Memories

Memories.

Sensory memory: 1) Iconic (visual) 2) Echoic (auditory)

Sensory Memory involves stimulus, and senses, in this part, two of our primary sensory memories are our eyesight and our hearing. These sensory memories are pretty much limited, where it can only hold up memories between 1 to 4 seconds.

Short Term Memory, or Working Memory.

Sensory Memory can be in the form of Short Term Memory (STM), where memories can be held for a longer duration, of between 12-30 seconds without any rehearsal, through selective attention. Without selective attention the stimulus that stimulates the sensory memory might just have no significance, since it will be lost in matter of seconds, but to make the stimulus a little longer to last, is to pay attention, only than will the stimulus be held in the STM, where it could be remembered a little longer. Our STM can only hold between 5 to 9 bits of information, where the magical number, or the common number of bits that can be held is 7. However, the duration and the capacity of information held in the STM can be further improved through Maintenance Rehearsal and Chunking.

Long Term Memory.

Memories stored in Long Term Memory (LTM), are considered to last more or less permanently, and capacity is always and will ever be unlimited. STM can be further improved to LTM through Elaborative Rehearsal, where memories are kept for longer times. LTM can be divide into to subsequent parts, that is  Declarative Memory and Non Declarative Memory. Declarative Memories are the memories that comes through you conscience, which you are fully aware of, which are facts and general knowledge. Non Declarative Memory however, is the type of memory that you are aware of, to put in other words, memories that comes by itself, like skills. Riding a bicycle is something you cannot express or say, it happens to come by itself. That is Non Declarative Memory.

Say that you were reading a text message sent by your mother, consider this as an example of Iconic Memory, and at the same time,  your friend is calling your name, take it as a form of Echoic Memory, where both of the stimulus, are that of the Sensory Stimulus.You are not aware that your friend is calling. This is what we call Selective Attention, where we are only aware of the memory that we pay attention to, like in this case, the text message that your mother has sent to you, that you are currently reading. In that message, your mother asks you to buy some toothpaste for your home, and when suddenly, your hand phone switches off by itself. It turned out to that your hand phone ran out of battery, and what you do is, you try to recall what your mother had just sent to you. The image of the text appears for only a short time, and you successfully noted what your mother wants you to do. When this happens, you successfully sent the encoded memory to your Short Term Memory, where the memory lasts a little longer. And because your mother happens to be the most important thing in your life, Elaborative Rehearsal takes place, where you store the memory due to the fact that the piece of encoded memory is meaningful, and you just upgraded the encoded memory to your Long Term Memory "storage", where you can recall what your mother wants you to do anytime anywhere, and anyhow.

WE ARE WHAT WE HAD LEARNT - LEARNING

Two weeks in Summer semester and this week we had learnt about learning. In my point of view, I began to see what Psychology is all about and how much our learning in our everyday lives do actually affect our behaviour through experience and practice.

Pavlov made one of the biggest discovery when he found out that dogs salivate aren't just a salivate action. However, the dog salivating is the behaviour when it came across the smell of delicious food. Therefore, Pavlov spent around 20 years of his lifetime on a research regarding to dogs digestion system where he created the term classical conditioning.

Let me share with you about one simple story on learning that happens in our everyday life: One fine day, Shazman discovered that his room was full with cockroaches; big, brown and yet too disgusting to elaborate more. However, the worst part was that there was a family of cockroaches living in his room. After awhile, Shazman thought that something must be done but he could not resist one of his bad habit which is eating in his room. So what he did was, he tried putting some fried mi on the floor and when a cockroch appeared, he sprayed it with Ridsect. Well, he did so quite for a few days. Surprisingly after a week he did the same act again by putting some food on the floor; however, no cockroach appeared, not even the smallest cockroach were in his room. To maintain the no-cockroaches, he then played the spray sound on his phone or the laptop. Now,  Shazman's room is free from the family of cockroaches. Yeay!

Well, there are five elements of classical conditioning where I'll state what those terms also meant by stating the connections between the story above:

1. Unconditioned stimulus (UCS): This term basically means 'unlearned'. In this case, the food is the unconditioned stimulus.
2. Unconditioned Response (UCR): Unconditioned response means the automatic involuntary to the unconditioned stimulus. Well in this story, the cockroach appearance in Shazman's room.
3. Conditioned stimulus (CS): This is the stimulus that becomes able to produce a learned reflex response by being paired with the unconditioned stimulus. In this case, it's the spray of the rid sect, but mostly is the sound produced by the spray.
4. Conditioned response (CR): This terms definition is the learned reflex response to a conditioned stimulus. Based on the story, the cockroach runs away especially when hearing the sound of the spray because the cockroaches knew that  the spray could actually kill them. Therefore, the flee out of the room making Shazman a happy boy. 
5. Neutral stimulus (NS): Neutral stimulus is a stimulus that on its own does not lead to any response. Well, we can take the food in the story as an example because the cockroach would eventually appear then it runs away when there is food.

Apart from classical conditioning theory, we also had learnt about Operant Conditioning. In general, operant conditioning is the learning of voluntary behaviour through the effects of pleasant and unpleasant consequences to responses. In simpler words, we can actually create someone's or some animal's behavior by having reinforcements. Those reinforcements would teach them on what should be done and vice versa. 

There are mainly two types of reinforcement:

1. Primary reinforcer: A reinforcement taken due to biological needs like hunger, thirst, or touch. For example, we drink cold water to quench our thirst on a sunny day.
2. Secondary reinforcer: A reinforcement that is being paired with a primary reinforcer. For example, to have cold drinks on a hot summer vacation needed money because nothing can be gain without money. Money is the the second reinforcer.

So for those two types of reinforcer, the reinforcement also has another two more branch:

1. Positive reinforcement: It is a reinforcement where there are pleasurable stimulus such as giving an ice-cream when our child cleans up his room.
2. Negative reinforcement: A reinforcement whereby removing, escaping, or avoiding an unpleasant stimulus. For example, we use a cool fever onto our heads when having a high fever.

Apart from that, this chapter also teaches that it is almost possible to train any living thing according to the way we want to by our own way and style. This  can actually be done by Shaping. Let's say, we want to train a monkey how to wear a shirt. Well, we can't expect to see the monkey wearing the shirt right on the spot. However, steps needed and same goes to reinforcement which is food. Perhaps at first we introduce the monkey what is a shirt then give food. Then one by one, starting from the head then it's arms to wear the shirt, then give food. You'll be amazed to see that the monkey can be able to waer the shirt on its own without any help from you. 

Many people got confused between negative reinforcement and punishment. Negative reinforcement is just the removal or avoiding an unpleasant stimulus while punishment is giving a response whereby making the action to most likely not repeated again in the future. Well, this important in our lives especially when being a leader or parents in a family. Well, there are actually ways to ave a more affective punishments:

1. Immediately punish when the bad action is taken. For example, cane our child when he or she don't want to attend classes.
2. We should make sure the punishment is consistent. So whenever our child don't attend classes, do not forget to cane him.
3. The punishment should also be paired with a reinforcement such as reward an ice-cream when our child attend classes

Apart from that, observational learning is the learning done through watching a model perform a certain behaviour. There are mainly four types of observational learning:

1. Attention
2. Memory
3. Imitation
4. Motivation

Well, that's just mainly about the topic learning. I hope that you do benefit the most from my blog :)

Written by Syazana Suraya

INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLOGY

It was the first class of psychology subject on the second day of our third semester. Being an engineering student, I really have no idea about what psychology is. Yes, I know it is something related to your mind. All this time I thought psychology is about reading people’s mind and understanding the way of thinking. But I never know that psychology is actually a scientific study of human behavior and mental process. There, I got one missed point about psychology –study of human behavior. Behavior here means outward actions and reactions while mental process is internal activity of our minds. 

Psychology is not about to study human behavior and the mental process only.There are 4 goals in psychology that we have learnt which are description, explanation, prediction and control. First, psychology is to describe what is happening with human behavior and its mental process.  A lot of methods can be used to describe behavior such as naturalistic observation, laboratory observation, case study, and surveys. All these methods will be explained more in detail. Second goal, psychology also is to explain the behavior. Why is it happening? Is it nature or nutured? In this case, theories are used as general explanation of a set of observation and facts. The third goal is to predict. We already know what is happening based on the observation made, and we already come out with theory that can explain our observation. So know we can predict what will happen or if it will happen again. The fourth one which is the last goal of psychology is to control. When we can describe, explain and predict, of course we can take control of the behavior. Learning psychology really has opened my mind and expectation about it. While everyone think psychology is just about reading human’s mind, psychology actually has its own goals to serve.  

            See, it is already a lot to share throughout our first week of psychology class. So I’m not going to tell everything that we have learnt in detail. To make it short I would like to share one thing I learnt in our psychology class which I found is really fascinating. It was about Pavlov’s dogs. So how does dog is related to psychology? Do you know that there was a Russian psychologist named Ivan Pavlov? He observed that his dogs will salivate in response to being fed. But what is interesting is when he noticed that the dogs would begin to salivate whenever he entered the room, even when he was not bringing them food. Pavlov then conducted an experiment, where he used a bell as a stimulus to his dogs’ salivation.  Whenever he gave food to his dogs, he also rang a bell. After a number of repeats of this procedure, he tried the bell on its own. As expected, the bell on its own now caused the dogs to salivate. 

         

I guess this example about Pavlov’s dogs is enough to cover our learning session for this week. From Pavlov’s experiment, we can see how the four goals are achieved. We also can see how psychology is very relatable to our daily life.  Psychology makes you understand better who you are and what your expectations and limitations are. I personally think that psychology has opened my eyes and change my perspective about this world. Since human beings are complex creatures, so I think learning psychology is going to be a fun journey!