Author Archives: Cody Schmidt

Classical Conditioning of My Roommate

1 Reply

During class we learned about Pavlov, and his experiments with classical conditioning. In Pavlov’s experiments he was able to pair an unconditional stimulus of food with a conditional stimulus of a tone from a tuning fork. After sounding the tone he presented a dog with food, which caused an unconditional response of salvation from the dog. After repeating this several times, Pavlov was able to cause the unconditional response of salvation from the dog just by the conditional stimulus, the tone. This occurred because after hearing the tone, the dog believed that the unconditional stimulus, the food, would be presented to them.

After learning about classical conditioning in psych 100 and watching a video in class of a kid classically conditioning his roommate, I thought I would try the same to see if I could get my roommate to experience a conditional response from a conditional stimulus. To do this, while my roommate was studying and not paying attention, I would shout “Mint”, and would follow by forcefully throwing a mint at him. When he was hit by the mint he naturally flinched. I repeated this several times throughout the day. Finally at the end of the day when he wasn’t paying attention I deiced it was time to see if just the conditional stimulus was cause the response of him flinching even though the unconditional stimulus was absent. Soon as he wasn’t paying attention I shouted “Mint”  immediately he flinched with the expectation that I was going to throw a mint at him. I successfully was able to classically condition my roommate to respond to a conditional stimulus in just a matter of hours.

Since I only paired the conditional stimulus with the unconditional stimulus for a short period of time and the fact that my roommate is also in psych 100, right after I used the conditional stimulus by itself, my roommate understood what was going on and he no longer experienced a conditional response. This showed me that my conditioning had a very short extinction period. Even though it only worked once, I was able to prove that it is possible to cause a response from a conditional stimulus.

Memory

Leave a reply

As humans we strive for knowledge, this is the reason that learning if such a large part of out early lives. We base our survival of the ability to learn and use that information in our everyday lives. For us to learn something though, we have to get that information into are memory. Memory is the persistence of learning over time, through the encoding, storage and retrieval of information. As being a college student I rely heavily on memory because college is all about learning, and I need to be able to remember what I learn here at Penn State to better my future. Memory isn’t simple, and to get all of this information into my memory I need to encode the information. That way I will be able to recall that information when necessary.

There are many different types of encoding that we use to get information into are short term, and long term memory. As a high school student, I used maintenance rehearsal to encode information to my memory. It wasn’t until college that I realized this was a horrible way for someone to study, and retain information, because it is only putting that information into your short term memory. It was easy though in high school, because you could just cram all the information you needed to know that day before your exam, and just get by. But by using this process, the information that I had learned was only available in my memory for a short period of time, and not long after the exam I would hardly remember anything that I learned. When I got to college I learned that by doing this, I could manage for the exams, but when the finals came around, I would be trying to teach myself an entires semesters worth of information, since everything that I had learned had left my short term memory, and very little was transferred to my long-term memory.

By taking psych 100 this semester, I learned that elaborative rehearsal is a far greater way to study, and retain information, since you are making meaningful connections to the information that you are trying to learn. By doing this, you transfer a greater amount of information into your long term memory, and it makes it a lot better when you are trying to recall that information.

Nature V. Nurture

Leave a reply

One of the oldest debates that is around when it come to psychology is the argument of nature versus nurture. The debate of nature versus nurture comes down to the idea of wether peoples individual personalities arise from the way that they were raised and the environment that they were raised in, or if each person’s personality is different from when they were born. Many studies have been conducted on this age old debate and both sides have come down to the decision that it is neither nature nor nurture that solely determine your personality, and in the end it is a mixture of both of them that determines one’s personality. For each person, one might have a bigger impact then the other, but everyone’s personality is a combination of the two.

To me, my brother and I are a great demonstration of the debate of nature and nurture. My brother and I, where raised by the same two parents, in the same household, and had the same rules/guidelines while growing up. Since we are only a few years apart, we both attended that same family events and holidays, and went through the same big events while growing up. Even though we lived such a similar life, we both turned out to be completely different people.

For me, I am a very “type A” person, I am very organized, strict, and live a seriously structured lifestyle which helps me get everything I have to do done in an organized timely matter. On the other hand, my brother is the complete opposite, he is definitely a “type B” person. He gets things done when he has to, and doesn’t plan out what needs to be done in the future. He lives with very little stress, and is definitely, and “go with the flow” person. We really do live two completely different life styles.

We both grow up the same exact way and yet we turned out to be completely different. So if there was something that I had to pick to explain why we turned out differently then each other, I would have to say that nature is the reason why. Nature has to be true, because we even though for the majority of our lives we were the same, we turned out to be completely different people with different thoughts, personalities, and emotions. If nurture was the case for us, we would be much more similar and have the same thoughts and opinions.

In out case nature is the reason why we are different despite are very similar experiences while growing up. This might not be the case for everyone, but in my case when it comes to my brother and I, nature explains are situation while nurture does not.