5130: Discovering Psychology

I just finished watching Dr. Phillip Zimbardo’s videos on Discovering Psychology for IT-5130. I think my wife was happy to sit down and watch a little with me since she majored in psychology and knew much of the information, but I did end up enjoying the videos myself. I liked the use of visual examples to help explain the concepts, and they were explained in a way that made them very interesting. But how could the brain not be interesting? Here are some quick notes of some key points I jotted down and wanted to keep here so I have them handy:

From the Sensation and Perception video:

• We have millions of sensory receptors throughout the body and each receptor picks up a certain type of energy (i.e. light or sound waves) and sends the information to the hypothalamus to be redistributed
• There is a distil stimulus – the thing being perceived, the actual thing – and a proxil stimulus – the image displayed on the retina. These can be different!
• Adaptation example – football player puts on goggles that make the receiver appear 20 degrees to the side, he will miss at first but then adapt to the perception. When goggles are removed he will miss again until he adapts back.
• Perceptual constancy = size, shape, brightness, etc. of an object appears to remain the same even when there are extreme variations in the image it presents (ie. if a shadow falls on our paper, we know the paper itself did not just get darker).

From Remembering and Forgetting:

• Experts estimate the brain can store 100 trillion bits of information!
• Memory – is affected by how much you concentrate and rehearse, the context in which you learn something, context in which you recall it, motivation, physical state and biological condition, and interference.
• 1960s – computer was used to represent memory, depicted the mind as an information processor. Information is encoded, stored and retained, then later retrieved.
• Constructive process of remembering = we put things together as a consistent memory, even filling in missing information.
• How and what you remember is determined by who you are and what you already know.
• When something is remembered, there is a corresponding change in the brain.
• Alzheimers studies –show problems with operant conditioning long before neurological testing of declarative memory shows problems. Has to do with acetylcholine neurotransmitters being blocked by scopolamine.

From Cognitive Processes:

• Information processing approach = valuable because it analyzes cognitive processes as a sequence of ordered stages – these stages can be traced as information flows through the brain.
• A central operating principal of the mind that cognitive psychologists study is our ability to form mental representations of the external world.
  o We perceive things like the letter “A” even in different forms, we still see it is the same letter.
  o We form categories of related things in our mind – these are called concepts. We store concepts by having a representation of the most typical representation of a category (called a prototype)
  o Schemas – we can infer things that belong in a schema so we can react to things.
• We don’t process a problem in a linear way like a computer but instead process it according to what it means to us.