plus de la psychologie

In preparation for tomorrow’s exam, I have been working out at the gym on campus (I do this anyway) because the physical activity is helpful in encoding memory.
I have read the material and reviewed the objectives and now I am ready to further encode the material by telling all of you people about it.
When I read the material I paid a lot of attention to what I was reading. This effortful processing contributed to deep elaborative rehearsal stage that I am now in. I elaborate on the material by associating it with some of my pre-existing shema. I am also engaging my hippocampus right now while I consolidate the information in the retrieval process. My hippocampus is involved in the transfer of Working Memory to LTM, but is not where the memories are stored. Actually, the hippocampus is no longer needed once the memories are locked-in. Memories are a collection of sensory input. Memories can consist of sight, sound, tactile sensation, emotion, etc. The parts of the cerebral cortex that were involved in the original stimuli are where the memories “live”. We have to put them back together to remeber them. This explains why stories change over time or we may forget where we heard something, but not what we heard. Our brains are extremely associative and even the power of suggestion can change a memory permanently.

oh shit, transience (distraction) has just occured in my study process, now I have to start over.
OK, I learned some new stuff (sensory input) and that information went through my sensory register (brain) where I attended to it and placed it in my working memory. Then I encoded it (stored it) and sent it into my LTM which my prefrontal cortex has been kind enough to help me with. Now I need to retrieve (further consolidate) the information for the purpose of this excercise in studying for my exam.
So here it is:
The Information Processing Model is really a computer metaphor. We take in information, process it, and spit it back out. It is a way of studying memory. There are three assumptions that it is based upon. One, people are active participants in the process. We attend to what we care about. Two, both quantatative and qualitative aspects of memory performance can be examined. Finally, information is processed through a series of hypothetical stages, or stores. Information processing is affected by previous knowledge, age differences in varying conditions, sensory memory, attention, speed of processing, limited-capacity primary memory (working memory), and permanent and large capacity LTM.
The three stages of memory are sensory memory, working memory, and LTM.
Sensory memory (sight, sound, etc) takes in very large amounts of information very rapidly. The representation of the stimuli is easily lost unless we pay attention to it. If I were to show you five or six pictures of a nickel (not the new ones), each with different arrangement of the stuff we all know is on a nickel, one of them being correct, would you be able to tell me which is the true arrangement? Probably not, unless you’ve studied coins. Even though we’ve seen this image a whole lot in our lives but we really have had no need to memorize the arrangement on it’s faces. Age differences in sensory memory are not typical. Where vision and hearing are involved, age-related differences do occur in attentional processing. Reaction time may be slower in an older person because processing the stimuli may take longer. This is sometimes evident in driving in older people. They may drive more slowly and turn on their turn signal earlier.

Selective attention simply describes how we choose the information we will process further. We focus our awareness on a very very very narrow range of stimuli. Thankfully so. What if we had to be aware of every heart beat or conscious of our inspiration and expiration? We would not be able to attend to anything else. We attend to things that are important to us. We also have the ability to pick up stimuli subconsciously and attend to it. For example, you are at a party talking with someone, ignoring all of the other conversation around you, then you hear your name. Suddenly you are attending to that conversation as well.
How much information can we process at one time? Quite a bit, but not much. Divided attention proves that we can make all of the moves it takes to drive, hold a conversation, and listen to the radio at the same time.
Working memory:
The active process and structures involved in holding information in the mind and simultaneouslyn using that information, sometimes in conjunction with incoming information, to solve a problem, make a decision, or learn new information. Dude.
Working memory has a very small capacity. Information is held there for 2-30 seconds. There are no age-related declines in working memory. That is, as we get older, if we are healthy, we will not suffer a loss of working memory function. Chunking is part of working memory useage. Phone numbers are a good example of chunking. Three digits, then three more, then four. Apparently we can chunk 7+2 items, but the chunks get bigger with experience.
We remember lists of words and digits using the primacy and recency effects. The primacy effect describes a better ability to remember the first items as they get more rehearsal. In the recency effect we remember the last few items as there is less interference.
So the brain is incredibly malleable. We can never with 100% confidence say “This is the way it happened.” We are more accurate in saying “It seems to me that it happened in this way.”
Our emotions are part of consolidating our memories. We lay emotional memories down in our amygdala which is a structure near our hippocampus (where do they get these names?) in our medial temporal lobes.
These are the structures that were damaged in that guy in the movie “Memento”. he claimed to have lost his short-term memory, but he was really suffering from anterograde amnesia. He had no hippocampus and no amygdala. the hippocampus is not where LTM or working memory are stored, so his problem was that he could not consolidate his working memory to LTM.

He would likely be able to learn new motor skills (make new motor memory) because the medial temporal lobe is critical for making new explicit memories, but not so important for implicit memories.
Explicit memory is broken down into two categories: Explicit episodic example-When is the last time you rode a bike. Explicit semantic-How do you ride a bike?
Implicit memory is broken down inton three categories: Implicit conditioned responses-fell off off a bike once and it hurt real bad so now even the word “bike” elicits an emotional response. Implicit peceptual priming: repetitive exposure-somewhat subliminal, and implicit procedural: you don’t have to think about how to ride a bike in order to remember how.
Cristallized and fluid intelligence. Wow. Um, Iam getting really bored. Alright, crystallized intelligence is knowledge acquired through life-experiences and education in a particular culture.
Fluid intelligence is knowledge through inference. This is a little bit slippery.
Fluid intelligence: You have only ever seen a chair that is soft and cushiony. You notice something that looks in shape somewhat like a “chair” but it is hard and made out of plastic. You sit in it and lo and behold, it fits into your schema of chair, which you have just expanded to include hard ones made of plastic. This is now crystallized intelligence. Next you see a rock that is roughly the same size and shape of a chair. You sit on it and it wokrs ok as a chair, even though you know it is a rock. It will still fit into your chair schema and it will still fit into your rock schema. Chair rocks are pretty cool that way. Then you come upon a stone that is shaped like a tree. This could fit into your tree schema, but upon further investigation and knowing that it belongs in your stone schema, it cannot be part of tree because it does not fit most of the biological aspects of a tree. But this depends on how you want to categorize tree in this instance. See how slippery it gets?

Ah Piaget, I will skip to the post-Piaget, post-formal operational thought: This describes theorizing when given little information. Par example: Little 8 year-oldJoey is told a story about a woman named Mary telling her lush of a husband that if he gets drunk one more time she will leave him and take the children. He gets drunk one more time. Does she leave him? Joey might say “No and I am certain on that because my Mom would never leave my Dad and take the children.” But 39 year-old Raenie would say “Well, she said she would, but she’s likely said that many times before and hasn’t done it yet. On the other hand she could be completely fed up and ready to make good her threats. Of course I don’t know their history and what you’re really asking is should she leave him…” Joey is preformal operative and Raenie is posrtformal operative. A teen might say “Yeah, duh. She said she’d leave him, it’s right there in the text, so she leaves him. Pshstt.” This is almost formalm operative. The teen is taking the information given and applying a systematic approach to just the facts given to come to the conclusion that, of course Mary will leave and take the children.
The standard research paradigm for studying memory is, um, I forgot.
OOh yeah:
1) Learning phase
2) Retention phase: Immediate to 10 minutes
3) Recall phase: recognition tests, cued recall, free recall.
Finis