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Operant Conditioning explains the concept of how humans form associations with the environment through the relationship of behavior’s and resulting events. Within this lecture, we learned about the two types of reinforcement, positive and negative. Reinforcement explains how a behavior increases as a result of a removed or added stimulus.  Negative reinforcement specifically describes a situation in which a behavior is increased as a result of removing a negative stimulus. It is most often going to incorporate an aversive stimulus. Negative reinforcement is often confused with negative punishment. Despite the removal of a stimulus in each situation, negative reinforcement works to increase a behavior whereas negative punishment works to decrease a certain behavior.  An example of negative reinforcement would be putting on an oven mitt to prevent burning your hand.

An example of negative reinforcement that happens in my life is having to turn off my alarm in the mornings to stop the loud sound from repeating. In this situation, the behavior would be forcing myself to get up and hit the stop button on my alarm, and the aversive stimulus would be the removal of the loud alarm sound. I continue the same routine everyday to stop the sound of the alarm from repeating itself constantly. I am increasing a specific behavior in order to remove the negative stimulus.We experience so many examples of negative reinforcement during our lives that we do not tend to pick up on. An action as small as turning off an alarm clock is basic example of negative reinforcement. I am taking away something negative in order to increase a certain response. The likelihood of this behavior occurring again in the future is very high, as I continue to remove the stimulus.

 

 

The way our brains remember and organize information is a pretty complex process and there are several factors in how we remember, and even how we forget. One example of forgetting is interference. Interference can be proactive, meaning information learned in the past interferes with information learned in the future, or retroactive, meaning information learned in the future interferes with information learned in the past. The image below helps explain the difference between these processes.

From: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Proactive-and-Retroactive-Interference-adapted-from-Passer-Smith-2011-273_fig13_297577879

In proactive interference, the student has previously learned Spanish and is currently attempting to learn French. Their past of learning Spanish is making it harder for them to recall the French words that they’re trying to memorize and understand. But, in retroactive interference, since the student is currently learning French, it makes it harder for them to recall information in the past, which is their knowledge of Spanish.

I have noticed an example of interference in my life when I was in middle school and high school. Throughout middle school and high school, I danced and each spring we would have a recital. After this lesson on interference, I realized that throughout this time period, I was experiencing proactive interference. While learning new dances, I remember I would sometimes mess up the choreography by using moves that I previously learned in a dance a or two year prior. This was an ongoing cycle throughout my dance career. This shows how the past information (the old dance moves) were affecting my ability to remember the present information (the new dance moves).

While I was researching these topics online, I came across a clever, and pretty funny, example of retroactive inference. One article stated that when you call your new boyfriend or girlfriend by your ex boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s name, you are experiencing a retroactive interference. This shows how information that is currently being learned (new boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s name) is interrupted by information from the past (the old boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s name).

 

Sources:

“Proactive and Retroactive Interference: Psychology.” tutor2u,

https://www.tutor2u.net/psychology/reference/proactive-and-retroactive-interference.

 

I decided to write my blog post about the topics discussed in lecture six involving Sensation and Adaptation. One of the concepts that really jumped out at me was the in depth explanation of attention. Attention in psychological terms, is the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a certain stimulus while trying to ignore the other perceivable stimuli. Attention is an extremely powerful force and it must understood that our environment contains too much information for someone’s brain to fully interpret all at once. We as humans try to take advantage of that and have developed our own ways of multitasking. Instead of focusing our attention on one thing, we choose to try and focus on multiple things at once. When people are busy doing something else, they often ignore the other significant things around them, and I have experienced something like this in my life.

A time that I can recall experiencing the effects of Attention occurred at my sleep away camp a few years ago. I was in deep conversation with my counselor, at the time while the activity instructor told me to come into the other room. There were two rooms connected to each other however they were separated by wooden barrier and to get to the other side you had to go through the door. I decided to multitask by walking backwards to find the door while still being able to talk to my counselor. I though I would find the door easily and successfully multitask however that was not the case. The door happened to be closed, so it was up to me to open it however since I was too busy talking I ended up walking straight into the door. I genuinely thought I would be able to perform these two actions at once, however my attempt was unsuccessful. All I ended up doing was hurting myself.

Attention is necessary to detect all of the stimulus changes around us.  We need to be more aware of what goes on around us and understand that Multitasking harms our attention span. When people are multitasking, it is more likely for them to make mistakes or perform their actions more slowly. I can prove this through my experience because while I was attempting to do two things at once I made a mistake and ended up hurting myself.