My dad has had a job in the city since my brother and I were little, so he takes the train to work everyday and needs change to pay the meter to park his car at the train station. He would arrive home from work at about 5:30pm everyday, and there is a bell on the mudroom door that rings when it’s swung open, so when my brother and I were little, we would hear the bell and know dad was home. At one point, my dad began giving us the change left in his pocket from the parking meter for us to put in our piggy banks. We loved getting change for our piggy banks because that meant that we would eventually be able to take it to the bank and put it in a machine that would spit out cash. Soon enough, every time my brother and I heard the bell from the door swinging open, we equated that to dad giving us change for our piggy banks. We would run out to the kitchen were he came in from the mudroom to collect our change, even if it wasn’t actually dad or he didn’t have change. This is an example of classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is a phenomenon that occurs when two stimuli are repeatedly paired and the response elected by the second stimulus is eventually elicited by the first stimulus alone. The ring of the bell by the door swinging caused my brother and I to run into the kitchen thinking we were getting change for our piggy banks, no matter if that was actually the case or not. The idea of classical conditioning was mostly developed by Ivan Pavlov, who did experiments on the physiology of digestion in dogs. Dogs would salivate simply from seeing the technician who typically fed them, rather than just from food itself. Just like the dogs in Pavlov’s experiment, my brother and I would get excited at the sound of the bell ringing, rather than just the change we would receive for our piggy banks, indicating classical conditioning.
Author: ews5435
Charlie’s World
This past summer I began babysitting a family of three, with a three-year-old girl, a one-year-old boy, and a newborn little girl. I had babysat many children before, but never kids of such young ages, so at first it was very interesting to watch how the smaller children behaved. I was especially intrigued by the one-year-old boy, named Charlie. He was learning and developing so much every day, and it was fascinating to see him try to learn how to walk, talk, and interact with his siblings. He was so curious of the world around him and would crawl all around the house looking for anything fun he could get his hands on or put in his mouth. His favorite thing to do was open the kitchen cabinet with all of the Tupperware containers and take them out and stack them or put them on his head. At the same time, I would try to teach him words by saying them and having him repeat them, but he could only say simple words like “hot” or “mama”. If I would say other words that he didn’t know, he could make the sounds of the words but not say them clearly. Charlie was in the sensorimotor stage of his development, where he was experiencing the world through senses and actions. He wanted to look, touch, grasp, and mouth everything he saw in order to take all of the new information he was experiencing in and interpret it. The sensorimotor stage extends from birth to about two years of age. Charlie was one when I was babysitting him, so he was right in the midst of the sensorimotor stage where everything he saw he had to touch. Charlie used trial and error to gain an understanding of the world. Even during the short time I was babysitting him during the summer, I saw him develop and grow in so many different ways. I gained a new understanding of how children develop and learn about the world around them, and even had so much fun watching how Charlie and his siblings reacted to new experiences
A Palm Reader’s Perception
This past summer, my friends and I decided one night while we were at the beach that we would go get our palms read on the boardwalk. I had always been curious every time I walked by a palm reader in the past, and now that my friends had agreed it would be a fun thing to do, I was genuinely excited to do it. Once my friends and I arrived at the palm reader, I immediately sat down and was told to give my name and age. After doing so, the palm reader began diving into the future of my life, and I completely believed it. The first thing she told me was that I would go into the medical field. This made me perk up since I’ve wanted to be a doctor since I was a little girl. As the palm reader went on, more things began sounding exactly like how I’ve always wanted my life to look in the future. By the end of the session, I was convinced that this palm reader had actually seen into my future and given me a glimpse of what’s to come. It wasn’t until I went home and told my parents what the palm reader had said, that I realized that she was just feeding off of my reactions, personality, looks, and mannerisms to come up with things to say that would most likely align with how she perceived me. The palm reader was using perceptionto come up with the best interpretation of how my life would end up. The American Psychological Organization defines perception as, “the process or result of becoming aware of objects, relationships, and events by means of the senses, which includes such activities as recognizing, observing, and discriminating. These activities enable organisms to organize and interpret the stimuli received into meaningful knowledge and to act in a coordinated manner” (American Psychological Organization, 2018).In my case, the palm reader wasn’t reading my palm, she was reading me, my reactions, my aura, and all of the stimuli she could to predict my future. Humans use perception all the time. Sometimes our perceptions are correct, and sometimes not. However, every time we make a perception, we are using information processing to come to some conclusion. There are two types of processing that can used, bottom-up processing or top-down processing. Bottom-up processing begins with sensory information and works up to how the brain takes that information in. Top-down processing begins with knowledge or expectations and works down to interpret something we see. The palm reader reading me was using bottom-up processing to predict my future based off of the stimuli her brain was taking in. Psychology truly is all around us because our brains are working, interpreting, and processing all of the time. The future my palm reader predicted may not be accurate, but at least the experience gave me a better understanding of how humans use perception every day.
Sources
APA Dictionary of Psychology. (2018). Retrieved from https://dictionary.apa.org/perception
Resnick, B. (2019, August 8). How desire can warp our view of the world. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/8/8/20706126/motivated-perception-psychology