Anxious? Yes… Yes I am. Why? Because it is finals week and finals make me anxious. However, if I am smart (which I like to think I am occasionally) then I may be able to use this anxiety to my advantage. When we encode information it means that we are taking what we want to remember and transferring it into our long-term memory. This can be done a number of ways. When we want to retrieve something from our long-term memory it is called retrieval. Sometimes we want to retrieve something from out LTM but just cannot seem to do that at the appropriate time. Like myself when taking an exam. I freeze up, my mind goes blank and I panic!! Total anxiety attack! So how can my anxiety help me retrieve the information I have encoded for my exam? Hopefully by applying State-Dependent Learning.

State-Dependent Learning is associated with ones state of awareness and internal feelings. In other words, we are likely to recall an event or something we studied if our internal feelings are the same as when we encoded the information.

Eric Eich and Janet Metcalfe conducted a study where one group of participant listened to sad music and another group listened to happy music. Once they were in the desired state (happy or sad), they were told to study a list of words. Two days later they were asked to come back and recall the list that they studied. What Eich and Metcalf discovered was that those who had the same state of mind (happy or sad) while encoding the list, showed better memory when asked to recall the list from two days ago.

So the way that I see it is that if I am able to be anxious while I study for the exam then my memory should serve me better as I take the exam; because lets be honest, I will be very anxious taking the exam. In all honesty I think that it is the anticipation of clicking the submit button that gets to me the most! However, once the exams are over and my grade is what it is, I am able to move on relax.

It is rare that I am anxious while studying because usually I have help with my daily tasks to make time for studying, however this semester I have not been so lucky. Especially now. We have relocated and my husband is currently still working 150 miles away so he is gone during the week, we have five children under the age of eight and it seems that no matter which day it is I am always three days behind. I have no time and no energy and yet an eminence desire to do well in school. If I am able to keep these internal feelings while I study and also when I take my exam, there may be a chance that my memory will serve me better simply because my state of mind dose not change.

There are very few things in this world that can melt a mother’s heart more than when her child begins to speak. When her daughter or son begins to say “mama” or “dada” for the first time, you would have thought that the mother just won the lottery and everyone needs to know about it. The way that children are able to mimic our sounds and understand our language, even before they can truly begin to speak it, has truly amazed me. Just the other day I was playing peek-a-boo with my 11 month old. She laughed each time as I removed my hands from my face and said “boo.” When I was done playing and attending to one of my other children, out of the corner of my eye I saw my 11 month old put her hands to her mouth and while removing them say “oooo.” She might as well have solved a calculus problem because I was shocked. She repeated the action, giving herself a little chuckle in between each one, for about a solid two minutes. At that moment I had won the lottery! Our abilities to learn languages is truly astonishing. It is said that infants produce their first words during their second year (sometimes earlier, sometimes later) and, after a slow start, begin adding words rapidly until they can understand more than 50,000 different words. Our knowledge of words is stored in the lexicon. This part of the brain allows us to understand the meaning of the words, there sounds and how they are used (Goldstein, p. 297). There are two parts that really make up language. The first part would be the phoneme and the second would be the morpheme. However, I mainly would like to focus on phoneme. The phoneme is the unit of language that refers to sounds. When we are saying a word we are not merely saying letters but are pronouncing sounds. This lesson becomes very clear to me as I teach my 4 year old daughter to read. If I were to hold up the letter E and ask her what the letter is, she would not be able to tell me. However, if I were to ask her what sound this letter makes she would be able to recite it with little thinking. This also goes for my eight year old and teaching her to spell. If I were to ask her to spell the word beach, I could be sure to ask her what sound does a C and H make together. As I teach my children to read and spell, sometimes I feel a bit like Professor Higgins (or is it ‘iggins ) from My Fair Lady. One of my all-time favorite movies! Each language differs from the number of phonemes it has. The English language has about 47 phonemes. (Goldstein, p. 297) As we listen to someone talk to us we are able to understand a word even if a phoneme is missing. We are simply able to “fill in” the missing sound. Richard Warner called this the phonemic restoration effect. This effect is an example of our top-down processing, in which we use our prior knowledge to process the information and understand the situation, word or sentence. This is why we are able to understand others when they may couch or skip sounds in a word. I am sure that this also why it is said that only the parents can understand what their toddler is saying when they speak. Between the phonemic restoration effect and top-down processing, I was able to understand that my 11 month old daughter was playing peek-a-boo, even though only the sound “ooo” came out instead of “boo.” I also experience this effect with my three year old on a daily basis as she mispronounces just about every word in her vocabulary, including “I Love You.” However, when she says those words my heart melts and I just won a million bucks!!!

Goldstein, Bruce. “Introduction to Cognitive Psychology.” Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. Thrid Edition ed. Belmont, CA 94002-3098: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2011.

I’m going to be honest… School is really not my thing. I enjoy the occasional learning experience here and there, but school in general is not something I look forward to. I especially dislike test times. I start getting anxieties and panicking and my mind seems to fall short on retrieving all the information I spent hours trying to encode! It is sad to say that tests and I go together like oil and water, and unfortunately I have the test scores to prove it. Because I dislike tests so much, I dread studying for them. I have joined study groups, I have written down notes upon notes, I have repeated information over and over again till my brain hurts and yet when it comes test time I still fall short to being prepared for it. This was particularly true for one class I had last semester. However, on the final exam of the class, I finally made a grade that reflected all the hard work I put into my studying.

Like most online courses, the exam was an open note test, however, we were only allowed to have one piece of paper, front and back, of notes. You better believe I used every available space on that sheet of paper. I find the hardest part about studying for an exam is not knowing what will be on the exam, so therefore I’m not quite sure what to focus on. Yet, what made this exam different from all the other ones was that I knew before I even took the exam, what I already knew and what I needed to spend more time studying. I knew this because the instructor made a practice exam that we could take as many times as we needed before taking the exam. The best part was that the questions were randomly selected and in random order each time you took the exam. I believe I took the practice exam 3 or 4 times before I took the real exam and it completely paid off!

There are many ways that we can encode information into our LTM. I believe that some methods work better for some than others. My experience above is an example of the “testing effect.” Enhanced performance due to testing. Oh how I wish all professors would allow practice tests like the one mentioned above (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).  I was just telling my husband last week that I wish I had a quiz I could take over and over again to help me prepare for my mid-termsJ.  Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke designed an experiment to test the advantages of testing. Roediger and Karpicke had college students read a passage for 7 minutes followed by a 2 minute break which they solved math problems. Then one group (the test group) took a 7 minute recall test where they were asked to write down as much of the passage as they remembered. The other group (the rereading group) were given 7 minutes to reread the passage (Goldstein, pg. 180). The task went on while the delay started to increase. First 2 minutes, then 5 minutes, 2 days and then 1 week. The graph shows that those who were in the testing group were able to retain the information in their LTM and be able to retrieve it when needed even after longer periods of delays in recalling information.

Please do not get the impression that I wish we had a graded quiz every week. No, I do not wish that. However, I can from my personal experience see that our retrieval of facts from encoding them into our LTM is effective when we are tested on what we want to remember. Though, I may have a dislike for school and tests, I know that I need them. Not only that but I notice this also in my children as I have taken on the responsibility of homeschooling them. Even as a mom I try to implicate the testing effect on my children so that later in life they will remember all that I have taught them.

Citations:

Goldstein, Bruce. “Introduction to Cognitive Psychology.” Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. Thrid Edition ed. Belmont, CA 94002-3098: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2011. Pages 180-181 Print.

Picture copied from: https://cerp.aqa.org.uk/blog/do-tests-help-you-learn

When given the assignment this week, I had the hardest time coming up with a topic to write about.  Even as I sit at my computer, trying to form sentences to write this post, my mind cannot seem to write a coherent thought.  I must have started and rewritten this post a dozen times over by now. Then as I looked up from my computer, trying to think of how to word my next sentence, I watched my three year old and four year old play on the floor in front of me.  They were crab-walking in circles and would laugh when the other one would fall down.  My four year old decided it was time to mix things up so she started crab-walking backwards.  I carefully watched my three year old, expecting her to continue crab-walking the way she knew how.  To my surprise, I noticed she was watching her older sister and then started crab-walking backwards just as her sister did.  Monkey see, monkey do. But why?

Although we take actions ourselves, we also observe others taking action on a regular basis. Mirror neurons found in the premotor cortex are neurons that respond when we observe another’s actions and then preform the task we just saw.  Neurons are a network of responders that transmit signals to the nervous system.  The way I see it, nerves help the brain and body act together.  When my three year old observed her older sister start crab-walking backwards her mirror nerves started firing.  As my three year old preformed the task she previously saw, her mirror neurons fired again.

In the early 90’s, Giacomo Rizzolatti and co-workers conducted experiments on monkeys to investigate how neurons fired when the monkey preformed tasks, such as picking up an object like a toy or food.  Interestingly enough they found that the premotor cortex did not just fire when the monkey preformed the task but also when he observed the task.  Further investigation and experiments lead to the discovery of the mirror neuron, but do these neurons just help us mimic another’s actions without understanding them?  Experiments show that the mirror neurons do more than simply respond to patterns of notion, it helps us to understand and complete our task.  When the monkey would watch the experimenter pick up an object with a pair of pliers, the monkeys mirror neurons were low.   When the experimenter would pick up the object with his hand the monkeys mirror neurons increased; and then increased again once the monkey preformed the task.  I am sure that this is partially due to the fact that the monkey did not have a set of pliers to play with as the experimenter did.  Another indicator that these neurons do not mimic is something called audiovisual mirror neurons, also found in the premotor cortex.  Experimenters have found that we not only respond to seeing a task being done but that we also respond when we hear a sound.  Audiovisual mirror neurons fire when we see an action and hear a sound at the same time.

Since the 1990’s much research has been done confirming the existence of mirror neurons and audio visual neurons in monkeys and humans.  Not all researchers agree with all the functions that have been attributed to mirror neurons.  However, there is no question that mirror neurons provide impressive examples of a link between what we observe and our actions (Goldstein, Cognitive Psychology, 3^rd Edition, pg.76).  In my opinion, if you ever wanted to see how our mirror neurons work in action and how we learn from others and respond to the environment around us, all you need to do is take a look at our children playing together.  Just as my three year old learned a new way to walk by observing her older sister, we also change, understand and mimic our environment around us.

Citations:

Goldstein, Bruce. “Introduction to Cognitive Psychology.” Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. Thrid Edition ed. Belmont, CA 94002-3098: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2011. Pages 75-76. Print.