Activity 5.3

Watch Saving Hubble Update, Gangster Birds, How Memory Works on PBS. See more from NOVA scienceNOW.

I chose the NOVA video "How Memory Works." I remember when H.M. died and at the time I was taking Physiological Psychology. My professor was a quirky soon-to-be-retired type and made us all watch the streaming of H.M.'s brain being sliced into tons of thin slices. I recall, at the time, freaking out that we were wasting a class as it was a rather difficult class. I think, after watching this video, I understand why he was so fascinated with H.M.'s brain.

This video is about long term memory. It starts with the anecdotal story of H.M. who struggled with severe epilepsy and because of this had his hippocampus removed. From H.M. we learned the importance of the hippocampus in long term memory because once H.M.'s hippocampus was removed he no longer could store memories from after the surgery. However, it was also discovered that although H.M. might have no recollection of learning he could still apparently learn. Finally, the video discussed  current rat research which shows that if the animal is given a certain drug immediately after it makes a memory the rat will then forget that memory.

I made several connections and had one question in response to this video. The question I had deals with erasing the poor ratty's memory. Does the drug administered only affect the recently formed memory or can it delete other memories? Has research been conducted looking at the all the effects of this drug and its effects on memories? This erasure of memory also reminds me of the Radiolab I recently posted which also discusses the research on this topic. One thing that really drew me was when one of the doctors said that you have a "slightly different head than you had today" everyday. It reminded me of Vygotsky who said something very similar with human development. Finally, H.M. and the research conducted with H.M. brought to mind past research I have learned about dealing with split-brains. Sometimes when individuals have particularly bad seizures they will undergo surgery that separates part of the midline of their brain. This helps prevent the seizures from spreading all over the brain. Once this surgery is conducted all kinds of interesting research can then be conducted on the individual. For example, I recall learning about individuals who had this "split-brain" and would experience one of their hands doing something in which they never recalled having "asked" their brain to do.

Here is a Wikipedia link if you're interested about split-brains.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain

Activity 5.1

Though I believe learning and memory are related I do not believe they depend on each other.

In thinking about all things I have learned, at least in my college years, I often think about a course I took in Entomology. Entomology is the subject my husband is studying and as I was a biology minor in undergraduate college I decided to take a course in it. As part of the course we had to memorize all the major insect orders and be able to spot insects that were part of each order. After two years of graduate school and filling my brain up with school psychology when conversing with my husband or his friends from the Entomology department I started to notice I couldn't verbally call up insect orders with the confidence I had once been able to. In particular I struggled with insects I rarely see on a daily occurrence; I could verbally recall what order a firefly belonged to but I could no longer remember what order a thrip belonged to. The orders of insects that I regularly saw and therefore thought of were still easily recalled but the ones I had not practiced seemed to have vanished. However, when I discussed the orders with my husband it was like for each order a little light was turning on. "Ah yes! Praying mantises are members of the order Mantodea!" Instead of having to recode the information into my brain I just had to dust it off a little. I tried finding a quote from James (1983) that I felt was related to this but was unable to locate it. Since I was unable to find the excerpt, I will instead summarize the gist. In the quote James states that a student who says they know an answer but can't exactly say what it is is different than a student who does not know at all. I believe this speaks to the difference of being able to verbally recall something versus knowing knowledge is floating around somewhere in your brain and you just can't say what it is.

I believe we remember vividly what we want to forget because of something called rumination. Unlike the knowledge I had gained from the Entomology course, things we wish to forget we repeatedly call up in our memory and think about, i.e. we ruminate about them. For example, say I had just taken an exam and thought I had bombed it. Though I want to move on and think about other things I keep bringing up questions in my head, thinking about if I answered them correctly, questioning whether I filled out all the pages, or looking up answers in my book. Instead of moving on and thinking about something else I keep bringing up the memories of the test, in short reliving it over and over again.

Activity 4.5

As I read the Pinker (2002) article this week I found myself writing lots of notes responding to what he was saying.

"People have no trouble overriding a stereotype when they have good information about an individual" (Pinker, 2002, p.204). This statement is in direct opposition to what I've frequently learned about the nature of stereotypes. I was always taught that when we find an individual who does not fit our stereotype we think of this individual as an exception to the rule. This probably has to do with what James says, in that it's easier to fit these people in our categories rather than creating new categories all together.

Do we change all terms merely to freshen them or is there more purpose to the change?

"Give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept; the concept does not become freshened by the name" (Pinker, 2002, p. 213). I used to struggle with name changes and what the current PC word of the day was. I have come to understand that although changing the name does not change the category or the stereotypes associated with them, it displays respect for the individual. Further, I believe groups who are discriminated against are the only ones to say what is or what is not offensive. In my opinion even though many such words do change there are some words that are always offensive and only ever said to degrade and hurt others.

Here is a clip of a very good example (or bad, depending on how you look at it) that changing terms is more than just "tinkering" with terms to reengineer people's attitudes (Pinker, 2002).
http://mediamatters.org/blog/2010/08/12/full-audio-dr-laura-schlessingers-n-word-rant/169161
*There is a very serious and offensive word spoken in this video so if you don't want to hear it please feel free to just read the article around the sound clip.

Activity 4.4

Chapter 11: Attention
Summary
In this chapter, James explains his theories on attention and how teachers should instruct based on attention tendencies. He begins by explaining the difference between passive (spontaneous) and active (voluntary, requiring effort) attention. James discusses how teachers can attain and maintain attention in their students by both making subjects interesting and through the use of external methods for subjects that cannot be made interesting.

Connection 1
"Elicit interest from within, by the warmth with which you care for the topic yourself"(James, 1983, p. 56).

Dr. Usher has asked us at least once to recall our favorite teachers and what made them such. This quote from James clarifies what, in my opinion, is a characteristic of the best teachers and classes I've ever had. If your teacher does not care about the subject or topic he or she is teaching why should the student care? My favorite teachers were teachers who incited passion for a topic in me by demonstrating keen interest and passion in the subject themselves.

Connection 2
James' explanation of active and passive attention made me recall a concept from the Mayer (2012) article. With James' chapter on Attention it almost seems as if he is speaking to a learner's motivation. Mayer discusses motivation several times in his article but one passage that really stood out to me is Mayer's discussion of generative processing. According to Mayer generative processing "depends on the learner's motivation to exert effort to learn the material" (Mayer, 2012, p. 92). Therefore, I took this to mean that even if a learner must exert effort to pay attention if the learner has the proper motivation they will still learn the information.

Chapter 14: Apperception
Summary
Though I often get confused by James, I do really enjoy his "voice." With this chapter, James is using his particular voice to try and clear up confusions for teachers about apperception. According to James apperception is taking in information. What we perceive is colored by what we already know. Further, that at a certain point it becomes difficult to change the way you perceive things because of the influence of past information.

Connection 1
After conducting the perceptual activities for this week and then rereading James' Apperception chapter I came across this line, "We overlook misprints, imagining the right letters, though we see the wrong ones" (James, 1983, p. 78). It's amazingly true that our minds do just this. We've seen words over and over again and when things are slightly wrong our brain supplies what we know is right from our memory; ignoring that which does not make sense.

Connection 2
"In admitting a new body of experience, we instinctively seek to disturb as little as possible our pre-existing stock of ideas. We always try to name a new experience in some way which will assimilate it to what we already know" (James, 1983, p. 78).

As I read this excerpt my mind was immediately brought to Piaget's theory of assimilation. Clearly, James and Piaget had similar ideas about the process of constructing and categorizing knowledge.

Activity 4.3

Universal Teaching with an Individualized Twist

After living and learning with another human being for the past five years I know indepthly that people have different learning styles, for me, this is incontestable. Despite this, while reading the Pashler et al. (2009) article I tended to agree that teaching to an individual's preferred learning style does not necessarily mean the individual will learn information better. Many thoughts raced through my mind as I read this article. The first that I considered is the matter of the self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think you learn a certain way will you learn better that way simply because of holding the  preconceived notion that you will? I was also reminded of the age-old questions of "Are you an introvert or an extrovert?" or "Are you Type A or Type B personality?" It could be my indecisive nature, but I've always been flabbergasted by these typologies.  Like Pashler et al. (2009) I've found that such categories "classify people into supposedly distinct groups, rather than assigning people graded scores on different dimensions" (Pashler et al., 2009, p. 107). This is also applicable for many of the labels that students are diagnosed with.

After reading this article and past material for this course, I started constructing a potential solution (at least in my head). My whole life, I've been taught that trying to learn through several modalities was most effective. I'm not sure if this is just something my mom told me or what, but it has worked for me. Usually this plays out as me reading material, writing on the material, reading concepts out loud, rewriting the concepts down on paper, talking to my husband about the concepts, and pacing around rooms reviewing information. Reading this article I questioned if it would be most effective for teachers to universally teach to best practice through multiple modalities. To follow James' (1983) advice of inciting interest and attention through pairing information with native interests. To avoid behaviors Dr. Usher reveals in her PPT as "minimizing how well student can register the information presented" such as through poor classroom management, distracting mannerisms/presentation, etc. And then to pair these practices with allowing students to individually engage in required learning activities based on how the students feel they learn best and further to pair this with Skinner's lovely idea of teaching machines.

Does being called a "good" teacher mean by definition that when you teach, the information reaches all students? Is this possible?

Activity 4.2

I think these exercises are a pretty good indication of the way my memory works. The exercises I did best on I had to be able to connect to something. For example, I did rather well with the letter recall because I used a strategy I often use for studying. We were given the letters NRVFTPLBH (D). As soon as I saw them I came up with this mnemonic “Not Really Very Fun Time People Let’s Be Honest.” This was much easier to recall than just a random string of letters. Another example is with the country recall. First of all, I’m awful at geography- sometimes the knowledge of this alone is enough to stress me out into not learning it. For this exercise Dr. Usher hypothesized that we would remember based on primacy, recency, and distinctiveness. I, instead, remembered them based on personal associations, for example I have a friend named Chad, I just watched a TV episode about Yemen, my best friend from high school and I used to love the name “Botswana”, and I have a friend whose brothers are adopted from Ethiopia. Finally, these exercises are also indicative of what stress will do to my memory. For some reason, when I receive information rapid fire I tend to get stressed and my brain “shuts down.” This is what usually happens when I get a bunch of numbers! I try chunking them, singing them, anything- but as each one comes I start to freak out. Interestingly, I also see this occur when administering cognitive assessments which have sections for short term and working memory. Students are given a list of numbers and then asked to recall the numbers. Even if they are doing well, once there gets to be a long list of numbers often they just shut down rather than trying.

Activity 4.1: Facial Perception

In undergrad, I was lucky enough to conduct an independent research project as part of a class. My professor was really interested in perception and encouraged us to complete our experiment in this vein. My experiment was designed around my hypotheses of facial perception based on sex and expression. It was my thought that humans would be quicker to point out a face on a facial grid if it was displaying a threatening facial expression (in this case an angry face). I further hypothesized that individuals would also be faster based on the sex of the person making the facial expression, with males being recognized faster than females. I based these hypotheses on both evolutionary factors and societal upbringing; it would make sense that we are able to pick out threatening faces quicker for our own safety. Further, based on our upbringing people typically are taught to fear males more than females.

The very old poster from my undergraduate experiment.

Here are the videos for my source of information:



This is a BBC Documentary called The Human Face. John Cleese is the host if anyone loves Monty Python (I do!). These are just 2 of the episodes (there are another 2 online). As these episodes are both long instead of watching them I'll just summarize some of the most interesting and relevant points. The videos elucidate several interesting factoids relating to facial perception. One that really stood out for me was the story of a man with Asperger's syndrome who struggled with understanding peoples' facial expressions; an ability that so many of us take for granted. The first part also discusses how in other cultures displaying facial expressions such as smiling are never really taught. This is connected to how at very young ages babies learn to emulate facial expressions from those around them. Part 2 is more related to facial recognition, but again is related to facial perception and our memory for faces. A particularly thought provoking anecdotal story was about a man who because of an accident was no longer able to recognize faces, even of his own children. From this video I also learned that we learn to recognize individuals by looking for features that differentiate them from the norm. Therefore, frequently we are better able to recognize caricatures than simple line drawings. It was also discussed how emotions are tied to our facial memories and how this tie can be both a helpful and complicating factor. A particularly distressing story was shared about a woman who was raped.  The individual she identified as having committed the rape was then incarcerated for many years before DNA testing was developed and then revealed that another man had in fact raped this woman. This video brought up the fact that memory is complicated and we are not computer-like in our ability to remember facts. Everytime we think about a memory we reconstruct it potentially changing it (something the radiolab podcast talks about as well). This video also discussed our greater ability to recognize those within our own race; another potential explanation for this woman's tragic mistake (for both her and the man who was wrongfully incarcerated).  

I first connected facial perception with the content for this week after watching the PBS video about magic in which they were discussing how the brain decides what to pay attention to and how even during a magic trick in which we are trying watch someone's hands we are still paying attention to that person's face. I also associated human facial recognition and perception with our evolutionary heritage to survive and adapt to our environment. 

"The human brain equips us to thrive in a world of objects, living things, and other people. Those entities have a large impact on our well being, and one would expect the brain to be well suited to detecting them and their powers" (Pinker, 2002, p. 197).

"Our perceptual systems are designed to register aspects of the external world were important to our survival" (Pinker, 2002, p. 199). 

There are many types of learning and learning to recognize the faces of individuals you know and understanding the emotions on someone's face; these are abilities that are essential to our ability to thrive.

This last link is unrelated to facial perception but is a fascinating link about memory. I also find Radiolab to be incredibly engrossing so if you get chance you should really listen to their podcasts.

http://www.radiolab.org/2007/jun/07/