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Memory Construction and Traumatic Events

Memory construction can be broken up into three stages: sensory, short term, long term. Sensory memory is the immediate recording of information that disappears quickly. Some sensory information will be kept in short term memory, which holds a few items for a short time. Lastly, some of the short term memory can be transferred into long term memory which is relatively permanent. The process of turning sensory and short term memory into long term memory is one that can be effected by many outside factors. For example, maintenance rehearsal is the process of repeating information to keep in working memory, increasing the chance of it going into long term memory. Visual imagery is another powerful aid to effortful processing. This is because visuals allow a person to create mental pictures. When a long term memory is achieved, it’s either procedural (implicit) or declarative (explicit). I will be focusing on the explicit memories, which include semantic and episodic. Semantic is general facts with no timeline, while episodic involves things that happen to you with a timeframe.

Image result for explicit memories

I recall a vivid reoccurring nightmare I would have as a kid in which I would fall into an endless dark pit after falling over the railing of the upstairs level in my house. This would always wake me up in a panic and sometimes off my bed. I would have this nightmare probably 2-3 times a week, which activates maintenance rehearsal. This is one of the reasons why I feel I can remember the vivid details of this nightmare. Another reason I can remember it so well is the fact that I have a mental image of the nightmare in my head. As this memory has been established as long term, it’s an explicit episodic memory. It’s explicit because I have to think about it to remember it and episodic because I have to travel back in time to recreate this memory. While I feel like I remember each and every detail of this nightmare, I know I’m a victim of the misinformation effect. This effect is caused by filling in missing pieces of information to make our recall more coherent.

There was another instance when I was just two years old where I experienced trauma and have a vivid memory of the situation. I remember I was standing on the edge of the open door of the non-moving mini van when I fell and hit my head on rocks, cracking my head open. I remember the action of falling down, followed by my cousin racing outside after he heard my screams. While I feel like I remember the exact situation, I know I’m experiencing infantile amnesia. Infantile amnesia occurs because until a baby turn around three and a half years old, they don’t have a conscious memory. However, I believe I have some recollection of the memory because it was trauma that caused it, therefore it has a special allocation in my brain.

Memory construction is a process that can be easily manipulated. Through techniques like maintenance rehearsal, or through acts of trauma, short term memory thoughts can be turned into long term which last relatively permanent.

 

 

Types of Memory

Memory Construction

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.

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.  

(www.verywellmind.com)

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!

http://www.psychologydiscussion.net/memory/memory-distortion-and-memory-construction-psychology/13582

 

Behaviorism and Being a Camp Counselor

Behaviorism, a theory constructed by John B. Watson, is concentrated on observable behavior. Watson’s theory is built around the idea that behaviors of an individual are shaped by experiences and interactions with stimuli. His theory also states that behaviors are learned from the surrounding enviroment, in which can shape or alter one’s behavior. Instead of trying to measure an individual’s internal mental state, which can be very difficult, Watson believed in analyzing one’s observable behavior. By studying these observable behaviors, Watson found that one’s behaviors are structured to be studided, taught, or even altered. Anyone from any walks of life can have their behaviors taught, no matter where you are from or how you were brought up throughout your life. There are two main types of conditioning for behaviorism, classical and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning refers to unprevoked responses your brain learns that result from experiences that occur before a response. This happens when you learn to associate two different stimuli, and no behavior is involved. On the other hand, operant conditioning refers to changes to one’s behavior as a result of experiences that occur after a response. This learned behavior is followed by either reinforcement or punishment.

This past summer, i had the opportunity to work as a camp counselor at a sleep away summer camp. While working with the youngest age group (ages 6-8) i found that operant conditioning works best while shaping the children’s behavior. After realizing that the cabin we lived in was an absolute mess, I tried again and again to have my campers clean up their areas each morning so the cabin would be clean again. However, i realized that cleanliness wasn’t a priority for children this young. Giving punsihments to these kids didn’t seem like a good idea, so i decided to positively reinforce good behavior by giving the kids extra time to play games at night, as long as they cleaned up their areas without being asked more than twice. After a few days of using this new system of reinforcement, the kids would clean up during the allotted time, and earn extra game time later that day.

The Camera and the Eye

The 5 senses allow humans to gather data about the world we live in. This data makes up our perception, and it dictates how we think and make decisions. The 5 senses include taste, smell, feel, sight, and hearing. Humans rely heavily on their sense of sight. Two hobbies of mine include astronomy and photography and the similarities between the eye and a camera are fascinating. There are also some interesting things I have learned about how the eye works in low light through astronomy that apply to what we have learned.

Our eyes pick up light on the visible spectrum. As light enters the eye it first passes through the cornea which is a clear covering that helps protect our eye and focus the incoming light. It then goes through the pupil which is a hole that can change size depending on how much light is present. The iris is the muscle that dictates how large the pupil is. After the light goes through the pupil it then passes through the lens. The lens focuses the light and it finally reaches the retina. The retina is filled with special neurons and cells that specialize in detecting light. Together these neurons and cells make up the optic nerve which ultimately sends information to the brain telling it what we see. 

In many ways (but not all), this is how a camera works. Photography is all about how to get the proper amount of light to focus on what we want it to. In a camera, the light passes through the lens. The photographer can change how large or small the iris of the lens is. This is referred to as aperture. After passing through the lens it hits the sensor. In digital cameras, the sensor takes the light and converts it into bits of data and ultimately into an image that we can see.

The eye is similar to a wide angle lens with a small focal ratio. The eye can see a relatively large area; however, only a small portion of what we can see is in focus. The function of the retina is also very similar to an image sensor. 

The human eye works slightly different when there is plenty of light verses when there is little light. As I mentioned before, the retina contains optic nerves. These are composed of cells called rods and cones. Cones are the cells that detect detail and color; however, they work best when there is plenty of light. Cones are concentrated in the center of the retina. Rods on the other hand are not as good at detecting detail and color, but they are more sensitive to light. Rods are more evenly spaced out throughout the retina and most highly concentrated slightly off the center of the eye. 

Rods come in handy when observing the stars. Some objects are extremely faint, and when you try to look directly at them they seem to disappear. When you look just to the side of the object though, you can make out the object in your peripheral vision. This is because your rods are more concentrated in this part of your eye and are better at detecting light. This method is called “averted vision”. 

Vision is incredibly important to the way we perceive the world. The way our eyes take in light is fascinating and valuable to understand in order to make sure we can appropriately analyze our surroundings.

Sources:

Course Textbook – Chapter 4: Sensation, Perception & Vision https://askabiologist.asu.edu/rods-and-cones https://vspblog.com/camera-vs-the-human-eye/.

 

Fight or Flight Response

The response of fight or flight amazes me. By definition it is “the physiological reaction that occurs in the presence of something distressing: mentally or physically. This is handled by the sympathetic nervous system.

One man named Tom Boyle once came across a boy and his bike crumpled under a car’s bumper. Boyle recalled being able to hear the adolescent screaming underneath the car. Suddenly Boyle bent down, grabbed the underside of the vehicle, and lifted with all his strength. The car rose a few inches but the boy was still trapped. Boyle lifted with some more vigor and finally the boy was able to wriggle free. What Tom Boyle did not realize is that he demonstrated an outrageous feat of strength. There is a world recording for deadlifting heavy weight, and that weight is 1,003 pounds. The car (Camaro) that Boyle lifted is 3,000 pounds. What Tom displayed is something called hysterical strength.  This is a display of extreme strength by humans in life or death situations. It is brought on by increased adrenaline production. This relates to fight or flight because that response requires adrenaline as well. Fight or flight can account for super strength, heightened sensual abilities, and more. While I haven’t experienced such an extreme response myself, I find it astounding that the body has an automatic mechanism that packs so much power.

My Experience Participating in a Survey

During summer session II at Penn State, I took an effective speech course that required me to participate in a research study for credit. The study I opted to participate in, was an online survey based on how students at Penn State take care of themselves when they become sick. The researchers conducting the study gathered data of my knowledge of antibiotics, and asked me when I believe it is necessary to use them. In our psychology class, we discussed surveys and how they are a common method in descriptive research. Descriptive research is a type of data collection that focuses on characteristics of a population and what is going on within the population.  A survey is a technique for ascertaining the self-reported attitudes, opinions, or behaviors of people. Researchers conducting a survey should be aware of the representative sample they are trying to reach. The representative sample is a key factor in conducting a successful study, as the results will only be accurate if the information is gathered from the group in which the study is targeted at. In the survey I participated in, the researchers were looking for information from a very wide representative sample, they wanted to collect as much information from as many Penn State students as possible. This eliminates the possible problem of  being unable to reach the representative group that they were interested in from arising, because the online survey could only be accessed by Penn State students. This is also an example of random sampling, which gives each member of a population, in this case the Penn State community, an equal chance of being selected for this study. The survey first started by asking me questions such as: how often I become ill, what medications I take when illness occurs, if I visit a medical professional right away, and if I ask their doctor for an antibiotic immediately. Then, I was instructed to watch a video about antibiotics that showed how and when to use them appropriately. The video also showed how they can be harmful if I use them when it is not necessary. After the video, I was presented with more questions based on the video, to test my knowledge based off of the information they presented to me. I was then asked questions that were very similar to the ones I was asked before I watched the video, that regarded my personal preferences about if and when I think I should take antibiotics to cure different types of infections. The survey did not use words that would be difficult for students to understand, and was based on a topic that every student is familiar with and has some previous knowledge on. In a survey, it is common for the wording of questions in a survey to lead the representatives to answer a question in a certain way. This survey worded questions in a very straight-foward manner and allowed for students to answer openly and honestly. This study was not trying to sway their participants in a certain direction, but rather collect their knowledge about antibiotics, and educate them. Also, in case any students were unfamiliar with how antibiotics worked, they provided information in the video and even included information that students may not have previously known.