Psychology topics and concepts

Psychology

Sensation and perception work together to help us see the world. Most people use these terms as interchangeable concepts. However, they are separate functions and each compliments the other.

Sensation is the process that allows the body to take in the stimuli from outside of it. For example, when we smell cooking, it is our sense of smell that sends the information to our brain. Our five senses are smell, sight, touch, taste and sound. If all of our senses are working, we cannot possibly sense everything around us. We may taste some of the ingredients of a prepared dish, but not all of them. The same applies to all of the senses. We hear some of the sounds around us, but because of the number of sounds available and the limit of our hearing, we do not hear everything. We may notice a smell, sound or other sensation and if it remains constant, we may not realize it there any more. For example, you may walk into a room and smell a deodorizer plugged into the wall. In fact, the smell can be rather strong to you. After a while, you may not smell it any longer because your senses have adapted to the smell. The senses collect this information from the environment and send it to the brain.

What happens in the brain is perception. It is in the brain that we make sense of our senses. One person's perception is different from another's. Our brain processes the information it already has and then processes the new information it receives from the senses. For example, if you smell a flower, your brain perceives whether it is a good smell or a bad smell. The same applies to all of our senses. Each of us can smell, taste, touch, see or hear the same thing as the person next to you, but the perception of it is based on how it is registered in your individual brain. The same perfume that smells good to you may not smell good to your friend.

We all have experiences when we look at something and it may not appear the same to you as it does your neighbor. There are various example of this, but one that is well-known is the picture that is either an old lady or a young lady, depending on how "you look at it." The same applies to looking lines that are the same length, but look like they are a different length.

One example of how our sense of sight does not truly match the object is how we look at the moon. We look at the moon and our sense of sight sends this image to our brain. We look at the moon and we see a huge white orb in the sky. The size is not correct, of course. Distance plays a part in what we see, hear and smell and this makes the images relative to the surroundings. We can feel cooked spaghetti with our eyes closed and it may feel like worms to us. Open your eyes, and it no longer is objectionable.

If our senses are not working properly, we have problems with our perception of what we sense. The problem may be as simple as not seeing well and perception is of the limited vision. Another example of this could be color blindness and the perception problem it can cause in a person. For example, an image or object, which is in the color a person cannot detect, may not be seen if it is surrounded by another color that can be detected. Additionally a problem that can occur between sensation and perception may be in the person who has mental illness and perception is based on a "different" reality. Perception is based on what our own brain recognizes and how it processes the information the senses of taste, smell, touch, vision and hearing send to it.

Classical and Operant Conditioning

Classical and Operant conditioning are two ways of learning. Both have the elements of response to stimuli and both are learned in response to stimuli. However, there are differences related to the person's incentives, reinforcement and active or passive learning.

Classical conditioning is when a person (or animal) learns by associating between an event and some stimulus (Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology, 2004). An excellent example of classical conditioning is how Pavlov trained his dogs. He fed them food and watched the dogs to see what response they had, which was salivation prior to receiving the food. He then began to ring a bell prior to feeding the dogs and after a period of time, the dogs began to salivate at the sound of the bell. No food had to be present to make the dogs salivate, as they were able to associate the bell with the food.

We, as humans, have examples of classical conditioning in our lives also. For example, we can smell a good meal cooking and almost taste it, remembering the last time we ate that meal, or we can have other reactions based on classical conditioning. We could hear a dog growling and have immediate fear, with hear racing and sweat pouring off us, if we associate it with the dog bite we got last year. We all have some experiences in the past that may not be on our minds all of the time, but when one or more of our senses recognizes something, there can be an automatic response based on the experience of it. Our hearts can race and we can immediately have fear when something makes us remember a frightening memory.

Operant conditioning is easily described as the relationship between behaviors and the consequences of those behaviors (Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology, 2004). As a child, if we write on the wall and we are punished for it, generally we will stop writing on the wall. This is a negative consequence for us and so we have learned not to do it because we are punished. If we work hard and get good grades and are rewarded with money for this, we will learn that working hard will provide some rewards.

Children learn at a young age to differentiate between behavior that is good or bad. Even before verbal skills are honed, children can learn this, just as animals can learn not to go to the bathroom on the floor while you are away. As verbal skills and reasoning improves, children learn how to behave so that they can have good consequences or not have the good rewards taken away. When homework isn't done and you are not able to go our on Friday night, you have a consequence that is a good reward being taken away. As we grow into adolescence and are more responsible for our own behavior, we can distinguish between these consequences and whether they are negative or positive. As we mature, we have more influence over what behaviors we engage in and the costs of our behavior. The consequences may not be those consequences imposed upon us by others, such as our parents or teachers. Drinking to excess causes headaches and hangovers. Driving too fast causes tickets. Negative reinforcement as well as positive reinforcement becomes an important part of our learned behavior. This type of learned behavior does not end at maturity. All of our life is filled with experiences that help us to learn what type of behavior produces the results we want. As we grow older, we learn from the experiences that make up this conditioning. Five-year-old children might eat enough ice cream to make themselves sick. A nineteen-year-old has been conditioned (operant conditioning) to know that eating too much ice cream will make them sick. Operant and classical conditioning both have places in the development of behaviors of people and animals

Memory

There are three kinds of memory. They are explicit, episodic and semantic. Although many researchers have studied memory and the description varies according to whom you ask, one way to describe memory is that it "may be broadly defined as the way past events affect future function" (Siegel, 2001).

Our earliest memories are implicit. As infants, we perceive the world around us and store those memories. We may associate a feeling of fear with certain sounds and we may react to that sound, whether or not there is any danger present. These implicit memories allow us to do things without thinking about it. For example, when you get on a bicycle, you know how to ride it without thinking about it. The same applies to when you get in your car and know how to drive. These are implicit memories that have been learned and are not consciously thought about. Implicit memories lead to the first type of memory to discuss, which is explicit memory.

Explicit memory is when we remember things that have happened. This memory is particularly true about things that have happened to us in the past. A person is able to recount the story of their life and can tell it in a chronological order, beginning with facts and adding in the memories of a lifetime. These memories have happened in the external world and they are remembered based on what has been experienced before (Explicit Memory Storage, 2004).

Semantic memory is memory that is based on a person's knowledge. This knowledge can be factual or theoretical (Semantic v Episodic Memory, 2004). Some examples of semantic memory might be that a person knows what kind of dog they are looking at or they know their friend's phone number.

This can sometimes be confused with the third type of memory, which is episodic memory. The difference in the two types of memories is that while you may remember the phone number of your best friend from when you were both 10 years old, you also can remember calling your friend and the kinds of things you did together as best friends and the kinds of things you talked about on the phone. If you remember the phone number without remembering the best friend and the phone calls, then the memory is semantic. If you remember the feelings and the friend along with the phone number, those are episodic memories. One source explains that accumulated episodic episodes may be semantic memory (Semantic v Episodic Memory, 2004).

The processes of memory are encoding, storage and retrieval. The brain processes information so that it can be stored. This process is called encoding. The information is stored in the brain for later use and this is called storage. The retrieval of the information is from long-term memory and it is sent to short-term memory for use (Huffman, 2000).

The three stages of memory are sensory, short-term and long-term. Memory is described as a flow of information. The first stage is the sensory, which is a very short-term flash of information that your mind flashes on. This memory does not last more than about a second and it's gone from your memory. The second type of memory is short-term memory, which a person can use to review information they have just received. For instance, if you have just heard an address, you can recall the street number a few seconds later. Long-term memory is the memory people use to recall events and information that have occurred in the past. This may be learned information or perhaps it is the address that you had as a child. This also can account for the memories you have of your childhood (Sensory Register, Short-term Memory and Long-term Memory, 2000).

The stage of memory called sensory register is the way we see the world. We see what is around us and the sensory register filters the information that we see. There is so much stimulation around us, that it would be impossible for our senses to process everything. Sensory register is the way that we send only the information to short-term memory that we see as interesting or pertinent.

Our short-term memory is how we remember the information that has just been passed to us from sensory register. The example of hearing the phone number and remembering the phone number later is an example of short-term memory. If the phone number is a new number to us and we need it for just the one phone call, we may remember the phone number for just a short time. If we are distracted from using that phone number immediately, we probably will forget the number.

Long-term memory is how we retain information for a long time. The two ways that memory can be accessed in recall and recognition. Recognition is when a person sees something and it looks familiar to them. An example of recognition in long-term memory is when you take multiple-choice tests and the answers look familiar. The fact that one of the answers is correct and you have seen it before is how you recognize the answer. It seems familiar to you and you verify in your mind that the information is correct. Recall is when you come up with information that you need. For example, a person taking a fill in the blank test must come up with the answers from their long-term memory or remembering where they were when a certain event happened. When a person recalls something, it is a process of searching through their memory and then comparing the information (Long-Term Memory, 2003).

Problem Solving, Creativity, Reasoning and Judgment

Cognition is the act or process of knowing (Encarta, 2004). The components of cognition are problem solving, creativity, reasoning and judgment. These components together make us have an understanding of the world around us.

Problem solving is the way in which we solve the puzzles that we are faced with every day. We see a goal that we need to reach and we decide what ways we can reach that goal. We may have some barriers along the way and we need to overcome in order to reach our goals. The way that we solve our problem comes from our creativity, which is based on several issues. We look at a problem and sometimes we have immediate solutions. Other time, we infer the solutions and the answer becomes evident. We use our intuition and our knowledge base and often we look at the different answers to problems and apply that to a specific problem.

Creativity can be useful is developing an answer to a problem, but it is often difficult to be creative due to our own stubbornness that we already know the answer, even if it doesn't fit.

We sometimes have a fear of looking stupid by trying something new or different and sometimes we hesitate to be creative because we think it is against our beliefs to try a certain way of solving problems. A creative person will try many different approaches to solve a problem and be willing to change their approaches.