Memory, Learning, and Sleep

- persistence of learning over time through storage and retrieval of information

• Encoding: processing of information into the memory system
• Storage: retention of encoded material over time
• Retrieval: process of getting the information out of the memory storage

Recall v.s. Recognition -

• Recall: you must retrieve the information from memory (fill-in-the-blank tests)
• Recognition: you must identify the target from possible targets (multiple-choice tests)

Flashbulb Memory: clear moment of an emotionally significant moment or event
3 Types of Memory:

1. Sensory Memory: immediate, initial recording of sensory information in memory system; stored just for an instant, and most get unprocessed
2. Short-Term Memory: memory that holds only a few items briefly; 7 digits (plus of minus 2); information will be stored into long-term memory or forgotten
• Working Memory: another word of describing the use of short term memory; 3 parts: audio, visual, and integration of audio and visual (controls where your attention lies)
3. Long-Term Memory: relatively permanent and limitless store house of the memory system

Encoding:

• Automatic Processing - unconscious encoding of incidental information; you encode space, time, and word meaning without effort; things can become automatic with practice
• Effortful Processing - encoding that requires attention and conscious effort; rehearsal is most common effortful processing technique; through enough rehearsal, what was effortful becomes automatic
• The Next-in-Line Effect: we seldom remember what the person has just said or done if we are next
• Spacing Effect: encode better when we study or practice overtime; DO NOT CRAM!!
• Serial Positioning Effect: our tendency to recall best the last and the first items in a list
• Semantic Encoding: encoding of meaning, like the meaning of words
• Acoustic Encoding: encoding of sound, especially the sound of words
• Visual Encoding: encoding of picture images
• Tricks to Encoding - imagery: mental pictures; Mnemonic Devices use imagery, "peg word system"
• Chunking: organizing items into familiar manageable units; often it will occur automatically

Long-Term Memory:

1. Explicit (declarative): with conscious recall
• Facts - general knowledge ("semantic memory")
• Personally - experience with events ("episodic memory")
2. Implicit (non declarative): without conscious recall; routine
• Skills - motor and cognitive
• Classical and Operant - conditioning effects

Types of Retrieval Failure:

• Proactive Interference - disruptive effect of prior learning on the recall of new information
• Retroactive Interference - disruptive effect of new learning on the recall of old information
• Motivated Forgetting: repression, basic defense mechanism that banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memory
• Misinformation Effect: incorporating misleading information into one's memory of an event
• Example: depiction of an accident

Learning:

• Associative Learning - learning that certain events occur together
• Classical Conditioning:
• Unconditioned Stimulus (UCS): a stimulus that naturally and automatically triggers a response
• Unconditioned Response (UCR): undeterred,naturally occurring response to the UCS
• Conditioned Stimulus (CS): an originally irrelevant stimulus that, after association with the other UCS,comes to trigger a response
• Conditioned Response (CR): the learned response to a previously neutral stimulus
• Ivan Pavlov
1. Acquisition - initial stage of learning; phase where neutral stimulus is associated with UCS so that neutral stimulus comes to elicit the CR (thus becoming CS)
2. Extinction - diminishing of a conditioned response;eventually happens when UCS doesn't follow CS
3. Spontaneous Recovery - reappearance; after a rest period,of an extinguished conditioned response
4. Generalization - tendency, once a response has been conditioned, for stimulus simliar to the CS to elicit
5. Discrimination - learned ability to distinguish between CS and other stimlus that does not signal UCS
• Operant Conditioning: learner is NOT passive; learning is based on consequences; type of learning in which behavior is strengthen if followed by reinforcement or diminished if followed by punishment

- classical vs operant: both use the "5"; classical conditioning is automatic (response behavior) and operant conditioning is individual behavior where one can influence their environment with behaviors which have consequences (operant behavior)

• Edward Thorndike: The Law of Effect, rewarded behavior is likely to recur
• B. F. Skinner: shaping - procedure in operant conditioning in which reinforcers guides behavior closer and closer towards a goal

-Reinforcer: any event that strengthens the behavior it follows

• 2 Types of Reinforcers: negative and positive
1. Positive Reinforcement - strengthens a response by presenting a stimulus after a response
2. Negative Reinforcement - strengthens a response by reducing or removing an aversive stimulus
• both are used to increase a desired behavior
• Primary Reinforcement - innately reinforcing stimulus
• Conditioned (Secondary) Reinforcer) - stimulus that gains its reinforcement power through tits association with a primary reinforcer
• Punishment - an event that decreases the behavior that it follows
• Positive Punishment: spanking, speeding ticket, sick after eating rotten food
• Negative: takeaway a to from a child after fighting with siblings, taking away treat from aggressive dog, grounding a misbehaving teen, in relationship, someone stops talking to another in response for the behavior
• Reinforcement Schedule
• Conditioned Reinforcement: reinforcing the desired response to every timeit occurs
• Partial Reinforcement: reinforcing a response only part of the time; acquisition process is sower, greater resistance to extinction

1. Fixed-Ratio Schedule: schedule that reinforces a response only after a specified number of responses; provide a reinforcement after a SET number of response
2. Variable-Ratio Schedule: schedule of reinforcement that reinforces a response after an unpredictable number of response; ex: lottery, slot machine, bingo; provides a reinforcement after RANDOM number of response
3. Fixed-Interval Schedule: schedule of reinforcement that reinforces a response only after a specified time has elapsed; requires a SET amount of time to elapse before giving reinforcement; ex: multiple choice quiz
4. Variable-Interval Schedule: schedule of reinforcement that reinforces a response at unpredictable time intervals; ex: pop quiz; requires a RANDOM amount of time to elapse to give reinforcement

• Token Economy: every time a desired behavior is performed, a token is given; can trade tokens in for a variety of prizes (reinforcers); sed in homes, prisons, mental institutes, and schools
• Observational Learning: Albert Bandura and his Bobo Doll;learn through modeling behavior from others; observational learning + operant conditioned = Social Learning Theory
• Latent Learning: Edward Toteman, sometimes learning is not immediately evident
• Insight Learning: Wolfgang Kholer and Chimpanzees, some animals learn through the"Ah Ha!" experience

Sleep:

- state of consciousness; we are less aware of our surroundings; conscious, subconscious, unconscious

- States of Consciousness: sleep, hypnosis, drugs

• Daydream: 1. helps us prepare for future events 2. can nourish our social development 3. can substitute for impulsive behavior
• Fantasy Prove Personalities: someone who imagines and recalls experiences with lifelike vividness and who spends considerable time fantasizing
• Biological Rhythms: annual cycle (seasoned variations: bear hibernation, seasonal affective disorder); 28 day cycle (menstrual cycle); 24-hr cycle (our circadian rhythm); 90 minute cycle (sleep cycle)
• Circadian Rhythm: 24-hr biological clock, body temperature and awareness changes throughout the day
• Sleep Stage: 5 identified stages of sleep; takes about 90-100 minutes to pass through 5 stages; brain's waves will change according to sleep stage you are in; first 4 stages are also known as NERM sleep; 5th stage is called REM sleep
• Stage 1: kind of awake and kind of asleep; only lasts a few minutes and you usually onle experience once a night; eyes begin to roll slightly; brain produces Theta waves (high amplitude, low frequency = slow)
• Stage 2: follows Stage 1 sleep and is the "baseline" of sleep; stage is part of the 90 minute cycle and occupies approximately 45-60% of sleep; more Theta waves that get progressively slower
• Stage 3 & 4: slow wave sleep, you produce Delta waves; if awoken you will be very groggy; vital for restoring body's growth hormones and good overall health; may last 15-30 minutes, is called "low wave sleep" because the brain activity slows down dramatically from the "theta" rhythm of Stage 2 to a much slower rhythm called "delta" and the height of amplitude of the wave increases dramatically; contrary to popular belief, it is called delta sleep that is the "deepest" stage of sleep (not REM) and the most restorative; delta sleep that a sleep-deprived person's brain craves first and foremost; in children, delta sleep can occupy up to 40% of all sleep time and this is what makes children unawakeable or "dead asleep" during most of the night
• Stage 5 (REM Sleep): Rapid Eye Movement, called paradoxical sleep; brain is very active, dreams usually occur in REM, body is essentially paralyzed; composed of 20-25% of a normal night's sleep; breathing, heart rate, and brain wave activity quicken; vivid dreams can occur, from REM to Stage 2
• Sleep Disorder:
• Insomnia - persistent problems of falling asleep; affects 10%of the population
• Narcolepsy - differ from sleeplessness and may fall asleep at unpredictable or inappropriate times; directly into REM sleep; less than .001% of population
• Sleep Apnea - person stops breathing during their sleep; wake up momentarily, gasps for air, then falls back asleep; very common, especially in heavy males; can be fatal
• Night Terrors - sleep disorder characterized by high arousal and an appearance of being terrified; occur in Stage 4, not REM, and are not often remembered
• Sleepwalking (somnambulism) - sleep disorder affecting an estimated 10% of al humans atleast once in their lives; most often occurs during deep non-REM sleep (stage 3 or stage 4 sleep) early in the night
• Dreams:
• sequence of images, emotions, and thoughts passing through a sleeping person's mind
• Manifest Content - remembered story line of a dream
• Latent Content - underlying meaning of a dream
• Why do we dream?
1. Freud's Wish-Fulfillment Theory: dreams are the key to understanding our inner conflicts, ideas,and thoughts that are hidden in our unconscious, manifest and latent content
2. Information-Processing Theory: dreams act to sort out and understand the memories that you experience that day; REM sleep does increase after stressful events
3. Activation-Synthesis Theory: during the night our brainstem releases random neural activity, dreams may be a way to make sense of that activity

Hypnosis: 

• Altered state of consciousness?
• Posthypnotic Suggestion
• Posthypnotic Amnesia

Dissociation Theory:

• Theory by Ernest Hilgard
• We voluntarily divided our consciousness up
• Ice Water Experiment
• We have a hidden observer, a level of us that is always aware

Role Theory: 

• Hypnosis is NOT an altered state of consciousness
• Different people have various states of hypnotic suggestibility
• A social phenomenon where people want to believe
• Works better on people with a richer fantasy life

State Theory:

• Hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness
• Dramatic health benefits
• It works for pain best

Perception Video

Sensation and Perception

- Sensation: your window to the world
- Perception: interpreting what comes in your window

• Sensation- process by which our sensory receptor and nervous system receive stimulus from the environment
• Bottom-Up Processing: begins with sense receptors and works up to brain's integration of sensory information
• Top-Down Processing: information processing guided by higher level mental processes
• Absolute Threshold: minimum stimulation needed to detect stimulus 50% of time
• Difference Threshold: minimum difference that the person can detect between 2 stimuli
• Just Noticeable Difference (JND): smallest detectable difference between a starting and secondary level of a particular sensory stimulus
• Weber's Law: idea that to perceive difference between 2 stimuli, they must differ by constant percentages; not a constant amount
• Signal Detection Theory: predicts how we detect a stimulus amid other stimuli
• Sensory Adaptation: decreased responsive to stimuli due to constant stimulation
• Example: don't need to feel if underwear is there or not
• Selective Attention: focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus
• Cocktail-party Phenomenon: ability to focus one's listening attention on a single talker among a mixture of conversations and background noises, ignoring other conversations
• form of selective attention
• Vision: our most dominating sense
• height of a wave gives us its intensity (brightness)
• length of wave gives us its hue (color)
• longer the wavelength, the more red
• shorter the wavelength, the more violet
• Transduction: transforming signals into neutral impulses (Sky High); information goes from senses to the thalamus, then up to various areas of the brain
• Young-Helmholtz Trichromatic (3 color) Theory: 3 types of cones - red, blue, green; these types of cones can make millions of combinations of colors
• Opponent-Process Theory: sensory receptors come in pairs -
• red/green,
• yellow/blue
• black/white
• if one color is stimulated, others are inhibited
• Hearing: height of wave gives us amplitude of sound; frequency of wave gives us pitch of sound
• Transduction in the Ear: sound waves hit eardrum then anvil then hammer then stirrup then oval window, everything is just vibrating, then then the cochlea vibrates (cochlea is lined with mucus called basilar membranes), in basilar membrane there are hair cells, when hair cells vibrate they turn vibrations into neural impulses which are called organ of Corti, sent to thalamus up to the auditory nerve
• Place Theories: different hairs vibrate in the cochlea when there are different pitches, same hairs vibrate when they hear high pitches and others vibrate when they hear low pitches
• Frequency Theory: all hairs vibrate but at different speeds
• Deafness: 1. conduction deafness - something goes wrong with sound and vibration on the way to cochlea, can replace bones or get hearing aid to help   2. nerve (sensorineural) deafness - hair cells in the cochlea get damaged, loud noises can cause this type of deafness, NO WAY to replace hairs, cochlea implant is possible
• Smell and Taste:
• Sensory Interaction - principle that one sense may influence another
• Taste: we have bumps on the tongue called papillae, taste buds are located on the papillae (actually all over the mouth); sweet, salty, sour, bitter, spicy

• Umami: flavorful, meaty, savory taste
• Touch: receptors located in skin
• Gate Control Theory of Pain: spinal cord contains neurological gate that blocks pain signals or allows them to pass onto the brain
• Vestibular Sense: tells us where our body is orientated in space, our sense of balance
• Kinesthetic Sense: tells us where our body parts are, receptors located in our muscles and joints
• Perception: process of organizing and interpreting information, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects
• Gestalt Philosophy: whole is greater than the sum of its parts
• Figure-Ground Relationship: organization of visual field into object (figures) that stand out from their surroundings (ground)
• Grouping: perceptual tendency to organize stimuli into groups that we understand
• proximity, similarity, continuity, connectedness
• Depth Perception: ability to see objects in 3-D although images that strike the retina are 2-D; allows us to judge distance
• Binocular Cues: the closer an object comes to you, the greater the disparity is between the two images
• Monocular Cues: distance cues, such as linear perspective and overlap, available to either eye alone
• Interposition - if something is blocking our view, we perceive it is closer
• Relative Size - if we know that 2 objects are similar in size, the one that looks smaller is farther away
• Relative Clarity - we assume that hazy objects are farther away
• Texture Gradient - the coarser it looks, the closer it is
• Relative Height - things that are higher in our field of vision look farther away
• Relative Motion - things that are closer appear to move more quickly
• Liner Perspective - parallel lines seem to converge with distance
• Light and Shadow - the dimmer the object appears, the further away it seems because it reflects less light
• Motion Perception: judged mostly by size of object
• Phi Phenomenon: illusion of movement created when two or more adjacent lights blink on and off in succession
• Perceptual Consistency: perceiving objects as unchanging, even as the illumination and retinal images change

Thinking:
- Cognitions: term for knowing, thinking, and remembering
- Concepts: mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people; similar to Piaget's Schemas
- Prototypes: mental images or best example of categories; if new object is similar to prototype, we are able to recognize it

• Trial and Error:
• Algorithms - methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem
• Heuristics - rule-of-thumb strategy that often allows us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently; short cut (prone to error)
• Insight - sudden and often novel realization of solution to problem; no real strategy involved
• Obstacles to Problem Solving:
• Confirmation Bias - tendency to search for information that confirms one's perceptions
• Fixation - inability to see a problem from a new perspective
• Mental Set - tendency to approach a problem in a particular way, especially if it has worked in the past; may or may not be a good thing
• Functional Fixedness - tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions
• Types of Heuristics (that often lead to error):
• Representativeness Heuristics - rule-of-thumb for judging the likelihood of things in terms of how well they match our prototype; can cause us to ignore important information
• Availability Heuristics - estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in our memory; if it comes to mind easily (maybe a vivid event) we presume it is common
• Overconfidence - tendency to be more confident than correct; to overestimate the accuracy of your beliefs and judgments
• Framing - the way an issue is posed; can have drastic effects on your decisions and judgments
• Belief Bias - tendency for one's preexisting beliefs to distant logical reasoning; sometimes making invalid conclusions valid or vice versa
• Belief Perseverance - clinging to our initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited
• Artificial Intelligence

Language and Thought:
- our spoken writing or gestured words and the way we combine them to communicate meaning

• Phonemes: in a spoken language, the smallest distinctive sound unit
• Example: the word chug has 3 phonemes: ch, u , g
• Morphemes: in a language, the smallest unit that carries the meaning
• Example: it can be a word or a part of a word (prefix/suffix)
• Grammar: system of rules in a language that enables us to communicate and understand others
• Semantics: set of rules by which we derive meaning in a language
• Example: adding "-ed" at the end of words makes it past tense
• Syntax: rules for combining words into grammatically sensible sentences

• Language Development -
• Babbling Stage: starting at 3 - 4 months, infant makes spontaneous sounds; not limited to the phonemes of the infant's household language
• One-word Stage: 1 - 2 years old, uses one word to communicate big meanings
• Two-word Stage: at age 2, uses two words to communicate meanings, which are called Telegraphic Speech
• developed by Skinner - explained language development through social learning theory
• Chomsky - acquire language quickly for it to be learned; "learning box" inside leads that enables us to learn any human language
• Language Influence Thinking?
• Whorf's Linguistic Relativity: idea that language determines the way we think (not vice versa)
• Number of Language Make us Think Different?
• Thinking without Language: we can think in words, but more often in mental pictures
• Animals Think?
• Kohler's Chimpanzees: Kohler exhibited that Chimps can problem solve

Intelligence:
- ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations; socially constructed thus can be culturally specific

• Factor Analysis: statistical procedures that identifies clusters of related items on a test; Charles Spearman used it to discover General Intelligence
• Multiple Intelligence: Howard Gardner agree with Spearman's General Intelligence and came up with Multiple Intelligence; idea that came about by studying savants (a condition where a person has limited mental abilities but exceptional in one area)
• Visual/Spatial
• Verbal/Linguistic
• Logical/Mathematics
• Bodily/Kinesthetic
• Musical/Rhythm
• Interpersonal
• Intrapersonal
• Natural
• Sternberg's 3 Aspects of Intelligence:
1. Analytical (academic problem solving)
2. Creative (generating novel ideas)
3. Practical (required for everyday tasks where multiple solutions exists)
• Emotional Intelligence: ability to perceive, express, understand, and regulate emotions
• Brain Functions and Intelligence: higher preforming brains use less active than lower preforming brains (less glucose used); neurological speed is a bit quicker
• Assessing Intelligence:
• Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon tried to figure out the concept of Mental Age (what a person of a particular age should know)
• discovered that by discovering someone's Mental Age they can predict future performance
• Terman using this study came up with the IQ test (aka the Stanford-Binet Test)
• Modern Tests of Mental Abilities:
• Wechsler's Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIs) - consists of 11 subtests and cues us in strengths by using Factor Analysis
• Aptitude v.s Achievement Tests:
• Aptitude - a test designed to predict a person's future performance; the ability for that person to learn (Example: SATs)
• Achievement - a test designed to assess what a person has learned (Example: AP tests)
• tests must be Standardized, Reliable, and Valid
• Standardized: test must be pre-tested to a representative sample of people and form a normal distribution or bell curve
• Flynn Effect - intelligence test performance has been rising
• Reliable: extent which a test yields consistent results over time; split halves or test-reset method
• Validity: extent to which a test measures what it is supposed to measure
• Content Validity - does the test sample a behavior of interest
• Predictive Validity - does the test predict future behavior
• Intelligence Over Time: at the age of 3, a child's IQ can predict adolescent IQ scores depending on the type of intelligence that's crystallized or fluid

Psychology on Baby Reactions