These are interesting videos about different aspects of learning!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRLfRRNoZzI – Pavlov’s experiments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxKfpKQzow8 – Baby Albert and Watson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUeLzfP8tCA Brief info on B.F. Skinner
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDujDOLre-8 – Thorndike and puzzle boxes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AepqpTtKbwo&feature=related – Interview with Skinner, pigeons, schedules of reinforcement, ends with free will question
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDtBz_1dkuk – Bobo Doll experiment explained by Bandura
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Monday, November 19, 2007
Analyzing Daydreams
Analyzing Daydreams
Keep a diary of your daydreams over two or three days. Carry a pad of paper or 3-by-5 cards and during idle moments of the day-before class, waiting for lunch, driving home, during a break in class- jot down what you've just been thinking about.
To understand the meanings of daydreams, Singer notes, students should look at certain attributes. For example, do some scenes and themes reoccur? Score your daydreams from 1 to 5 on the following characteristics.
1. Is the fantasy purely visual or do other senses come into play? For example, in fantasizing about a banquet do you hear the speaker, smell the food, taste the roast beef? Some daydreams consist entirely of conversations with another person. Do you see the person and listen to his or her comments or do you simply do all the talking? Score 1 if only one sense was invovled but up to 5 if more senses come into play.
2. Are your dreams personal or impersonal? In dreaming about a bank robbery are you a spectator or are you actively involved as a perpetrator or victim? Score 1 if you are merely a bystander and up to 5 if you are actively involved.
3. Was the dream relevant to your real life? If you daydream about visiting the harem of an Arabian sheik, you are probably just seeking an escape from today's problems. However, if you are rehearsing a conversation you will have with your employer tomorrow, you are dealing with an immediately relevant aspect of your life. Again score 1 to 5, with 5 representing extreme, obvious relevance to your current life situation.
4. How vivid was your dream? Did you see it through a thick fog or was it clear and sharp? Were events in color or balck and white? Could you clearly hear what was being said? Score 1 to 5, with higher scores representing the more vivid experiences.
Singer states that by averaging these ratings for a whole series of dreams you can get a sense of your underlying motives. For example, to what extent do our fantasies reflect achievement? If we have been doing poorly in school and telling ourselves that it doesn't matter, while our daydreams show us overcoming incrediable obstacles, we may have misjudged our deepest wishes. Similarly, if our daydreams consist of passionate love affairs while in everyday life we have focused on career success, we may be suppressing a deep need for affection. Does power play a prat in our dreams? Dependency? Escape from danger? These and other motives may be reflected in our dreams. In each case Singer instructs us to ask ourselves whether the dreams coincide with real-life efforts and goals or are they very different? Is it possible we are hiding certain motives from ourselves and need to reevaluate our life efforts?
Keep a diary of your daydreams over two or three days. Carry a pad of paper or 3-by-5 cards and during idle moments of the day-before class, waiting for lunch, driving home, during a break in class- jot down what you've just been thinking about.
To understand the meanings of daydreams, Singer notes, students should look at certain attributes. For example, do some scenes and themes reoccur? Score your daydreams from 1 to 5 on the following characteristics.
1. Is the fantasy purely visual or do other senses come into play? For example, in fantasizing about a banquet do you hear the speaker, smell the food, taste the roast beef? Some daydreams consist entirely of conversations with another person. Do you see the person and listen to his or her comments or do you simply do all the talking? Score 1 if only one sense was invovled but up to 5 if more senses come into play.
2. Are your dreams personal or impersonal? In dreaming about a bank robbery are you a spectator or are you actively involved as a perpetrator or victim? Score 1 if you are merely a bystander and up to 5 if you are actively involved.
3. Was the dream relevant to your real life? If you daydream about visiting the harem of an Arabian sheik, you are probably just seeking an escape from today's problems. However, if you are rehearsing a conversation you will have with your employer tomorrow, you are dealing with an immediately relevant aspect of your life. Again score 1 to 5, with 5 representing extreme, obvious relevance to your current life situation.
4. How vivid was your dream? Did you see it through a thick fog or was it clear and sharp? Were events in color or balck and white? Could you clearly hear what was being said? Score 1 to 5, with higher scores representing the more vivid experiences.
Singer states that by averaging these ratings for a whole series of dreams you can get a sense of your underlying motives. For example, to what extent do our fantasies reflect achievement? If we have been doing poorly in school and telling ourselves that it doesn't matter, while our daydreams show us overcoming incrediable obstacles, we may have misjudged our deepest wishes. Similarly, if our daydreams consist of passionate love affairs while in everyday life we have focused on career success, we may be suppressing a deep need for affection. Does power play a prat in our dreams? Dependency? Escape from danger? These and other motives may be reflected in our dreams. In each case Singer instructs us to ask ourselves whether the dreams coincide with real-life efforts and goals or are they very different? Is it possible we are hiding certain motives from ourselves and need to reevaluate our life efforts?
Sunday, November 18, 2007
This week in PSYCH!
Monday: Dream AP due, Drugs (chart using other textbooks), practice test, do IB summary sheet in groups
Tuesday: Test over Consciousness unit, Turn in notebook
Wednesday: You sleep in, I come to school.
Thursday: Happy Thanksgiving. Big meal, big nap, hopefully big win for the Lions
Friday: Either shop or avoid the mall area at all costs.
Saturday: High: 36 °F Mostly cloudy and chilly
Sunday: High: 42 °F Periods of clouds and sunshine, NOTES DUE TUESDAY! (Mods 9 & 10)
Tuesday: Test over Consciousness unit, Turn in notebook
Wednesday: You sleep in, I come to school.
Thursday: Happy Thanksgiving. Big meal, big nap, hopefully big win for the Lions
Friday: Either shop or avoid the mall area at all costs.
Saturday: High: 36 °F Mostly cloudy and chilly
Sunday: High: 42 °F Periods of clouds and sunshine, NOTES DUE TUESDAY! (Mods 9 & 10)
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Continuum of Consciousness Powerpoint
CONTINUUM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Consciousness
Awareness of the outside world and your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and other mental processes
Doctors: awareness that is demonstrated by either explicit or implicit recall (surgery)
0.2 % of surgical patients (under general anesthesia) retain some degree of consciousness
3 Central Questions
1. What is the relationship between the conscious body and the physical brain? AKA: Mind-body question
Dualism: They are separate (Descartes), pineal gland as the "third eye", discredited
Materialism: the same, like hardware and software combining to form an image on a screen, current belief
3 Central Questions
2. Is consciousness a unified phenomenon or several different ones?
-Theater view: various aspects of awareness converge on the "stage" to "play" before the "audience" of your mind
-Parallel Distributed Process (PDP) model:
mind processes parallel streams of information which interact somehow to create consciousness
3 Central Questions
3. What is the relationship between conscious and unconscious activities?
-Freud had lots of ideas, many discounted, but current brain research does support the idea that many important mental activities do occur outside of our awareness.
Functions of Consciousness
Produce the best current interpretation of sensory information in light of past experience and make the interpretation available to parts of the brain that need it
Allows access to a vast store of information through memory processes (study on pictures)
Everchanging, multilayered, varying in both quantity (levels) and quality (states)
Levels vs. States
When you are alert and aware of your mental activity and incoming sensations, you are fully conscious. However, at the same time other mental activity is taking place within your brain at various distances or levels of consciousness.
When your experience of yourself and incoming stimuli vary in focus and clarity, then you have variations in your states of consciousness.
Levels of Consciousness
Conscious: at any moment, the mental events that you are aware of exist here (Necker Cube example)
Nonconscious: mental events that cannot be experienced consciously (brain regulating blood pressure)
Preconscious: outside of awareness, but can easily be brought out (Last night’s dinner?)
Unconscious (subconscious): mental activity that influences consciousness, but is not conscious (for example: priming)
Unconscious Examples
General anesthesia patients: While still unconscious, audiotape of 15 word pairs were played over and over, afterwards they couldn’t remember anything, but…when given one of the words in each pair, patients would produce the other
Patterns: Flashing of X’s on different places on the screen in a complex pattern, without being able to explain the pattern ($ 100 bribe didn’t even work), participants could follow it by becoming faster and more accurate
Blindsight: When the primary visual cortex is damaged causing blindness, sometimes other pathways may permit vision without awareness! (report seeing nothing, but accurately locating visual targets, identifying directions of moving objects, naming color of lights, identifying emotion in faces)
Priming: People tend to respond faster and more accurately to previously seen stimuli, even if they don’t recall seeing it. Unscrambling sentences with emotional cues caused people to act later in similar ways to the emotion (rude words = later more likely to interrupt)
Other Examples
IAT – correlates with consciously held attitudes (age prejudice)
Prosopagnosia: cannot consciously recall familiar faces (can still recognize many objects and people by their voices) but…show eye movement patterns, changes in brain activity, and autonomic nervous system responses that don’t occur when viewing unfamiliar faces
Anterograde amnesia: inability to form new memories, but … can still learn new skills (without remembering anything about learning them)
Overall, unconscious processing may help us to carry out more effectively mundane day to day activities.
States of Consciousness
Controlled Processes
Automatic Processes
Daydreaming
Altered States
Sleep and Dreams
Unconsciousness
Consciousness
Awareness of the outside world and your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and other mental processes
Doctors: awareness that is demonstrated by either explicit or implicit recall (surgery)
0.2 % of surgical patients (under general anesthesia) retain some degree of consciousness
3 Central Questions
1. What is the relationship between the conscious body and the physical brain? AKA: Mind-body question
Dualism: They are separate (Descartes), pineal gland as the "third eye", discredited
Materialism: the same, like hardware and software combining to form an image on a screen, current belief
3 Central Questions
2. Is consciousness a unified phenomenon or several different ones?
-Theater view: various aspects of awareness converge on the "stage" to "play" before the "audience" of your mind
-Parallel Distributed Process (PDP) model:
mind processes parallel streams of information which interact somehow to create consciousness
3 Central Questions
3. What is the relationship between conscious and unconscious activities?
-Freud had lots of ideas, many discounted, but current brain research does support the idea that many important mental activities do occur outside of our awareness.
Functions of Consciousness
Produce the best current interpretation of sensory information in light of past experience and make the interpretation available to parts of the brain that need it
Allows access to a vast store of information through memory processes (study on pictures)
Everchanging, multilayered, varying in both quantity (levels) and quality (states)
Levels vs. States
When you are alert and aware of your mental activity and incoming sensations, you are fully conscious. However, at the same time other mental activity is taking place within your brain at various distances or levels of consciousness.
When your experience of yourself and incoming stimuli vary in focus and clarity, then you have variations in your states of consciousness.
Levels of Consciousness
Conscious: at any moment, the mental events that you are aware of exist here (Necker Cube example)
Nonconscious: mental events that cannot be experienced consciously (brain regulating blood pressure)
Preconscious: outside of awareness, but can easily be brought out (Last night’s dinner?)
Unconscious (subconscious): mental activity that influences consciousness, but is not conscious (for example: priming)
Unconscious Examples
General anesthesia patients: While still unconscious, audiotape of 15 word pairs were played over and over, afterwards they couldn’t remember anything, but…when given one of the words in each pair, patients would produce the other
Patterns: Flashing of X’s on different places on the screen in a complex pattern, without being able to explain the pattern ($ 100 bribe didn’t even work), participants could follow it by becoming faster and more accurate
Blindsight: When the primary visual cortex is damaged causing blindness, sometimes other pathways may permit vision without awareness! (report seeing nothing, but accurately locating visual targets, identifying directions of moving objects, naming color of lights, identifying emotion in faces)
Priming: People tend to respond faster and more accurately to previously seen stimuli, even if they don’t recall seeing it. Unscrambling sentences with emotional cues caused people to act later in similar ways to the emotion (rude words = later more likely to interrupt)
Other Examples
IAT – correlates with consciously held attitudes (age prejudice)
Prosopagnosia: cannot consciously recall familiar faces (can still recognize many objects and people by their voices) but…show eye movement patterns, changes in brain activity, and autonomic nervous system responses that don’t occur when viewing unfamiliar faces
Anterograde amnesia: inability to form new memories, but … can still learn new skills (without remembering anything about learning them)
Overall, unconscious processing may help us to carry out more effectively mundane day to day activities.
States of Consciousness
Controlled Processes
Automatic Processes
Daydreaming
Altered States
Sleep and Dreams
Unconsciousness
Monday, November 12, 2007
November 12-16 in Psych!
Monday: Essays and intro Consciousness unit. Turn in IB summary sheet (if you didn't have it done on Friday).
Tuesday: 1st hour: notes due and then off to the assembly. Everyone else: Notes due, Continuum of Consciousness information (The powerpoint won't open at home and I can't get my school laptop to post it, so I'm trying another computer tomorrow at school. Thanks for your patience :)
Wednesday: Rewrites due, 1st hour: Continuum of Consciousness information, 2nd and 6th: Nap Attack video
Thursday: Choice Project due, Sleep Disorders
Friday: Hypnosis
Tuesday: 1st hour: notes due and then off to the assembly. Everyone else: Notes due, Continuum of Consciousness information (The powerpoint won't open at home and I can't get my school laptop to post it, so I'm trying another computer tomorrow at school. Thanks for your patience :)
Wednesday: Rewrites due, 1st hour: Continuum of Consciousness information, 2nd and 6th: Nap Attack video
Thursday: Choice Project due, Sleep Disorders
Friday: Hypnosis
Monday, November 5, 2007
Week of November 5
Monday: Methods and either analyzing M.C. Escher drawings or looking up optical illusions (there are handouts for both. Methods section due tomorrow.
Tuesday: Methods section due. Peer critiquing (if satisfied, turn in with peer critique. Otherwise, sign the paper Mrs. Messemer has and take it home to fix.) IF YOU ARE DOING YOUR EXPERIMENT IN CLASS, BE READY FOR WEDNESDAY!
Wednesday: In class experiements
Thursday: In class experiments, practice test
Friday: Test! Notebook due (Journals! A few sentences per question)
Tuesday: Methods section due. Peer critiquing (if satisfied, turn in with peer critique. Otherwise, sign the paper Mrs. Messemer has and take it home to fix.) IF YOU ARE DOING YOUR EXPERIMENT IN CLASS, BE READY FOR WEDNESDAY!
Wednesday: In class experiements
Thursday: In class experiments, practice test
Friday: Test! Notebook due (Journals! A few sentences per question)
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