PSYC1150 (post-midterm notes)

Ch. 4: sensation and perception:

• Top-down processing: perception driven by internal properties (ex. previous memories)

• Bottom-up processing: perception driven by external factors

• External stimulus is transferred into neural processing by transduction

• Absolute threshold: the lowest amount of stimulus we can detect

• Cornea: transparent cells that focuses light on the back of the eye

• Fovea: the center of the retina

Ch. 5: consciousness

• Consciousness: subjective experience of thought, feeling and sensation

  • William James: stream of consciousness is continuous flow of changing thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc.

• Meta-cognition: reflecting on one’s own thinking processes, thinking about how you think

• Theory of mind: everyone perceives things differently

  • Develops around 2-4 years

• 5 levels of awareness:

  1. Higher-level consciousness: controlled processing, actively focused

  2. Lower-level consciousness: automatic processing

  3. Altered states: produced by drugs/alcohol, trauma, fatigue

  4. No awareness: unconscious thought

• Circadian rhythm: biological 24h clock (body temp and hormone production changes)

  • regulated by the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the hypothalamus, part of the limbic system

  • disrupting the circadian rhythm can increase risk of: depression, slowed reaction time, cardiovascular problems, decreased immune system function, hallucinations

• Stages of sleep: ~90 min cycles

  1. Very light sleep, 5-10 minutes; beta (alert), alpha (relaxed), theta (light sleep) waves; myoclonic jerks

  2. Non-REM 2, 10-30 minutes; sleep spindles (sudden spikes of electrical activity); K-complex (sharp rising and falling waves) helps move memories from short term to long term, 60% of sleep

  3. Deeper slow wave sleep, characterized by delta waves, crucial to feeling rested, suppressed by alcohol

  4. Stage R REM, looks like brain waves (high frequency, low amplitude), vivid dreams increasing heart rate/blood pressure/irregular breathing, 90-100 minutes

• REM dreams: emotional, illogical, biologically important

• Non-REM dreams: typically less vivid than REM dreams, often involving more mundane or fragmented scenarios, and are generally more focused on thoughts and emotions rather than visual imagery.

• Reticular formation: crucial for sleep and arousal

• Neurotransmitters: transmit serotonin, norepinephrine, acetylcholine; levels vary between sleep stages

  • Rise in serotonin and norepinephrine wakes us up

• 30-50% of people experience sleep disorders

  • Most common insomnia (15-17%)

  • Sleepwalking (15-30% of children; 3-5% of adults)

  • Narcolepsy, can cause cataplexy (loss of muscle tone), due to lack of orexin production

  • Sleep apnea (9-13%) stop-start breathing during sleep caused by blockage in the airway

  • Night terrors, most common in children

• Most people who claim to have been abducted by aliens have a history of sleep paralysis (a disruption of R-stage sleep)

• Dreams help to: process emotional memories, integrating new memories, learning new ways of doing things, simulating threats to help us better cope in everyday life, reorganizing/consolidating memories

• Freud’s dream protection theory: dreams transform our sexual and aggressive instincts into symbols that represent wish fulfillments, must be interpreted by a trained professional psychoanalyst

• Cognitive theory: dreams are dramatized real-life concerns with no deeper meaning, purpose is to process information, solve problems, think creatively

• Activation-synthesis theory: dreams are an attempt to make sense of randomly generated neural signals during REM

Ch. 6: Nurture

• Types of learning:

  • Habituation: responding less strongly to a stimulus over time

  • Sensitization: responding more strongly to a stimulus over time

• Ivan Pavlov: physiologist, most known for his work with digestion in dogs, first began work in classical conditioning (Pavlov’s dogs)

• Acquisition: the phase in which the conditioned response is established (ringing the bell then giving the food)

• Extinction: eventually the reaction will go away if it is not consistently reinforced

• Stimulus generalization: when similar conditioned stimulus elicit the same response (ex. ringing a bell and wind chimes)

• Stimulus discrimination: exhibiting a conditioned response ONLY to the specific stimuli

• Operant conditioning: learning by consequences

• Thorndike created the cat puzzle box, the first to systematically study operant conditioning

  • Law of effect: responses that are rewarded are more likely to be repeated, responses that are punished are less likely to be repeated

• Reinforcement: outcome that strengthens a response

• Positive reinforcement: adding a pleasant stimulus to increase the likelihood of a behavior (ex. stickers for cleaning your room)

• Negative reinforcement: taking away an unpleasant stimulus to increase the likelihood of a behavior (ex. pain makes you take Tylenol)

• Punishment: outcome that weakens a response

• Positive punishment: adding something negative to decrease the likelihood of a behavior (ex. speeding ticket to decrease likelihood of speeding)

• Negative punishment: taking away something positive to decrease the likelihood of a behavior (ex. taking away a phone to decrease likelihood of bad behavior)

• Discriminative stimulus: signals the presence of reinforcement (the bell)

• Schedules of reinforcement: pattern of delivering reinforcers, simplest is continuous reinforcement

  • Partial reinforcement: when reinforcement is only delivered some of the time, more resistant to extinction (ex. gambling)

  • Fixed ratio: reinforcement after regular number of responses (ex. punch card: every 5 ice creams you get a free one)

  • Variable ratio: reinforcement after a certain number of responses on average (ex. gambling) unreliable number of responses

  • Fixed interval: reinforcement after specific amount of time (ex. paycheck every 2 weeks)

  • Variable interval: reinforcement after average time interval

• Observational learning: learning by watching others

• Preparedness for phobias contradicts equipotentiality

  • We are evolutionarily predisposed to have certain phobias (heights, snakes, etc.)

• Instinctive drift: the tendency for animals to return to natural habits even after repeated reinforcement

Ch. 7: memory

• Memory illusion: a memory created by the brain that never actually occurred

• We reconstruct memories rather than reproducing them

• Observer memory vs. field memory

  • Observer is viewing yourself in 3rd person in memories

  • Field is viewing memories through your own POV

• Paradox of memory: memory is really good sometimes, really bad other times

• Atkinson-Shiffrin theory: sensory, short-term, and long-term memory are all stored differently

  • Input → sensory memory → (when given attention) short-term memory → (when rehearsed) long-term memory

• Types of attention:

  1. Selective attention: purposeful focus

  2. Divided attention: multitasking

  3. Sustained attention: vigilance

• Elaboration: creating connections between new and old info

• Types of sensory memory:

  1. Echoic memory (hearing)

  2. Ionic memory (vision)

  3. Eidetic memory (photographic)

• Short-term memory lasts around 30-seconds unless actively retained

  • Strategies: maintenance rehearsal (repeating info in the same order), elaborative rehearsal (linking new info to current life)

• Chunking: grouping info together into higher-order units

• Working memory is active, holding info in memory to be edited and changed

• Long-term memory includes facts, experiences, and lifetime skills

• Schema: organized knowledge structures and templates remembered (aka. script)

  • ex. how to act at a birthday party/restaurant

• Long-term potentiation: the strengthening of connections over time with repeated use

• Memories are more easily retrieved when the state (physical or psychological) remembering in is the same state in which the info was learned

  • ex. drunk people needing to be drunk again to find a lost item

• Autobiographical memories: form of episodic memory which focuses on personal experiences, 3 levels:

  1. Lifetime: eras or chapters of life

  2. General events: family reunions, waiting for the bus in the morning

  3. Event specific knowledge: that one time you got bit by a dog

• Reminiscence bump: you are most likely to remember the most info from 15-25

• Flashbulb memories: memories for emotionally significant events that you are more likely to have a more detailed memory of, more resistant to forgetting (ex. remembering where you were when 9/11 happened)

Ch. 10: motivation and emotion

• Drive reduction theory: certain drives motivate us to minimize aversive states

  • Either physical (hunger) or psychological (loneliness) needs

    • Always trying to maintain equilibrium

• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs

  • Primary (biological) and secondary (psychological) needs

• Self-determination theory: everyone has 3 basic needs

  1. Competence: self-efficacy, mastery, expectation of success

  2. Relatedness: close relationships, needing to belong

  3. Autonomy: independence, self-reliance

• Emotion: feeling that involves physiological arousal, conscious experience, behavioral expression, interpretation

• James-Lange theory: event → arousal → interpretation → emotion

  • Emotions come from interpreting bodily sensations

• Cannon-Bard theory: event → emotion + arousal

  • Emotion and arousal are experienced at the same time, prompted by the event

• Schachter Singer’s two-factor theory: event → arousal → cognitive label → emotion

  • Emotion is caused by undifferentiated arousal (aka. alertness) with cause for alertness

  • Heavily based on personal experiences and history

• Paul Ekman: proposed everyone (regardless of culture) has the same 7 core emotions → happiness, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise, anger and contempt (in the future maybe also pride and awe)

  • Core 7 combine to create secondary emotions (ex. disappointment = sadness + anger, hate = anger + disgust)

• Cultures may have different display rules (cultural/societal/familial) but do not have different core emotions

• Duchenne (real) smiles vs. Pan-Am (fake) smiles

• Broaden and Build theory: happiness helps to increase open thinking and an ability to see the big picture

• Durability bias: the belief that a negative state/feeling will last forever

• Hedonic treadmill: emotions are influenced by events, but will always return to personal “set point” (baseline)