Topical Blog Week #4 (Due Friday)

As I was reading through chapter four, I found that I an interest in Gustav Fechner. He was a German Psychologist. The interesting thing about the developed interest is that I am intrigued by his beliefs in theory rather than in practice.

Fechner, being an esteemed statistician as well as a psychologist (some might consider him more of a philosopher), believed that the mind-body problem could be solved with mathematical precision. The unit of measure that Fechner chose to measure these changes was jnd (just noticeable differences). As one might imagine he was challenged promptly after the work was published. In theory, it would be nice to be able to believe that the mind-body problem could be solved with mathematical equations; but in practice it turns out that his theory only shined true under certain circumstances. I tend to understand the mind-body problem in the sense that they cooperate simultaneously and are different entities that are not mutually exclusive; and that's all I really feel I need to know about it.

It seems that even though there are only certain limitations Fechner's law can be utilized, it was useful because there DOES seem to be some relation between sensation as well as physical intensity. In this time period, a statement similar to that makes complete logical sense. It may not have been as apparent when Fechner was alive. As it turns out, Fechner's studies was some of the first examples of a new form of experimental psychology involving more precise measuring tools. That, in itself, opened a doorway to psychology becoming the science that it is today. I would imagine that there is much debate to whether or not psychology should have stayed a qualitative science/philosophy or to make the jump that it did into quantitative science; but had psychology not taken that leap into the field of measured science, it may not have developed as much as it has today.

http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/psychbeginnings.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Fechner
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Gustav_Fechner

For my topical I decided to focus on some of Wundt’s work on consciousness.
Basically, Wundt was focused on what the elements of thought were, and how consciousness worked as well as feelings and emotions. Often times he is thought of as the founder of experimental psychology, though he didn’t realize how big his contribution was back then. He suggested the principal of actuality that proposed that consciousness is a reality and that it is the subject matter of psychology. He believed that consciousness was an ACTIVITY of the brain rather than one specific thing or material. Perception, apperception and creative synthesis were a big part of consciousness and how we perceive the world. Voluntarism was a product of the discovery of these things meaning there was a distinguished difference between voluntary actions and automated actions. For instance, when we apperceive things we are voluntarily seeing them and giving them our full attention, whereas we also perceive other things and objects that we are not giving our full attention to and this process is fairly automated. Wundt said that the process by which our brain’s consciously perceieve these things is called creative synthesis.
This information was definitely a big breakthrough within psychology because we started to understand how and WHY we perceive and understand certain things.
http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/wundtjames.html
http://www3.niu.edu/acad/psych/Millis/History/2002/wundt.htm
http://peace.saumag.edu/faculty/kardas/Courses/HP/Lectures/C9Struc.html

My topic is over Fechner's Elements of Psychophysics. It's interesting to learn and understand about thresholds and the differences between a small amount. The first experiment on thresholds was done for vision of the eye in 1942 by Hecht, Shlaer and Pirenn. They found that the rods in our eyes cannot take in more than a single photon of light when perceived at the threshold. On days like today when it's really white out, it's hard to walk into my house or a building and see right away without being blinded. It takes a while for my eyes to adjust which makes perfect sense because theres too much threshold from the outside wheres its bright to inside where it's dark. I also found an experiment on the distance of a candle in the darkness. If someone had a candle shining 30 miles away, and we were in complete darkness, we would be able to see it. Also, if someone put that candle right infront of us and backed up foot by foot, it would take them 44 hours until we couldn't see the flame! I thought this was very interesting.
There was also tests done on hearing, known as the auditory threshold. Our biopsychology class took this test last semester and about 95% of us heard the frequencies at about 100-300 hz being the lowest and around 1000 being the highest. I know people have different hearing, but this was a good test to see how everyone's hearing relates and how closely related the thresholds of sound work. Thresholds are a part of every one of our senses. They are also vital for living as well. Being able to smell a fire from far away and even seeing a different light change could be life saving.

the topic I wanted to do some more research on was the topic of Ebbinghaus and his study of memory. Ebbinghaus practice they theory of practice and repitition and how that effects the numbers of memory. When researching I wanted to start with what ways work now and how to improve memory. Some of the information I found that Ebbinghaus also was interetsted in was usuing your senses to enhance memory. He used associations between elements to help improve his memory. I read if you relate what you know to something it builds on previous knowledge then it is easier to retrieve. These methods remind me of the movie house bunny where in order to remember peoples names she says them out loud in an satanic way that helps her better to memorize them. By using her other senses and relating them all some way she can better keep track of names. (I will put the link of the clip below)When Ebbinghaus used nonsense syllables he was able to give some of these syllables an association to other words and meanings. This is basically describing what mnemonic devices are. I often use mnemonic devices to try to relay the information instead of just forcing straight memory. The most common way of making mnemonic devices are when you take the first letter of things and then make them into a sentence or a statement by using the first letters of the items.
Overall Ebbinghaus was the first to embark on picking apart memory and learning what caused it to improve or what practices to do to enhance learning. Most of his theories are still used today and many consider his work to be evolutionary.

http://www.helpguide.org/life/improving_memory.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWYsekCJdac
http://psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/tp/memory_tips.htm

In Chapter 4 I found Hermann Ebbinghaus’s ideas on human memory to be interesting. During the 1870’s he studied at numerous universities and fought in the Franco-Prussian War for a short time. Originally interested in history, but switched to philosophy and earned a PhD in that department. After moving and traveling around Europe, he discovered the book Elements of Psychophysics by Gustav Fechner. This sparked his ideas for memory experiments. The approach Fechner went about sparked the idea for Ebbinhaus that all mental processes could be measured.

Hermann wanted to start with a simple procedure when he first started his experiments involving memory. He started by using average words that were very familiar to most people and would cause less confusion. The issue with this is that the easier the words are to remember, the easier it is to form associations between them. By forming associations between words, one is able to remember the list better than if they were random words that were not familiar in meaning. To solve this problem, he attempted to create something that was easy to remember without prior knowledge of the word. He came up with “nonsense syllables”. These were three letters long and made up of two consonants with a vowel in the middle. He created 2300 nonsense syllables for this experiment. These syllables had different association value due to the fact that it was nearly impossible to make all the syllables unrelated to meaningful words. He only used this experiment on himself because he believed it would help control his results. Today, we know that this was not a very well controlled experiment. The more he familiarized himself with his nonsense syllables, the easier it was going to become for him to memorize them. Experiments generally require more than one subject in order to compare signal and noise.

Ebbinghaus was the first person to document the type of relationship among length of material to be memorized and the total energy put forth to learn it. He found that the longer the list is, the more repetition is required to remember the list. The more he experimented with memorizing lists, the more conclusions he was able to make based on memory. Many of his findings are used today by people as study strategies. He found that studying over a period of time was much more effective than trying to cram all the information in one night. This is a concept that is taught all the time today in elementary school, high school, college, and so on. When you familiarize yourself with material, it is easier to remember when you look over it again and again over a period of time.

The main reason I chose to write about Hermann Ebbinghaus is because I think he made a significant amount of contributions towards findings on memory. He only chose to involve himself in his experiments because he thought his work was too tedious for other people to experience. In a way, I think this was a selfless thing to do. It wasn’t a very efficient way to conduct research, but it was a good start and led to many other experiments. I also chose this topic because memory is still talked about today and how to modify study strategies in order to retain information for tests and important material. It fits into Chapter 4 because there is a detailed section about Ebbinghaus and his studies.

http://users.ipfw.edu/abbott/120/Ebbinghaus.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Ebbinghaus

http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/ebbinghaus.shtml

My topical blog is about the two-point threshold theory that Ernst Weber, a frofessor of anatomy and physiology at the University of Leipzig, came up with. I really found this part of Chapter 4 interesting because I have actually done the test before in a previous science class I took last semester. I also find it interesting becuase of the fact that so many different parts on out bodies receive messages completeley differently from other parts of our body. This really ties into chapter 4 because it is a main topic brought about and is something that can easily be done by people anywhere.

An interesting thing I found out was that the temperature of what the two-point object is can play an effect on how well you can sense the difference between the two points. I find this interesting because you would think that if just a point were touching it would be hard to clearly be able to identify the difference in temperature. I also find this interesting because the temperature of your skin can also play a factor as to what you feel or sense on your skin.

Another thing I found out about two-point thresholds was that recently scientists have questioned the validity of the test. They say that the tested is only a discriminative response to the two points. Otherwise saying that they know when they feel it or don't but it is up to them to actually say when they feel the difference. Recent technology and advancements of the method will create valid test results for the two-point test and will make more clear when people actually do feel the difference. I found this interesting because the test seems pretty self reliant in itself to be valid. It is essentially two points poking you and you tell when there is a sense of two rather than one point felt. I honestly don't know what new advancements have been done to make this test more valid except making sure that the person is honest.

Another thing I researched and got more information about is which parts of the body were the most sensitive to the two-point test and which weren't. There is a picture of a disproportional male that shows the different parts of the body most sensitive. Although it looks awkward, it is a good representation of the parts of the body that are most sensitive. The picture can be viewed at the bottom link below. The fingers, hands, and lips are the most sensitive. The reasons they are most sensitive is because those 3 parts of our body interact with the most variable amounts of stimuli. We use our hands and fingers to grab, touch, hold, move, etc. We use our mouth and lips to talk, eat, taste, etc. It is important that if we were to grab a hot pan, we would be able to react faster to take our hand off rather than sit there and singe our skin. I found this interesting becuase I have a friend who lost feeling in his pinky as a child. He could put his pinky on a heater in the high school classroom and not be affected by it neurally at all. His finger would be burnt but his nerves wouldn't send the message to his brain to pull it off. I think this is an intersting subject because it makes me question what would happen if we were built differently and had our more sensitive body parts on other parts rather than our hands and face. Would the glove industry go out of business?

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2728779
http://cdp.sagepub.com/content/9/1/29.abstract
http://people.usd.edu/~schieber/coglab/2point.html

I chose to write about Ebbinghaus and his memory study. I found his experiment with memory to be very interesting. He basically spent at least two years of his life memorizing jumbles or words or numbers. He studied how we learn them, how long we can retain information, and how quickly we can re-learn forgotten material. I found this interesting, because I am surprising good at memorizing lists of things.
He used “Serial Learning” to do this. This is when you learn a list of things all together. It is kind of like learning a phone number. He did it with random syllables (nonsense syllables) or numbers.
Ebbinghaus also is famous for his “forgetting curve.” He used the “savings method” to study this. He found in his research that he could only remember about 7 plus or minus 2 of the syllables when he only looked at them once. He mapped the amount of forgetting levels over time, and discovered the time it took him to relearn the information got a little bit longer the longer it had been since he originally learned the material.
I think memory retrieval is interesting. It is like when you are talking to your parents, and you say oh that’s really cool I’ve never done that. Then they say yeah you have we did that this time don’t you remember. They tell you the story and you can recall some of it after they tell you. This would be because of the forgetting curve. An example more relevant to learning would be when you haven’t taken a math class in a while and you need to re-learn how to multiply fractions, it takes you less time to re-learn how to do it.
http://www.web-us.com/memory/hermann_ebbinghaus.htm
http://www.brainybehavior.com/blog/2008/02/ebbinghaus-the-father-of-modern-memory-research/
http://psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/p/forgetting.htm

The topic that I chose to look into further was Wilhelm Wundt’s concept of apperception. The term apperception originates from Descartes work from the word apercevoir found in his book Traite de Passions. The term was then borrowed and put into more technical terms by the German philosopher, Leibniz. Wundt then began using the term in psychology. His concept of apperception was brought up when he was concerned about how the mind actively organizes its experiences through an act of will. He labeled this his voluntaristic system. Apperception is the central concept to his voluntaristic system, which involves the active nature of the mind. Apperception is a general term for all mental processes in which new information is brought into connection with already existing information and then classified, explained, or understood. I found a few examples that helped me to understand this concept more clearly. The first example is that a rich child and a poor child are walking together and they come across a ten-dollar bill on the sidewalk. The rich child says it is not very much money and the poor child says it is a lot of money. The difference lies in how each of the children apperceives the same event (the lens of past experience through which they see and value the money). The second example I found was when we see a fire, which involves visual perception, we correlate the appearance of fire with past experience of being burned. This correlating the appearance of the fire is how we apperceive it. Having combined the present information with our past experiences, we realize that we should avoid touching the fire, which could result in a burn. These examples made me realize how often we actually apperceive things. We are making decisions everyday based on our past experiences and our knowledge of those events. Wundt helped to clear up the difference between simply perceiving something versus apperceiving something. Perceived ideas are grouped together in a mechanical and automatic process, whereas apperceived ideas are grouped in a way in which Wundt called creative synthesis. This “creative synthesis” takes place at the center of attention and is a more conscious process.

The reason I found this topic so interesting is because of how much we really use it in our everyday lives. It isn’t something that we think about doing we just do it. I have never heard about apperception before this, I only had the idea of perception. It helps us to focus our attention on a specific object, event, or idea and give that thing meaning. Different people may have different meanings for things because of their past experiences and how they interpret it.

Apperception allows for us to make meaning of the experiences we have and that is why it is so important for this chapter. It has everything to do with psychology and our minds and helps us to understand everything.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apperception
http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Apperception
http://www.3niu.edu/acad/psych/Mills/History/2002/wundt.htm

I also came across a diagram that shows how complex the cognitive system is according to Wundt. It shows that apperception takes place at higher consciousness and processing levels. I found it to be kind of interesting so I thought I would include the link for that as well.

http://www.smithsrisca.demon.co.uk/PSYwundt1902.html

One topic in Chapter 4 that I wanted to learn more about was Weber’s idea of two-point threshold. The two-point threshold is the point, which can be like the tip of a pin or a pencil, where the perception changes from feeling “one” point to feeling “two” points. Areas that have great sensitivity, like the thumb or lips, have a much smaller threshold than areas that have less sensitive skin, like the upper arm. This means that the more sensitive areas don’t have to have points that are very far apart before it is noticed as two separate points, whereas on the less sensitive parts the points have to be placed further apart to be noticed as separate. This is important to know because touch can provide information about an object, like surface texture which can’t be determined by vision. Our skin contains mechanoreceptors, which are receptors that are sensitive to mechanical pressure or deformation of the skin. The mechanoreceptors are not uniform throughout the body, hence different areas of sensitivity through the body.
http://www.answers.com/topic/two-point-threshold
http://www.bookrags.com/tandf/two-point-threshold-tf/
http://www.uni.edu/~maclino/hs/documents/2point.pdf

The subject that i decided to write about this week is Edward B. Titchener. The reason that i have decided to write my blog about Titchener is that he had influenced the history of psychology for such a long time with his influence upon Boring, and his history.

As we have already read from the textbook, Titchener studied under William Wundt, and his interpretation of Wundt's ideas and philosophies helped shape the history of Wundt up until the 1970's. Besides when he was a part of Wundt's history, Titchener worked as a great psychologist in his own right.

Before Titchener ever studied with Wundt at Leipzig, he studied at Oxford. While at oxford he read some of Wundt's work, and even translated some of it work into English. After Oxford, Titchener then moved onto Leipzig to get his doctorate, and then went on to Cornell to teach psychology, instructing in the style of structuralism. As a combination of his own thought and Wundt's teaching, Titchner came up with the idea that the mind can basically be divided into different elements, and that complex thoughts are made up of these "mind elements."

One of Titchner's students, Margaret Floy Washburn, was the first woman psychologist, even though he barred women from his professional group that he founded. one of the interesting things that Titchner discovered that is still used today is that the size of objects around the subject can influence how we perceive it, and this is demonstrated in the third link in my sources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_B._Titchener
http://www.nndb.com/people/958/000164466/
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TitchenerIllusion.html

I decided to look at Hermann Ebbinghaus and his nonsense syllables further. The reason behind my interest in this is because I remembered an interesting experiment we did with memory that is related to his findings. Ebbinghaus decided to investigate the development of new associations between unassociated stimuli. He used nonsense syllables, also known as CVCs. They are three letter units that are comprised of two consonants with a vowel in the middle. They were created to memorize without having any real strong meaning to individuals that looked at them. To do this he used serial learning involves memorization of a verbal stimuli then recalling them in the exact order. Throughout out his experiment he used himself as the test subject. He attempted to try and measure the speed at which a series of symbols with differing lengths could be memorized and found that length of these sessions determined the length of time needed to commit these terms to memory. The same goes for the number of the symbols. He also created a forgetting curve which showed that people are more likely to forget at a very rapid rate shortly after initial learning. It explains the exponential nature of forgetting, describes the formula of forgetting as

R = e(−t/S).The symbol R stands for memory retention, S is for relative strength of memory, and t stands for time. This graph has found some interesting data. According to the graph most humans will halve their memory of newly learned knowledge in a matter of days or weeks unless they review the material that they had previously learned.

Ebbinghaus is most certainly influentual in the field of memory and learning and has helped us today even in research of things such as Alzheimers disease and diagnosing other memory disorders.
http://www.psychology.sbc.edu/Ebbinghaus.htm
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Hermann_Ebbinghaus
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvF7n0d7K8c