Memory is a constructive process that is unique to each person and their memory. What most people don’t know is that as humans, we filter or fill in missing pieces of information to make our recall of memories more coherent. This leads to a few issues because it makes our memories not completely correct even when we think they are. The misinformation effect is when we incorporate misleading information into one’s memory of an event. Another thing that affects false memories is source amnesia. This is when a person attributes an event to the wrong source. This could be something we experienced, heard, read or imagined. An example of this is when you ask someone where they were at the time of 9/11. In a study, everyone that participated reported they were somewhere else than the actual place they were during 9/11. This relates to the misinformation effect. By having these false filled in bits of information, this makes it very difficult for someone to be sure if a memory is true or false. Scientists believe that most memories must be true. A study on this was done by Hyman and Billings in 1998. They conducted this in three phases. During the first phase, they obtained memories from the subjects’ childhoods. Then, they asked the subjects if they remembered five events. Four of the events had occurred while the last one didn’t occur. Three days later, they would conduct phase three. Phase three was when the researchers would ask the participants again if they remembered the five events. The results were that the students remembered the event that never happened. Although I have never been through this entire research study, my friends played a joke on me a few years ago. One night, my friend Sofia asked me if I remembered a girl named Kelly. I said I didn’t, she then proceeded to explain a little bit about who Kelly was. She said she moved away while we were still in elementary school. The next day, Sofia asked me if I remembered a girl that we went to elementary school with named Kelly. I then responded saying I did in fact remember Kelly. Sofia burst out laughing, exclaiming that Kelly wasn’t real. She said that she made her up to see if I would go along with it.
Month: October 2019
Blog Post 2: Schemas
Schemas are essential for a person’s cognitive development and plays a major role in children, as they are developing through childhood, and plays a large role in adults. The idea of schemas stems from Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget who studied how development of the mind occurs in stages as children experience different schemas. Schemas are aspects of the world. These aspects of the world are learned and developed by children and adults through experience. As children and adults learn new things every day from the environment, experiences are developed, which leads to the development of different schemas. There are schemas for everything we experience in the world. For example, according the picture below, social schemas include not eating garlic when on a date. Many people share the common respect of not eating garlic when going on a date because garlic smells and can create an awkward situation when intimacy occurs. Because many people have experienced the smell of garlic or have experienced being on a date when they or their partner has eaten garlic, that experience develops into schema of avoiding garlic before a date.
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As experiences continually occur, new schemas are developed and can modify or change old schemas. For example, growing up, my neighbor owned a Maltese puppy with whom I played with every day. This puppy had soft and white fur which I was obsessed with. Every time I held this puppy, I would embrace it and cherish its warm, fluffy fur. The puppy made me feel safe and secure because of how friendly and cute it was. However, one day when I was playing with the puppy, it became agitated and bit my leg. I was shocked that it bit me and began crying in pain; my parents rushed me to the doctor to make sure that I was safe. That moment changed my perception of my neighbor’s puppy and I no longer felt comfortable being around the puppy or any puppy that was of the same breed. This experience is a great example of how new experiences can change our schemas. Before the puppy bit me, my schema of Maltese puppies was that they were friendly, adorable, and gentle animals because of how positive my experience was with the puppy. However, my schema of Maltese puppies changed after experiencing a traumatic event at a young age. Suddenly, my schema of Maltese puppies was that they were dangerous and were not as cute and friendly as they appeared to be. My initial experience with the Maltese puppy and my new experience with the Maltese puppy caused my initial schema to be replaced with a newer schema. Schemas are created through experience and can change depending on the experience one has had.
Perceptual Illusions in New York City
by Tiara Paul
While sensations reflect the raw nature of stimuli we pick up from our surroundings, perception is defined as our final experience we build of the world. Perception goes hand in hand with cognition; the way our brains process information, drawing from preexisting knowledge and identifying connections, is what impacts our interpretation of this “raw” data from our human senses. The picture below illustrates how we interpret simple sensations into more meaningful perceptions. In Chapter 4, the Gestalt principles describe how the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. For instance, we see a variety of cues (jumble of colors) but perceive with meaning (face of a friend).
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SErqVGcAR0
Illusions can be used to study perception. Cognitive illusions make us do a double take because they indicate how our expectations influence our perceptions. Typically, our perceptions help us perceive the world, but illusions fool us by tricking our natural perceptions, making us see things that do not exist or that are incorrect.
One example is the Ames room. I went to the Museum of Illusions in New York City this past summer and took a picture in the Ames room, but it was not until Psych 100 that I understood the concept! The Ames room is an illusion whereby the room is not what we typically consider a room. It is not a rectangular cuboidal volume. Rather, the floor, ceiling, and side walls are trapezoidal in shape. Opposite walls are not parallel and adjacent walls are not perpendicular at right angles. Rather, the walls are slanted outward. The floor is not level. Rather, it is on an incline where the far left corner is lower. These features show how our natural perceptions deviate from reality. The illustration below displays the true shape of the room: an irregular quadrilateral. We perceive two figures to be standing next to each other, but in reality, one is in a farther corner of the room, resulting in a flawed perception of both size and depth. Typically, the monocular depth cue of relative size tells us that smaller objects are perceived farther away. However, the Ames Room illusion prevents us from noticing this reality.
Source: http://editorial-ink.us/ames-room.asp
The consequence of the Ames Room is that if people who are the same size stand near each other at the far corners of the room, it appears that one is extremely tiny and one is very large. In the picture below, I am standing on the far right with my friend; we are both 5’3”. On the left, the two boys are 6 feet tall, but in the Ames Room, they appear to be considerably shorter than us.
Additionally, it is worth noting that in a video of the Ames Room, our idea of perceptual constancy is challenged. In this phenomenon, we perceive a stimulus as constant despite changes in sensation. Typically, with perceptual constancy, our percept is the same even though the sensations an object creates on our receptors is changing. The Ames room challenges this.
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCV2Ba5wrcs
For this blog post, I purposely explained the room first before showing the picture in order to reverse the normal order in which we witness illusions. Perhaps by first learning the “trick,” you were able to view the picture accurately instead of being fooled by your perceptions. In a slightly different way, relating to memories, this reflects bias. Bias is one of Daniel Schacter’s 7 Sins of Memory, whereby we align memories to our current beliefs, an example of distortion.
In these ways, illusions allow us to understand how perceptions, our final experience as a result of processing raw sensations, works because they show how our expectations influence what we perceive.
Proactive Interference Ashley Niland
Proactive Interference
Interference is one of the many explanations when it comes to forgetting memories. Interference is a situation in human memory where the learning information has an interaction between new memories and past memories. There are two kinds of interference in psychology. Retroactive Interference is when newer information makes it harder to recall older information. An example of this would be when you’re learning to dance with multiple moves, you are only able to remember the move you just learned, and not all the ones you learned before it. The other kind of interference is Proactive Interference. Proactive interference is when information you learned a while ago, interferes with your ability to remember new information.
A time I experienced Proactive Interference is when we moved houses to a different district when I was about 9. I lived in the first house since I was born and became so skilled with remembering the address. I remember filling out a “Homework Buddy” sheet incase you were sick that day and didn’t come to school, your homework buddy would either call you and tell you what you missed, or drop your missed work off at your house. When filling out the sheet for my homework buddy, it asked for your address and a phone number. As soon as I got the sheet, I finished the 2 questions very quickly with no hesitation. Until, my new teacher came over and told me I wrote my old address. I practiced the new one with my mom so many times, but no matter how much I tried, I would still incorporate some form of my old addresses into my new one. Whether it was the zip code, 2 out of the 4 numbers or sadly, even the street name, I could not seem to remember the new address because I was so used to the old address.
This shows Proactive Interference because my old address information kept interfering with my ability to remember my new address information. The inforamtion I learned earlier made it harder for me to learn newer information of similarity. Because the older memory of my first address had been rehearsed and heard multiple times for many years, it was stored strongly in my long term memory.
Sources:
Cherry, Kendra. “What Is Interference in Psychology?” Verywell Mind,
Verywell Mind, 6 Aug. 2019, www.verywellmind.com/interference-
definition-4587808.
Praveen Shrestha, “Proactive and Retroactive Interference,” in
Psychestudy, November 17, 2017.
Blog Post #2: Memory Construction
Memory is a constructive process in which we filter out and fill in missing pieces of information to make our recall more coherent. Something called the Misinformation Effect is when people incorporate misleading information into their memory of an event. By creating these false memories, we begin to imagine them and they seem like they truly happened. I have experienced this many times in my life, especially when discussing past events with friends or family.
It is so easy to quickly fill in the blanks of old stories and memories. If something sounds like it could have happened, your brain makes you believe it did and you have constructed your memory. We do not realize how easy it is to just create new memories. We are very capable creatures and while we are capable of creating these memories, they are usually not very accurate.
Just the other day, my friends and I were all recalling our experiences from different concerts we had been to. In 2016 I attended the Meadows Music and Arts Festival where I saw rappers such as Kanye West and Chance the Rapper perform. I recall this experience all the time when I tell people I went to this concert. I remember the smell of pizza and beer as I walked through the music festival, the bright colors and crazy outfits people wore and I remember seeing Kanye West run onto the stage as fireworks exploded throughout the sky above Citi Field. While I obviously do have a general memory of the concert and recall a decent amount of the details, I don’t truly remember all the bits and pieces of that day. Sometimes I find myself adding or taking out details of my experience from this concert because I do not exactly remember everything that happened that weekend (considering it was 3 years ago).
I do remember seeing the performances and the feelings of excitement and happiness I felt while watching them, but my brain has embellished this experience with every storytelling I have given to my friends in the past. I find myself adding new details to my stories sometimes and at other times taking out details. On the website Psychology Discussion they discussed memory construction by stating “Not only can memories be distorted; they can also be constructed. In other words, people can recall events that did not actually occur, or experiences they never really had.” Not only do people embellish stories, but sometimes they end up completely making up their memories. This idea means people are literally remembering things that didn’t happen. The mind is a beautiful and crazy thing!