The idea of language, speech, comprehending sentences, and the ability to learn not only one language, but many has always been very interesting to me. The idea that there are roughly 7,100 languages worldwide blows my mind. It raises questions about was there ever a universal language, what factors played a part in creating such a diverse linguistic society, and will more or less languages come to light over the coming years.

While reviewing and reading the lesson 11 material, I found Grices four conversational rules interesting. The rules of maximums of quantity, quality, relation and manner. Knowing that if one of the rules are violated, we unconsciously pick up on during conversations with others. Other violations of these rules can also be a cue to end the conversation. This is relevant to my life because I work fulltime in a retail related job and have many many conversations during the day with people. I did not know about Grices rules before this class, but I can vouch that now I will be more aware of them while others talk to me. I can also say that they are also very accurate, meaning that I think all conversations should follow those four rules. Something else that I enjoyed learning about was the McGurk effect. In the video, the sound did not change, but the motion of their mouth change so we heard a different sound. It pairs auditory and visual comprehension, and it seems like what we see is what we hear, even though sometimes the actual sound does not change. The McGurk effect plays a huge part in our language, sentence comprehension, and the ability to learn a language that we do not know…

This is relevant to my life, because I have three younger brothers and I remember when they were learning to talk. While watching the McGurk video, I found it funny with how he was slowly pronouncing words as if we were toddlers trying to learn a language. That is exactly how I talked to my brothers while they were young in order for them to comprehend and learn what I was saying. I remember when they reached the level of kindergarten and early elementary just how important learning English was. They had homework almost every night in regards to speech, the alphabet, and learning how to read. This makes sense because if we do not learn it early in life while we are developing there is a risk that later in life we will not be as strong in that given area.

Overall, I found this lesson to be intriguing and even made me want to do more research on my own about language, comprehension, and sentence formations to where they are understandable. I will also most likely use this information moving forward with my college career and with life in general.

Our textbook defines memory as, “the process involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer present.” Memory is a very fascinating because we can remember something from when we were five, but cannot remember what we did a week ago. Short-term memory is designed for us to store smaller amounts of information and only held for short amounts of time. According to the our class textbook, “STM is the window into how the present is represented in our minds. We can examine STM to look at how long information is held, the capacity, the way the information is coded, and the way the information is lost.”

I have a great long-term memory, and can remember very specific details about a lot of things throughout my life, but my short-term memory is not nearly as clear. I’m almost convinced it is part of my family because everyone from my younger brothers, to my grandma, to my extended family has trouble with STM. A very common question in my household, and probably many others, is “where’s the remote?” I eventually got sick and tired of not only this question, but many others like it so I made designated spots for certain items in the household.

Another interesting fact that I learned while reading through lesson five is the digital span task. This refers to a given set of numbers that can either stay as one set or be broken down into chunks. Phone numbers are a great example of this. Instead of having 12 numbers all at once, we break it down into (111) – 234-1234. This makes it a lot easier to remember and with rehearsal of the number it will eventually become part of our LTM. This is also relevant to me because at work we all have an employee ID number that is divided in half by a “-“.

When working on retaining information that is usually just part of out STM interference also plays a huge role. According to VeryWellmind, “you might have a harder time remembering someone’s name if you’re in a crowded, noisy room, or if you were thinking of what to say to the person rather than paying attention to their name.” I can very much to relate to this because when I am learning new information, especially for class/exams, I have to be in a quite area to study if I want to remember anything. The retention of information and memories requires STM to be transferred into LTM.

Overall, I find it extremely interesting how out minds work, not just relating to memory, but for every aspect of how we function and interpret things. This is the main reason why I am pursuing a Psychology Degree and hopefully a few more degree’s after this one!

Citations:

Cherry, K. (2011, January 13). Short-Term Memory Duration and Capacity. Verywell Mind; Verywellmind. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-short-term-memory-2795348

Goldstein, B. E. (2019). Cognitive psychology : connecting mind, research and everyday experience. Langara College.

In lesson three we learn about Gestalts Laws of Perception and just how they influence our lives on a daily basis. Although they are only rule of thumb ideas that help us best figure out a situation and are not official laws that psychologically we follow, we still look to laws of perception for guidance. Within in Gestalts Laws he had different topics areas which include; proximity, similarity, good continuation, connectedness, common fate, and the law of pragnanz. Perception is the ability to understand inner qualities or relationships, and Gestalts Laws help us define different aspects of how and why we perceive things either the same or different from each other. Sometimes we perceive things that are not as bad as we imagine. For example, fear of something, when that certain “thing” may not be as harmful as we perceive it to be.

Perception to me is everything. Not just on a daily basis but throughout my entire life. Thinking back of a time where perception was particularly important to me was when I was in an almost life or death situation. It was a fight or flight moment that happened so quick there was almost no time to perceive anything but danger. When learning about perception in a previous psychology class I learned about the perceptual process and how most times we do it automatically. Step one is observation, and in my case observation was immediate. Step two is perceptual selection in which we selection different aspects of the situation based on level of importance. In this stage we often filter out information that is not useful to us so our focus can be put on the “more important” stimuli. Again, in my situation there was not much time to filter information. It was almost an automatic understanding of the entire event in a matter of seconds. Lastly, step three of the perceptual process is known as perceptual organization. This is where in repeating events we would form the stimuli into a patterns that is understandable by our own standards.

In my opinion perception should be very important to everyone and everyone should learn how to properly perceive different scenarios in their lives. We have a tendency to have a negative perception about things, but in most situations it is not as bad as we think. Life would be a lot easier if we all thought in a more positive manner and realized no matter what situation we are in, it could always be worse.

As you can see, perception is a very complicated yet interesting topic. Although we have Gestalts Laws of Perception, a lot is still open for discussion because his “laws” only provide us with rule of thumb ideas. Perception depends on the situation, but based on how we think about the situation our perceptions can sway either to positive or negative.