Tag: psychology

Classical Conditioning

The definition of classical conditioning given in class is a type of learning in which an organism learns to associate stimuli; an automatic response to a stimulus. An example of this is thunder and lightning. We know that when we see lightning, we wince or get anxious because of the loud sound of thunder that follows immediately after we see this flash of light from the sky. This is because we learn by association, which allows our minds to connect events that occur in a sequence. Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist primarily known for his work with classical conditioning. He conditioned dogs to salivate when hearing a bell. How? Well, Pavlov knew that dogs would naturally salivate when presented with dog food. Therefore, every time he would present a dog some food, he would ring a bell first, then give the dog food. After he practiced this experiment many times, every time he rang a bell the dog salivate, even when Pavlov did not have food for the dog.

Pavlov used four characteristics of classical conditioning for this experiment: Unconditioned stimulus (US), which naturally elicits a response, Unconditioned response (UR) which is a naturally occurring response, Conditioned stimulus (CS) which is an originally irrelevant stimulus, association with US that triggers CR, and Conditioned response (CR), which is a learned response. In this case, conditioning food (US) produces salivation (UR). The tone of the bell (neutral stimulus) does not. During conditioning, a neutral stimulus (bell) and the US (food) are paired resulting in salivation (UR). After conditioning neutral stimulus (now CS) elicits salivation (CR). 

There are other characteristics of classical conditioning such as acquisition, extinction, spontaneous recovery, generalization, and discrimination which can occur over time with this type of conditioning. Acquisition associates a neutral stimulus with the US. The neutral stimulus must come before an unconditioned stimulus. Extinction diminishes a conditioned response when the US no longer follows CS which will eventually lead the subject to quit responding. Spontaneous Recovery is the reappearance of an extinguished response after a break but will most likely become extinct again. Generalization is the tendency for similar stimuli to elicit similar responses. Pavlov conditioned salivation (CR) by using vibrations on high. Therefore, the dog responded strongest to high stimulation, but also to stimulation near high. And finally, discrimination is the ability to distinguish between a conditioned stimulus and other stimuli such as bells with different tones: one bell gets a response, one does not. 

A personal experience I’ve had involving classical conditioning would be when I had to babysit my 2-year-old nephew for a week. Every time I would wake him up from his mid-morning nap, he would cry. One morning before I woke up him up, I decided to make a pot of coffee which would sound off a quick “ping” when the coffee was ready. After one week of brewing coffee before waking him up, I would hear him cry immediately after the “ping” sounded, even though I did not physically wake him up yet. In this situation, the unconditioned stimulus would be me waking my nephew up from his nap and the unconditioned response would be him crying. After associating the sound of a ready coffee pot to me waking him up immediately after, the “ping”, conditioned stimulus, would make him cry, which is the conditioned response even though I did not physically wake him up.

Selective Attention

Selective Attention is the process of putting more energy into processing what’s important and funneling out what some one finds not important.  We are able to bring information into our Short-term memory through selective attention.  Selective attention can happen with us purposefully doing it and it can happen unintentionally as well. If you’re in a loud class room and you are trying to hear the professor talk, you are going to use selective attention to only listen to the professor.  Unintentionally may be a scenario like this: your walking down the street with your friend while they are telling you a story, you see a car coming and so you stop at the cross walk but you didn’t hear anything your friend said.  Your attention was on the car because you found it more important to not get hit by a car rather than to hear your friends story.

Every time we listen to something, hear something, or taking any type of sensory information in, we process it through selective attention.  Anything that seems important will be brought to our short term memory.  Anything that wasn’t important, we will funnel out and it will not reach our short-term memory which will result in no memory of it at all.  If we do not encode something, we can not retrieve it.

Personally an example of selective attention that has happened to me is the following: I was home with my sister and watching a movie that interested me, she got up from the couch, walked right in front of me, and I had no memory of her leaving the room.  A few minutes later, I went to talk to her and i realized she wasn’t there.  This was selective attention because I found watching the movie was more important and interesting then my sister walking across the room.

I feel that we have all experienced the, “Wait, when did you leave the room…?” example of selective attention.

Aerial Perspective

The eighth lecture was primarily focused on perception and how we interpret the things around us using visual cues. There are many aspects of perceptual organization, but I wanted to explain one in more detail.  Aerial perspective is defined as objects at distances that are blurred, less detailed, and lighter in color than when they are nearby.  The effect is due to the atmosphere which causes far away objects to appear “hazy” and unclear to the human eye.  Aerial perspective is a monocular cue that is used for depth perception.  Most people probably utilize aerial perspective every day when driving or walking around without even knowing it.


Aerial perspective is most easily noticed by observing natural landforms like mountains.  During the winter months, I go on many ski trips to various places such as Stowe, Vermont, with either friends or family and the landscape there is one of the best for observing aerial perspective.  As seen in the pictures above, there are many hills, trees, and objects littered throughout the landscape that have distinct shapes and colors. The colors (brown, green) and the shapes of the ground and the trees are easily visible in the foreground of the picture.  Aerial perspective is more visible in these pictures the farther out you look. The mountain ranges that are much farther out in the pictures are covered by the “haze” of the atmosphere and make colors and shapes far less distinguishable. The once browns and greens of the closer objects are non-recognizable and appear as a uniform bluish mountain range in the distance.

 

Aerial perspective provides us with monocular cues that significantly help with depth perception.  Without these cues, many things such as hitting the slopes and other activities would be hard to gauge and interpret.

Definition of Aerial Perspective found at: https://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Aerial+Perspective

 

Depth Perception: Monocular Cues

In Lecture 8, we talked about perceptual illusions, which help us understand how our perception is organized. Part of these illusions include depth perception, which enable us to judge distances. There are two types of depth perceptions: binocular cues (using both eyes) and monocular cues (using one eye). Focusing on monocular cues, this only requires one eye to obtain depth information. 

Examples of monocular cue perspectives include interposition, which allows one object to block our view of another, showing that the object that is blocking is closer. Aerial perspective, which shows that with more distant objects become fainter. An example of this could be to look at a picture of mountains with more “hazier” mountains in the background. Another example of a monocular cue is linear perspective, which involves parallel lines appear to converge with distance. The more the lines converge, the greater their perceived distance. With texture gradient, we see fewer details (texture) the farther an object is from us. Finally, motion parallax shows us that close objects appear to move more quickly than objects that are farther away. An example of this would be looking out a car window and seeing that the mountains in the back are moving at a slower pace than trees or other objects in front.

A personal experience I had when working with depth perception was when I was in art class in the 6th grade and was told to sketch a long street, with houses and stores on both sides. In order to create the illusion of depth, I needed to draw the street convergence in the distance. To do this, I had to use a linear perspective in which I created parallel lines that represented the street, that got closer or narrower as they appear farther away from the viewer. By doing this, it looked like my street was covering great distance as you looked up from the drawing. 

Attention

An important factor that affects our everyday lives is where we focus our attention. Are we focused on one thing at a time, or many things at a time? Trying to focus on many things at once can result in us not focusing on any one thing well. How much effort we put into our attention is also important. In other words, are we trying to focus and pay attention, or are we distracted by other things in our surroundings? While our brains are incredibly powerful, they can only allow us to process a little bit of information at a time from our environments. Selective attention allows us to focus in on something specific while blocking out other, less important, information. When a person experiences selective attention, it can be positive or negative. When selective attention allows a person to gather more details about the main subject, it is a positive experience. However, when selective attention prevents a person from gathering all the information necessary, it is a negative experience.

A friend of mine shared an example that illustrates attention, or lack thereof, from her work. She was attending a meeting with a large group of people that covered an important project that applied to everyone at the meeting to some degree. While my friend came to the meeting prepared to take notes with a pen and paper, almost everyone else brought their laptops. You would think this would be fine and shouldn’t create a problem, right? Unfortunately, that appears to have not been the case for everyone. My friend, as usual, sat in the back of the room. This gave her, unintentionally, a view of many people’s laptop screens. She noticed that many people appeared to be using their laptops not to take notes on the meeting, but rather, to work on other projects during the meeting.

This example relates to the class topic of attention. During this meeting, many people were not focusing their attention where it belonged – on the meeting presenters. In addition, by trying to pay attention to multiple things at once, were the attendees really listening to or doing any of them well?  Finally, those members of the audience using selective attention techniques were not getting the complete message of the presentation.

Behavioral Conditioning: “Little Albert” Experiment

Behavioral psychology is one of the modern perspectives of psychology and as defined by our class; has a focus on operant conditioning, punishment and reinforcement. Anybody that has a pet can easily relate a basic concept of behavioral conditioning to their life. Say your dog likes to beg for food. If you cave and decide to appease your dog, the dog will continue to beg as now it knows that it will get what it wants. You don’t typically want to reinforce bad behavior, or else the unfavorable behavior will continue due. As I stated, this is basic conditioning that just about anybody can witness and attest to. The concept of conditioning brought a more unethical question though; can a phobia be conditioned into a young child?

John Watson performed an experiment in 1920 that would be known as the “Little Albert” experiment. He along with his assistant Rosalie Rayner set out to answer the question. They would take a 9-month baby and have him play with a white rat. By default, Albert had no problem with the rat and showed no fear of it, even enjoying his time with it. They would then make a loud, unexpected noise behind the child, scaring the life out of him. After repeating this multiple times, the child grew terrified of the rat, even when no noise was made. The repeated trials held during this experiment conditioned “Albert” to associate rats with loud scary noises, and caused him to be terrified by them as a result. This experiment, though quite useful to the progression of psychology as a science, has been deemed horribly unethical. The fact that Watson never de-conditioned the child only serves to make it worse.

Sources used:

DeAngelis, T. “’Little Albert’ Regains His Identity.” Monitor on Psychology, American Psychological Association, Jan. 2010, www.apa.org/monitor/2010/01/little-albert.

Selective Attention

In class, we learned that selective attention is the ability to deal with some stimuli and not others.  The world contains more information than our brains can handle, so we use selective attention to filter out what is most important to us. There are a few parts of attention that require specific efforts.  The mental effort allows the individual to mentally filter other stimuli to focus on one specific stimuli. An example of this would be if you were in class and there were peers whispering behind you in class while trying to focus on the teacher lecturing a lesson. You have the ability to mentally block that conversation to focus on the lecture. The natural effort is a sensory adaptation, like when you put a bandage on our arm. Initially, you will feel the stickiness of the bandage stick to your arm hairs, but eventually, you will adapt to the feeling and forget it is even there and you can focus on other stimuli. Effortless attention is when we automatically select our attention without thinking about it. An example of this would be if you heard a loud noise, like a book drop on the floor. Our attention would immediately go towards where that sound came from. 

An example of selective attention would be the “Monkey Business Illusion” shown in class. We were told to focus on the number of times a basketball was passed between people wearing white shirts, while changes were happening in the background (such as the gorilla being present, someone wearing a black shirt leaving the game, and how the curtain in the back changed from red to orange). We selected our attention towards the people wearing the white shirts passing the ball and were unaware of everything else happening in the background. 

Relating selective attention to personal experience, just recently I went to the grocery store and saw a huge stand for a popular brand of pumpkin flavored coffee as soon as I walked through the doors. Not only that, pumpkin candles were being burned and fake, orange leaves, and scarecrows were decorated all around this Fall display. My attention was immediately drawn to this brand of coffee, even though I usually buy a different, cheaper brand in the back of the store.  I ended up buying this brand of coffee because my attention was effortlessly drawn to it when I walked into the store. If it wasn’t for the huge stand, it was definitely the additions that triggered my senses (the sight of the decorations and smell of the candle) that attracted me to this display. This example of selective attention allowed me to process what was important to me, which was the name brand pumpkin coffee, and filter out other stimuli, in this case, the cheaper coffee in the back of the store. 

 

 

Color Blindness/Deficiency

Color Blindness, or color deficiency, is prevalent in around 10% of males in today’s society.  It occurs when cells in the retina of the eye fail to respond correctly to different light wavelengths.  The eye consists of photoreceptors called rods and cones. Rods in themselves can not help in perception of color; cones are the backbone of color perception. Color blindness occurs when there are deficiencies in the cones or if they do not work at all (Color Blindness Explained).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Color blindness is not a life-threatening disorder and is manageable if the right steps are taken.

Here’s my story:

For as long as I have known him, my cousin has lived with red-green color deficiency. The first symptoms started to show when we were younger at family parties; we would get into arguments about certain colors of toys and characters in cartoons. After this occurred and was resolved by our parents, on multiple occasions,  his mom decided to take him to the doctor around 3rd grade. He was diagnosed with red-green color deficiency and has been managing ever since.  

In the beginning, it was very confusing for him and was hard to work with especially at school.  His most prominent obstacle was determining the colors on a traffic light whenever he started driving; he had to learn the location of the light rather than base it on the slight hue that the light had in order to know when to stop or go.  Color deficiency is not curable, as there are lenses and contacts that could possibly enhance some of his colors, but he has not tried them.  

The eye is a very complex structure with many components that all have significant importance.  The deficiency in cones of the retina account for color deficiency and are not able to be fixed, but the deficiency itself can be managed with time.

 

“Color Blindness Explained.” All About Vision, www.allaboutvision.com/conditions/colordeficiency.htm.

All images obtained from Google images

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