Internal Assessment Stroop Effect

In psychology the Stroop Effect means the reaction time. The experiment was originally made by John Ridley Stroop in 1935. Today, records have shown that people had replicated this study 700 times. He conducted the experiment in 3 different ways: the 1st one was use the name of the colors in black ink, the 2nd was done the same way as the first one but with different color ink used, the last one was using squares with different colors. Sroop identified a large increase in the time taken by participants to complete the color reading in the second task compared to the naming of the color of the squares in experiment 2 while this delay did not appear in the first experiment. Such interference was explained by the automation of reading, where the mind automatically determines the semantic meaning of the word, and then must override this first impression with the identification of the color of the word a process that is not automatized. Unlike researchers performing the Stroop test that is most commonly used in psychological evaluation J.R Stroop never compares the time used for reading black words and the time needed for naming colors that conflicted with the written word. Stimuli in Stroop paradigms can be divided in 3 groups: neutral, congruent and incongruent. Neutral stimuli comprise those in which only the text, or color are displayed. Congruent stimuli are those in which the ink color and color name refer to the same concept. Incongruous stimuli are those in which ink color and concept differ. Three experimental findings are recurrently found in stroop experiments. A first finding is semantic interference, consisting in the fact that naming the ink of neutral stimuli is faster than in incongruent conditions. It is called semantic interference since it is usually accepted that the relationship in meaning between ink color and word is at the origin of the interference. Semantic facilitation defines the finding that naming the ink of congruent stimuli is faster than with neutral stimuli. The third finding is that both semantic interference and facilitation disappear when the task consists in reading the word instead of naming the ink. It has been sometimes called Stroop asyncrony, and has been explained by a reduced automaticitation when naming colors compared to reading.

Placebo Effect

The placebo effect is somewhat a felt improvement in health which dose not include medication or a proper treatment, also fake surgeries and therapies are considered placebos. In 1995 Henry K. Butcher found that 35% of the people recovered using pills with no active ingredients. Other researchers studied 10 of Butcher´s 15 studies and found that 67% of the peoples condition improved without the using a placebo, another study was shown that people who had a cold where given a placebo and they experienced improvements in six days. It was also found that Henry K. Butcher only reported the percentage of conditions that shows improvements of the placebo, not the percentage that deteriorated. After examining 800 studies of the placebo effect, that was published worldwide by Henry, there was no evidence for the alleged placebo effect. The researchers did an experiment using 3 groups of participants: a group with medication, a group with a placebo, and a group with no treatment. The results of the 3 groups where matched 100% of the time. In my opinion of the effectiveness of placebos its kind of weird how the body behaves when received a treatment that doesn't cure the disease, but I think that some placebo work because for example every time I get a headache I put a pillow on my head for 40 minutes and it results that the pain is relieved or slight pain remains.

Gender and Cultural Difference

The Gender

In this article the Psychologists Agneta Herlitz and Jenny Rehnman in Stockholm investigated that if man or women had more accurate memory in remembering every day events. They found that episodic memory was a strength for women, in detail this indicates that women are excellent at remembering words, objects, pictures of every day life, etc., but men have a better ability at remembering non-linguistic information for example, finding there way back when lost. Another discovery that they found was that women where better at remembering faces than men, to prove this they did a an experiment where they presented three groups of participants with black and white pictures of hairless, androgynous faces and described them as ‘female faces,’ ‘male faces’ or just ‘faces.’ The results where found that women where able to remember female faces than the male faces. To conclude this research they found that Environmental factors, and education influence the differences of memory between men and women.

The Culture

In this article Michelle Leichtman researches about memories of children and how well they can remember their childhood when they grow up, they found that people from the US have more strength in remembering their childhood because they grew up in societies that focus on individual personal history, but in Asia many people don't remember their childhood because they grew up in culture where they value there interdependence rather than personal autonomy.

Alzheimer's

Alzheimer's is a disease that occurs at the age of 65, in which your brain starts to deteriorate and you lose resent memories, your personality, and you might forget things that are common in your daily life such as the location of your house, or the names of your family.This disease starts off in the minor stage in which many symptoms are noticeable by others, as the person ages the disease get worse at the point in which you don't remember who you are, and other people who know the person will visualize him as a stranger. Not all people get Alzheimer's , and the people who get it don't necessarily get to the severe stage of Alzheimer's. After watching the video of people with Alzheimer's I felt sad for them because its terrible that you forget the common things that revolve around you, and your education. Especially your personality because when you become disrespectful and angry others will not what to talk to the person or take care of them, which basically they will be left alone until they die. Although there is a medicine that can slow down the progress of the disease, but not curing it, but I wish that in the future there will be a cure for Alzheimer's, my mom says that to prevent this disease you have to keep your brain active by reading, solving puzzles, or anything else that stimulates the brain.

The Language Of Emotion: Ad Slogans In Native Tongues Connect To Consumers' Emotions

In this experiment Stefano Puntoni, Bart de Langhe, and Stijn van Osselaer were trying to find out the expressions of people towards marketing messages in different languages. They tested this by using different slogans expressed in different languages with the participants, it turned out that messages expressed in consumers native language tend to be more emotional than messages in there second language. The conductors don't believe that the effect is not due to the language or the difficulty in understanding the message, they said that it depends on the personal memories and the language context, reading or hearing a word (unconsciously) triggers memories of situations in which that word played a role, because consumers usually have more personal memories with words in their native language than in their second language, marketing messages in their native language tend to be perceived as more emotional. Through out there study they also found out that the effect is more found in women than in men.

Early Scents Really Do Get 'Etched' In The Brain

Yaara Yeshurun of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel conducted this experiment, she said that she found the first associations between an object and a smell had a distinct signiture in the brain. In her study the reserchers where presented a group of adults with a visual object, and later a set of pleasent and unpleasent oder while the brain were imaged by funtional magnetic resonance imaging. A week later the same adults where presented the same objects they used previously, the reserchers noticed that they remembered early associations clearly when they were unpleasant, the researchers even found that they could predict what a person would remember later based on the activity in their brains on day. Yeshurun said that its good to remember unpleasant memories as a risk management. These results could suggest ways to strengthen particular memories, more importantly, it may help us generate methods to better forget early and powerful memories.

Some Short-Term Memories Die Suddenly, No Fading

The conductors of this experiment was Weiwei Zhang a postdoctoral scholar, and Steve Luck a professor of psychology. There experiment was about short-term memory, 12 adults where participating, and each one was a shown three different colors on a computer screen, at the end of each color they where given a color wheel to match the colors. The conductors also took into account the amount of time it took them to observe the color and choosing the color on the wheel. They also did the same process but with shapes instead of colors. This could be important in everyday life, because it would provide a mechanism to help us avoid the confusion that might occur if we tried to make decisions on the basis of weak, inaccurate memories. Zhang and Luck are currently incorporating these findings into a study of short-term memory dysfunction in people with schizophrenia.

The Memory Questions

1. Explain the concept of sensory memory.
Its the ability of retaining impressions of sensory information. There are 2 types of sensory memory; iconic, and echoic memory.

2. Give an example of sensory memory.
You lose concentration in class during a lecture. Suddenly you hear a significant word and return your focus to the lecture. You should remember what was said just before the key word.

3. What is the capacity of our sensory memory?
500 milliseconds.

4. Describe the concept of short-term memory.
short-term memory is the ability of holding small pieces of information in mind.

5. What is the "magic number" as it relates to short-term memory and who conducted the experiment which established this measurement?
7+or-2, George A. Miller conducted this experiment

6. What is chunking?
chunking refers to the strategy of using short term-memory effeciently

7. What has been determined to be the ideal size of "chunks" for both letters and numbers?
The size of chunks is 4+/-1

8. Which mode of encoding does short-term memory mostly rely on, acoustic or visual?
Its definently visual

9. Explain the duration and capacity of long-term memory
The long-term memory is infinite it can last until you die

10. Explain in detail the Atkinson-Shiffrin Model of memory.
The Atkinson-Shiffrin Model is an advantage of the multi store model. It can chunk information into smaller models of memory.

11. Identify three criticisms or limitations of the Atkinson-Shiffrin Model of memory.
- It explains allot about memory, but its just a "model"
- It distinguishes different forms of memory, but it does not take into account what information is presented
-The Atkinson-Shiffrin model does not give enough emphasis to unconscious processes.

12.Explain the Levels of Processing Model of memory.
The levels of processing effect refers to the memory recall of stimuli as a function of the depth of mental processing.

It contradicts Atkinson-shiffrin memory model in the representation of memory strength as continuously variable. Its divided into Maintenance rehearsal and elaborative rehearsal.

13. What is maintenance rehearsal - give an example.
Maintenance Rehearsal is the process of repeatedly verbalizing or thinking about a piece of information.

For example - late at night, you have been out partying all night, you get back home and you are hungry. you decide to order 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.

14. What is elaborative rehearsal - give an example.
Elaborative rehearsal involves deep sematic processing of a to-be-remembered item resulting in the production of durable memories.

For Example - A new student arrives at a classroom you tell his name and try to substitute the name with something else to create a connection with the name instead of saying the persons name a million times.

15. Who developed the Levels of Processing Model and the concepts of maintenance and elaborative rehearsal?

It was developed by Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart


-http://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Maintenance%20Rehearsal
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkinson-Shiffrin_memory_model
-http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=limitations+of+the+Atkinson-Shiffrin+Model+of+memory.

The Memory Video

In this video I learned that there are many ways to have a memory, and how fragile it is to lose your memory. I also feel bad about this person who had no long term memory, and it was scary when they said that he was trapped in the present just imagine that you went to a theme park and it was so awesome, and 2 months later a friend tells you about your summer and you can't remember it. I didn't know that neurons connected each other to retrieve a memory and that it also reaches full power at the age of 30, and weakens as you get older ,but so weak that you can't even remember who you are.

There are some memories that will stay with you for life depending on the impact of curtain event in your life. Ex. “The day that the World Trade Center came down”. Other people can sometimes play with your mind and say things that aren't true, in other words false memories, this can cause a person to think about it later in the future thinking that it was true when its not. In Conclusion, I just can't believe the many things my brain can do, its like if the brain functions faster than Internet loading.

The Stroop Effect

The stroop effect is a demonstration of reaction time of a task. They call it "stroop" because of a scientist named Ridley Stroop who published the effect in 1935 in an article entitled Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions, there 3 detailed experiment that he did.

In his experiment the task required the participant to read the written color names of the word independently of the color ink. In the next experiment the person had to say the color of the letters independently, and also had to name the color of the dot squares. This could be confusing and may take some time because the word could say "yellow" and the word is colored in green, but if you try to focus on the color and not the word it would be less confusing. This experiment allow the participant to read the color list a quick as possible to test the persons reaction time. This effect is used most commonly in psychological evaluations. The Studies of the Stroop effect have consistently revealed activation in the front lobe and more specifically in the anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, two structures hypothesized to be responsible for conflict monitoring and resolution. People who have frontal lesions obtain a lower punctuations in the stroop test.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect

Multi-task Questions

1.Why is multitasking considered by many psychologists to be a myth?

Multitasking is a myth because you can't do 2 things at the same time because after someone perfomes an act they will move one to the next act, and keep jumping back and forth.

2.To what does the term "response selection bottleneck" refer?

Respones seletion bottle neck refers to the brain to respond to several stimuli at once. This causes people to loose time.

3.David Meyer has found that multitasking contributes to the release of stress hormones and adrenaline. Why is this important?

The release of stress hormones can damage your health, it leads to conflict of short term memory. Now that we know about this we can lower the cause.

4.Explain what Russell Podrack found regarding multitasking.

He found out that multi-task can affect the way we learn. When you multitask you do not recieve information efficiently, and you will not learn well.

5.What does the author conclude could happen to our culture as a result of increased multitasking?

He concludes that multitasking means the art of paying attention, the ability to shift our attention, and to exercise judgment about what objects are worthy of our attention. William James, the great psychologist wrote a book called "The Principal of Psychology" in 1890.

The Mbuti Tribe

The Bambuti are pygmy hunter-gatherers, They travel in groups and they are small in size ranging for 15 to 60 people, but overall the population is about 30,000-60,000 people. There 4 types of cultures that the Bambuti learn: the Efe, the Sua, the Mbuti, and the Aka. They live in the forest of Ituri, its 70,000 square kilometers of forest, there is large amount of rainfall nearly about 50 to 60 inches of rain. There Religion has do with the forest they consider that the trees are there greatest protector they somtimes call there protector "mother" or "father". Colin Turnbull was a famous anthropologist, he first realized that distance affected perception because he went with Kenge, and he saw buffalo from a distance and he asked Turnbull want kind of insects are they, but then Kenge was socked when Turnbull told him that it was buffalo from a distance. Kenge knew that buffalo where not small.


The pygmy would also be socked the same way as Kenge did because since they live in a forest the trees block there view, and because of that they know less about reality than we do. Everything is learned by experience.




Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Turnbull

Colin Turnbull's Life

Colin Turnbull was born on November 23, 1924, and died on July 28, 1994. He was a famouse British American anthropologist and he was one first ones to work in the field of ethnomusicology. He was educated at Westminister School and Magdalen Collage, Oxford where he studied politics and philosphy. In 1951 after he graduated from Banaras he traveled to Democratic Republic of Congo with Newton Beal, and a school teacher that he meet at India.

Turnbull studied the BaMbuti during that time, though that it was not the goal of the trip. He later was working for the Hollywood producer Sam Spiegal, he hired Turnbull to assist in the construction and transportation of a boat needed for his film. The boat was called The African Queen which was used for the fim of the same title. Turnbull became a natrulized citizen of the United States in 1954, after he was named curator in charge of African Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in 1959 and he moved to New York City.

Colin Turnbull's life long affair with the African Pygmies made him one of the most famous intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s. In an intimate portrait of a remarkable man-at various times a gold-miner, builder of The African Queen and anti-death penalty advocate-Grinker describes how Turnbull fell in love with a beautiful, poor African American named Joe Towles who became as much Turnbull's heroic creation as did the Pygmies.

Perception Influence

The internal perception are thought that come from our inside that changes our views of reality for example, if you here an explotion you will think that it was a car crash, an airplane, or a movie. An external perception is what really is going on around us, it is what builds our internal perception. For example if you see a car crash from your house and you heard the noise, the next time you hear a crash you will asume it is car, not only that but our family, enviorment, public, and the TV can all change the way we view things. Sometimes we can get bad perceptions of things that happen around us.

5 things that make me happy

Home-Its the most relaxing place.

Videogames-Keeps me entertained.

Travel-It gives me the feeling of a New World.

Bed-Ones im in bed I can't get off of it.

My Brother- He makes me laugh.

5 things that I dislike

School-I get bored very easily.

Books-My eyes feel irritated when I stare at it for to long.

English Class- To much literature.

Hot Days- I sweat when I don't want to sweat.

Traffic- I lose my patience.

Perception is Reality

Perception is the process of obtaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. Perception is one of the oldest fields of philosophy. Two types of consciousness are considerable regarding perception: phenomenal (any occurrence that is observable and physical) and psychological. The difference everybody can demonstrate to him- or herself is by the simple opening and closing of his or her eyes: phenomenal consciousness is thought, on average, to be predominately absent without sight. Through the full or rich sensations present in sight, nothing by comparison is present while the eyes are closed. Using this precept, it is understood that, in the vast majority of cases, logical solutions are reached through simple human sensation. The analogy of Plato's Cave was coined to express these ideas.

Perception and Reality

In the case of visual perception, some people can actually see the percept shift in their mind's eye. Others, who are not picture thinkers, may not necessarily perceive the 'shape-shifting' as their world changes. The 'esemplastic' nature has been shown by experiment: an ambiguous image has multiple interpretations on the perceptual level. The question, "Is the glass half empty or half full?" serves to demonstrate the way an object can be perceived in different ways.

Why am in IB Psychology

I am in IB psychology because ive herd that IB art you have to study important artists and have to right an essay about them, so instead I chose psychology and anyway I enjoyed the class last year and learned allot about humen behavior. I would assume that i would learn more about humen
behavior If i get into IB Psychology.