares this progression to cramming for a big exam. When attempting to memorize a large amount of information in a short period of time, you only hold onto the information until it isn’t necessary anymore (i. e. a few days later). However, this article gives a few tips on how we can improve our memory and ensure that the information stays with us for a much longer period of time.

The first tip the article gives is to connect new information with what you already know. They claim that the knowledge you already possess is not affected by the forgetting curve; therefore, connecting new memories to older memories that are already fully integrated would result in quicker memory gain. In one study, A Replication and Analysis of Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve, they found the same correlations as Ebbinghaus’ original research. However, this tip cannot be backed up by this research because there was no instance in which the new information being learned was connected to previous knowledge. Even so, we can assume that, since the forgetting curve pertains to new memories, previous knowledge is most likely unaffected by this theory. Therefore, the article was accurate in saying that integrating new information to previous knowledge would positively impact your studying and information retention.

The second tip the article gives is to keep accessing and activating the information in regularly spaced intervals. They claim that this will ensure that the knowledge becomes fully integrated. I completely agree with this tip based on the replication of Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve which had near-identical results that supported the original findings of Ebbinghaus’ method of savings or savings affect. In this study, the researchers activated the information at twenty minutes, one hour, nine hours, one day, two days, six days, and thirty-one days. Congruent with Ebbinghaus’ findings, the subjects memory improved significantly as time progressed. Therefore, this tip of repetitively accessing information on a schedule should impressively increase your memory!

https://giphy.com/gifs/game-memory-WgM4yPZQneYZa

The final tip the article suggests is to download memory games that integrate information that you’re studying. The writer claims that through this memory testing software, you can train your brain to turn learning into an engaging activity and, therefore, increase your chances of remembering. However, in one study about the effect of brain training games on working memory and processing speeds in young adults, the results do not indicate that brain training games would work for everyone. Some games might improve some cognitive functions, but this is not a strong enough correlation to support this article’s tip that brain games will improve learning.

Overall, this article applied Ebbinghaus’ research fairly well. They understood the large aspects of his studies and used this knowledge to come up with a few good tips on improving memory for students. This said, the writer did not have research to back up a few of these tips and, therefore, wrongly assumed that brain games always improve memory. Even though this could be the case in some individuals, based on the research I found, we cannot apply this to the general population.

Nonetheless, I believe this is a very relevant article that contains a few great tips that everyone could begin to integrate into their studying routines. The most reliable tip is to access the information your studying on a regular basis to ensure that you are retaining the information, just as Ebbinghaus’ original research found with the savings affect. An easy way to do this is to plan your studying strategically each week, staying on a routine schedule. What tip will you start using in order to make your studying becomes more efficient in order to boost your grades?

The Illusion of Truth and Fake News

Over the past two years, the topic of “fake news” has been all over the news thanks largely in part to Donald Trump and the 2016 presidential election. Throughout the election year and still to this day many websites have published stories that have little to no factual claims. And yet many of these fake news stories have convinced people that they are in fact factual and credible. The spread of fake news could be related to the illusion-of-truth effect which states that the more someone hears a statement, the more likely they are to believe that it is true. This is closely related to the topic of false memories which are memories that people claim to have experienced something which actually never happened.

There are examples where the illusion-of-truth effect can be seen in politics with such claims as Barack Obama is a Muslim, or he was not born in the United States. These claims are false but the reason they still exist is because of the illusion-of-truth effect. Lets pretend that a website has a story which claims Obama was not born in the United States. Now let’s say 100 people see that story and tell their friends about it or share it on social media which results in more people seeing it. Then another website sees that claim and makes an article about the same false claim. As more and more websites publish articles on the topic, the more likely people are going to believe it or at least think the story has plausibility.

A study from the Central Washington University was conducted to see “whether repeated exposure to fictitious stimuli would cause participants to develop a false memory for having heard about the false news stories from a source outside of the experiment” (Polage). The results of the study found that those who were exposed to fake news were more likely to believe that it was true (Polage). This study is helpful to have research behind the claim that fake news can be influential on a person’s thoughts and memories.

Society is currently in the age of technology where anyone can spread fake news through social media. Just in the last year, there was a good example of how fake news can spread in an instant. The mass shooting in Las Vegas led to a false claim that the suspect was a Democrat who was against Donald Trump. This claim eventually made its way to websites which wrote articles about the false claim. Those news stories were then shared on Facebook and other sites. The more likes and shares these posts received, the more believable this claim became to people (Levin).

The illusion-of-truth effect and the effect it has on news can be quite dangerous in a time where anyone can post something on the internet. False information can sometimes move faster than the truth. This is an issue we will have to deal with in the coming future to prevent false information that could have a negative impact on everyday things.

Works Cited

Levin, Sam. “Facebook and Google promote politicized fake news about Las Vegas shooter.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 2 Oct. 2017, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/02/las-vegas-shooting-facebook-google-fake-news-shooter.

Polage, Danielle C. “Making up History: False Memories of Fake News Stories.” Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 8(2), 21 May 2012, pp. 245–250., doi:10.5964/ejop.v8i2.456.

The Vanishing of Accents

Have you ever stopped to think about accents? I’m not talking about accents we use to create emphasis on syllables or words, but in terms of the way a specific nation pronounces a language. It’s important to note that accents aren’t the same as dialects. An accent is all about how people sound. A dialect encompasses the idea of accents, but it extends farther by touching on the particular grammar a person uses when talking. A great example is the word “y’all”, which tends to be used by Southerners in the United States. The use of the word “y’all” would be a Southern dialect, while the word “southern” is the accent.

Simple enough, right? The world has many languages so it’s only reasonable that we have many accents. But did you ever stop to wonder why a German girl singing “I Will Always Love You” doesn’t sound any different (accent wise) from an american singing “I Will Always Love You”? In the video from the link above, Laura, a little girl from Germany, appears to have an American accent while she sings. However, this is not the case. If you had talented singers from around the world singing the same American song, and you were unable to visually see them, it would probably be quite hard, to nearly impossible to figure out which voice was from where. This is all because of phonetics, and how singing causes two main things to occur: a change in our vocal cord’s air pressure, and the pace of our delivery.

A person’s accent is lost by the slower paced delivery of the song, which causes one’s accent to turn neutral. Accents, for the most part, disappear when singing. David Crystal, a linguist from Northern Ireland, explains that our intonations and rhythm of speech are removed while singing. A song’s melody causes the rises and falls of our voice to disappear (intonations) while the beat of the music causes the systematic arrangement of speech to disappear (rhythm). Furthermore, songs have accented syllables (no pun intended) that require the singer to elongate vowel sounds. This same neutralizing effect happens with air pressure as well. A singer’s whole quality of sound is altered by the expanding of enlarged air passages.

Despite recognizing that accents don’t usually come through in songs, some people still argue that singers are getting rid of their accent on purpose. Discourse & Communication researcher Andy Gibson, from Auckaland University of Technology in New Zealand, disagreed. He explained that neutralizing the accent simply comes more natural than anything else. In a study he conducted, singers with accents when speaking weren’t even aware that any change was occurring in their voice, but there were very few cases where vowels they sung matched the vowels they spoke.

So why is it, then, that little Laura appears to have points in the song that sound less like an American accent? We can assume this is similar to Gibson’s study. While his participants had very few moments that their vowel sounds while singing matched up with their vowel sounds while speaking, they still had instances where their accent snuck through. In fact, it’s actually harder for a singer to attempt to retain their accent while singing, though some still do this anyways.

Thinking about all of this makes me wonder about how kids differ from adults once again. We established in class that kids make all of the sounds in speech, regardless of their native language, which enables them to learn languages more easily than adults. Does that make it easier for kids like Laura to have their accents disappear when singing, even if they can’t actually speak the other language? In my mind, kids would be better at imitating the musical notes; therefore, able to neutralize their voices more effectively. Perhaps, though, this would only occur for those kids who were musically inclined.

Is Your Brain Weird?

It is, according to this Buzzfeed article. The article is entitled “11 Memory Facts That Prove Your Brain Is Weird.” The article talks about weird memory phenomena, like false memories and context-dependent memories. Along with each fact is a description and a nifty GIF of a fuzzy animal or a movie quote. So that’s pretty cool. But even cooler, unlike many social media mentions of cognition, this article actually backs its assertions up with real cognitive research! I’ll take you through a few of the mentioned memory facts, summarizing their points, and then I’ll analyze their respective research articles.

First, the Buzzed article talks about that familiar sensation of walking into a room and totally forgetting why you had to go to that room. In this study by Gabriel Radvansky, participants were given tasks to complete in a virtual reality comprised of many rooms. Each room had two tables with an object on one table. They had to carry the object to the other table or into another room, but once holding it, they couldn’t see it any longer. They would be tested frequently on which object they were holding and which they had just put down. Participants performed much more poorly on memory tasks when they had just crossed through a door than when they had traveled the same distance but remained in the same room.

This study made me think of memory tasks where participants forget details of a story (the bus driver example) because their brain automatically makes the call about what information is important and what isn’t, without the person actually deciding, and doesn’t encode the irrelevant info into long term memory. Similarly, in this study, participants’ brains recognize the doorway as a marker of the end of an episode. The door serves as an event boundary, so the brain decides which information is no longer likely going to be relevant, and it is dropped from the working memory in preparation for new, more relevant information in the new room. This is an example of our brain jumping the gun and automating a process to save us time, attention, and effort. When it works to our advantage, it’s great, and we don’t notice it. When it doesn’t, however, we forget why we came into a room and get really frustrated!

RV-AB577_WEEKIN_DV_20110208191537 Another weird memory fact mentioned in the Buzzfeed article is that closing your eyes can help you remember more effectively. In a recall study, participants were shown a video and then reported on it (free or cued recall). They were tested a few minutes later and again a week later. Some participants had their eyes open during recall tests, and others had their eyes closed. The study found that eye-closure had no effect on recall in the first test, but increased accuracy on the second test by 37%. It even helped participants recall things they hadn’t reported the first time.

What is causing this phenomenon? My first inclination is to think it has something to do with attention. We learned in class that attention is a resource (why else do we say “pay” attention?). This resource is limited, and our brains can only consciously focus on so many things at once. Perhaps something about closing our eyes helps limit which stimuli are demanding our attention, and allows us to focus inwardly and more effectively recall previously encoded information. The study mentions also that eye-closure only helps us with “fine-grain visual details,” not overall big picture, or even auditory details. This indicates that the effectiveness of eye closing has to do with how we encode information. When the information we encode is very visual (the example in the study is “she elbowed him in the face”), closing our eyes allows us to relive the moment and re-visualize what occurred. This improves recall.

I found this article to be very interesting. Memory is complicated and messy, and that makes it always worth studying. I especially appreciated the references to how our brain automates complicated processes in order to make our experience more simple and streamlined. We’ve learned a lot about this trend in class, and seeing it at work in memory was interesting. In some ways, it departed from the usual social media science article, which tends to throw out crazy facts with vague research backing it up. The article provided direct links to cognitive research that supported its assertions. My only issue with the article was the way it approached some of the research findings. It seemed that the author was more focused on the “wow” factor of its studies than in actually imparting the main points of the research studies. In the eye-closing study, for example, many interesting findings were left out of the Buzzfeed summary in favor of the more simple, attractive finding. Overall, however, I liked this article.

Amazing Memories and the Potential Future of Memory Research.

Imagine being able to remember everything you have ever said or done. If you’re like me, I barely remember what I said two days ago let alone everything I’ve ever said. Though, I’m sure it would get rather annoying to our partners if that were the case. There are those rare individuals who have a gift (or curse) which is called “Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory” or HSAM for short. These individuals have the uncanny ability to remember more personal and emotional memories. Memories referred to as episodic memories.

Episodic memories are just that, memories that have personal meaning that are tied to emotion. The other type of memory is called semantic memory. Semantic memories are not tied to emotions, they’re just facts. So if I ask you, who was the first President of the United States? Or, what is the capital of the United Kingdom? There probably is not much if any emotional ties to these answer, yet you were able to remember them. This is your semantic memory. Don’t worry, there are semantic memory champions as well:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY6DznRX6L0[/youtube]

So, it seems as though you can’t have it both ways, but that you can at least practice really hard and become good at your semantic memory. But how does memory really work? There are two ways that we’ll talk about it, the first will be cognitive and the other will be more neuroscience.

Cognitive psychologist use the Modal Model of Memory, which follows a path from sensory input, to sensory memory, to working memory, and then into long-term memory (LTM). Working memory is sometimes referred to as “short-term memory” though that term is not used as much anymore. From working memory, it has three places to go, the memory can decay, it can move into long-term, or the individual has to keep the memory active through rehearsal. Working memory has a capacity though, it can hold 7 items (plus or minus 2) within. It also has a time limit which is roughly 30 seconds, though if you believe old Hollywood movies, it’s more like 5 minutes. Once the memory goes into LTM, cognitive psychology doesn’t go into how it is stored, just mainly into how it is retrieved. For this, we turn to a more neuroscience approach:

According to Neuroscientists, forming a LTM starts this chain of neurons connecting that otherwise don’t normally connect. The example used above is building a bridge between two areas that weren’t previously connected. So, let’s take the example of the rats, when the tone is played, they receive a shock. After the first time, neurons are being connected to tell the rat, this tone equals a shock. After it is done a few more times, the connection between the neurons is stronger (long-term potentiation) and the signal is able to travel quicker when recalled.

This is only at the cellular level and does not fully explain the entire purposes, but it goes far enough for our purposes in this post because there has been a study done recently that challenges this school of thought. Neuroscientists have recently found that memories may actually exists within the neurons themselves. The implications of this, if supported, has not only the potential of changing the way in which we think about memory, but it could mean hope for those suffering from illnesses like PTSD and Alzheimer’s.

For PTSD sufferers, this could potentially mean that we could do a “Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and zap the neurons and get rid of the memories in which the individuals are having the problems with. For Alzheimer’s, this could mean that their memories are truly lost and that they could, with further research, regain some of the previously thought lost memories. The research is really still new and definitely needs further testing to gain any sort of support and I remain skeptical as one critic suggested that the “results were observed in the first 48 hours after treatment, a time when consolidation is still sensitive.” Consolidation refers to the process in which working short-term memory becomes long-term memories.

As this is the last post that I’ll probably be making on this blog, I leave you with this scene of Eternal Sunshine of the spotless Mind:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ke2HjqVXfc[/youtube]

Study Tip: Spatial/Relational Studying

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always had a problem with flashcards. Teachers would tell me to make flashcards for vocabulary words, for example. I found that once I’d written the words on the card, and added their definitions, I could already remember which definitions matched which words. Since I could match the words and definitions accurately, studying the flashcards no longer felt necessary. The whole process felt redundant and unhelpful to me. But the problem was that just because I knew which word went with which definition, that didn’t mean I understood the term.

In class, we discussed maintenance rehearsal versus elaborative rehearsal. Maintenance rehearsal is rehearsing a piece of information enough to keep it active. In this rehearsal, it doesn’t ver really move into long-term memory. Elaborative rehearsal, however, is rehearsal that involves processing. It helps us move information into long-term memory. Learning isn’t just about repeated exposure (think of the penny or the Apple logo). Learning needs deeper levels of processing. This might involve imagery, meaning, or personal tie-ins. Learning that involves surface details or sound patterns just doesn’t stick as well. Research supports the textbook and the discussion we had in class. In a study by Craik and Tulving (1975), participants were asked to answer questions about words. Sometimes, the participants answered about the meaning of the word (deep). Other times, they answered about the sound/structure of the word (shallow). They were then asked to pick the original words out of a longer list. While the deep processing took longer, the subjects who semantically processed the words showed greater performance on the recall task.

My original study tip is developed from several sources: my personal study habits, our class discussion, the research, and a technique mentioned in class by a fellow student. In a discussion about the problems of flashcard usage and maintenance rehearsal, this student mentioned how one could create flashcards using class notes etc., but then instead of engaging in repetitive and rote memorization with those cards, attempt to categorize them instead. I felt that this would be a much more meaningful way to interact with the material. As I thought about this suggestion, and pondered my own study habits, I came up with my suggested study tip: Flowcharts

You’ll need a whiteboard (a gallon plastic bag around a white sheet of paper works, but the bigger the board the better. In the ITCC, there are tons of big white boards free for our use!), dry erase markers, and small cards/sticky notes. First, write out important pieces of information on the cards. These bits of info can be definitions, theories, categories, relationships, tasks, people, ideas, studies, aspects of studies, etc. For example, if you have notes on a scientist who did two studies, each of which had two main findings, write out a card for the scientist, each study’s basic details, and details on each of the findings. When you’re done with the information for the chapter, shuffle your cards. Next is the fun part.

diagram-empty-2 Now, you want to take your cards and start sorting them into a flow chart! You can stick them up on the board, and use the markers to draw connecting lines and arrows. The most important part here is to emphasize relationships. Thinking about how your concepts interact is important for making them stick in your long-term memory. It’s much more effective than just memorizing!

flowchart Practice putting your cards in a linear/chronological flow and drawing arrows between steps. Show what came first conceptually, and influenced later steps. Then try a hierarchical structure. What are the overarching themes and categories, and the subcategories and details? How do they relate to each other? Don’t be afraid to draw tons of arrows! The more times you engage with the pieces of information in different ways, the more comfortable you’ll be with them.

Good luck studying!

Talking About Thinking

A group blog by Cognitive Psychology students