Author: gfk5118

How we behave and what we think is based on what we learned. Learning is essential for our lives, and without the ability to learn, life would be effectless and meaningless. Conditioning, the ability to change one’s behavior depends on the environment, is one type of learning, and classical conditioning is one of the types of conditioning. Classical conditioning is learning that occurs when a neutral stimulus becomes associated with the unconditioned stimulus that causes a natural response. This condition has demonstrated by Pavlov’s experiment. In this experiment, the experimenter fed the dog after ringing the bell. After a few days, the dog drooled when he heard the bell ringing. The dog made an association between the bell ringing and food and caused him to salivate. The sound of the bell was a neutral stimulus and became a conditioned stimulus.

The classical conditioning has characteristics of acquisition, extinction, generalization, and discrimination. The neutral stimulus (NS) must be associated with an unconditioned stimulus (US), and the NS must come before the US. The conditioned response is not always permanent. It diminishes as the US does not follow the CS, but it could reappear after a break, which is called spontaneous recovery. When an organism learns something by classical conditioning, a similar stimulus can cause a similar response. On the other hand, the conditioned organism can distinguish between a conditioned stimulus and other stimuli.

My sister hates to go to the hospital because of the disinfectant smell at the hospital. When she was a baby, she did not like to go to the hospital because of the injection, and this caused her to dislike the smell of disinfectant at the hospital. When she went to the hospital to get a shot, she smelled the distinctive odor, and she made an associated between the smell and getting a shot. In this case, getting a shot is the unconditioned stimulus and the unconditioned response is rejection to the hospital. Then the neutral stimulus, the smell of the disinfectant, became conditioned stimulus, and the rejection of the hospital became the conditioned response.

Our brain actively encodes, stores, and retrieves a lot of information throughout our lives. The memory is the repetition of learning through this process. It has three stages: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. The sensory memory is the brief storage of the sensory information, and the short-term memory holds few items that last longer than the sensory memory. The short-term memory becomes the long-term memory through elaborative rehearsal, which is making the information meaningful by making connections with prior knowledge or personal experience. These encoded and stored information are not always accurate. The memory is a constructive process, so we tend to fill or alternate the missing pieces of information to make it more understandable. Also, it can be modified by post-event information. Therefore, what we believe to be true in memory might be wrong. There was a case of a man who lived in prison for 17 years because of the misinformation of the brain.

In November 2001, Royal Clark Jr., who was 24 years old at that time, got convicted of an armed robbery at the Burger King in Terrytown, Louisiana. The fingerprints from the scene were unusable for DNA testing, and the only evidence was the witness by a 19 years old boy who was sure that Clark was the robber. With that one eyewitness, Clark was found guilty and sentenced to 49 and a half years. Then 17 years later, the Innocence Project New Orleans took his case and reinvestigated. They reanalyze the fingerprint that was unusable back in the day, and it matched to Jessie Perry, who has the history of several armed robberies in the same area. Clark was proven his innocence and released from prison. This case clearly shows the jeopardy of the misinformation of the eyewitnesses. Nancy Franklin, a psychology professor at Stony Brook University who is a specialist in memory, explains that the “mugshot exposure phenomenon” causes false eyewitness testimony. She said that eyewitnesses often think they recognize them from the crime scene, but in fact, they got familiarized with their faces from the mugshot. This case best illustrates the effect of the misinformation of the brain. 

This does not mean that all of our memories are untrue, but we should be aware that there are some alternated memories. 

 

Reference:

“How Faulty Eyewitness Testimony Can Lead to Wrongful Convictions.” CBS News, CBS Interactive, 9 Sept. 2019, www.cbsnews.com/news/faulty-eyewitness-testimony-can-lead-to-wrongful-convictions/.