Intro to psych midterm 2: Ch. 5-11

Cross-sectional studies

comparing people of different ages

Longitudinal studies

following people across time

Studies are observed through:

Nature and nurture

Continuity and stages

Stability and change

Nature and nurture

How does our genetic inheritance (our nature) interact with our experiences (our nurture) to influence our development?

Continuity and stages

What parts of development are gradual and continuous, like riding an escalator? What parts change abruptly in separate stages, like climbing rungs on a ladder?

Stability and change

Which of our traits persist through life? How do we change as we age?

* Some things stay the same throughout times, and some change 
* In the future we could think we predicted it from the past, but we can not predict the future 
* We all change in age, looks, and sometimes personality 
* “Life requires both stability and change. Stability provides our identity. Change gives us our hope”

Conception

* Women are born with eggs, men create sperm during puberty 
* Sperm has to penetrate egg to fertilize it 
* “Before half a day elapsed, the egg nucleus and the sperm nucleus fused: The two became one”

Prenatal development

* Zygote
* Embryo
* Fetus

Zygote

* Fertilized eggs
* One cell become 2, then 4—each just like the first—until this cell division had produced some 100 identical cells within the first week
* After 10 days of conception, zygote attaches to the mothers uterine wall

Embryo

* When the zygote continues to develop there are two parts, the embryo and the placenta 
* The embryo is inside and is the soon to be born kid
* The placenta is the nutrients and oxygen from mother to embryo 
* Over 6 weeks, the organs begin to form and heart beats

Fetus

* 9 weeks, embryo looks like human
* Now considered fetus
* 6 months, organs develop enough to give fetus survival reliability
* Fetus can hear
* Once born, babies know their mothers voice

Fetal Life: The Dangers

* **Teratogens** can damage an embryo or fetus
* Viruses and drugs 
* When alcohol enters bloodstream, also for fetus 
* Reduces activity in central nervous system 
* Alcohol use during pregnancy may prime the woman’s offspring to like alcohol and put them at risk for heavy drinking and alcohol use disorder during their teen years
* 1 in 10 women report consuming alcohol while pregnant
* Alcohol, Smoking, Other drugs, Illnesses, STD’s, Extreme stress 

The Competent newborn: inborn skills

* automatic reflex responses ideally suited for our survival
* Rooting
* Sucking 
* Startle reflex 
* Grasping reflex
* Crying  
* **Habituation** gives us a way to ask infants what they see and remember
* a decrease in responding with repeated stimulation

Maturation: 

* Biologically-driven growth and development enabling orderly, sequential changes in behavior

Types of physical development

* Brain development 
* Motor development 

Brain development 

* The developing brain cortex actually overproduces neurons, with the number peaking at 28 weeks

Motor development

* Developing brain enables physical coordination
* Skills emerge as infants exercise their maturing muscles and nervous system
* Babies roll over before they sit unsupported, and they usually crawl before they walk

Brain maturation and infant memory

* Infant at Work: Babies only 3 months old can learn that kicking moves a mobile, and they can retain that learning for a month
* Difficult to recall before age 4
* As children mature, this infantile amnesia wanes, and they become increasingly capable of remembering experiences, even for a year or more
* The brain areas underlying memory, such as the hippocampus and frontal lobes, continue to mature during and after adolescence

Cognitive development 

* **Cognition** refers to the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating 
* Making connections and associations to one another 
* Name to name or face to name 
* all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating
* With enough time to process the faces, 5-month-old infants displayed the same brain signature of visual awareness

Piaget’s Cognitive Developmental Theory

* Piaget’s core idea was that our intellectual progression reflects an unceasing struggle to make sense of our experiences
* Piaget proposed two more concepts
* First, we assimilate new experiences, we interpret them in terms of our current schemas (understandings). Having a simple schema for dog, for example, a toddler may call all four-legged animals dogs. 
* But as we interact with the world, we also adjust, or accommodate, our schemas to incorporate information provided by new experiences. Thus, the child soon learns that the original dog schema is too broad and accommodates by refining the category
* Piaget believed that children construct their understanding of the world while interacting with it


* In the sensorimotor stage, from birth to nearly age 2, babies take in the world through their senses and actions—through looking, hearing, touching, mouthing, and grasping. As their hands and limbs begin to move, they learn to make things happen.

Maturing beyond egocentrism developing a “theory of mind”

* Having a theory, not being able to touch it 
* Using context clues as to what they are thinking 
* Theory of mind - refers to the ability to understand others’ mental states
* Between ages 3 and 4.5, children come to realize that others may hold false beliefs 
* Empathizing by putting yourself in their mind
* Is empathy nature or nurture? - your brain gives you the potential, but up to you to want to 

Social development: attachment study

* Refers to an emotional tie to another person 
* Harry Harlo studied attachment 
* Harlo’s study started by taking baby monkeys and putting a baby blanket in it, monkey got attached
* Then studied again but with two artificial monkey mothers, one had bottle and one was made of cloth 
* This proves that babies do not attach to the mother because of food, but rather because of contact

Origins of attachment

* attachment is based on physical affection and comfortable body contact, and not based on being rewarded with food 
* Babies want to cling to caregivers for dear life
* Babies need to have constant sensitive, responsive caregiving 
* Parent should know what a child needs
* Being sensitive is being aware 
* Being responsive means responding every time 
* Consistent and loving 
* Kids just need to feel safe and loved
* Basic trust and secure attachment affect out later relationships 
* Relationships are a place where one can feel safe and loved

Parenting styles

Combination of responsive and demanding

* Authoritarian parenting  


* Permissive parents 
* Neglectful parenting 
* Authoritative parents 

Authoritarian parenting

* Not responsive, not loving 
* Extremely demanding and controlling 
* Harsh cruel discipline 

Permissive parents

* Very loving and very responsive 
* Not demanding, no structure, no discipline 
* Kids tend to be irresponsible 

Neglectful parenting 

* Neither responsive nor demanding

Authoritative parents

* Both responsive, and demanding 
* All equalled out 
* Structure, control, and love

Adolescence (transition period from child to adulthood): Brain development 

* During puberty, the brain stops automatically adding new connections 
* During puberty, a lot of selective pruning happens 
* Continuing growth of myelin 
* Drugs affect the developing changing brain, can be really bad 

Adolescence (transition period from child to adulthood): Frontal lobes are last to rewire

* Frontal lobes - involved in planning, judgment, self control 
* Frontal lobe maturation lags behind that of the emotional limbic system 
* Adolescents may understand risks and consequences but give more weight to potential thrills and rewards 
* Their brains are biased toward immediate rewards 

Adolescence (parenting and peer relationships): Gowing peer influence

* Adolescents are rejecting everything their parents have taught them 
* More parent-child conflict, usually over minor daily life issues
* What their friends are, they often become, and what “everybody’s doing” they often do 


* The attachment relationship with parents is changed but still needed 
* Adolescents is not a good time to sever all ties with family

Associative learning: Classical conditioning

* Learning to associate to stimuli 
* How it works: after repeated exposure to two stimuli occurring in sequence, we associate those stimuli with each other. 
* Result: out natural response and can produce a predictive stimulus 
* Ex: lightning and thunder 
* After repetition, lean response: cover ears

Associative learning: Operant conditioning

* Learning to associate a behavior and a consequence 
* Child learns: 
* Repeat behaviors which were followed by desirable result 
* Avoid behaviors which were followed by undesirable results 
* Ex: if i say please then I will get a cookie 

Cognitive learning

* Occurring new behaviors and information mentally 
* **Occurs:** 
* By observing events and the behavior of others 
* Watching people and copying their behaviors 
* By using language to acquire information 
* School, talking

Ivan Pavlov’s discovery

* He was interested in physiological processes
* Ivan Pavlov would attach test tubes to dogs mouths to measure the amount of saliva 
* While studying salivation in dogs, Ivan Pavlov found that salivation from eating food was eventually triggered by what should have been neutral stimuli such as: 
* just seeing the food.
* seeing the dish. 
* seeing the person who 
* brought the food.
* just hearing that person’s 
* Footsteps.
* Before conditioning: 
* Neutral stimulus: a stimulus which does **not** trigger a response 
* Used the bell → no response 
* Unconditioned stimulus and response: a stimulus which triggers a response naturally, before/without any conditioning 
* Dog food → salivating 
* During conditioning:
* Rang bell, gave food, rang bell, gave food, rang bell, gave food, etc
* Associating bell with getting food and with food, the dogs salivate
* Eventually linked the bell to food

Acquisition

* The initial stage of learning/conditioning 
* What gets “acquired”
* The association between a neutral stimulus and unconditioned stimulus 
* Timing: 
* Neural stimulus needs to be right before the unconditioned stimulus

Extinction

* Diminishing of conditioned response
* If the unconditioned response stops appearing with the conditioned stimulus, the conditioned response decreases

Generalization

* Refers to the tendency to have conditioned responses triggered by related stimuli 
* Ex: Pavlov conditioned dogs to drool when rubbed; they then also drooled when scratched 
* Ex: if you get bit by a dog, so you are scared by a dog, and now all animals 

Discrimination

* Refers to the ability to only respond to a specific stimuli, preventing generalization 
* Ex: Pavlov conditioned dogs to drool at bells of a certain pitch; slightly different pitches did not trigger drooling

John B Watson and classical conditioning: Playing with fear

* Little Albert experiment 
* In 1920, 11-month-old Little Albert was not afraid of rats.
* John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner then clanged a steel bar every time a rat was presented to Albert
* Every time Watson brought out a white rat, Watson would band the steal bar as loud as possible 
* Child started to associate rats with loud sound 
* Eventually generalized and became afraid of anything with white fer/hair
* Before conditioning:
* no fear to white rats
* After conditioning: 
* White rat became conditioned stimulus and reflex is fear
* Over time: this little boy became afraid of everything with white fur/hair

How operant conditioning works:

* Do more of the behaviors of the consequence we want 
* Ex: We may smile more at work after this repeatedly gets us bigger tips.
* Ex: We learn how to ride a bike using the strategies that don’t make us crash.
* Ex: training an animal to do something 
* How it works: An act of chosen behavior  is followed by a **reward** or punitive feedback from the environment. 
* Results: **Reinforced** behavior is more likely to happen again 
* **Punished** behavior is less likely to be tried again
* Not deep emotion - observable behaviors and environmental stimuli 
* Thorndike’s law of effect 

Thorndike’s law of effect

* Build a cat box with multiple different contraptions for the cat, with one escape door 
* The door opens by do a particular action 
* Put cat in puzzle box, put food on the outside, cat wanted to escape 
* What will happen the second time you put the cat in the box after escaping the first time 
* The cat learned that lever = escape and food 
* The law of effect: behaviors followed by favorable consequences become more likely, and behaviors are more likely to change

B.F. Skinner: the operant chamber

* Mimicked it off of Thorndike's experiment 
* The operant chamber (“skinner box”) allowed detailed tracking of rats behavior change in response to different rates of reinforcements 
* Bar the can be pressed down and food comes down 
* Tried multiple times to get food 
* Push lever down 10 times, 20 times, then get food

Reinforcement

* Any consequence of a behavior that makes it more likely to happen again 
* Any event that strengthens the behavior it follows

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* Positive reinforcement
* Negative reinforcement
* Shaping behavior
* Immediate and delayed reinforcement 
* How often should we reinforce?
* Continuous reinforcement
* Partial/intermittent reinforcement:

Positive reinforcement 

* Adding something to increase a behavior 
* Ex: giving tips, cookies 

Negative reinforcement 

* Taking away something (annoying/unpleasant) to increase a behavior
* Ex: take away something annoying (tapping) to increase study behavior

Shaping behavior 

* A way to use reinforcement 
* Reinforcement in baby steps 
* When a creature is not likely to randomly perform exactly the behavior you are trying to teach, you can reward any behavior that comes close to the desire behavior 
* Ex: want to get a dolphin to jump up high. 
* Start by having the dolphin swim through the hoop under water then quickly give fish, then keep going up until out of water

Immediate and delayed reinforcement 

* A rat needs to be reinforced immediately after performing the desired behavior 
* Animals need immediate 
* Humans do respond to delayed reinforcers 
* Ex: start class in january and get grade in may 
* Ex: paycheck 
* The **ability to delay gratification** is associated with achievement and social competence 
* People who want immediate gratification will not achieve much in life 

How often should we reinforce?: **Continuous reinforcement**

* **Reward every time when start to teach a new behavior** 
* **But, if you stop rewarding, the behavior can stop**

How often should we reinforce?:

Partial/intermittent reinforcement

* the target behavior takes longer to be acquired/established but persists longer without reward 
* Ex: slot machines and very low chance 
* Ex: mom reinforcing a kid with a candy bar from a tantrum 
* He won't quit trying
* More likely to stick around 

Punishment

* Any consequence that decreases the frequency of the behavior it follows 

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* Positive punishment 
* Negative punishment 
* When is punishment effective?

Positive punishment 

* Adding something (unpleasant) to decrease a behavior 
* Ex: child spanking, animal electric shock 

Negative punishment

* Taking something (pleasant) away to decrease a behavior 
* Ex: take away video games 

When is punishment effective?

* Can not punish animals because they don’t learn from that
* Over their heads 
* Works for humans when swift and sure 
* Ex: hand in fire will hurt immediate every time 
* It works **less well** when the only consequence we encounter is a distant, delayed, possible treat 


* Severity of the punishment 
* NOT HELPFUL as making the punishments immediate and certain

Problems with physical punishment 

* Punished behavior is suppressed, not forgotten 
* Physical punishment does not replace the unwanted behavior 
* Punishment teaches discrimination among situations 
* Punishment can teach fear 
* Kids can not process logically what you are saying to them 
* Physical punishment models aggression as a method of dealing with problems 
* Ex: my mom hits me when she is mad, so i can hit someone lower than me when i'm mad 
* Punishment focuses on what NOT to do, which does not guide people to a **desired** behavior 
* Even if understandable behaviors do stop, another problem behavior may emerge that serves the same purpose, especially if no **replacement behaviors** are taught and reinforces
* Ex: preschoolers push and hurt each other unintentionally

Applications of operant conditioning: School and parenting

* Rewarding small improvements works better than expecting complete success, and also works better than punishing problem behaviors. 
* Notice people doing something right and affirm them for it.
* Notice more of the good than bad 
* Reward can be attention or praise, not only food

Applications of operant conditioning: Sports

* Athletes improve most in the **shaping** approach. 
* Reinforce small successes and then gradually increase challenges. 
* Baby steps

Applications of operant conditioning: Work

* Some companies make pay a function of performance or company profit rather than seniority. 
* Reward specific, achievable behaviors, not vaguely defined “merit.” 
* Ex: make a specific amount of sales and get reward

Self improvement:

1. State realistic goal & announce it
2. How/when/where will you work towards your goal
3. Monitor how often you engage in the designed behavior
4. Reinforce desired behavior
5. Reduce the rewards gradually

Role of biology in conditioning: Biology limits on classical conditioning

* Can any natural response be conditioned to any neutral stimulus?
* Preparedness: Each species has a biological predisposition to learn associations that have a survival value 
* Ex: associate taste & nausea 
* Ex: If you become violently ill 4 hours after eating contaminated oysters, you will probably develop an aversion to the TASTE of oysters more readily than to the sight of the restaurant, its plates, the people you were with, the music you heard there, etc.

Role of biology in conditioning: Biology limits on operant conditioning

* Will a pigeon peck to obtain food?
* Will it flap its wings to obtain food?
* Will it peck to avoid a shock?
* Will it flap its wings to avoid a shock?  
* Organisms are predisposed to learn associations that are naturally adaptive 

Cognitive processes: In classical conditioning

* Knowing that our reactions are caused by conditioning give us the option of mentally breaking the association 

Cognitive processes: In operant conditioning

* Humans can respond to delayed reinforcers such as a paycheck 
* Humans can set behavioral goals for self & otters and plan their own reinforcement

Observational learning:

* Learn by observing others 
* Modeling: process of observing and maintaining a specific behavior 
* By watching models we expect vicarious reinforcement and vicarious punishment

Mirroring in the brain

* When we watch others doing out being strung **mirror neurons** fire in patterns that would fire if we were doing the action or having the feeling ourselves 
* Our brains stimulate and vicariously exercises what we observe

From mirroring to imitation 

* In humans, imitation is pervasive 
* Children will **overimitate** 
* Routinely copy adult behaviors that have functions or reward 
* Theory of mind humaves have brains that support 

Applications of observational learning 

* People modeling of prosocial behaviors can have prosocial effects 
* People modeling of antisocial behaviors can have antisocial effects 
* Under stress, we do what has been modeled for us 
* Models in real life and in media

Why do we have memory?

* If we don’t have memory we don't have a life 
* We wont remember friends, family, home 
* Culture 
* Skills, knowledge
* Language 
* Past joys, pains 
* What defines me?

Studying memory

* Memory refers to the persistence of learning over time, through the encoding, storage and retrieval of information.
* Persistence of learning over time 
* Coding - bringing it in 
* Storage - keeping it there 
* Retraval - bringing it back to mind when needed 
* 3 behaviors that show memory is functioning:
* Recall 
* Ex: tests 
* Recognition 
* Relearning 
* Should be easier and happen quicker

How does memory work

* Encoding → storage → retrieval 
* exception to the computer analogy:
* Our memories are less literal and more fragile 
* Out brains process many things simultaneously (same things unconsciously) by means of **parallel processing** 

Model of memory formation: The Atkinson-shiffrin model

1. Stimuli are recorded by our senses and held briefly in sensory memory
2. Some of this information is processed into short term memory and encoded through rehearsal
3. Information then moves into long term memory where it can retrieve later


1. Need to put effort into long term

* Modifying the model:
* More goes on in short-term memory besides rehearsal; this is now called working memory.
* Some information goes straight from sensory experience into long-term memory; this is automatic processing.

Working memory: functions

* What you are thinking and processing right now 
* Gets better as we get older 
* It hold information not just to rehearse it , but to actively process it 
* Makes sense of new input and links it with long term memories
* Working memory capacity appears to reflect intelligence level 
* Those who can juggle the most mental bald tend to exhibit high intelligence and ability to maintain focus

Encoding memories

* Dual track memory
* Automatic processing and implicit memories 
* Effortful processing and explicit memories 

Dual track memory

Processing

* Effortful - Conscious and on purpose memory
* Automatic - unconscious, no effort

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Implicit vs explicit memories

Explicit memories

* Declarative memories 
* Facts and experiences that we can consciously know and recall 
* Acquired through conscious effortful processing 
* (studying, rehearing, thinking, processing)

Implicit memories

* Some information skips the conscious coding and goes straight to storage 
* Memories are typically formed through automatic processing

Automatic processing and implicit memories

* Procedural memory 
* Automatic skills 
* Classically conditioned associations 
* Conditioned to think a way 
* Information about **space** 
* Remember based on visualization on page
* Information about time 
* Information about frequency

Effortful processing and explicit memories

* Without active processing, short term memories will disappear 
* Effortful processing strategies boost our ability to form new memories 
* Ex: chunking (grouping), mnemonics, hierarchies
* Strategies: 
* Distributed practice
* Testing effect 
* Deep/semantic processing 
* Making information personally meaningful 

Distributed practice

* The spacing effect:
* You retain more information over time 
* Those who learn quickly, forget quickly

Testing effect

Repeated self testing and answering

Deep/semantic processing

* The deeper (more meaningful) the processing, the better out retention 
* “Shallow” processing- 
* Memorizing the appearance or sound of words

Making information personally meaningful 

* Rephrase what you see and hear into meaningful terms 
* Most people excel at remembering personally relevant information

Memory storage:

* Memories are NOT in isolated files, but are in overlapping neural networks, distributed throughout the brain. 
* No year one, year two, etc 
* Some brain cells that fire when we experience something fire again when we recall it 

Explicit memory processing

* The network that processes and stores new explicit memories including your **frontal lobes** and **hippocampus** 
* Need a functioning hippocampus 
* Events and facts are held in the hippocampus for a couple of days before moving to the cortex for long term storage = **memory consolidation** 
* Much of this consolidation occurs during **sleep** 
* A lot of serious memory work is happening when sleeping

Implicit memory processing

* The **cerebellum** forms and stores the implicit memories created by classical conditioning 
* The basalganglia is involved, motor skills for memory

The amygdala, emotions and memory: How do your emotions affect memory processing?

1. Emotions can trigger a rise in stress hormones
2. Stress triggers the amygdala
Amygdala processes strong and mostly hard emotions
3. The amygdala increases memory forming activity so the brain will “tag” these memories as important


1. More likely to remember an event if stressed or scared

* As a result: the memories are stored with more sensory and emotional details
* Not just the objective facts
* Traumatic memories are well remembered
* Because we do not want them to happen again

Brain processing of memory: synaptic changes 

* If you form a memory, can I physically see it in your brain?
* Yes, neurons are talking to each other 
* When sea slugs or people form memories, their neurons release neurotransmitters across the synapses
* (sea slugs are commonly used to test)
* With repetition, the synapses undergo **long-term potentiation (LTP) = signals are sent across the synapse more efficiently** 
* The more the communication across the synapses happens, the more connections and communications they have 
* More receptor sites, more connections

Memory retrieval 

* Memory is stored as a web of associations
* The best **retrieval cues** come from associations we form at the time we encode a memory 
* Retrieval cues can bring up different memories if similar with another 

The power of priming 

* When mind is on one thing, it can’t stop to think of another thing 
* **Priming** triggers a thread of associations and can affect us unconsciously 
* Study: people primed with money related words were less likely to then help another person 
* Study: priming with an image of Santa Clause led kids to share more candy 
* Santa is generous 
* Study: people primed with a missing child poster then misinterpreted ambiguous adult-child interactions as kidnapping

Context dependent memory 

* Dependent on the environment 
* Encoding specificity principle 
* Where specifically did you encode 
* Cues & contexts specific to a memory will be most effective in helping us recall it 
* If you retrieved it on land, it will reappear on land 
* If you retrieved it underwater, it will reappear underwater

State dependent memory 

* Memories can be ties to the **physiological or emotional state** we were in when we formed the memory 
* Mood congruent theory 
* When you are in a good mood, you retrieve good memories 
* When you are in a bad mood, you retrieve bad memories

What leads to forgetting?

* Do it all the time and no weird meaning to it
* Brain damage 
* Specific parts and can not remember 
* Encoding failure 
* Common reason 
* You are bombarded with information and you don’t pay attention to most of it, so you don’t encode it 
* Storage decay
* You have no use for it anymore 
* Use it or lose it 
* Retrieval failure 
* Tip of the tongue phenomenon 
* A clue helps retrieve it
* NOT REPRESSION - you need to keep working on a memory to remember it 

Why is our memory full of errors 

* We infer out past from stored information PLUS what we later imagined, expected, saw, and heard
* We have a memory we create and what goes into the memory is what happened and pictures, what parents said, what you imagined 
* When we “replay” a memory, we often replace the original with a modified version 
* Memories can be continuously revised → reconsolidation 
* Memory is not perfect

Misinformation & imagination effect 

* Study: two groups of participants watched a video of a car crash 
* Group 1: Participants watched a video of a minor car accident. The participants were then asked, “How fast were cars going when they hit each other?”
* Actual accident 
* Group 2: Those who were asked, “...when the cars smashed into each other?” reported higher speeds and remembered broken glass that wasn’t there.
* Misremembered accident 
* Misleading question
* Even repeatedly **imagining** nonexistent actions and events can create **false memories**

Misattribution

* Have you ever discussed a childhood memory with a family member only to find that the memory was: 
* from a movie you saw, or book you read? 
* from a story someone told you about your childhood, but they were kidding?
* from a dream you used to have?
* from a sibling’s experience?
* Source amnesia

Source Amnesia

* Amnesia about the source of the information 
* Misattributing the source to your own experience

Discerning true & false memories

* Overconfidence: people are overconfident about their fallible memories 
* Unreal memories **feel** like real memories 
* It’s hard to separate false memories from real ones 
* You can remember the gist of it but not the specific details

Constructed memories and children

* Imagined events are hard to differentiate from experienced events 
* When interviewing kids, DO NOT LEAD; be neutral and non suggestive in your question 
* Little kids do not give accurate information 

Recalling memory about sexual abuse

* Traumatic memories lead to vivid, persistent, and haunting memories 

“Definition” of intelligence 

* Intelligence can be defined as “whatever intelligence tests measure.”
* Nothing more 
* Usually school smarts 
* Generate scores; allows us to compare individuals 
* When everyone gets a score, we can compare and rank people 
* Ex: sat & act: measures your potential to get into a college