Author Archives: Daphne Kei Dymeck

My Visual Imagery

The book, Cognitive Psychology, states that autobiographical memory is “memory for dated events in a person’s life. Autobiographical memory is usually considered to be a type of episodic memory, but has also been defined as including personal semantic memories.” My grandmother was using her autobiographical memory when she shared stories of her life during World War II in Japan to my mother who past told them to me. One of the events she shared was when she was running through the streets of Tokyo while the city was being fire bombed. I was told stories of how her family survived during the war and how they went from being a well-to-do family to losing everything for the war effort.

Although I have not met my grandmother (she passed away some time before my parents met), I have not been to Japan and I was not alive during World War II. I use information I know about my grandmother, Japan and the war to picture these events in my mind by visual imagery. Cognitive Psychology also states that visual imagery is “a type of mental imagery involving vision, in which an image is experienced in the absence of a visual stimulus.”  I am also using top-down processing, “processing that involves a person’s knowledge or expectations. This type of processing has also been called knowledge-based processing.”

My grandmother did not speak English and I do not speak Japanese but my mother learned English when she was a child and was able to pass these stories on to my sisters and I. I think it is really interesting how we can share our experiences through language and process the information into images.

Works Cited

Goldstein, E. Bruce. Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience.Belmont: Wadsworth, 2011. print

Did you see that?

Inattentional blindness is an effect that happens when you focus your attention one thing and fail to notice other things right in front of you. Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris created a film that demonstrated inattentional blindness. They filmed two teams, one team passing a basketball to each other and the other team not handling the ball. They used the film in an experiment where they had observers focus their attention on counting how many times the ball was passed. During the film a person in a gorilla suit walked through the scene which almost half of the observers missed.

After reading about inattentional blindness I automatically thought about subliminal messages and if they really work. There are many claims about subliminal messages particularly about how they are used to influence people’s behaviors. My curiosity about this subject lead me to question my instructor, Dr. Wede. I asked him, when considering inattentional blindness, does subliminal messages really work? He responded by telling me ” There is evidence in isolated types of studies where subliminal presentation can affect reaction times and certain types of basic memory tasks. But there is no evidence suggesting that subliminal messages affect more complex behaviors (like buying choice, language learning, dieting, quitting smoking or any other number of products that claim to use subliminal messages to change your behavior).”

Based on the information I read about inattentional blindness and the information I received from Dr. Wede, I don’t think subliminal messages work. For example, hidden pictures or messages used in advertising.

 

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References

Goldstein, B. (2011). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience, 3rd Edition.Wadsworth, Inc.

imitating imitation

In chapter three of our text book we read about mirror neurons. The text states that a mirror neuron is a “neuron in the premotor cortex, originally discovered in the monkey, that responds both when a monkey observes someone else carrying out an action and when the monkey itself carries out the action. There is also evidence for mirror neurons in humans.”

Being a mother of two young children, I have learned that imitating is an important part of learning. My kids are always carefully watching me all the time and learning the things I do. When my daughter was a toddler she had a little play kitchen where she pretended to cook as she watched me cook. And when my son was an infant he had seen some puppets on television clapping and he began to clap with them. It is because of mirror neurons people are able to take in information they perceive and use it to understand what they see. In an article by Eric Jaffe he quotes Giacomo Rizzolatti, “when I see a person doing something, the same action which this person performed entered inside my motor system and I have a copy of it.” The mirror neurons become active when someone performs an action and when they see another person perform the same action. What is interesting is that these mirror neurons help us understand another’s point of view. Rizzolatti says “This mechanism can combine the most important part, goal understanding, with the details of vision. So we have a binding between goal and how this goal is achieved.” What I am curious about is if mirror neurons work the same for blind people since they cannot see actions performed. Do these neurons fire when they hear things such as laughter? I know that if I hear someone laughing in the next room I’ll start laughing too, even if I don’t know what they’re laughing at.

Mirror neurons play a part in the information we receive from others so we can understand this information and even predict the intention of others.

Works Cited

Goldstein, E. Bruce. Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2011. print

Jaffe, Eric. “Reflecting on Behavior: Giacomo Rizzolatti Takes Us on a Tour of the Mirror Mechanism.” Association for Psychological Science. Web.01 Feb 2014. <www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2011/july-august-11/reflecting-on-behavior-giacomo-rizzolatti-takes-us-on-a-tour-of-the-mirror-mechanism.html>