The Stroop Effect: Background

The Stroop Effect began as a dissertation for John Ridley Stroop. This experiment originates in 1885 in work done by J.M. Cattel. He stated that colors and objects took longer to name the word. Both experimenters were interested to know what caused the interference was between conflicting processes. Once he made his research, Stroop wanted to explain the interference. His study was based on 2 major questions. What effect each of the dimension stimulus would have trying to name the other dimension? Would practice have an effect on the interference? He created 3 experiments. Experiment #1 studied the effect of different ink color on reading words aloud. The results of this experiment was that participants averaged 2.3 seconds longer to read the words with the incompatible ink color. On experiment #2 the task was changed to naming the ink color of the words aloud. This time it was the same order as in the first experiment but te shapes where substituted for words. The results Ridley Stroop got out of this experiment was that the participants averaged 47 seconds longer to name the ink color of incompatible words than to name the solid-colored shapes. On experiment #3, 32 participant were supposed to practice and name the ink color of incongruent words for 8 days. Ridley Stroop wanted to find out whether practice affected the results. The results for this experiment was that time on incompatible words decreased with practice. The conclusions were that practice did make a difference. Also, he concluded that naming words activated a single reading response, while colors activated more responses. Naming colors was much more difficult that reading them in words. The Stroop Effect is a difficulty or interference when naming the color of an object when the color interferes with the name of the object. The Stroop Effect also states that participants have a difficulty eliminated any irrelevant information during a task. There is a variation in the Stroop Effect and it is that it may be tested through various experiments. it has been manipulated in various ways by experimenters. There has been many variations since Ridley’s findings. Other people that have influenced the Stroop Effect are MacLeond, Hamers, Regan, Arnoult, McCown, Eriksen and Seymour. There are many limitations for these critical trials. For example, acoustic relations can alter the results. Also, the interference begins until around 2nd grade and declines through adulthood until around 60 and then rises again. It is also more powerful in the dominant language of bilinguals. The explanations for these findings are that words are that words are read faster than colors are named. Two responses compete to be the response that is produced. We automatically read a word when it is there for us to read and colors are everywhere and we do not necessarily say the color in our head every time we see a different color. in conclusion, this interference found when incongruent data is together makes it more challenging for us.

Placebo Effect

The placebo effect is a beneficial effect, produced by a placebo drug or treatment, that cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and must therefore be due to the patient's belief in that treatment. The patient believes the placebo is a normal pharmacological substance that will cure their pain and because they believe it will in some cases it does even if it is a tablet without effect. This idea was presented by H.K. Beecher who evaluated 15 clinical trials with different problems and found that 35% of the people he tested were cured by a placebo alone and 66.7% of the patient’s conditions were improved. Since then, many studies have been done with higher results. These placebos have been effective for people with any pain, depression, heart ailments, gastric ulcers and other stomach issues. Many other studies were done concerning the efficiency of the placebo effect and some discuss it does not really work. Before real pharmaceutics medicine was used, there were only placebos. The limitations of the placeboes are that sometimes doctors don’t know if maybe the placebo is not going to be effective and may worsen the patient’s health. I think that for minor health problems such as a cold or depression the placebo effect might be efficient but for major diseases it should not prescribed. The placebo effect can also have many beneficial results so it should not be discarded because it can still be very cheap and easier for many people but it should also me accompanied by other medicines so that it is not risky.

These articles explain how gender and cultural differences affect the way and how long we retain memory. For example, Psychologists Agneta Herlitz and Jenny Rehnman in Sweden discovered that women can remember more about everyday events than men. The results of their experiments indicated that women do extremely well in verbal episodic memory tasks and men were better than woman at visuospatial processing. To get to these conclusions the psychologists made an experiment in which three groups of participants where presented with black and white pictures of hairless, asexual faces and described them as ‘female faces,’ ‘male faces’ or just ‘faces.’ The results show that women could remember the ‘female’ faces better than they could remember the ‘male’ faces. This shows us how gender affects memory in different ways.

Psychologist, Michelle Leichtman, tries to explain how different cultures have particular factors that may shape memory. She ives many examples. One of them is that if you ask someone tha comes from the Unisted States, a country that focuses a lot in their history, about the earliest memory they have they might tell you about some event when they were about 3. But if you ask the same thing to an Asian, a culture that values independence more than personal history, they will probably tell you about a memory they have when they were 4 or more. So, according to this we can observe that how long you retain a memory may vary depending on your culture. These discoveries have been results of studies made in the past. Mary Mullen and Harlene Hayne both did studies trying to find how differences between cultures affect memory. Mullen asked 700 Caucasians and Asians about their earliest memory and found an average difference that Caucasians’ memory was 6 moths earlier than Asian’s. Then Hayne found that Maoris’ culture helped them retain memory longer than Caucasians. To explain this Michelle Leichthman and some colleagues investigates and found that high-elaborative mothers talk a lot to their children about the past, while low-elaborative mothers don’t talk much about the past. So, they found that Maori mothers are high-elaborative mothers compared to Asian mothers. This explains to us how culture can affect our memory.

Alzheimer’s disease is a problem in the brain that affects your memory. The symptoms develop slowly and get worse through the years to a point that it interferes with daily activities. This disease is progressive and irreversible it slowly destroys memory and thinking skills and eventually the ability of completing basic tasks. When the disease is advanced the patient can no longer respond to the environment, they might become mute or stop eating. Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia. Alzheimer’s is not a normal part of aging but as you get older the possibilities if having the disease increase. Most patients with Alzheimer’s are 65 or older. Alzheimer’s is one of the leading causes of death in America, but the most frightening part of the disease is that there is no current cure. Although there is no cure, there are some treatments that help slow down the worsening symptoms and improve the quality of life for the patients. The most common early symptom is having difficulty remembering new information. As the disease develops other symptoms may appear such as forgetting basic things you have done for your whole life. Another example of a symptom of a patient in the severe stage of Alzheimer’s is that the person may not be able to recognize his father or daughter. This disease is one of the priorities for many labs; it has been killing people for many years and will keep on doing if scientists don’t find a cure for it. It may be terrifying but it is the true, Alzheimer’s is an average person’s fear of getting older.

Native Language Connects To Consumers' Emotions

In our world we are exposed to several languages each day. For example, television ads, billboards, ads, ect… All of these are presented in different languages. What authors Stefano Puntoni, Bart de Langhe, and Stijn van Osselaer, found out was that we perceive out native language more emotionally that foreign languages. These authors that studied bilingual and trilingual populations tested different slogans with consumers and found differences in how the messages were perceived. They reached the conclusion that it was not that they did not understand, or understood less the message in a second language, instead it had to do with memory. This means that the words in a consumer’s native language made the person unconsciously relate that word to a memory they had. Because we mostly have memories with words of our native language, the message containing that language we use the most and have most memories about is perceives more emotionally. Their tests also prove that this effect was found more on woman than men because woman have more efficient memory of emotions. This does not only help us understand why we feel more related to a message using our native language, but also this tells us that we should communicate to consumers using their native language because they will feel emotionally related.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081215111433.htm 

New Understanding Of How We Remember Traumatic Events

Neuroscientists and researchers at the University of Queensland discovered a theory that explains why it is so hard for us to forget traumatic events. The experiment consisted of many studies, lead by the Queensland Brain Institute,  of the amygdala. The amygdala is the part of the brain associates with the processing of emotions. After several studies, scientists discovered a cellular mechanism causing the formation of memories doing with emotional events, which occurs with a certain stress hormone that is present in emotional events. Dr. Louis Faber and her colleagues in the University of Queensland also show how adrenaline in the brain controls the chemical and electrical pathways that are responsible for memory formation. That is why our deepest memories are snapshots of high emotional impact. The new mechanism discovered, helps us understand how these memories are formed. Also, the discovery opens doors to further investigation of anxiety disorders and post-traumatic disorders. 

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081028103111.html

Some short memories Die Suddenly instead of Fading Away

This experiment was conducted by researchers of the UC Davis Center for mind and brain. What researchers Weiwei Zhang, a postdoctoral scholar, and Steve Luck, a professor of psychology, were trying to prove was that short memories dies suddenly and did not fade away as scientists have thought for decades. Their experiment consisted of two tests, each given to 12 adults. On the first one, 3 different colored squares flashed in the computer. Then a color wheel appeared and the three squares also appeared but this time they were colorless and one was highlighted. Afterwards, the subject was asked to recall the color of the highlighted square and was asked to click on the area of the wheel that matched the color. They repeated this 150 times. The results were that the people that did remember the color clicked very close to the color in the wheel and for the ones that the color had disappeared from their memory, clicked on a random color. This means that memory does not fade away instead it goes away suddenly. The second test was similar but it used shapes instead of colors. Luck said, “[They] either had the memory or didn’t have the memory. The memories did not gradually fade away”. This information helps us understand about memory retention and formation. And it is basic for everyday life because it provides a mechanism to help us avoid the confusion while trying to make decisions based on weak memories. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090429091806.htm

What is Memory?- How does it Work?

1. Sensory memory is the first level of memory. Sensory memory retains the brief impression of a sensory stimulus after the stimulus itself has ended. The sensory memory holds a short impression of sensory information even when the sensory system does not send any information anymore.

2. You lose concentration in class during a lecture. Suddenly you hear a significant word and return your focus to the lecture. You should be able to remember what was said just before the key word since it is in your sensory register.

3. Sensory memory corresponds approximately to the initial 200–500 milliseconds after an item is perceived. The capacity of sensory memory was approximately 12 items, but that it degraded very quickly (within a few hundred milliseconds).

4. A system for temporarily storing and managing information required to carry out complex cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning, and comprehension. Short-term memory is involved in the selection, initiation, and termination of information-processing functions such as encoding, storing, and retrieving data.

5. The “magic number” is a highly cited paper in psychology published by George A. Miller, it argues that the number of objects an average human can hold in working memory is 7 +/- 2.

6. To explain chunking I’m going to use an example. Fourteen letters is difficult for most people to store in their short-term memory. But you can use a technique called chunking to increase the capacity of STM. Instead of trying to remember 14 letters you must first chunk the letters into larger units that can help you remind them quicker as 6 chunks instead of 14 letters.

7. Between two and three

8. Acoustic

9. Long term memory’s capacity is unlimited because it never fills up and it is permanent. It has infinite capacity.

10. In 1968 Atkinson and Shiffrin proposed a model of human memory which demonstrated two distinct memory stores: short-term memory, and long-term memory. Later a third memory store was added: sensory memory. This model categorizes memory.

11.

a. The sensory stores are sensory systems, not memory systems as most people think of the term "memory."

b. The three-box model suggests that there is nothing in between short-term and long-term memory. However, evidence shows that information can reside somewhere between the extremes of active attention and long-term storage. Memories can be "warmed up" but outside of attention. In other words, intermediate levels of activation are possible.

c. The three-box model implies that there is just one short-term system and just one long-term system. In reality, there are many memory systems operating in parallel (for example, different systems for vision, language, and odor memory). Each has short-term and long-term operations.

d. The Atkinson-Shiffrin model does not give enough emphasis to unconscious processes. Unconscious activation is shown with a tentative, dotted arrow. Modern researchers find that unconscious and implicit forms of memory are more common than consciously directed memory processes.

12. It is an influential theory of memory proposed by Craik and Lockhart which rejected the idea of the dual store model of memory. This popular model said that characteristics of a memory are determined by its location. Instead, Craik and Lockhart proposed that information could be processed in a number of different ways and the durability or strength of the memory trace was a direct function of the depth of processing involved. There model contains shallow processing which leads to a fragile memory trace that is susceptible to rapid forgetting. And deep processing results in a more durable memory trace.

13. Maintenance Rehearsal is the process of repeatedly verbalizing or thinking about a piece of information. Your short term memory is able to hold information about about 20 seconds. However, this time can be increased to about 30 seconds by using Maintenance Rehearsal.

a. For example - late at night, you have been out partying all night, you get back home and you are hungry. you decide that it's time for pizza. So you pick up the phone and call information to get the number of a local pizza delivery place. When the operator gives the number, you say the number over and over so that you don't forget it in the time it takes to hang up and dial the number. This process of repeating the number over and over is maintenance rehearsal. It won't help get the information into long term memory, but it will help keep it in short term memory a little longer.

14. Elaborative rehearsal is a memory technique that involves thinking about the meaning of the term to be remembered, as opposed to simply repeating the word to yourself over and over.

a. For example, you need to remember the term "neuron." In order to permanently commit the term to your memory, you look up what it means (it is a nerve cell), find out its purpose (transmit information from or to the central nervous system), look at a diagram and study its parts, and think about how it relates to things that you already know (like how different it is from other kinds of cells, assuming you are familiar with other cells). If you do this several times (rehearsal), then you will be more likely to remember the term.

15. Craik and Lockhart

http://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Maintenance%20Rehearsal#ixzz12vjX5Qk6

http://penta.ufrgs.br/edu/telelab/3/elaborat.htm

How Does Your Memory Work?

The video made me notice that memory is the most remarkable trait I posses. I take memory for granted because luckily I have always had the gift of remembering most things. As we grow up memory becomes fundamental almost as common as breathing. What I learned through this video is that there are many consequences to the loss of memory and unfortunately there are many human living without being able to remember a single thing. As life goes by many memories we have from childhood start falling apart. Our memory shapes our personal identity, our perception of life, it shapes us. From birth our brain is changed by our experiences. Our memory stores a collection of vacations, friends, books, movies and all of our experiences. Unluckily, those who have memory deficiency are not able to have a past or a future; they only live in the present. By the age of nine, if your memory is working well, you gain the ability of time travelling in your mind. What is special about humans is that we are the only animal that knows about yesterday and that is why we want to keep living. Memory also gives you the ability of abstract thought and imagining things because of your experience.

Memory also gives us the skill to plan. We can think about actions in the past and therefore consider actions in the future that help us survive. We should be grateful for having a well-working memory because it will help us to survive, develop, speak, problem-solve, prove and many other abilities that come up through the pressure of memory. All of these abilities are not offered to people with memory discrepancy.

The Stroop Effect

What is the background for this experiment?

The Stroop Effect is an effect found in the 1930s by John Ridley Stroop. This effect is used as a test in psychology. This effect explains how our brain processes information. This effect demonstrates how interference can slow down how the brain processes information because it is trying to sort various thing s at the same time.

How is the experiment conducted? (explain step by step in as much detail as possible)

The Stroop Effect consists of a list of colors printed in the same color of ink. First, the person is asked to say the colors from the list and you can see it is going to be very easy for the person to read them, if you want you may record the time to compare afterwards. Then, the subject is given a list of words with names of colors printed in different colored ink. They are told to tell the color of the ink of the words fast and you will see it is much more difficult for the person.

What are the results?

The result of the Test is probably going to be that the person said the first set of words easily and without any mistakes or confusions. And the second set of words you will see is going to be much difficult for the person to say the colors quickly and most subjects even make many mistakes.

Why do these results occur?

You may find that you hesitate or stumble, because the brain is trying to pay attention to more than one thing, reading and the visualizing the colors. The brain tries to process two types of information: a color, and a word naming a color. This is why it is much more difficult to read the second set of words.

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

Multitasking/ Distraction

1. Why is multitasking considered by many psychologists to be a myth?
It is considered a myth by psychologists because they say that it is impossible to multitask. We believe we are multitasking but we are actually just distracting ourselves and not absorbing the information correctly. When we are "multitasking" we are doing more than one thing at a time and we are not concentrating in one. So, actually to multitask is effective in the short term because you finish things faster but in the long term it is worst because you do not recall the information.

2. To what does the term "response selection bottleneck" refer?
It is the same with your attention that when you are trying to pay attention to a lot of things your brain can't process everything at the same time so you stop paying attention and you are not able to completely understand anything. It is also a form of saying that you will probably have to decide what thing you will pay more attention to and won't really concentrate in everything.

3. David Meyer has found that multitasking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline. Why is this important?
It is important because this psychology causes stress and he says that multitasking is effective while doing it because it is faster but in the long term may cause problems. The release of hormones and adrenaline can cause and contribute to the loss of short-term memory loss.


4. Explain what Russell Podrack found regarding multitasking.
He found that multitasking adversely affects how you learn. Even if you understand while multitasking you are unconsciously learning less because that learning is flexible and you can't learn the information entirely. His research shows that we use different parts of the brain for learning and storing information and when we are multitasking the information is stored in the striatum a place involved with learning new skills but not in the hippocampus a place involved with sorting and recalling information. So the information is not well stored.


5. What does the author conclude could happen to our culture as a result of increased multitasking?
That we will not learn well and if we keep using the cell phone and computer while doing homework the information won't be stored in the correct place and we will lose the information rapidly. It concludes that multitasking it a form of distraction for a person that is trying to learn.

BaMbuti Pigmies

Anthropologist Colin Turnbull is the man who has given the most amount of information for s to have a glimpse at the society of this Pygmies. He interacted with them in Congo. He had alliance with one who traduced everything. He made 6 major trips to Africa. He is known for studying the ethnology of the Pygmies. The BaMbuti are a Pygmy race that live in the forest in central Africa. He observed that their life and culture revolved around the environment they live in. One Pygmy said this about the forest they live in: “The forest is our home; when we leave the forest, or when the forest dies, we shall die. We are the people of the forest”. They never separate from the tribe and they sometimes made bonfires at night and sang and danced. The most important season for these pygmies is the honey season. They also have a sacred trumpet called the Molimo. The culture of the molimo was that the sacred part of it was the song it made and the ‘spirit’ it gave. The BaMbuti have many rituals like this, says Trunbull. The ritual of the sacred Molimo was that they light it on fire, sing songs, and “feed” the Molimo. At the Molimo fire the trumpet is passed through the flames and hot ashes are rubbed over it. The sounds of the trumpet imitate animal sounds. SO, as we can se their perception of nature is totally different than our. Why do you think that is? Maybe, because nature is their home, without the forest they would be totally different. And for us nature is just the trees and grass in the yard. Their perception of life revolves around their forest. We use a trumpet to produce music for instance, while they use to imitate animal sounds. Their form of entertainment is different as well. Their perception of life is highly influenced by the environment they live in. Another example is that we are accustomed to seeing people leave and come back or to see them every other week. Meanwhile, they see each other every single day and they sleep close and everyone in the community interacts with one anther at least 3 times each day, imagine if one of the tribe would leave to the city they would think they died because they do not have experience with people leaving and coming back and they do not know what is outside of the community in the forest.

http://collegecrisis.tripod.com/id9.html

Colin M. Turnbull was born in London in November 23, 1924. He received his education at Westminster School and later at Magdalene College at Oxford University. Turnbull studied philosophy, politics and music. He was part of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve during World War II. Then, he was granted a research in the Department of Indian Religion and Philosophy at Banaras Hindu University in India. Later, he returned to attend to Oxford University where he studied anthropology and specialized in African field. Turnball was highly influenced by E.E. Evans-Pritchard, one of his professors. In 1951 he took a motorcycle trip to view East Africa, the Congo, the Sudan and Egypt. There he became really interested by African ethnology. In this trip he had his first encounter with the Pygmies. Under a grant from the Royal Anthropological Institute, Turnbull returned to Africa (Congo) in 1957 to continue his research on Pygmy tribes. Most of his works were based on Africa ethnology and he made six major trips to Africa. Because of his important researches and work he received many important positions. For example, he gained the position of Assistant Curator of African Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History, was a geologist for a gold mine in northern Canada, wrote many articles discussed in television and radio, and made various documentary tapes. His last important position was teaching at George Washington University.

Turnbull met Joseph Towles in 1959. They exchanged vows in 1960. They worked together most of the time and Towels accompanied him on the trips to Africa. In the Congo in 1970, they conducted fieldwork on the Nkumbi circumcision initiation ritual for boys. They were inseparable. After Towles died Turnball donated all his belongings and their research. After the death of his partner he left to Bloomington and later in 1994 died of complications of AIDS. 

Many internal and external factors influence our perception if life. An example of an internal influence is our senses. What we see, hear, touch, say and smell highly influences our perceptions of certain things. Our age is another example. A teenager’s perspective of technology differs from a 40-year old’s, therefore their perception also differ. Culture plays an important role in our perception. Different cultures have different ways of interpreting experiences, values and practices. Race, ethnicity, gender, economic class and age are external factors that influence our perceptions. Religion, spirituality and sexual orientation are internal influences. Social rules such as being respectful to your elder influence our perception. Our role in society and how we should act influences too. Our perceptions are influenced by others and by our own senses. For example, I love to pass by Mr. Dougherty’s room because he laughs at my jokes and I laugh at his. The way he responds to my jokes influences my perception of him and his class. I like to be short because someone once told me short people are the ones with the biggest heart, what this person said shaped my perception about short people. I liked putting chinches on my foot but last time I hurt my toe with one so my experience with chinches gave me the perception that I could hurt myself again. I like sleeping with my grandma because when I was younger she used to have presents for me every time I slept with her, and now even though she does not give me presents I feel really comfortable and happy when I sleep there. The way my grandma treated me influenced my perception of her. I hate going to Boston because once my family and I went there for Christmas and it was the first time I had been away from home and my grandparents for the holiday so it brings me bad memories. This trip gave me a bad perception of Boston. I don’t like going to the dentist because every time I go there or the dentist huts my cheek or tells me I have to come again meaning that my she won’t take my braces any day soon. The pain caused by my braces reflects upon a bad perception towards dentists. Perception is shaped by our experiences. 

Why is our perceptions our reality?

The knowledge of every man consists on his experience. Every person has different experiences therefore a different perception of reality. Some life experiences might be impossible to recall but they are always stored in our brain. This is why we all have different fears and joys. This is related to Classical Conditioning because things have different meanings according to everyone’s experience. Our perception of the world starts since we are in the womb. So, even though we can’t remember anything when we are a child, our brain still has this memory present. That is why perception is our reality because everyone’s perception reflects on the way they live. Let’s say I got bit by a dog when I was a kid, my perception of dogs would be fear and I would try to be as far away from them as possible. This would be my perception of dogs. But others might have had a dog they had connected very well to; this person probably loves dogs and has one. This is his feeling towards dogs. So, everyone’s life revolves on the person’s perspectives and experiences. A person’s style of living is build up by the perceptions he/she has, our perception becomes our reality.

Why I chose to be in IB Psychology?

I chose to be in Psychology because I find it amusing how much I learn about how the human brain works. I took a course in summer that taught me allot about neuropsychology. I learned a lot in a couple of weeks and those weeks helped me decide that I want to study Neuropsychology in college. It is amazing how all the things I learn relate to my everyday life. I understand how the brain works and why. I can also understand what parts of the brain are affected when somebody is having a seizure. I learned why Alzheimer’s makes my grandma and old people forget small details. I now understand what part of the brain is affected by Huntington’s disease, the disease that causes my uncle to tremble. So, I chose to be in IB Psychology because besides having THE BEST chinche teacher, I love to learn about the marvelous world inside our brains.