Transcript Learning and Memory

frog
piano
bag
penis
house
chair
sex
purple
dimple
notebook
spoon
finger
horse
button
bitch
staple
Memory and Learning
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Name all of your middle school teachers
What about…?
Holding Material in Working
Memory
After each word, say the previous word:
Peach, apple, blueberry, melon, orange, mango, banana,
lemon, papaya, fig, plum, tangerine, grape
After each word say the word from two words
back:
Write down as many of the words from the list in the
beginning of class as you can.
How many of you remembered each word?
Calculate the % of students who remembered each word.
Are you all just a bunch of perverts, or does a brain
structure explain this? Which brain structure?
Stressful or emotionally exciting experiences increase the
secretion of epinephrine and cortisol. These both activate
the amygdala, which in turn stimulates the hippocampus
and the cerebral cortex. If you had damage to the
amygdala, you would not have remembered the “taboo”
words any better than “spoon” or “chair”.
Were the first and last words remembered better than
most of the others? This is called the primacy and the
recency effect.
Short-term and Long-term Memory
Short-term
•Most adults can hold about seven items in short-term memory
•Forget it quickly unless you work at remembering it
•Once it’s gone, it’s gone forever
Long-term
•Can store vast amounts of information without removing old memories
•You may think you’ve forgotten something, but a clue or hint can help
you reconstruct it
•Short-term memories must be consolidated into long-term ones
•Meaningful and emotional events don’t require effort to consolidate
(flashbulb memories)
How we process information from our environment:
Stimulus  Reception  Transduction  Coding
Learning; a relatively permanent change in
behavior that results from experience
Some behaviors can be learned through trial and error
learning, but this is not the most efficient way to gather
new information for most animals.
I. Classical
Conditioning
(Associative learning)
Pavlov's Dog
Pavlov 2
The Office
Two and a Half Men
Mowrer; bell and pad
pg. 27 Understanding Psychology
Generalization; responding to a similar stimulus
(same response to circle and oval)
Discrimination; responding differently to different (but
similar) stimuli
(different responses to circle and oval)
Extinction; dying out of a conditioned response because of
no reinforcement/punishment or because the conditioned
stimulus is continually presented without the unconditioned
one.
Spontaneous Recovery; the reappearance of the
conditioned response when the conditioned stimulus is
again presented
II. Operant Conditioning
Definitions
Skinner
Terms to know
Reinforcement Schedules
Practice
Aversive Control; avoiding bad consequences
Escape Conditioning; a behavior that causes an
unpleasant consequence to stop
Avoidance Learning; a behavior that prevents
an unpleasant consequence from happening
Aversive stimuli can produce negative side
effects (rage, aggression, fear, etc)
Learned Helplessness or Learned Laziness;
when you realize that actions have no effect on
the environment (giving up…lack of effort)
Seligman;
•Shock treatment with dogs
•If reward comes with no effort a person
learns that work is not necessary (learned
laziness)
•If pain comes no matter how hard one tries
a person gives up (learned helplessness)
•Learned helplessness is a major cause of
depression
Seligman identified three elements of helplessness:
Stability; the person’s belief that the helplessness
comes from a permanent characteristic
Globality; “I’m just dumb”
Internality; failure lies within
How we think determines behavior…we don’t just
learn to react to stimuli…we attribute an outcome
to a source and that affects self-esteem which in
turn, affects behavior
Factors that affect learning:
Feedback; learning from mistakes or
success
Transfer; can be positive or negative
Old skills can help you learn new ones or
they can block you from learning new ones
(driving in England)
Practice; better to space out practice
Learning complicated skills
Sea World website
Shaping…rewarding successive
approximations of the desired behavior
(example: reward facing right to begin, then
start rewarding only quarter turn to the right,
then half way around, then full turn)
Response chains… reward each behavior
when it’s performed in the proper sequence
Classical or
Operant?
Is the animal learning
to associate one
thing with something
else?
Is the animal learning
from a consequence
to an action? (a
positive or a negative
consequence)
III. Modeling
•Modeling
•Observational learning
Tower of Hanoi
http://www.cut-the-knot.org/recurrence/hanoi.shtml
http://www.pedagonet.com/fun/flashgame185.htm
•Social responses; learning how to
behave in a new situation by watching
how others behave
•Disinhibition; watching others not have
consequences for dangerous acts
Learning to learn; Harlow showed that
animals develop strategies that can be
applied to new, unique situations
Learning to cooperate, creativity, problemsolving, etc.
Episodic memory: recall of an
event
Crime scene memory
Crime scene 2
Declarative memory: the ability to state a
memory in words
Rain Man
Kim Peek
Clive
Memory
Memory; autobiographical
How to memorize like the pros
Procedural memory: the development of
motor skills
Amnesia:
Anterograde: loss of memories for events
that happened after brain damage
Retrograde: loss of memory for events
that occurred shortly before brain damage
Explicit memory: a deliberate recall of
information that one recognizes as a
memory
Implicit memory: the influence of recent
experience on behavior, even if one does
not realize that one is using memory
(which person to trust)
Ant pedometers:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2009/11/25/120587095/ants-that-count
Selective attention: the ability to choose among various
inputs/stimuli (Cocktail party effect)
Would you be more likely to “tune out” the person you’re
talking with if someone nearby…
said your name?
was very attractive?
was talking about something that interested you?
Cocktail party studies
Bats at a cocktail party
Brain filter discovered
What information are you taking in?
Sensory memory…you’re taking EVERYTHING in very
briefly!
Where is a memory located?
Lashley and the search for the Engram
Lesions through all structures in rat brains.
No cut or combination of cuts inhibited a rat’s retention or
acquisition of knowledge (they had no trouble learning or
remembering a maze)
Lashley concluded that learning was not localized in any
one area of the brain…all cortical areas could substitute for
one another as far as learning is concerned
How is human intelligence
different from animal
intelligence?
How is it similar?
Crime scene memory;
Confabulation
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm
Directed thinking
A systematic, logical attempt to reach a specific goal
Problem-solving using strategies
• Break the problem down into smaller steps
• Work backwards from the goal
• Examine multiple possibilities (think “outside the box”)
• Compare to past situations, but avoid “rigidity”
Non-directed thinking
A free flow of thoughts through the mind with no particular
goal or plan
• Creativity; use info in a way that is new and meaningful
• Flexibility; ability to overcome rigidity
• The defeat of Functional Fixedness!
• Recombination; new mental rearrangement of familiar
elements
• Insight…AHA moment