The Stroop Effect

The stroop effect is an experiment that was first conducted by John Ridley Stroop in the 1935. As stated by the dictionary, the stroop effect is a psychological experiment that tests the reaction time of a task. The task taken in consideration is the one of looking at our ability to read words faster and automatically than when we say colors. The cognitive mechanism that is involved in this experiment is called direct attention, you have to manage your attention, stop, think and then respond to it.
"This effect is a demonstration of interference, in which the brain experiences slowed processing time because it is trying to sort through conflicting information." This expirement also shows us that people have a harder time thinking what color the word is than saying the word  the brain delays on actually knowing automatically and takes more time analyzing the  color the letters have. Why this happens? Well, the both areas that are trying to function: read and talk are giving signals to the same area on the brain at the same time, which makes it difficult to process and therefore makes the person say it slower.
The experiment consists of first giving the word of the color with the letter of their same color. The person is asked to read the set of words and they are timed. Then, they are asked to do it again, but this time the letters of the color are painted with another color that does not match the word. They are also timed. The results say that when you read the word with a different color, it will take you more time.
My experiment will be conducted the same way as John Ridely Stroop did, only that I will use high school students, boys and girls to analyze the data and results.

The Stoop Effect or the one about short term memory

The Placebo Effect - Is it real or just imagined?

After reading the articles and learning more about placebo effects I got a better undestanding on what it was, in the articles it is said that the ´´placebo effect is the measurable, observable, or felt improvement in health or behavior not attributable to a medication or invasive treatment that has been administered.´´ This tells us that it is a was of curring people with out actually giving them real medication  and, it makes you feel better as you asume what you are given will give you stability. THe whole idea about the placebo effect was invented by  H. K. Beecher.  He evaluated 15 clinical trials concerned with different diseases and found that 35% of 1,082 patients were satisfactorily relieved by a placebo alone he found out that for some people pills worked in order to satisfy their needs and believing it what they were taking gave them more life. Many other diffrent test were done and provided the testers with diffrent informations.Psychologist have came to conclutions which informs us that placebos work because consumers on the pill believe the will be healed by the pill and they mostly tell us that it depends on the state of mind. Our thought and mind have the ability to get us into better situation and help us overcome illnesses we just have to belive. Before any medication exsited sold by pharmaseutics many illnesses were cured by placebos. Many researchers found out that beecher was right and that placebos did work and could cure sickness like stomatch pain, depression etc. One of the greatest limitations about this expirement was that Beecher did not give the results on data  and that doctors did not know how patients would respond to the placebo, and instead of being cured they could be more dammaged. IN my opinion i belive placeboes helps since they have no side effects and people have been helped by them intead of being druged will real medications.I also belife that the some of the data provided by Beecher helped save lives and learn more about how it can work. What mostly came to my attention is how psychologist are write humans have the power in their mind its all in the head you can either think possitive and get better results or be negitive and never get better.

Alzheimer's Disease

As we were shown in class the diffrent cases of Alzheimer´s I learned first of all that it is not a diseas that any human being decided to have or has the option to make it go away. After watching the video one of the most importants things I saw was that this disease does not only affect the person with it but it affects mostly thier family members or people important to them. Lossing your mind , forgetting thing, halusinating, forgetting events in your life and names , are some of the few effects that alzheimer has. as said in the article ¨Alzheimer's disease — the degenerative brain condition that is not content to kill its victims without first snuffing out their essence — has for decades simply laughed at such efforts.¨ This disease will eventually kill you but slowly it makes you completly loss control and you stop understanding what is around you.You no longer understand reality from fiction. THey still haven´t found any cure for this and every year more people are affected by it. Something that also comes to my atention is that medicins and puzzels just help your mind be good for a while but after a certain amount of time it will all go away. I think that thier should be more reasearch and more doctors and `specialist trying to find a cure for alzheimers since it is and uncontrolled sickness since there is still no cure for it and death still comes with it. If i were in that position of taking care and visiting someone in that position i would have more understanding in the way family members suffer, as they realize that the person they love simply gets worst instead of improving, and they don´t know when the day will come when they completly forget about them. Eventhought they can maintaing someone with alzheimers alive for a long time i dont think you can call that living anymore because their are no memories no good moments, everything vanishis slowly and what you used to know is gone.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2025369,00.html#ixzz14HeSNFeQ

MEMORY

There is an idea that women can remeber things better than men, and this is being discussed in the first article. Psychologists Agneta Herlitz and Jenny Rehnman in Stockholm, Sweden, found out that significant sex differences in episodic memory, were women can remember better past memories in a long-term. The results state that women were able to remeber verbal stuf better such as: remembering words, objects, pictures or everyday events but men were able to do better than women at remebering remembering symbolic, non-linguistic information. But, there are some sex differences that indicate that women can remember better things that are verbal and visuospacial. Also, women are better at remembering and recognizing the faces of women, more than those of men because they pay better attention to them. "To determine this particular finding, the psychologists presented three groups of participants with black and white pictures of hairless, androgynous faces and described them as ‘female faces,’ ‘male faces’ or just ‘faces.’ The findings indicate that women were able to remember the androgynous faces presented as female more accurately than the androgynous faces presented as male." The fact that women remeber things better than men can be deducted from the educational differences.

The second article talks about how researchers are discovering that our culture helps shape how we remember our past--and how far back our memory stretches. Researchers believe that humans have what Freud called "childhood amnesia" because they cannot remember any event before certain age. What is interesting is that the time in which this effect ended in each person changes throughout each culture. For example, for some poeple it might have ended at the age of 4, but for others it was at their 2.5 years. They believe that people who grow up in a society that focuses on individual personal history and on personal family history will vary in their memory abilities. The study conducted on the caucasians and the Asians, clearly demonstartes how the memories varied from each culture. They also found out how mothers also influence on the memory of each child. There are some moms who elaborate more on talking about certain past events to their child's but others simply ask closed questions and don't ask about past events. "To many Americans, she says, this lack of interest in ones own or others' personal pasts violates what we think of as a truism--that the fundamental thing that makes us who we are is our personal memories." Many cultures believed that personal memorie's are not important and simply don't try to remember them.
Overall, Leichtman says, "It's not yet an old idea" that culture influences memory. "Right now we're really refining it and working out the wide variety of mechanisms that cause it."

http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep05/culture.aspx
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080220104244.htm

Short-Term Memory

Scientists believe that short-term memories do not dissapear after some seconds, but that they gradually become more imprecise. In the University of California, they have found the opposite to this idea. Their subjects were able to retain certain colors for about for second but it suddenly dissapeared and it did not become imprecise. Weiwei Zhang and Steve Luck conducted and experiment on 12 adults in which they could prove the accuracy of short-term memory and the probability that it still existed. In the first test, three squares, each with a different color, flashed for a tenth of a second on a computer screen. After a time of 1, 4 or 10 seconds a wheel showing the entire spectrum of colors appeared on the screen. The three squares also reappeared, only now they had no color and one of them was highlighted. The participants were asked to recall the color of the highlited square and click on the color that best matched it. They had to repeat this 150 times with each color. When each of them could remember very closely the color of the box, they clicked very close to it on the wheel, which means that the distance between the click and the actual color indicates the accuracy of the memory. If they clicked at random on the wheel, the colored had disappeared from their memory. The second test conducted is very similar to the first one, only that they used different shapes instead of using colors. The researchers were able to conclude that the brain is "more like a laptop computer that continues working at the same speed until it suddenly shuts down.” You can relate this to real life situations because many people have difficulties understanding why their short-term memory is bad. By understanding that you are able to retain things for certain amount of time and that it does not become unaccurate, you are able to help people reform and make better their short-term memory with the use of shapes and colors like they did.  Also, it can be applied to a research experiment conducted on the short-term memory of people with schizophrenia.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090429091806.htm

In this article they are trying to say that the smells that are first smelled are better stored in our brain and have a better level than others that we dislike. The researchers include Yaara Yeshurun, Hadas Lapid, Yadin Dudai, and Noam Sobel, of the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovot, Israel. "We found that the first pairing or association between an object and a smell had a distinct signature in the brain," even in adults, said Yaara Yeshurun of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. In the study, the adults were presented with an object first with one type of pleasant or unpleasant smell and sounds, and then with a second one while their brains were imaged by functional magnetic resonance imaging. The researchers found that people were able to remember early associations with bad odors or sounds that were unpleasant and also that they could predict what the person was going to remember. "We expected a unique representation of initial or 'first' olfactory associations but did not expect that it would materialize even in cases where the behavioral evidence did not indicate a stronger memory," Yeshurun said. They can see how when two regions of the brain work together, they are able to recall some memories or senses that were earlier stored. this can be applied to people who are having problems woth traumas and help them forget about them because it helps a person localize where they are storing unpleasant memoies and how to get rid of them. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091105132448.htm

Language of Emotions

A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research says that when you make an advertisement or a message in a person's native language, that it will be more likely to trigger an emotion. Authors Stefano Puntoni, Bart de Langhe, and Stijn van Osselaer (Erasmus University, the Netherlands) studied bilingual and trilingual countries and Europe and saw how messages in the native language of each population triggered an emotion more than a message that was provided in their second language. They believe that this is due to the difficulty of understanding and percieving the message in a different language than the one that they feel more comfortable, and that this depends on the personal memories too. Consumers usually have more personal memories with words in their native language than in their second language. They alo found that it had a greater effect in women than in men due to the fact that women have more emotional memories stored. This can be applied in real life because when someone is trying to express a message and have an effect on a certain population or society, they should try to use the native language in them in order to have a greater effect. This, possibly used in advertisements of some new product, or even politics.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081215111433.htm

Early Scents

What is Memory and How Does it Work?

1. Explain sensory memory?
Sensory memory is when you use senses to store event or objects you saw in your memory. It is the first level of memory.
2. An example would be that I use my eyes in order to observe something and then store that image in my memory.When you see an object and then dissapears you stay with that image.
3.The capacity of sensory memory?
 Our brains can gather a lot of information but most of that information dissapears fast and just stays in our memory for a short amount of time. There is two sources for sensory memory:
-iconic memory (visual sensory memory)-less than 1 second
-echoic(auditory sensory memory)less than 4 seconds.
4.Concept of short term memory?
MEMORY BEFORE LONG TERM COMES IN AND GOES OUT IN HEAD BETWEEN 30 TO 40 SECOND THE MORE YOU ANALYZE IT IN SHORT TERM IT WILL STAY IN LONG TERM
5-What is the "magic number" as it relates to short-term memory and who conducted the experiment which established this measurement?The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information. remember seven things dont remember more than 5.
6.What is chunking?
chunking refers to a strategy for making more efficient use of short-term memory by recoding information. It gathers pieces of information to remember it better and put it into one group instead of having them all seperated.
7.What has been determined to be the ideal size of "chunks" for both letters and numbers?
The size of chunks would be 2, 3, or 6 letters or numbers.
8.Which mode of encoding does short-term memory mostly rely on, acoustic or visual?
Acoustic
9.Explain the duration and capacity of long-term memory?
The capcity is unlimited because its been shown their is no limit to what we can store. The duration is permenent  meaning a lifetime.
10.Explain in detail the Atkinson-Shiffrin Model of memory?
Memory starts as stimuli that we sense some of it goes into short term, if hold on to it or reherse it in short term then we can move it to long term, so once it gets there that information stays.
11.Identify three criticisms or limitations of the Atkinson-Shiffrin Model of memory?
"The three-box model suggests that there is nothing in between short-term and long-term memory. The three-box model implies that there is just one short-term system and just one long-term system.The Atkinson-Shiffrin model does not give enough emphasis to unconscious processes."
http://www.psywww.com/intropsych/ch06_memory/criticisms_of_the_classic_three-box_model.html
12.Explain the Levels of Processing Model of memory?
first shallow processing that would be like maintenance when you reapeat things so that you dont forget them. deep processing is like elaborative rehearsal  is when you compare something you don't know  to something that you already know so that you recall it later.
13.What is maintenance rehearsal - give an example.
Maintenance rehearsal is when you reapeat something over and over again so that you dont forget them. When i say someones name over  AND OVER AGAIN IN ORDER NOT TO FORGET.
14. What is elaborative rehearsal - give an example.
WHEN i REMEMBER SOMEONES NAME BECAUSE ITS THE SAME AS MY FAVORITE SINGER.
Who developed the Levels of Processing Model and the concepts of maintenance and elaborative rehearsal?
Craik and Lockhart

Memory Video

• After watching the video in class, i understand the importance and the relationship that memory has on our life and how it affects our way of living. Memory, defines who you are and the way you act, it creates an identity. Eventhough memory can not be directyly seen, you understand that it is constantly changing and growing. Everyday, every second of your life, you are experiencxing new things that are stored into your memory, and can later be recalled. You are constantly learning and interacting with the environmnent, which makes your memory increase. usually, it is said that you begin to remember and recall events and things from your memory at about 2 years old, when you start to maybe reason a little.
• On the first part of the video, they are conducting a self recognition test with a mirror in several small children. They are placed in front of a mirror to see what is their reaction. Then they are placed again infront of the mirror and get some paint in their nose to see how they react and if they are able to recognize that it is them, who has paint in the nose. Many of the children don't even recognize themselves, while others touch the mirror thinking that it is something on the mirror. Just two of the tested kids are abvle to recognize themselves and touch their noses. It is important to know who you are since you are a toddler because it is part of your identity. Then, they conducted an experiment to see how good is their mental image and memory. They make them store a small lion into a cabinet. Two weeks later, they were asked to find the lion and no one was able to find it and remember were it was, except for Toby and jenny who were able to find it. This demonstrates how the brain has not developed yet when you are a little kid.
• On the second part of the video, they show a man who was born with amnesia, and is unable to recall and understand his past. He constantly watches pictures with his parents to understand who he is, but he can not remember it after some hours. he has to write things in order to remember them because his brain did not fully develope and has problems with his memory. They conducted an experiment on him to see if he could remember and draw a picture after an hour of not watching it, and he was unable to draw an accurate drawing. His hypocampus is not recognizing things and that is affecting his way of living. From this man, I can see how our memory is vital in our every day things, and how it affects his way of living and communicating with others.

THE STROOP EFFECT

The stroop effect is an experiment that was first conducted by John Ridley Stroop in the 1935. As stated by the dictionary, the stroop effect is a psychological experiment that tests the reaction time of a task. The task taken in consideration is the one of looking at our ability to read words faster and automatically than when we say colors. The cognitive mechanism that is involved in this experiment is called direct attention, you have to manage your attention, stop, think and then respond to it.

How was the experiment conducted?

• The Stroop task is separated in 3 separate sheets of paper. The name of the color and the color on each name is different depending on the sheet. 
• Stroop was trying to show that the person read the word faster when it has the same color on the word. This was on the first sheet. 
• On the second sheet, stroop was asking for the experimenter to say the color that he saw on each word out loud and not to focus on the words.
• On the last sheet, stroop wanted to prove that after practicing for 8 days the experiment, the time they took to express the color or the word decreased.

Results?

After conducting the experiment, Stroop found that naming the color on the word was much slower than reading the words out loud. Also, he saw that the practice of this could decrease the amount of time that it took to say them. He also was able to prove the effects of information going into the right hemisphere of the brain and the left hemisphere and how conflicting this was. 

Why does this Happen?

This happens because the brain can only manage one task at a time. For example, your right brain is trying to say the color but the left side is trying to say the word. This makes that there is too much information going into the brain and you cannot perform both tasks at the same time. The brain is trying to do one thing, read which is what is more automatically done, and this affects the time it takes to say the color instead of the word. 

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-stroop-effect.htm

http://www.rit.edu/cla/gssp400/sbackground.html

The Myth of Multitasking

Questions:

1. Why is multitasking considered by many psychologists to be a myth?
2. To what does the term "response selection bottleneck" refer?
3. David Meyer has found that multitasking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline. Why is this important?
4. Explain what Russell Podrack found regarding multitasking.
5. What does the author conclude could happen to our culture as a result of increased multitasking?

Answers to questions:

1. Many psychologists believe that the idea of multitasking is simply a myth because humans are only born with one brain, which implies that we are a single person. Through the studies that have been conducted, they have proven that the idea of multitasking is not that a person does all the things at the same time, instead, it is the switching and alternation of tasks in just seconds. It has been proven that it is not effecient at all, since our mind focuses on one action and forgets or does poorly on the other one.
2. The psychologist, Marois, found out about this term that occurs when the brain is forced to respond to several stimuli at the same moment, which only leads to time loss because the brain is the one that decides which task to perform.
3. It is important because Meyer contributed to the fact that this release may cause long-term health problems on the person if they are not controlled and this may contribute to loss of short-term memory, which would affect a lot on the normal way of living of a person.
4. The main idea of Russel in his finding was that the multitasking affects the way of learning of a person. He states that learning with multitasking, makes it less flexible and that the information can therefore not be retrieved in an easy manner. To explain this, he conducted an experiment in which he analyzes the brain of people who don't use multitasking and the brain of those who do use multitasking. As a result, he found that the people who do use multitasking use a part of their brain called striatum. This section of the brain is involved with the learning of new skills but in a lame way, while the people who don't use it tend to store and retrieve information more precisely. He finally states that humans are born to focus on one task and not on multiple of them because this makes the works and ideas less efficient and precise.
5. As a conclusion, he states that the society may gain information through multitasking but loose wisdom. This means that people will learn a lot of things and recieve more information but the way they act upon it will be less efficient.

"THE MYTH OF MULTITASKING" by Christine Rosen

Observations of the BaMbuti Pygmies

The BaMbuti Pygmies were one of the most famous tribes in the African culture since they were under 4feet 6 inches tall in height . They lived in the Ituri Forest of the eastern Congo. Pygmies were also rear because the blood type differ so much from others. Bambuti pygmies were psychologically conditioned to their enviorment, and also had diffrent percetions on objects that the saw everyday.  The Pygmies are nomadic hunters and gather food for their own consumption, they also trade with thier neighbors for pot or pans which were not available in the forest. the were nomads since they moved every three weeks in order to gather food and had diffrent hunting techniques. it was intresting the way in which they married it was an important eent and was also called the "sister exchange" and were also amazing musicans. Colin Turnbull was an anthropologist who studied African societies and one of the most important tries he was interested in were the Bambuti pygmies and hunting societies thats why he decided to learn more about them. Turnbull studied the way in which they lived and their perspective . He reviled the IK and described the latter as lacking in any sense of altruism. Turnbull found out that eventhough bambuti lived in the forest the didnt know what mountains and hills were because they had never seeen thing from a perception far away. Colin observed a 22 year old boy called Keny and saw that he called thing that he had never seen like if they were witch craft because of their size. then keny understood and adapted to the enviorment understanding whhat things were. He had never seen this before since in his forest when you get up a tree the more you can see are 1OO feet below. Colins information was that perception is completly different for pygmies and that they adapt to eniviorments easily.

http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/cultures_of_world/64224

Colin Turnbull

Colin Turnbull was born in London, England in 1924. Colin studied philosophy, polotics, and music in Magdalen college at oxford university. He also studied in India, he returned to Oxford and studied anthropology, specialized in American field. On his trip in 1951 was when he first visited the Pygmies. He became very intrestes in the African tribes, he studied native language, and music.He died of pneumonia at the age of 69. Turnbull was an unconventional scholar who rejected neutrality. He idealized the BaMbuti and reviled the Ik, and described the latter as lacking any sense of altruism, in that they force their children out of their homes at the age of three, and gorge on whatever occasional excesses of food they might find until they became sick, rather than save or share. Turnbull gained prominence after hi wrote the book The Forest People in 1962 it was a detailed study about the Mbuti Pygmies. The Pygmies were also known as the mountain people.  His partner in his study who  helped him persever  was called Dr. Joseph Towels they has an opened gay relationship. Turnbull retreated to a Buddist monastery he lived there after his partner died, because both had complications with AIDS.

What I like:

• Travel: it remembers me of good memories and my family.
• Rest: I feel peace and serenity.
• Sports: makes me feel adrenaline and I like it because it makes me stop being a fatty.
• Jean Pi: being with him makes me feel happy and secure. I love him so much that I will marry with him!
• Laughing: their is always good things in life and laughing is a healthy one.

What I Dislike:

• Last day of Vacations: coming back from vacations remembers me of coming back to reality, Honduras, which is not a safe place.
• The zoo: it reminds me of the day I puked in the middle of the street and how bad I was feeling that day.
• Sad Memories: they bring sadness to my life and really bad memories about things that happened. 
• Sleeping Alone: I am afraid to darkness.
• Going to School: There is always too much work and I end too tired.
• I feel useless and with no purpose when I can not do something well. 

What factors influence our perception?

There are many factors which influence our perception. One of the major factors that influence our perception is senses everyone senses things in different ways, as well as the view in which you have towards different objects is different. Our age and state of mind, or what we have been taught at home affect the perception we have towards the world. These factors would divide into two branches that would be the internal and external factors that affect our perception. Culture which would be external affects our perception since it consists of out practices, believes, value and the way we tell people about our experiences in life. It can also be the way we unwrap our self to the rest of the people. Internally would be the way I sense things and the way I act around people. Factors like my behavior toward the rest of the community and my physiology. Social roles people have can also affect perception since is the way they are viewed you can try to become someone you really are not.

Why is perception your reality?

Perception is the view each and everyone of us have towards life. Every person has a diffrent perception of life, the way they live, and their belivies. Perception is your reality because the way in which you view the world is the reality, or what you believe is true about life. That is the reason why every person has a diffrent perception on what happens in their every day life. An example would be the way I distinguish right from wrong probably what I think is completly wrong, somebody else believes its something normal. My perception for killing is that it is wrong, nobody has the right to take someones life away, for someone in a gang or a dilincuent it might be something normal that is why we have diffrent realities. Perception is they way you see things around you what you like or don't. It is you reality because its your way of thinking, the information you have gather of what you see. The information you gather from things around you might be diffrent for every person the way you view the world, is your perception and that its why its your reality.

What is Psychology?

Psychology for me is the study of peoples behavior and it gives us a better understaning in why people act the way they act. it gives us more ideas in why people have certain behaviors. It can also test us in synthoms of sicknesses we may have. Psychology is a very important study of the human behavior and gives of better reasoning on the facts. Psychology is important to me because it gives me a better undestanding on the way i act and the reason for the actions I take.