When we study and learn, we pay attention to something in particular, we focus on it. Then, the two parts of our brain start to work, both individually and together too. What do we feel? How do we learn? And why we forget things? This article will give you some answers.
Let's try some questions I found here: "Do you remember your first day of school? What did it feel like when you were separated from your parents? Did you like your teacher? Did you make friends? The process of creating a new memory and bringing it back to mind years later is a complicated and abstract thing, yet we all do it every day. How does memory work?"
- Feeling: It is a psychic phenomenon originated by the excitation of a sensory organ, excitation which in turn is produced by a stimulus, and by virtue of which certain qualities of the objects of the external world are known, such as colors, sounds, smells, tastes... or certain states of the organism itself.
The senses are receptors where the body gathers information from the outside world (colors, sounds,...) and inside the body (state of the viscera, body movements, pain, ...) Sensory receptors are located in different parts of the body:
- On the surface of the organism. They are the five classic senses.
- Within the organism; In the respiratory, digestive, urogenital and, generally, in the viscera. Thanks to them we get feelings of hunger, thirst, well-being, etc.
- In muscles, tendons, joints. They control muscle responses.
The stimuli are forms of energy that affect the senses (retina, tympanum ...) but in themselves are psychologically silent: neither the vibrations of the air are sonorous nor the electromagnetic waves have any color. Sound or color arise when nerve impulses triggered by stimulation of the tympanum or retina reach the corresponding zones of the cerebral cortex.
Not all stimuli that reach the senses are capable of provoking sensations. For example, the human eye perceives only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. The same thing happens with certain very low sounds or with certain olfactory properties.
- Perception: The Human Being does not take the information that comes from the outside world in the form of pure sensations: our knowledge of reality does not consist of a cluster of colors, sounds, tastes, etc. We grasp reality as something structured, as objects endowed with meaning. Perception consists in a structured integration of the sensory data, in virtue of which the stimulating energy manifests itself as the world.
The basic psychological unit of sensible knowledge is not sensation, but perception. It is a sensocognitivo process and is conditioned by learning, past expectations and cognitive schemata, as well as other subjective factors such as motivations, interests, etc; Or social, such as language, culture.
The laws of perception
It was Gestal psychologists who mostly studied these laws, especially those related to visual perceptions. This school defends that the form imposes like a figure structured according to certain laws.The most important are the following:
a) Ratio figure-background
He states that what we perceive is a figure that is cut out on a background. The figure has its own characteristics such as: shape and defined outlines; Greater structuring; Closer to the subject than the background; Closed and with a surface smaller than the bottom.
The fund, as opposed to the figure, lacks precise contours; Is uniform; More distant, wraps the figure and its surface is smaller. A curious circumstance is the so-called fund-figure reversibility. The best-known example is the Rubin Cup. In this drawing, either we perceive two faces in dark cut out on a white background, or a white cup on a dark background.
b) Stimulation grouping laws
Our perceptions tend, on the one hand, that the form is organized in such a way that the perceived figure is as simple as possible; On the other hand, we tend to perceive the figure as clearly as possible.The so-called good figure or good form is imposed. Some of these laws are:
- Law of Proximity: to such stimuli, we tend to perceive those who are grouped closer together.
- Law of Continuity: we tend to group stimuli that have a continuity of form.
- Law of Similarity: together we tend to perceive stimuli that have similarities to each other.
Nothing we perceive remains constant: the wavelengths change according to the variations of luminosity; The size of the objects varies according to our position; Shape is modified by perspective, etc.However, our brain is able to perceive the same color, the same size or the same shape. This phenomenon is known as perceptual constancy.
If our perception of objects varied at the same time as the stimuli that come from them, it would be impossible to recognize things, since they would be in perpetual change. The perceptive constancy is, therefore, vital for our adaptation to the environment.
Social and individual influences on perception
Perception is not a process that is determined solely by the physiological mechanisms of the senses and the brain. Many other elements of educational and cultural origin are involved.
a) Influences of language and culture
The linguistic ability to elaborate abstractions modifies the perception of the world. The adult symbolically processes sensory information: the things that surround him and the situations in which he is immersed are perceived as being carriers of abstract qualities. For example, a sports car is interpreted as something more than a pure object: you see success, power, money,... Thanks to language, the world ceases to be a world limited to objects and physical events to become a meaningful world, meaning meaningful.
But it is not only the language that modifies perception, but also the opposite: the greater perceptive fineness of some peoples towards essential aspects of the environment in which they live, lead them to a better linguistic specialization. Thus, for example, in the Arabic languages there are more than 400 words to designate the camel.
b) Other influences: motivations, attitudes, interests ...
Interests or motivations influence perception. Thus, a person who loves the opera will capture an infinity of musical and scenic details in one performance, in front of another that bores him. A student who is not motivated in the explanation of the teacher will tend to capture diffusely what is said in class, while another student who is interested in the subject will not lose detail. If someone is hungry he will more easily perceive an advertisement of food than another who is satisfied, etc.
Another factor that influences is the previous attitude that we have before certain stimuli. Allport and Kramer conducted an experiment to determine the influence of social prejudices on perception.They selected a group where there were people with racial prejudice and people without prejudice. Subsequently, they screened slides of white men and each member of the group was asked to identify individuals of Jewish origin. The result showed that prejudiced individuals more easily identified Jewish faces.
- Attention: it is a selective process of perception. When we walk down a street the amount of stimuli that impact our senses is practically unlimited; However, at every moment our brain is only conscious of a limited number of these stimuli. If we are playing cards or chess we will concentrate on the game and we will miss other stimuli that come from where we are. Any student has thousands of subjective experiences about what it means to attend or not to attend in class to the teacher's explanations.
An interesting phenomenon is perceptual defense. This is a property by which favorable or pleasant stimuli are identified more quickly than unfavorable or unpleasant ones. In other words, subjects especially cater to stimuli motivating significance, while their attention is not triggered, or takes longer to do when they get unpleasant stimuli.
Many factors influence the attention. Some affect the stimuli themselves (size, color, luminosity, movement, repetition), while others are internal factors of the subject itself (motives, interests, tastes, moral or aesthetic values). Advertising psychology often uses techniques to increase the public's attention for commercial purposes. Among the procedures used are the following: originality (telling amazing stories, posing absurd situations, etc.), spectacularity (special effects, mixing shapes and colors, figures executing impossible movements, staging majestic), word games or Jokes that border what is morally forbidden, sexual claims or incitement, etc.
- Memory: The importance of memory is vital. Without it, learning would be useless; It would be impossible for us to survive in a changing world and we would not have the sense of personal identity. In it also some of the highest human functions are established: thought, language, the ability to foresee and plan the future, etc.
Memory is the ability of our brains to store and retrieve information. It is constituted by innumerable components, which are distributed along neural networks that act within numerous structures of the brain. There are many different memories: olfactory, visual, logical, analytical, associative, etc.
Psychologists often divide memory into three systems:
a) Sensory memory
Sensory memory registers sensations and allows us to explore the characteristics of the information that reaches us. It is maintained for a very brief period (just one second). Two things can happen next: either it is transferred to short-term memory or it disappears.
The traditional example used to illustrate this type of memory is the vision of a feature film. We perceive sequences in motion, although in reality the film is composed of fixed photographs separated by brief intervals of darkness. The sensation of movement is obtained thanks to the sensory memory retaining the vision of each image until the appearance of the next one.
Specialists believe that there is a special type of sensory memory for each of the five senses. This is how we talk about visual and auditory memory.
b) Short-term memory
Some of the information captured by the sensory memory passes into short-term memory. It processes the data that is consciously used to respond to the problems of our immediate present.
The relationship between the STM and the LTM is directional: part of the STM goes to the LTM to be stored there indefinitely; At the same time, when we need to retrieve information from the past, it is transferred in the opposite direction to be able to use the memories and learnings in our immediate present.
The STM has a very limited storage capacity: about seven items or units of non-significant information such as letters or numbers. In addition the maximum retention period is also very short: between 15 and 30 seconds. So, for example, when they ask us to memorize a phone number, after a few seconds the number is out of memory, as long as we do not mentally repeat it in order to store it in the LTM.
c) Long term memory
It preserves perceptions, feelings and actions of the past. Its storage capacity is virtually unlimited. However, this stored information is not always accessible; Sometimes we are not able to remember, but that does not mean that information has been erased, but the keys to its recovery have not been correctly executed.
Neuropsychologists do not yet know how to accurately retrieve the information from the LTM, although they do know that its updating depends on how it has been codified (depth and organization) and that the keys we use to remember them coincide with the codes in which it was codified .
The LTM is divided into:
- Episodic memory: It consists of events or episodes that have happened to us. For example: the color of a dress, the song heard at a party, the way the teacher explained History at school, etc.
- Semantic memory: Memory is the abstract. R ational covers the knowledge of the world and language. It allows us to make reasoning, relate concepts, know the meanings of words or grammatical rules, etc.
...and how we forget things...
There are different theories that try to explain the causes of forgetfulness
a) Disuse theory: if the stored information is not used it tends to fade and disappear.
b) Interference theory: l new learning will impact negatively on the old ones , so that new information tends to erase one held previously.
c) Motivational and emotional theories: we forget those events or learning that we find unpleasant or have negative emotional connotations.
For further information we recommend this article by National Geographic.
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Creado a partir de la obra en https://isabelmerinocabanillas.wordpress.com/.
Este obra cuyo autor es http://maestrousero.blogspot.com/ está bajo una licencia de Reconocimiento-NoComercial-CompartirIgual 4.0 Internacional de Creative Commons.
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