PSYC 1010 - Test 2 Notes Chapter 5: Variations in Consciousness ...
PSYC 1010 - Test 2 Notes
Chapter 5: Variations in Consciousness The Nature of Consciousness / Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Consciousness is the continually changing stream of mental activity
Circadian Rhythms influences the cycles of sleep and wakefulness (occurs about once per day). Exposure to light resets biological clocks by affecting the activity of the suprachiasmatic nucleus (in the hypothalamus) and the pineal gland (which secretes melatonin at night). Jetlag and sleep deprivation is often the byproducts of unsynchronized Circadian Rhythms and can cause serious implications in memory and attention. Melatonin can be used to treat such byproducts of synchronization difficulties.
If no natural light exist, then our natural clocks are affected and possibly altered. During sleep, our brain remains active and has its own cues. Case Study: Siffre’s “25-hour day”
Infradian Rhythms occurs less than once a day, but more than once a year. Menstruation and hibernation are some examples. Ultradian Rhythms occur more than once a day. Heartbeat and respiration are also common examples of such.
Electroencephalogram (EEG) can measure sleep through voltages and waveforms.
Sleep and Waking Cycles
During a night’s sleep, a series of 90-minute sleep cycle stages take place.
Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep is often associated with dreams and waking thoughts.
REM sleep declines as the person gets older. But REM cycles (4) rarely change.
Restoration Theory: Body needs to rest and recover. Regular exercise can help sleep.
Preservation Theory: Why risk being killed if you can only get food in the day?
Reticular Activating Sleep (RAS) stimulates awake-like EEG waves during sleep. Damage to RAS can result in coma and sleep-like EEG waves
Pons act as “bridges” to other areas of the brain and activate the cortex. Damage to pons can result in the abolition or reduction of REM sleep.
Dreams
Interpretation of Dreams (1900): Meaningful output of the subconscious mind. Believes that the manifest content (dream images) depicts latent content (real meanings) to protect the dreamer. Sigmund Freud was at the height of this hypothesis with his dream analysis.
Problem-focused approach: Reflect ongoing conscious preoccupations of waking life. Predictable dream patterns for people in grief or depression.
By-product of mental housekeeping: strengthening synaptic connections. REM sleep associated with consolidation of learning and memory. Sleep can help you recover hidden or lost memories as well as learning them. Even naps can help.
Activation Synthesis Hypothesis: neural stimulation from the pons activates other brain areas involved in waking consciousness. Random neural firing may help weave a story in dreams as a side-effect to random neural activity.
Content of dreams depend on one’s age and gender, events of one’s life, and external stimuli experienced during the dream.
Hypnosis: Altered Consciousness or Role Playing? (Hypnotic subjects are awake) Meditation: Pure Consciousness or Relaxation? (Psychological relaxation) Altered Consciousness with Drugs: Recreational drugs can alter consciousness with psychoactive drugs which exerts its main effects in the brain.
Chapter 6: Learning
The changes in behavior accumulating across generations are stored in the genes as well as over a lifetime are stored in the central nervous system.
Classical Conditioning
Ivan Pavlov - “Psychic Secretions” (also known as “Pavlovian Conditioning”)
Before Learning, the subject is exposed to the unconditioned stimulus (UCS) in which an unconditioned response (UCR) is observed. The subject is also exposed to the neutral stimulus (NS) in which no response is observed. During Learning, the UCS is repeatedly paired with the NS while UCR continues to be observed in the subject. After learning, the NS becomes a conditioned stimulus (CS) and the UCR is observed as conditioned response (CR). Higher-order conditioning involves conditioning another stimulus to produce the same CR while replacing the old CS as the new CS.
John Watson argued that psychology should be an objective experimental branch of natural science. He concludes that psychology has failed as a science.
Generalization: Using a slight variant of the actual CS to produce a slight variant of CR.
Discrimination: CR is only produced when same or similar CS is used.
A conditioned response may be weakened and extinguished entirely when the CS (NS + UCS) is no longer paired with the UCS (extinction). Some other cases show a spontaneous recovery after USC is again introduced after extinction.
Counterconditioning: Undoing a conditioned response
Compensatory-Reaction Hypothesis: From expected drug dose to actual drug overdose.
Operant Conditioning
Edward Thorndike - also known as “Trial and Error” Conditioning
Thorndike’s Law of Effect: Responses that produce a satisfying effect in a particular situation become more likely to occur again in that situation. Responses that produce a discomforting effect become less likely to occur again in that situation.
B.F. Skinner believed that almost any behavior could be “shaped” by operant methods.
Behavior can be shaped by “operant methods” in stages in conditioned environments.
Partial Reinforcement: Response is not rewarded on every trial. Behavior becomes more resistant to extinction as well as getting extensive efforts for small rewards (e.g. casinos). o Fixed Ratio: Reinforced after a fixed number of responses o Variable Ratio: Reinforced after a variable number of responses. o Fixed Interval: Reinforced after a given amount of time has elapsed. o Variable Interval: Reinforced after a variable interval of time has elapsed.
Response rate increases as behavior is influenced by positive (give) and negative (take) reinforcements. Response rate decreases as behavior is influenced by positive (give) and negative (take) punishments. Also the key dependent variable in operant conditioning.
Differences: Experimenter controls reinforcement in classical conditioning while the subject controls reinforcement in operant conditioning. Classical conditioning focuses on involuntary responses (e.g. heart rate, salivary secretion) while operant conditioning focuses on voluntary responses (e.g. pecking, hand movements, speech).
Evolutionary Perspective (behaviorist): Anything can be conditioned to anything else (classical) and any behavior can be trained (operant).
Observational Learning
Conditioning by observing a model. Classical and operant conditioning in observational learning depends on attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation.
John Garcia: are organisms evolved and prepared to learn these conditions? Different animals have different preparedness to learn (e.g. language in humans, maze-learning in rats). Chapter 7: Human Memory Encoding: Getting Information into Memory
Attention facilitates encoding information into the brain selectively (like a filter)
Maintenance Rehearsal is the process of repeating bits of information in short-term memory to prevent possible loss.
Sensory register inputs both Iconic Memory (Visual) and Echoic Memory (Auditory).
George Sperling developed a unique experiment to test iconic memory in humans.
Storage: Maintaining Information in Memory
Sensory memory preserves the original information for only an instant
Primary Effect is the ability to remember the first few things seen
Recency Effect is the ability to remember the last few things seen
Chunking is the encoding strategy to remember things in continuation (or in a sequence)
Long-term memory is an unlimited capacity storage that may hold information indefinitely. However, even long-term memories can become distorted, “repressed”, and even forgotten if left unrecalled overtime.
Short-term memories can be forgotten completely in an instant if no rehearsals were done.
Retrieval: Getting Information Out of Memory
Reinstating the context of an event (seeing a related event for example) can help facilitate recall. Memories are not replicas of past experiences. They are only reconstructive.
Memory is rarely reliable to any extent. It is even possible to remember things that never actually happened (False Memory).
Flashbulb Memories are often remembered because of a “stress” it caused (e.g. climaxes, tabloids), but like other long-term memories, it is also unreliable to an extent.
Anatomy of Memory
“Reverberating circuits” refers to electrical activities in short-term memory facilitating repetition. The hippocampus is used as an “index” to any memories stored in the brain.
Memory is not stored in just one place of the brain. Synapse is associated with the neural anatomy of long-term memories. Hebbian learning hypothesizes that “neurons that fire together wire together.”
Forgetting: Memory Lapses, Memory Types, and Memory Disorders
Decay theory proposes that forgetting occurs spontaneously with the passage of time. Decay is shown to be faster in short-term memories and slower in long-term memories.
Repression involves that motivated forgetting of painful or unpleasant memories.
Concussion: Memories must rely on different neural mechanisms from older memories. Concussion can disrupt recent memories, but not as much for older memories.
Explicit Memory: conscious memories for events occurred in the past for factual use.
Implicit Memory: unconscious memories of how to carry out actions or solve problems.
Explicit Memory is declarative whereas Implicit Memory is non-declarative (procedural). They are both stored in different, but separate parts of the brain.
Retrograde Amnesia: memory loss prior to injury / incident
Anterograde Amnesia: memory loss after injury / incident
Huntington’s Cholera: autosomal dominant disorder impairing explicit verbal-recognition, mirror-tracing tasks and other types of implicit memory-recognition. Alzheimer’s disease: genetic-related disease causing problems in memory and other intellectual functions.
Chapter 8: Language and Thought Language: Turning Thoughts into Words
Sounds > Phonemes > Morphemes > Words > Sentences > Meaning
Languages are symbolic, semantic, generative, and structured
B.F. Skinner argues that language and grammar are learned through operant conditioning. Children acquire language through imitation and reinforcement. Nativists argue that humans have innate capacity to learn language rules.
Noam Chomsky argues that there are too many combinations to learn in language
Children normally utter their first words around their first birthday. But very often, they generalize and overextend words and rules (e.g. door-door, wug, gived).
As children get older, they gradually learn the complexities of syntax.
Case Study: “Genie” could only speak a few words, but grammar heavily impaired.
For proper grammar, language has to be acquired before the age of six
Research suggests that Bilingualism may be associated with higher levels of controlled processing and slower decline in some cognitive abilities often associated with old age.
Non-human primates do not have vocal apparatus for speech.
Reasoning: Problem Solving and Logic
Problems of inducing structure, problems of transformation, and problems of arrangement were common types of problems psychologists have distinguished.
Variety of strategies (often cognitive) can be used to solve problems: trial and error, subgoals, reverse engineering, analogies, and changing perspectives.
Deductive Reasoning: Reasoning from the general to the specific through the use of series problems (review series of statements and arrive at a conclusion not contained in
any single statement) and syllogisms (combining two general premises to see if a particular conclusion is true).
Inductive Reasoning: Reasoning from the specific to the general using specific clues and comes up with a general theory. Sherlock Holmes is a better example for this.
Some cultures encourage a field-dependent cognitive while others foster more fieldindependent cognitive (analysis and problem restructuring). Can be holistic or analytic.
Confirmation Bias: Attempt to prove or disprove a hypothesis.
Functional Fixedness: The perception that an object can only function as it was designed to do. This contrasts the perception of thinking “outside the box.”
Choices and Chances: Estimating Probabilities
Availability Bias: The availability of statistical data and possible classified documents.
Representativeness: Probability of characteristics not present in existing data or statistics.
Insight: Using available resources to accomplish a goal or figure out a problem.
Simon’s theory of bounded rationality suggests that human decision and strategies are simplistic (often yielding irrational results). An additive decision model is used when people make decisions by rating the attributes of each alternative and selecting the alternative with the highest sum of ratings.
Another way to make choices is to use the process of elimination (remove irrationality).
Evolutionary psychologists argue that errors and biases in human reasoning can be greatly reduced when problems are presented in ways that resemble the type of input humans would have processed in ancestral times.
Chapter 5: Variations in Consciousness The Nature of Consciousness / Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Consciousness is the continually changing stream of mental activity
Circadian Rhythms influences the cycles of sleep and wakefulness (occurs about once per day). Exposure to light resets biological clocks by affecting the activity of the suprachiasmatic nucleus (in the hypothalamus) and the pineal gland (which secretes melatonin at night). Jetlag and sleep deprivation is often the byproducts of unsynchronized Circadian Rhythms and can cause serious implications in memory and attention. Melatonin can be used to treat such byproducts of synchronization difficulties.
If no natural light exist, then our natural clocks are affected and possibly altered. During sleep, our brain remains active and has its own cues. Case Study: Siffre’s “25-hour day”
Infradian Rhythms occurs less than once a day, but more than once a year. Menstruation and hibernation are some examples. Ultradian Rhythms occur more than once a day. Heartbeat and respiration are also common examples of such.
Electroencephalogram (EEG) can measure sleep through voltages and waveforms.
Sleep and Waking Cycles
During a night’s sleep, a series of 90-minute sleep cycle stages take place.
Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep is often associated with dreams and waking thoughts.
REM sleep declines as the person gets older. But REM cycles (4) rarely change.
Restoration Theory: Body needs to rest and recover. Regular exercise can help sleep.
Preservation Theory: Why risk being killed if you can only get food in the day?
Reticular Activating Sleep (RAS) stimulates awake-like EEG waves during sleep. Damage to RAS can result in coma and sleep-like EEG waves
Pons act as “bridges” to other areas of the brain and activate the cortex. Damage to pons can result in the abolition or reduction of REM sleep.
Dreams
Interpretation of Dreams (1900): Meaningful output of the subconscious mind. Believes that the manifest content (dream images) depicts latent content (real meanings) to protect the dreamer. Sigmund Freud was at the height of this hypothesis with his dream analysis.
Problem-focused approach: Reflect ongoing conscious preoccupations of waking life. Predictable dream patterns for people in grief or depression.
By-product of mental housekeeping: strengthening synaptic connections. REM sleep associated with consolidation of learning and memory. Sleep can help you recover hidden or lost memories as well as learning them. Even naps can help.
Activation Synthesis Hypothesis: neural stimulation from the pons activates other brain areas involved in waking consciousness. Random neural firing may help weave a story in dreams as a side-effect to random neural activity.
Content of dreams depend on one’s age and gender, events of one’s life, and external stimuli experienced during the dream.
Hypnosis: Altered Consciousness or Role Playing? (Hypnotic subjects are awake) Meditation: Pure Consciousness or Relaxation? (Psychological relaxation) Altered Consciousness with Drugs: Recreational drugs can alter consciousness with psychoactive drugs which exerts its main effects in the brain.
Chapter 6: Learning
The changes in behavior accumulating across generations are stored in the genes as well as over a lifetime are stored in the central nervous system.
Classical Conditioning
Ivan Pavlov - “Psychic Secretions” (also known as “Pavlovian Conditioning”)
Before Learning, the subject is exposed to the unconditioned stimulus (UCS) in which an unconditioned response (UCR) is observed. The subject is also exposed to the neutral stimulus (NS) in which no response is observed. During Learning, the UCS is repeatedly paired with the NS while UCR continues to be observed in the subject. After learning, the NS becomes a conditioned stimulus (CS) and the UCR is observed as conditioned response (CR). Higher-order conditioning involves conditioning another stimulus to produce the same CR while replacing the old CS as the new CS.
John Watson argued that psychology should be an objective experimental branch of natural science. He concludes that psychology has failed as a science.
Generalization: Using a slight variant of the actual CS to produce a slight variant of CR.
Discrimination: CR is only produced when same or similar CS is used.
A conditioned response may be weakened and extinguished entirely when the CS (NS + UCS) is no longer paired with the UCS (extinction). Some other cases show a spontaneous recovery after USC is again introduced after extinction.
Counterconditioning: Undoing a conditioned response
Compensatory-Reaction Hypothesis: From expected drug dose to actual drug overdose.
Operant Conditioning
Edward Thorndike - also known as “Trial and Error” Conditioning
Thorndike’s Law of Effect: Responses that produce a satisfying effect in a particular situation become more likely to occur again in that situation. Responses that produce a discomforting effect become less likely to occur again in that situation.
B.F. Skinner believed that almost any behavior could be “shaped” by operant methods.
Behavior can be shaped by “operant methods” in stages in conditioned environments.
Partial Reinforcement: Response is not rewarded on every trial. Behavior becomes more resistant to extinction as well as getting extensive efforts for small rewards (e.g. casinos). o Fixed Ratio: Reinforced after a fixed number of responses o Variable Ratio: Reinforced after a variable number of responses. o Fixed Interval: Reinforced after a given amount of time has elapsed. o Variable Interval: Reinforced after a variable interval of time has elapsed.
Response rate increases as behavior is influenced by positive (give) and negative (take) reinforcements. Response rate decreases as behavior is influenced by positive (give) and negative (take) punishments. Also the key dependent variable in operant conditioning.
Differences: Experimenter controls reinforcement in classical conditioning while the subject controls reinforcement in operant conditioning. Classical conditioning focuses on involuntary responses (e.g. heart rate, salivary secretion) while operant conditioning focuses on voluntary responses (e.g. pecking, hand movements, speech).
Evolutionary Perspective (behaviorist): Anything can be conditioned to anything else (classical) and any behavior can be trained (operant).
Observational Learning
Conditioning by observing a model. Classical and operant conditioning in observational learning depends on attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation.
John Garcia: are organisms evolved and prepared to learn these conditions? Different animals have different preparedness to learn (e.g. language in humans, maze-learning in rats). Chapter 7: Human Memory Encoding: Getting Information into Memory
Attention facilitates encoding information into the brain selectively (like a filter)
Maintenance Rehearsal is the process of repeating bits of information in short-term memory to prevent possible loss.
Sensory register inputs both Iconic Memory (Visual) and Echoic Memory (Auditory).
George Sperling developed a unique experiment to test iconic memory in humans.
Storage: Maintaining Information in Memory
Sensory memory preserves the original information for only an instant
Primary Effect is the ability to remember the first few things seen
Recency Effect is the ability to remember the last few things seen
Chunking is the encoding strategy to remember things in continuation (or in a sequence)
Long-term memory is an unlimited capacity storage that may hold information indefinitely. However, even long-term memories can become distorted, “repressed”, and even forgotten if left unrecalled overtime.
Short-term memories can be forgotten completely in an instant if no rehearsals were done.
Retrieval: Getting Information Out of Memory
Reinstating the context of an event (seeing a related event for example) can help facilitate recall. Memories are not replicas of past experiences. They are only reconstructive.
Memory is rarely reliable to any extent. It is even possible to remember things that never actually happened (False Memory).
Flashbulb Memories are often remembered because of a “stress” it caused (e.g. climaxes, tabloids), but like other long-term memories, it is also unreliable to an extent.
Anatomy of Memory
“Reverberating circuits” refers to electrical activities in short-term memory facilitating repetition. The hippocampus is used as an “index” to any memories stored in the brain.
Memory is not stored in just one place of the brain. Synapse is associated with the neural anatomy of long-term memories. Hebbian learning hypothesizes that “neurons that fire together wire together.”
Forgetting: Memory Lapses, Memory Types, and Memory Disorders
Decay theory proposes that forgetting occurs spontaneously with the passage of time. Decay is shown to be faster in short-term memories and slower in long-term memories.
Repression involves that motivated forgetting of painful or unpleasant memories.
Concussion: Memories must rely on different neural mechanisms from older memories. Concussion can disrupt recent memories, but not as much for older memories.
Explicit Memory: conscious memories for events occurred in the past for factual use.
Implicit Memory: unconscious memories of how to carry out actions or solve problems.
Explicit Memory is declarative whereas Implicit Memory is non-declarative (procedural). They are both stored in different, but separate parts of the brain.
Retrograde Amnesia: memory loss prior to injury / incident
Anterograde Amnesia: memory loss after injury / incident
Huntington’s Cholera: autosomal dominant disorder impairing explicit verbal-recognition, mirror-tracing tasks and other types of implicit memory-recognition. Alzheimer’s disease: genetic-related disease causing problems in memory and other intellectual functions.
Chapter 8: Language and Thought Language: Turning Thoughts into Words
Sounds > Phonemes > Morphemes > Words > Sentences > Meaning
Languages are symbolic, semantic, generative, and structured
B.F. Skinner argues that language and grammar are learned through operant conditioning. Children acquire language through imitation and reinforcement. Nativists argue that humans have innate capacity to learn language rules.
Noam Chomsky argues that there are too many combinations to learn in language
Children normally utter their first words around their first birthday. But very often, they generalize and overextend words and rules (e.g. door-door, wug, gived).
As children get older, they gradually learn the complexities of syntax.
Case Study: “Genie” could only speak a few words, but grammar heavily impaired.
For proper grammar, language has to be acquired before the age of six
Research suggests that Bilingualism may be associated with higher levels of controlled processing and slower decline in some cognitive abilities often associated with old age.
Non-human primates do not have vocal apparatus for speech.
Reasoning: Problem Solving and Logic
Problems of inducing structure, problems of transformation, and problems of arrangement were common types of problems psychologists have distinguished.
Variety of strategies (often cognitive) can be used to solve problems: trial and error, subgoals, reverse engineering, analogies, and changing perspectives.
Deductive Reasoning: Reasoning from the general to the specific through the use of series problems (review series of statements and arrive at a conclusion not contained in
any single statement) and syllogisms (combining two general premises to see if a particular conclusion is true).
Inductive Reasoning: Reasoning from the specific to the general using specific clues and comes up with a general theory. Sherlock Holmes is a better example for this.
Some cultures encourage a field-dependent cognitive while others foster more fieldindependent cognitive (analysis and problem restructuring). Can be holistic or analytic.
Confirmation Bias: Attempt to prove or disprove a hypothesis.
Functional Fixedness: The perception that an object can only function as it was designed to do. This contrasts the perception of thinking “outside the box.”
Choices and Chances: Estimating Probabilities
Availability Bias: The availability of statistical data and possible classified documents.
Representativeness: Probability of characteristics not present in existing data or statistics.
Insight: Using available resources to accomplish a goal or figure out a problem.
Simon’s theory of bounded rationality suggests that human decision and strategies are simplistic (often yielding irrational results). An additive decision model is used when people make decisions by rating the attributes of each alternative and selecting the alternative with the highest sum of ratings.
Another way to make choices is to use the process of elimination (remove irrationality).
Evolutionary psychologists argue that errors and biases in human reasoning can be greatly reduced when problems are presented in ways that resemble the type of input humans would have processed in ancestral times.
