Chapter 1: Introducing Psychological Science

Module 1.1: The Science of Psychology:

➢ Cyber emotional intelligence: research that examines the assumptions that we make about
people based on their online personalities
➢ Psychology: the scientific study of behaviour, thought, and experience, and how they can be
affected by physical, mental, social, and environmental factors

The Scientific Method:

➢ Whether a field of study is a science is based not on the subject but on the use of the scientific
method
➢ The scientific method: a way of learning about the world through collecting observations,
developing theories to explain them, and using the theories to make predictions

A. Hypothesis: Making predictions:

➢ Hypothesis: a testable prediction about processes that can be observed and measured
• Can be supported or rejected (Can’t prove it)
• A scientific hypotheses must be testable
• Supported hypothesis: lead to new ones and strengthen theories
• Rejected Hypothesis: revised and tested again and can potentially alter an existing
theory
➢ Pseudoscience: An idea that is presented as science but does not actually utlizie basic
principles of scientific thinking or procedure
• Ex: Astrology

B. Theories: Explaining Phenomena:

➢ Theory: an explanation for a broad range of observations that also generates new hypotheses
and integrates numerous findings into a coherent whole
• Theories are general principles or explanations of some aspect of the world whereas
hypotheses are specific predictions that can test the theory or, more realistically
specific parts of the theory
➢ Hypothesis supported = support for theory = accepted explanations of behaviour or other
phenomena
➢ Hypothesis rejected = rethink elements of theory
➢ Any scientific theory must be falsifiable
• Evidence may be discovered afterwards that challenges a theory
• Theories can be updated
• This process helps to ensure that science is self-correcting
➢ Facts about scientific theories:
• Theories are not the same things as opinions or beliefs
• All theories are not equally plausible.
• A measure of a good theory is not the number of people who believe it to be true
C. The Biopsychological model:

➢ The Biopsychological model: a means of explaining behaviour as a product of biological

psychological, and social factors
• Biological influences: brain structures and chemicals, hormones, and external
substances such as drugs
• Psychological influences: memories, emotions, and personalities, and how these
factors shape the way we think about and respond to different people and situations
• Social influences: friends, peers, ethnicity, and culture
➢ These three levels are connected and heavily influence each other

Building Scientific Literacy:

➢ Scientific Literacy: the ability to understand, analyze, and apply scientific information
➢ Four steps:
• Knowledge gathering
• Scientific explanation
• Critical thinking
• Application

A. Critical thinking, curiosity, and a dose of healthy skepticism:

➢ Critical thinking: involves exercising curiosity and skepticism when evaluating the claims of
others and without own assumptions and beliefs.
➢ Core set of habits and skills for developing critical thinking:
• Be Curious
• Examine the nature and source of the evidence, not all research is of equal quality
• Examine assumptions and biases
• Avoid overly emotional thinking
• Tolerate ambiguity
• Consider alternative viewpoints and alternative interpretations of the evidence
➢ Critical thinking is not a philosophy, a belief, or a faith, nor is it meant to make everyone
arrive at the same answer. It helps find and justify good answers.
➢ Scientific and critical thinking involve the use of the principle of Parsimony: the simplest of all
competing explanations of a phenomenon should be the one we accept

Module 1.2: How Psychology became a science:

Psychology’s Philosophical and Scientific Origins:

➢ Science is a philosophy of knowledge that stems from two fundamental beliefs:

• Empiricism: a philosophical tenet that knowledge comes through experience
o Knowledge about the world is based on careful observations, not on common
sense or speculation
o Scientific theories must be logical explanations how the observations fit
together
 • Determinism: the belief that all events are governed by lawful, cause-and-effect
relationships
o Does this mean that we do not have control over our own actions? This is
known as the “free will versus determinism” debate
o Behaviour is determined by both internal (genes, brain chemistry) and
external influences

A. Influences from the ancients: Philosophical insights into behaviour:

➢ Physician Hippocrates (460-370 BCE) in ancient Greece developed the world’s first personality
classification scheme
• Four humours or fluids flowed throughout the body and influenced both health and
personality
• The four humours included:
o Blood
o Yellow Bile
o Black Bile
o Phlegm
• Different combinations of these four humours were thought to lead to specific mood
and behaviours
➢ Galen of Pergamon, (127-217) refined the previous work and suggested that the four humours
combined to create four temperaments (emotional and personality characteristics that
remained stable throughout the lifetime)
• The four temperaments were:
o Sanguine (blood): a tendency to be impulsive, pleasure-seeking, and
charismatic
o Choleric (yellow bile): a tendency to be ambitious, energetic, and bit
aggressive
o Melancholic (black bile): a tendency to be independent, perfectionistic, and a
bit introverted
o Phlegmatic (phlegm): a tendency to be quite, relaxed, and content with life
• He recognized that the temperaments of most people would be a combination of
these extremes
➢ Psychology did not advance during the Dark Ages (Latter parts of the fourth century)
➢ Psychology also did not immediately benefit from the scientific revolution of the 1500s and
1600s
➢ Psychology was not classified as “scientific” until the 1800s due to Zeitgeist: a general set of
beliefs of a particular culture at a specific time in history
• People were not ready to accept a science that could be applied to human behaviour
and thought because doing so would seem to imply the philosophy of materialism: the
belief that humans and other living beings are composed exclusively of physical
matter
o We are nothing more than complex machines (we have no soul)
• To opposite to this belief is dualism: the belief that there are properties of humans
that are not material (we have a soul separate from body)
B. Influences from physics: Experimenting with the mind:

➢ Earliest explorations made by Gustav Fechner (1802-1887) who studied sensation and
perception
• Was interested in the natural world of moving objects and energy
• Coined the term Psychophysics: the study of the relationship between the physical
world and the mental representation of that world

C. Influences from evolutionary theory: The adaptive functions of behaviour:

➢ Darwin noticed that animal groups that were isolated from one another often differed by only
minor variations in physical features which seemed to fine-tune the species according to the
particular environment in which they lived, making them better equipped for survival and
reproduction
• Theory of evolution: Natural Selection: the genetically inherited traits that contribute
to survival and reproductive success are more likely to flourish within the breeding
population. These traits differ across locations because different traits will prove
beneficial in different environments
➢ Behaviour is shaped by natural selection and like physical traits, behaviours are subject to
heredity influences

D. Influences from medicine: Diagnosis and treatments:

➢ Clinical psychology: the field of psychology that concentrates on the diagnosis and treatment
of psychological disorders
• Impacted by the study of brain localization: certain parts of the brain control specific
mental abilities and personality characteristics
• Studied in two different ways:
o Phrenology: Physician Franz Gall (1758-1828) and Johann Spurzheim (1776-
1832)
▪ The brain consisted of 27 “organs” corresponding to mental traits and
depositions that could be detected by examining the surface of the
skill.
▪ Different traits and abilities were distributed across different regions
of the brain.
▪ Particular trait or ability = brain area related to that would be larger =
bumps on a person’s head
▪ By measuring the bumps on a person’s head, proponents of
phrenology believed that it would be possible to identify the different
traits that an individual possessed
o Brain Injuries: Physician Paul Broca (1800s) and Karl Wernicke (1874)
▪ Studied a patient named Tan who could hear and understand perfectly
well but was unable to speak
▪ Broca identified an area on the left side of Tan’s head that was
damaged and claimed to have found where specch production was
localized (now known as “Broca’s area”)
 ▪ After, Wernicke identified Wernicke’s area. Patients with damages to
this part of the brain could speck in sentences that sounded normal
but with unusual or made-up words. Although they could hear just
fine, no speech made sense during the recovery period. This area is
critical for language comprehension
• Other ways:
o Magnets: Franz Mesmer (18th century)
▪ Believed that prolonged exposure to magnets could redirect flow of
metallic fluids in the body, thereby curing disease and insanity.
▪ Some of his patients seemed to be cured
▪ Believed to be due to Psychosomatic medicine: when a patient is
cured because they believe that they are cured
▪ His methods became famous and were termed “hypnosis” because of
the trans Mesmer produced in his patients
o Hypnosis: Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
▪ Began to use hypnosis to treat his own patients
▪ Interested in how hypnosis seemed to have cured several patients of
hysterical paralysis: a condition in which an individual loses feeling
and control in a specific body part, despite the lack of any known
neurological damage or disease.
▪ Led to the development of own technique: Psychoanalysis: a
psychological approach that attempts to explain how behaviours and
personality are influenced by unconscious processes
▪ Knew that conscious experience includes perceptions, thought, a
sense of self, and the sense that we are in control of our ourselves
▪ He also believed in an unconscious mind that contained forgotten
episodes from early childhood and urged to fulfil self-serving sexual
and aggressive impulses
▪ Proposed that because these urges were unconscious, they could exert
influence in strange ways, such as restricting the use of a body part
(Hysterical paralysis)
▪ Believed that by hypnotizing participants, he could have more direct
access into the individual’s unconscious mind and then he would be
able to determine and correct any desires or emotion he believed
were causing the unconscious to create the psychosomatic conditions
▪ Although he did not conduct any experiments to test his work, his
research was very important because:
❖ Modern psychologists make inferences about unconscious
mental activity
❖ Led to the development of the medical model: The use of
medical ideas to treat disorders of emotions, thought, and
behaviour
 ❖ Incorporated evolutionary thinking: physiological needs and
urges relating to survival and reproduction can influence our
behaviour
❖ Placed great emphasis on how early life experiences influence
our behaviour as adults

E. The influence of social sciences: measuring and comparing humans:

➢ Influential force came from the social sciences of economics, sociology, and anthropology
➢ Perception and statistical analyses: Sir Francis Galton
• Believed that heredity (genetics) explained psychological difference among people in
terms of social class
o Example: great achievement tended to run in families
o People who did better in scholarships, business and wealth were able to do so
because they were better people (genetically speaking)
• To prove this, he developed ways of measuring eminence: a combination of ability,
morality, and achievement
o One observation: the closer the relative, the more similar the traits
• First one to take on the question: Nature VS Nurture relationships: the inquiry into
how heredity (nature) and environment (Nurture) influence behaviour and mental
processes
o Was on the nature side (did not take into consideration how upbringing and
family traditions could explain similarities among relatives)
• Led him to purse scientific justification for eugenics (“good genes”)
• Encouraged the belief that social programs should encourage intelligent, talented
individuals to have children, whereas criminals, those with physical or mental
disability, and non-White races should be kept out of the English gene pool
o Influenced the thinking of Adolf Hitler

The Beginnings of Contemporary Psychology:

➢ By the late 1800s, Zeitgeist changed so that the study of human behaviour was acceptable

A. Structuralism and Functionalism: the beginnings of Psychology:

➢ Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) was largely responsible for establishing psychology as an

independent scientific field.
• His primary research method was “introspection” meaning “to look within” which
required participants to explain their experience with a stimulus
• He also developed reaction time methods as a way of measuring mental effort.
• What made his ideas distinctly psychological was his focus on measuring mental
events and examining how they were effected by his experimental manipulations.
• Worked with concepts that involved a person’s perceptions with concepts such as free
will (Voluntarism)
➢ Edward Titchener, his student, adopted the same method of introspection used by Wundt to
devise an organized map of the structure of human consciousness
 • Structuralism: an attempt to analyze conscious experience by breaking it down into
basic elements and to understand how these elements work together
o Attempts to look at permanent, unchanging elements of thought
➢ William James (1842-1910) was influenced by Darwin’s evolutionary principles and thus,
preferred to examine behaviour in context, and explain how our thoughts and actions help us
adapt to our environment
• Functionalism: the study of the purpose and function of behaviour and conscious
experience
• In order to fully understand behaviour, one must try to figure out what purpose it may
have served over the course of our evolution

B. The Rise of Behaviourism:

➢ Biologists became interested in how organisms learn to anticipate their bodily functions early
in the 20st century
➢ Reflexes: Professor Edwin Twitmyer (1873-1943) or perhaps Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936)
• Classical Conditioning: the sound of the bell successfully predicted the hammer, the
ringing soon had the effect of the hammer itself. This led to behaviourism.
• Behaviourism: an approach to only focus on studying only observable behaviour, with
little to no reference to mental events or instincts as possible influences on behaviour
• Ivan Pavlov noticed that dogs began to salivate to a tone if the tone had a history of
sounding just prior to the delivery of food. This led to distinct methods that started
the behaviorist movement.
➢ In NA: John B. Watson began to believe that all behaviour could ultimately be explained
through conditioning
• Only observable changes in the environment and behaviour were appropriate for
scientific study
• Believed that Wundt’s introspection method was too subjective
• Believed so much in the power of experience and so little in the power of genetics
• Watson later on developed a company that developed ads that employed behaviorist
principles between a product’s brand image and positive emotions
o People will buy things based on what they see, what is observable
➢ NA: B.F Skinner (1904-1990) also believed that psychology was the study of behaviour and not
of the unobservable mind
• Foundation of behaviour was how an organism responded to rewards and
punishments
o We tend to repeat those actions by which we receive a reward and avoid
actions that lead to punishment
• Conducted experiments where he observed the effects that changing the reward
schedule had on the behaviour of animals like rats and pigeons
• Resistance: if our behaviour is controlled by external rewards and the satisfaction of
motivational drives, then this leaves little room for free will

C. Humanistic Psychology emerges:

 ➢ By mid-20th century, psychology was dominated by two perspectives: behaviorism and
Freudian Psychoanalytic approaches,, which had for sure removed free will
• Both perspectives: the individual person was merely a product of forces that operated
on her, and she had little if any control over her own destiny or indeed, even her own
choices beliefs, and feelings
• To the behaviorists, human experience was the product of a lifetime of rewards,
punishments, and learned associations.
• To the psychoanalysts, human experience was the result of unconscious forces at
work deep in the human psyche
o Originated from the medical model
o Focused on illnesses of the body and brain
➢ New Perspective: Humanistic Psychology: focuses on the unique aspects of each individual
human, each person’s freedom to act, his or her rational thoughts, and the belief that humans
are fundamentally different from animals
• Carl Rogers (1902-1987) and Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
o Both Psychologists focused on the positive aspects of humanity and the factors
that lead to a productive and fulfilling life
o Searching for the meaning of life
o Mental well-being and satisfaction can be attained through gaining a greater
understanding of themselves
o Opposed both psychoanalytic tradition and behaviorism in proposing that
humans had the freedom to act and a rational mind to guide the process

D. The Brain and Behaviour:

➢ Karl Lashley (1890-1958): was interested in locating the engram, the place in the brain where a
memory trace was stored
➢ Using rats, he made two main findings:
• The exact location of the damage did not affect performance, long-term memories are
stored throughout many parts of the brain (not just located in one area)
• Principle of mass action: the size of the damage did have an effect, with larger lesions
causing a greater impairment in performance
➢ Donald Hebb (1904-1985): conducted studies examining how cells in the brain change over
the course of learning
• He observed that when a brain cell consistently stimulates another cell, metabolic,
and physical changed occur to strengthen this relationship
• This theory (Hebb’s Law) demonstrated that memory, a behaviour that we can
measure and that affects so many parts of our lives, is actually related to activity
occurring at the cellular level
➢ Wilder Penfield (1891-1976): developed a surgical procedure to help patients with epilepsy
• This procedure involved removing cells from the brain regions where the seizures
began, doing so would prevent the seizures from spreading to other areas of the brain
• But before doing so, he applied electricity to different parts of the brain and the
patient told him what sensation they were feeling. Based on this, he was able to
create maps of the sensory and motor cortices in the brain
 • Also showed that people’s subjective-response experiences can be represented in the
brain
• The behaviorist theory was not a complete representation of our mental world

E. The Cognitive Revolution:

➢ Cognitive Psychology: A modern psychological perspective that focuses on processes such as

memory, thinking, and language
• Led to Cognitive neuroscience
➢ Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909): collected reams of data on remembering and forgetting
• Produced many “forgetting curves” which showed that most of what a person learns
will be forgotten rapidly, but that the rate of forgetting will then slow down, enabling
us to remember some of the information that we have learned
➢ Frederick Bartlett (1886-1969): used experiments to better understand human memory
• Found that our memory was not like a photograph, but was instead influenced by a
number of outside factors including a person’s cultural knowledge and experiences
➢ Gestalt Psychology: an approach emphasizing that psychologists need to focus on the whole
of perception and experience, rather than its parts
• Argued that much of our thinking and experience occur at a higher, more organized
level than Wundt emphasized; they believed that Wundt’s approach to understanding
experience made about as much sense as understanding water only by studying its
hydrogen and oxygen atoms
• The whole is greater than the sum of its parts
➢ 1950s: invention of the computer was a useful tool to this science

F. Social and Cultural Influences:

➢ Norman Triplett (1861-1931): observed that cyclists ride faster in the presence of other
people than riding alone
➢ Events in Nazi-controlled Germany that led up to WW2 contributed to this new branch of
psychology in at least two ways:
• German professors and scientists escaped Nazi Germany and came to North America.
They brought with them the influence of gestalt psychology
• Research on social influences began as a result of collaborations between sociologists
(who studied populations of people) and psychologists (who studied individuals at
that time)
➢ Evolved into social psychology: the study of the influence of other people on our behaviour
➢ They also observed that not all people responded to social groups or the presence of others in
the same way
• Led to the development of personality psychology: the study of how different
personality characteristics can influence how we think and act
➢ Kurt Lewin (1890-1947): suggested that behaviour is a function of the individual and the
environment
 • All behaviours could be predicted and explained through understanding how an
individual with a specific set of traits would respond in a context that involved a
specific set of conditions
➢ Cross-Cultural Psychology: the field that draws comparisons about individual and group
behaviour among cultures; it helps us understand the role of society in shaping behaviour,
beliefs, and values
• Allows us to examine how people respond when being pulled in different directions by
family history and the culture of their current country of residence
 Chapter 2: Reading and Evaluating Scientific Research

Module 2.1: Principles of Scientific Research (page 31)

Does classical music make you smarter?

➢ Governor Zen miller believed that when young children listened to classical music it would
make them smarter
• Many would think that this observation is true due to the fact usually individuals who
listen to classical music are generally more smarter and sophisticated
➢ “Mozart effect” happened in which parents began to buy classical CDS for their children, but it
eventually died down as many scientists were not able to replicate this study
➢ It was only based on one study that showed that adults who listened to classical music
performed better on a test of spatial ability (understand the spatial relations among objects-
used to do everyday tasks like packing; knowing if some box is big enough to put things in)
• The media generalized this to all forms of intelligence (when they did not know if it
actually applied or not)
➢ This example highlights the need for better scientific literacy and critical thinking

What makes science such a powerful technique for examining behavior?

➢ The single most important aspect of scientific research looks for:

• Objectivity: anyone should be able to agree on the facts, be able to test and observe
them other than the person who has described them (Ex: the scientist)
➢ When an individual observes an event, their interpretation of it becomes subjective
• Subjective: meaning that their knowledge of an event is shaped by prior beliefs,
expectations, experiences, as well as their mood
➢ Many individuals tend to regard a scientific approach as one that demands proof and is
rigorous

Five characteristics of Quality Scientific Research:

➢ Quality scientific research meets the following criteria:

1. It is based on measurements that are objective, valid, and reliable
2. It can be generalized
3. It uses techniques that reduce bias
4. It is made public
5. It can be replicated

Scientific measurement: objectivity, reliability and validity:

➢ The foundation of scientific methodology is:

• Objective measurements: the measure of an entity or behavior that within an allowed
margin of error is consistent across instruments and observers
o In other words, the way that a quality or behavior is measured must be the
same regardless of who is doing the measuring and the exact tool they are
using
 o Ex: your weight on the scale in the washroom or the scale in the gym.
However, weight will vary slightly from scale to scale (margin of error)
➢ A Variable (object, concept, or event being measured) is an important part of research
• In the example above, the variable was weight
➢ Back in time, psychologists would measure variables using questionnaires or to stimuli
presented on the computer
• Now technology such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) (allows
researchers to view the brain and see which areas of the brain are being used while
one performs a specific activity)
• With this great number of measurement options, it’s now possible to examine the
same variable, using a number of techniques
➢ A variable must include carefully defined terms
➢ Operational Definitions: are statements that describe the procedures (or operations) and
specific measures that are used to record observations
• Ex: intoxication can be described in a number of ways, such as physiological measures:
blood and alcohol, behavioral measure: number of missteps when trying to walk heel-
to-toe on a straight line and self-reported measure: score on the self-report called
“intoxication index)
➢ To improve the Mozart effect:
1. They should have used objective behavioral measures, measures of thinking and
reasoning in studies of listening to classical music
2. Should have done it in a variety of areas of intelligence not just spatial reasoning
3. Should have seen that the increase in IQ level was very small and short lived
4. They should have considered other types of variables, not just music, books (like
Stephen kings horror, novel, as well).
➢ Search through the existing research before making decisions
➢ The behavioral measurements that psychologists make must be valid and reliable
➢ Validity: the degree to which an instrument or procedure actually measures what it claims to
measure
• Ex: In order to measure depression scientists cannot randomly ask a bunch of
questions and just decide that particular scores justify depression or not. Instead a
depressed person would actually need to score differently than a non-depressed
person.
• Creation of valid measures is time consuming and requires a great deal of testing and
revising
➢ Reliability: when it provides consistent and stable answers across multiple observations and
points in time
➢ Different types of reliability that affect psychological research:
1. Test-retest reliability examines whether scores on a given measure of behavior are
consistent across test sessions.
2. Alternate forms reliability: examines whether different forms of the same test produce
the same results
 • By having multiple versions of a test that produce the same results, researchers
and hospital workers can test individuals on multiple occasions and know that
their measurement tools are equivalent
3. Third type of reliability takes place when observers have to score or rate a behavior or
response
• Ex: participants being watched by observers; who look for amount of eye
contact\touching that was being done while solving the problem
• Having more than one rater allows one to have inter-rater reliability (meaning
that the raters agree on the measurements that were taken)
• If an experiment is designed with clear operational definitions and criteria for the
raters, then it is likely that you will have high intense rater reliability

Generalizability of Results:

➢ Generalizability: refers to which the degree to which one set of results can be applied to other
situations, individuals or events.
• One way to increase the possibility that research results will generalize is to study a
large group of participants
• Ideally it would be best to study an entire population: the group that researchers want
to generalize about
• Psychologists usually study the sample: a select group of population members
• Once the sample has been studied, then the results may be generalized to the
population as a whole
o This is why they try to use a random sample: a sampling technique in which
every individual of a population has an equal chance of being included
(regardless of class standing, gender, major, living situation,etc)
o However, sometimes it is impossible to obtain a random sample, so observers
must settle for conservatory samples: samples of individuals who are most
readily available, (Ex: introductory psychology students)
• In addition to generalizing across individuals, psychological research should generalize
across time and location as well
o Ecological validity: meaning that the results of a laboratory study can applied
to or repeated in the natural environment (Ex: computer test assessing your
different stimuli, can be used in very common situations such as driving or
finding a friend in a common classroom)
• Have to be careful not to overgeneralize (like the Mozart effect, the study was done
on adults but the media somehow attributed the results to children)

Sources of Bias in Psychological Research:

➢ Researcher bias: unintentional bias that is introduced by researchers (treating participants in

different experimental situations differently)
➢ Subject bias or participant bias: the possibility of participants including animals to introduce
their own bias
➢ Bias can also be introduced by the act of observation itself
 • Ex: When researchers changed the conditions in an factory working environment, they
noticed an increase in productivity in the workers
• The results were due to the fact that they factory supervisors were observing them
not because of the change in variable
• This became known as the Hawthorne effect: a behavior change that occurs as a result
of being observed
➢ A challenge for experimenters is to limit the effect that they have on the results of their own
study so that the results are due to the variables being studied
➢ The fact that demand characteristics can alter results is of particular importance for
researchers investigating new drug treatments for different conditions.

Working the Scientific Literacy Model: (Demand characteristics and Participant behavior)

➢ Results of psychological studies should provide uncontaminated views of behavior

➢ Researchers need to withhold as much detail as possible to get the best, least biased results
possible

What do we know about how bias affects research participants?

➢ When studying human behavior, a major concern is Demand characteristics: inadvertent cues
given off by the experimenter or the experimental context that provide information about
how participants are expected to behave
➢ Can take the form of Social desirability: means that research participants respond in ways that
increase chances that they will be viewed favorably
➢ Demand characteristics can also cause participants to try and figure out the purpose of the
experiment; obvious cues from the researcher can give this away.
• Ex: psychologists asks participants to put on a heavy backpack and walk on a ramp
➢ Explanations for Demand Characteristics:
• When there is no explanation for performing a given set of actions; people tend to
draw their own conclusions
• Can also be explained by researchers and observers introducing biases and unwittingly
drawing out the responses they desire

How can we critically evaluate the issue of bias in research?

➢ One way to evaluate whether participants expectations are influencing the results is to create
an additional manipulation in which the researchers give different groups of participants
different expectations of results
• Ex: telling a group of people that they should study for test and that it counts for
marks while to the other you say that it’s not for marks, the people who you told that
the tests was for marks would do better than the other group
➢ Manipulating participants expectations is an effective way of testing whether demand
characteristics could be playing a role in the results of experiments

Why is this relevant?

➢ The science of psychology involves the study of a number of very sensitive topics; the results
are often used to allow policymakers to make better-informed decisions
 ➢ Demand effects are particularly problematic when studying clinical populations or when
performing experiments with different types of clinical treatments

PYSCH @ The hospital: the Placebo Effect:

➢ Placebo effect: a measurable and experienced improvement in health or behavior that cannot
be attributable to a medication or treatment
• This is used in drug studies: one group is given a drug to treat their sickness and the
other is given an inactive substance (placebo)
o The group that is given the placebo often reports that they feel better because
they have expectations that the drug will have an effect on their brain and
their body
o Patients that are given an placebo, claim that they themselves feel better (it’s
in their heads)
o People who are given a placebo are given relief from pain and nausea this
because these people often had increased activity in their frontal lobes
o Participants creating a new “mental set” in their current state- created the
belief in their head that their pain is going to decrease
o Placebos can affect our responses to pain and also block the sensitivity of
brain pathways

Techniques that Reduce Bias:

➢ One of the best ways for reducing subject bias is to provide anonymity: each individuals
responses are recorded without any name or other personal information that could link a
particular individual to specific results
➢ Confidentiality: means that the results will be seen only by the researchers
• Participants are much more likely to provide information about sensitive issues like
their sexual history, drug use or emotional state if they can do so confidentially and
anonymously
➢ Participant anxiety about the experiment can be reduced if researchers provide full
information about how they will eventually use the data
• If volunteers know that the data will not be used to diagnose psychiatric problems,
affect their grades or harm them in some other way
➢ Another source of bias in psychological research involves participant expectations of the
effects of a treatment or manipulation
• It is important that experiments involving drugs (recreational or therapeutic) utilize
what are known as blind procedures
• In a single blinded study: the participants do not know the true purpose of the study
or else don’t know which type of treatment they are receiving (placebo, drugs)
➢ Sometimes researchers can introduce their own bias
• The researcher might intentionally treat individuals in the two conditions differently,
thus biasing the results
• In order to eliminate this possibility, researchers often use a technique known as
double-blinded study: A study in which neither the participant nor the experimenter
knows the exact treatment for any individual
 oIn order to carry out this technique, the researcher must arrange for an
assistant to conduct the observations or the researcher must not be told what
kind of treatment the participant is receiving until after the study is complete
o They are often used when researchers are testing groups that differ on
variables such as personality characteristics or subtle demographic factors
such as sexual orientation
➢ Keeping the experimenter (and participants) blind to these results allows the research to
remain objective.

Sharing the Results:

➢ Once a group of researchers has designed and conducted an objective experiment that is free
of bias, it is important to communicate their findings to other scientists
• Psychology’s primary mode of communications is through academic journals
o Academic journals resemble magazines in that they are usually softbound
periodicals with a number of articles by different authors
o Unlike magazines, however, journal articles represent primary research or
reviews of multiple studies on a single topic
➢ Peer review: a process in which papers submitted for publication in scholarly articles are read
and critiqued by experts in the specific field of study
• Involves two main tasks:
o First an editor will receive a manuscript from a researcher and determine
whether it’s appropriate or not
o Second, the editor sends copies of the manuscript to a select group of peer
reviewers-another professional working in the same field
▪ These reviewers critique the methods and results of the research and
make recommendations to the editor regarding the merits of research

Replication:

➢ Once research findings are published, it is possible that other researchers build upon the
knowledge that you have created; it is also possible for researchers to double check whether
or not your results simply occurred by chance
➢ Replication: is the process of repeating a study and finding a similar outcome each time.
➢ As long as an experiment uses sufficiently objective measurements and techniques and if the
original hypothesis was correct, then similar results should be achieved by later researchers
who perform the same types of studies
➢ Belief of Replication: Correct hypotheses and sound methods should produce repeatable
results

Five characteristics of Poor Research:

➢ Poor evidence comes most often in one of five varieties: untestable hypotheses, anecdotes, a
biased selection of available data, appeals to authority, anecdotes and appeals to (so-called)
common sense
1. Testable Hypotheses: For a hypothesis to be testable, it must be falsifiable: the hypothesis
is precise enough that it could be proven false (Ex: Sigmund Freuds theories)
 • If you cannot disconfirm a hypothesis there is no point in testing it
2. Anecdotal evidence: an individual’s story or testimony about an observation or event that is
used to make a claim as evidence
• If the anecdotal claims are not backed up with scientific research; then they should be
viewed with caution
2. A biased selection of available data: people with a particular political or economic agenda
can still make claims that appear scientific if they performed biased selection of the
available data
• Some individuals, particularly politicians and corporations- might present only the
data that supports their views
• Ex: The debate over whether human behavior is a major cause of climate change
3. Appeal to authority: the belief in an experts claim even when no supporting data or
scientific evidence is present
• Expertise is not evidence; “expert” describes the person making the claim not the
claim itself.
4. Appeal to common sense: a claim that appears to be sound but lacks supporting scientific
evidence
• In addition to common sense, beliefs can originate from other potentially
unreliable sources (Ex: appeals to tradition (We have always done it this way!) as
well as appeals to novelty (it is the latest thing!)

Module 2.2: Scientific Research Designs

➢ Psychologists always begin their research with a question and then create a research designs;
a set of methods that allows a hypothesis to be tested.
➢ Research designs influence how investigators (1) organize the stimuli used to test the
hypothesis (2) make observations and (3) evaluate the results
➢ All research designs include:
• Variables: can be a property of an object, event or something that can take on
different values
• Operational definitions: they define the variables for the purpose of a specific
study
• Data: when scientists collect observations about the variables of interest, the info
they record is collected data
➢ These characteristics of research design are important regardless of research designs are
important regardless of the design that is used

Descriptive Research:

➢ Descriptive research answers the question of “what” a phenomenon is; it describes its
characteristics
➢ Research questions address the appearance of behavior, its duration or frequency, its
prevalence in population
 ➢ Researchers gather data through case studies, naturalistic observations and surveys and
questionnaires

1. Case studies:

➢ A case study is an in-depth report about the details of a specific case

• Case studies are not done on everyone; they are done on individuals who have a very
uncommon characteristics or have lived through a very unusual experience
• Ex: the case of Phineas Gage who tampted the mixture of blasting powder and fuse
before the sand was added (using an iron rod) and that caused the iron rod to be
propelled upwards under Gages eye. After Gage survived the incident, it became
apparent that Gages injuries were not limited to physical damage; his mental state
had also been affected (he became more impulsive, impatient, inconsiderate, and
indecisive after the incident). Examination which involved Dr. Harlow sticking his
fingers into the hole of Gages head, suggested that the damages was located at the
frontal lobes of his brain (this region is now known to be involved in complex
behaviors including decision making and emotional regulation)

2. Naturalistic Observations

➢ They obstructively observe and record behavior as it occurs in the subject’s natural
environment.
• The individuals being observed should not know that they are being observed
otherwise the act of observation could change the participant’s behavior.
➢ When a scientist conducts naturalistic observation research, they are making systematic
observations of specific variables according to operational definition
➢ By having the precise definition of the variable, and how it will be measured, naturalistic
observers can ensure that their results are objective and that different people observing the
same environment would score the behaviors in the same way
• Thus, naturalistic observations can occur anywhere

3. Surveys and Questionnaires:

➢ Self-reporting: a method in which responses are provided directly by the people who are
being studied, typically through face to face interviews, phone surveys, paper and pencil tests,
and web-based questionnaires
• The individuals speak for themselves
➢ How do researchers figure out if their questions are valid?
• For clinical questionnaires, the researchers can compare results to a participants
clinical diagnosis
• For questionnaires that involve other phenomena, researchers perform a lot of
pretesting in order to calculate norms or average patterns of data

Working the Scientific Literacy Model: (Case Studies as a form of Scientific Research)

➢ Case studies allow the clinician or researcher to present more details about an individual than
would be possible in a research report involving a number of participants
What do we know about using case studies as a form of scientific research?

➢ They are useful in describing symptoms of psychological disorders and detailed descriptions
about specific successes or failures in treatment
• Focusing on a single case allows researchers to reach a very high level of detail that
would not have been obtainable if they didn’t focus on just one single case
➢ However, due to this, case studies cannot necessarily be attributed to everyone cause they
describe the situation of a specific individual

How can science test the usefulness of case studies?

➢ They can be used to test existing hypotheses or an existing scientific theory

• Ex: the hypothesis that the amygdala is the part of the brain that causes one to feel
fear and the case in which someone still felt fear even though they didn’t have an
amygdala forced researchers to study more about the structure of the brain. It was
more complex than what they thought
➢ Case studies are also used to find the similarities and differences between different concepts
• Ex: research has shown the ability to link emotional responses to previously
unemotional objects may play a role in the development of PTSD
• Allowed researchers to draw a link between this cognitive mechanism and this clinical
condition

How can we critically evaluate the role of case studies in research?

➢ They can help guide our understanding of scientific theories

• Ex: case studies have shown that a number of studies of patients who suffered
damage to their frontal lobes after car accidents have become more impulsive
• Hence, although it may be presumed that case studies do not provide generalizability,
the studies obtained can be used to explore scientific theories which then can be
applied to different contexts and situations
• Different research projects provide more of an analysis and understanding of a specific
scientific concept

Why is this relevant?

➢ Single cases serve as an inspiration for many future studies that attempt to test whether the
observed result can be generalized to more individuals, perhaps even to humans in general
➢ Of course, case studies are limited to those who only have unique experiences. They cannot
be used to answer all research questions

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Correlation Research:

➢ When performing descriptive research, psychologists usually record more than one variable of
data
➢ Correlation Research: involves measuring of degree of association between two or more
variables
 ➢ Correlation can be visualized using a scatterplot
• Each dot represents one participant, once all dots are put together one sees a pattern
emerge
➢ Correlations take direction:
• Positive: they both move in the same direction whether it be increasing\decreasing
• Negative: One variable increases while the other decreases
➢ Correlation also have magnitude and strength: which refers to how closely the changes in one
variable are linked to the changes in the other variable
• Magnitude is measured by the correlation coefficient
o Zero= no relationship between the two variables
o +1.0= very strong positive correlation
o -1.0=very strong negative correlation
▪ Magnitudes are the same but direction is different
➢ Correlation does not equal causation
• Correlation gives the impression that one causes the other (e.g humor and good
health)
• Third variable problem: a third, unmeasured variable is responsible for the causation
between the two variables

➢ Illusory correlations: relationships that exists in the mind rather than in reality

Experimental Research

➢ Two main differences between correlation research and experimental research: the random
assignment of the participants and the experiments control over the research being studied

1. The experimental method

➢ Critical element of experiments: Random Assignment

➢ Random assignments: a technique for dividing samples into two or more groups in which
participants are equally likely to be placed in any conditions of the experiment
• Random assignment allows us to assume the two groups will be roughly equal
➢ Confounding Variable: variable outside of the researchers control that might affect or provide
an alternative explanation for the results
➢ Randomly assigning participants to the different experimental conditions also allows the
researcher to assume that other sources of variability such as mood and personality are
evenly spread across the different conditions

➢ The variables that are being studied:

• Independent variable: the variable that the experimenter manipulates to distinguish
between two or more groups (participants cannot alter these variables as they are
controlled by the researcher)
• Dependent variable: the observation or measurement that is recorded during the
experiment and is compared across all groups (dependent upon the participants
responses or performances)
 ➢ Between subject design: an experimental design in which we compare the performance of
participants who are in different groups
• Allows one to see the differences between groups
• Problem: could have occurred by chance
• There are two groups:
o Experimental group: is the group in the experiment that receives a treatment
or the stimuli targeting a specific behavior
o Control group: is the one that doesn’t receive treatment or stimuli targeting
specific behavior. This group serves as a baseline to which the experimental
group is compared
➢ Within subjects design: an experimental design in which the same participants respond to all
types of stimuli or experience all experimental conditions
• No separate groups wherein one is exposed to something and the other is not
• In this case, the order of the conditions would be randomly assigned for each
participant

2. The Quasi-Experimental Method

➢ A research technique in which two or more groups that are compared are selected based on
predetermined characteristics rather than random assignment
• Ex: experiments comparing males and females
➢ Differences between groups can be shown and they won’t be related to what one is studying
➢ Quasi experiments can point out relationships among preexisting groups but they cannot
determine what it is about those groups that lead to the differences

Converging operations

➢ Each method of studying behavior has benefits as well as limitations

➢ To achieve true random assignment, while controlling for any number of confounding
variables and outside influences, the situation may be made so artificial that the results of an
experiment do not apply to natural behavior
➢ Study topics in a variety of possible designs, measures, and samples. When a theory’s
predictions hold up to dozens of tests using a variety of designs (Converging operations), it is
that that much more accurate.

Module 2.3: Ethics in Psychological Research

➢ The CIA researched mind-control techniques because many of their enemies were doing on
their citizens ( when they were prisoners of war)
• Became known as the project called the MKultra
➢ Patients were admitted to this project if they had minor problems- they were not given proper
consent and often the tests that were perfomed on them were inhumane causing them to get
anxiety, dimensia-they were never the same
• The project ended in 1973
Promoting the Welfare of Research Participants:

➢ In Canada, all institutions that engage in research with humans, including colleges and
universities are required to have a research ethic board (REB) which is a committee of
research and officials at an institution charged with the protection of human participants
➢ They are intended to protect individuals in two ways:
• The committee weighs potential risks to volunteers against the possible benefits of
research
• Individuals must give consent to participate in the research

Weighing the risks and benefits of research:

➢ The majority of physiological research involves minimal exposure to physical and mental
stress
➢ More common are measures that involve possible cognitive and emotional stress
• Examples include:
o Mortality Silence: when participants are made more aware of death
o Writing about an upsetting or traumatic experiences: participants write about
an upsetting experience (Ex: death of a loved one, etc)
➢ Another source of risk: asking participants to provide the experimenter with sensitive and/or
personal information
• Disclosing personal information is a potential threat to a person’s reputation friends,
and family
➢ Psychologists must find ways to minimize risks so that participants do not suffer from
unintended consequences
• They have to weigh out the potential benefits and the risks when doing their research
➢ The Stressors:
• Mortality silence: stress tends to be short term and they can learn a lot about how a
person’s decisions are influenced by recent events in a person’s life
• Writing about upsetting experiences: researchers can learn how coping through
expression can help emotional adjustment and physical health
➢ The REB serves as a third party that weighs the risks and benefits of research without being
personally invested in the outcome

Obtaining Informed Consent

➢ Before any experimental procedures begin, all participants must provide informed consent: a
potential volunteer must be informed and give consent without pressure
➢ To be truly informed about the study, volunteers should be told at minimum the following
details:
• The Topic of the study
• The nature of any stimuli to which they will be exposed
• The nature of any tasks they will complete
• The approximate duration of the study
• Any potential physical, psychological or social risks involved
• The steps that the researchers have taken to minimize those risks
 ➢ Blinded volunteers: that in the experimental design the participants do not know exactly what
the study is about (may lead to subject bias)
➢ Some researchers use deception: misleading or only partially informing participants of the
true topic of hypothesis under investigation
• The deception in short term; once the experiment is over, the participants are
informed of the true nature of the study and why deception is necessary
• Once participants are informed, they must also be able to give consent
➢ To determine if full consent is given:
• Freedom to choose: individuals should not be at risk for anything or damage to their
reputation if they choose not to participate (financial loss, physical harm, etc)
• Equal opportunities: volunteers should have choices. Researchers must provide
alternative studies for participants to take part in
• The right to withdraw: volunteers should have the right to withdraw without penalty
• The right to withhold responses: volunteers responding to surveys or questionnaires
should not have to respond to questions that they feel uncomfortable answering
➢ If unable to attain consent directly from the participant themselves, then consent must be
given by a third party (Ex: a parent)
➢ Debriefing: meaning that the researchers should explain the true nature of the study and the
nature and reason for deception (after the experiment is over)

The right to Anonymity and Confidentiality:

➢ Anonymity: the data collected during research study cannot be connected to individual
participants (individuals doing a survey without recording their name)
• If pure anonymity is not available-confidentiality is a reasonable substitute
➢ Confidentiality has two parts:
1) researchers cannot share specific data observations or data that can be connected
with an individual
2) All records must be kept secure so that identities cannot be revealed
unintentionally

The welfare of animals in Research

➢ The study of psychology includes the study of the animals

➢ Scientists do tests on animals because they cannot do certain things to humans
• Lesioning (damaging) different parts of the brain in order to examine the resulting
behavioral impairments
• Genetic research requires species with much shorter life spans so that several
successive generations may be observed
• Selective breeding which allows researchers to study highly similar groups of subjects
which helps control for individual differences based on genetic factors

REBS for animal-based research:

➢ Three main areas of ethical treatment are emphasized by researchers and animal welfare
committees:
 1. The first is the basic care of laboratory animals-that is providing appropriate housing,
feeding, and sanitation for the species.
2. The second is minimization of any pain or discomfort experienced by the animals
3. Although it is rare for a study to require discomfort, the researchers must ensure that the
pain is justified by the potential benefits of the research

Working the Scientific Literacy Model: (Animal Models of Disease)

➢ MPTP was discovered in 1976 by 23 year old chemistry graduate student who injected himself
with MPPP thinking that he would get a pleasure inducing effects rather he got Parkinson’s
disease
➢ MPTP was discovered to cause this disease

What do we know about animal models of diseases?

➢ MPTP is a model for Parkinson’s disease and there are many other models for other diseases
➢ Scientists can make animal models based on other diseases
➢ They can do this in four steps:
1. If a disease is causing damage to a specific body part, scientists could take those parts
from an animal to further examine
2. Scientists can introduce a drug\substance that caused the disease\symptoms of the
disease
3. Researchers could create animal models of certain disorders by altering the environment
of the animals
4. Scientists can alter the genetic make-up of animals

How can science test animal models of diseases?

➢ Testing on animals allows humans to stimulate the effects of the disease without harming
humans
➢ There is not enough people with some diseases for this type of trial and error testing to occur
making it hard to find patients who had not already been used for treatment attempts,
therefore the use of animal models is a necessity
➢ All animal models must have the following three characteristics:
1. It must share the same physiological and behavioral features of the disease in humans
2. The tests used to measure the behaviors must be valid ( things that are used to test
humans cannot be used to test animals)
3. The subjects in the animal treatments should respond the same way humans would; if
they don’t then the animal test is not valid

How can we critically evaluate these models?

➢ The easiest criticism that is made towards using animal models is that animal brains are not
human brains; human brains are more complex
 ➢ A second criticism that is made is that researchers are only beginning to understand the
specific parts of the brain that are involved with disease; this threatens the accuracy of animal
models.
➢ Physical symptoms will be shown by animals but mental symptoms such as thoughts,
expressions and even like hallucinations cannot be presented by animals
➢ How researchers can counteract these arguments is:
• If the conditions of a good animal model is met then we can assume that the animal
model is fairly close approximation of the disorder it is being used to study
• The confidence will increase if researchers conduct the similar tests and get the same
results
• Using converging operations-using multiple research methods to analyze the same
question-it is possible to create effective animal models

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Ethical Collection, Storage and Reporting of Data:

➢ Researchers have to maintain the confidentiality, the anonymity and security of the data
➢ The journal should be kept for a reasonable amount of time like three to five years. The
reason for doing this is for a lengthy period relates to the public nature of good research
• The data may be used by other researchers to reinterpret it and examine it before
replicating it
➢ The need for maintaining confidentiality requirement conflicts with the need to make data
public, but this is not necessarily true (in terms of anonymity)
➢ In addition to scientists being safe with their data, scientists must be honest with their data
• Sometimes there are cases of scientific misconduct: which is when individuals
fabricate or manipulate their data to fit their desired results
• The chances of fraudulent being published can also be decreased by requiring
researchers to acknowledge any potential conflicts of interest which includes personal
financial gain
➢ At the end of the article, there will always be a footnote which informs the public when there
is the potential for a company or government agency to influence research

Module 2.4: Statistical Primer

Descriptive Stats:

➢ Descriptive stats: a set of techniques used to organize, summarize and interpret data
➢ In most research the stats used to describe and understand the data are of three types:
frequency, central tendency and variability

Frequency

➢ Most data can be placed in the form of a histogram, which is a type of bar graph
➢ Frequency: the number of observations that fall within a certain category or range of scores
• Histograms are not the only way to depict the results of the experiment, sometimes
its better to depict the distribution of the data using a smooth line called a “curve.”
 ➢ Normal Distribution: (sometimes called a bell curve): a symmetrical distribution with values
clustered around a mean central value
➢ Negatively skewed distribution: a distribution in which the curve has an extended tail to the
left of the cluster (school grades on an assignment were extremely high with only a few
people performing poorly
➢ Positively skewed distribution: a distribution in which the long tail is on the right of the
cluster
• Most of the time, skews occur because there is an upper and lower limit to the data

Central Tendency:

➢ Central tendency: a measure of the central point of the distribution

➢ There are three measures of the central tendency: mean, median, and the mode
• Mean: the arithmetic average of a set of numbers
• Median: the 50th percentile- the point on the horizontal axis at which 50% of all
observation are lower and 50% of all the observations are higher
• Mode: the category with the highest frequency
o The mode is the least measure of central tendency that is used because it
doesn’t provide a lot of information, it is only used when dealing with
categories of data (Ex: When someone is looking at number of votes for
candidates)
➢ When its positively skewed: better of calculating the central tendency by using the median
cause extreme values effect the mean but not the median
• The longer the tail, the more the mean is pulled away from the center of the curve.

Variability:

➢ Variability: the degree to which the scores are dispersed in a distribution

• High variability means that there is a large number of cases that are closer to the
extreme ends of the continuum for that set of data
• Low variability means that most of the scores are similar
➢ Measures of central tendencies are always accompanied by measures of variability
➢ Standard deviation: a measure of variability around the mean\average distance from the
mean
• In a normal curve, most of the data are clustered within one standard deviation of the
mean
• Over 95% of the data is found within two standard deviations of the mean

Hypothesis Testing: Evaluating the Outcome of the Study:

➢ Hypothesis testing: a statistical method of evaluating whether differences among groups are
meaningful or could have been arrived by chance alone
➢ When the standard deviation is small, it would be easy to detect differences between the two
groups being studied but when the standard deviation is large, it seems that the two groups
are virtually identical (refer to page 69 for the example)
Working the Scientific Literacy Model: (Statistical Significance)

➢ Statistical Significance: the means of the groups are farther apart than you would expect them
to be by random chance alone
• It was proposed in 1925 by Ronald Fisher

What do we know about statistical significance?

➢ It is based on the researcher making two hypotheses

• Null hypothesis: assumes that any differences between groups or conditions are by
chance
• Experimental hypothesis: any differences are due to a variable controlled by the
experimenter
➢ The goal of researchers is to find differences between groups that are so large that it is
virtually impossible for the null hypothesis to be true
➢ “p value”: the probability of the results due to chance
• Lower p-values indicate a decreased likelihood that your results were fluke
➢ All p-values involve a measure of central tendency (usually the mean) and measure of
variability (usually the standard deviation)

What can science tell us about statistical significance?

➢ Scientists needed to establish a fairly conservative threshold for rejecting the null hypotheses
• If it were quite easy for researchers to find a significant result, it would increase the
likelihood that results labelled as being significant were actually due to chance
o The first p value was less than 0.05 (If a p-value was less than 0.05, then there
was less than 5% chance that the results were due to chance.
➢ Later on, especially for medical uses, p-value became less than 0.01, which indicates that
there is a 1% chance that the results were because of chance
➢ When testing small sample sizes it’s difficult for the results to be deemed significant

Can we critically evaluate the use of statistical significance testing in research?

➢ Some concerns with significant testing is that if the p value is less than 5%, the more tests that
are done the likelihood of the results occurring by chance is much greater
• This is why scientists use a more conservative p value (as the number of comparisons
increase, they decrease the p value)
➢ A second problem is that the larger number of participants you have, the easier it becomes to
find significant effects; extremely small differences would be considered significant ( large
number of people=larger numbers=larger difference)
➢ Jacob Cohen developed a technique whose developed “power analysis” whose goal is to
calculate “effect sizes”
• “Effect sizes” tell the researcher whether the difference is statistically small or large
➢ There is still a possibility that the results occurred by chance and it is only through replication
having other laboratories repeat the same experiment and get the same result that you can
become confident that the results are meaningful
 Chapter 3: Biological Psychology

Module 3.1: Genetic and Evolutionary Perspectives on Behavior

➢ Evolutionary psychology: how human behavior has evolved to solve problems that relate to
survival and reproductive success

Heredity and Behavior

A. The Genetic Code

➢ The genetic material is organized into genes which are the basic unit of heredity; genes are
responsible for guiding the process of creating the proteins that make up our physical
structures, regulate development and physiological processes throughout the lifespan
• They are composed of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid): a molecule formed in a double
helix shape that contains the 4 nucleotides; adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine
(ATCG)
• Each gene has its own unique combination of these nucleotides (AAATCG)
o This is makes up an individual’s genotype: genetic makeup of an organism
o Genes are like a form of instructions that tells the cell what to do
o When the info inside the gene is expressed, it is called a phenotype: the
physical traits or behavioral characteristics that show genetic variation such as
eye color or behavior
➢ Genes are organized in pairs along chromosomes: structures inside the nucleus that are lined
with all the traits that the individual inherits
• Humans have 20000-25000 genes distributed across 23 pairs of chromosomes (half
from father and half from mother)
• Some humans can have trisomy – in which they have one extra chromosome (Ex:
down syndrome)
➢ Types of genes:
• Homozygous: If two corresponding genes at a given location on a pair of chromosomes
are the same
• Heterozygous: If the two genes differ
➢ When inheriting genes, people who will express it in their phenotype have to have a specific
coding in their genotype.
• In the genotype, they can either have two dominant genes (TT) or one dominant and
one recessive gene (Tt) or two recessive genes (tt)
• If they have TT or Tt that means that they will express the gene in their phenotype but
if they have the tt then they will not express the gene in their phenotype.

B. Behavioral Genomics: The Molecular Approach

➢ Behavioral genomics: is the study of DNA and the ways in which specific genes are related to
behavior
➢ The Human Genome Project:
• Started in 2003
• Identified 20000-25000 genes
 • Did not provide cures for diseases or understanding of behavior but led to the
locations of genes
• Researchers were able to compare genotypes of different individuals (people who had
the disease, people who did not) to understand the cause of the conditions (e.g
parkinsons disease-which linked to five different mutations including SNCA, Parkin,
PINK1, DJ1 and LRRK2)

Myths in Mind: single genes and behavior

➢ Behavior cannot be simply linked to only one gene, but rather multiple genes
• Ex: a person’s predisposition to alcohol involves multiple genes
➢ A single gene can only affect one trait (another myth)
• Gene is not only relevant to alcohol addiction but other behaviors such as drug
dependence and antisocial behavior
• “Shared genetic liability”: one gene can represent multiple traits but can share
responsibility for behavior with other genes

C. Behavioral genetics: Twin and adoption studies

➢ Behavioral genetics: is the study of how genes and the environment influence behavior
• It is often applied to comparing people of different levels of relatedness such as
parents and their offspring or even unrelated individuals
• Twins are the group of people that provided the most insight
➢ One method commonly involves comparing identical and fraternal twins
➢ Monozygotic twins: come from a single ovum (egg), which makes them genetically identical
(almost 100% genetic similarity)
➢ Dizygotic twins: come from two separate eggs fertilized by two different sperms that share
the same womb; these twins have approximately 50% of their genes in common (like they are
diff siblings from diff pregnancies)
➢ The studies that are done by researchers have the assumption that if a trait is genetically
determined, then individuals with a greater genetic similarity are more likely to have that
same trait (monozygotic twins would have more traits in common in comparison to dizygotic
twins)
➢ Longitudinal studies: studies that follow the same individuals for many years
➢ Heritability: a statistic, expressed as a number between zero and one that represents the
degree to which genetic differences between individuals contribute to individual differences
in a behavior or trait found in a population
• Heritability of 0 means that genes do not contribute to individual differences in a trait
(Ex: having a mouth; because we all have mouths) whereas a heritability of 1.0
indicates that genes account for all individual differences in a trait (Ex: people have
taste diff things, except would be between 0 and 1)
• Heritability scores does not just simply reflect how much genetics contributes to the
trait itself rather heritability scores tell us the degree to which genetics explain
differences between people with that trait
➢ Environmental factors and genetics play a role in individuals differences in behavior
 • It has been scientifically determined that genetics play a bigger role in behavior in our
toddler years while environmental factors play a bigger role in behavior during our
teen years (social life, social networking, etc.)
➢ The adopted family represents the nurture side and the biological family represents the
positive side
• However adopted children can either be like their own parents (strong genetic
inheritance) or they could be like their unrelated parents ( environment, how the
parents brought them up)
• Young children are more similar to their adoptive parents intelligence wise and
adolescents seem more similar to their own parents intelligence wise
o This suggests that some genes relating to intelligence can be expressed later
on in development
➢ For intelligence, heritability seems to increase with age, whereas the opposite is true for
depression and anxiety.
➢ Genetic heritability and variability (environment) would be different all around the world
• This is why we cannot generalize any results from one particular study
• We can make hypothesis about what we would think we would find if we performed
the same study somewhere else
• An estimate of heritability is based on two things 1) the amount of genetic variability
within the group being studied (2) the variability in the environments that members of
that group might be exposed to

D. Gene Expression and Behavior

➢ The fact that heritability estimates change over time based on our different experiences
shows us that nature and nurture interact to produce behavior.
➢ All cells contain genes but only some of those genes are active (between 6000 to 7000) in the
human genome (produce proteins)
• These genes influence the development of brain structures, the production of
chemicals that allow brain cells to communicate with each other and the connection
between cells that allows large scale brain networks to form
• The expression of these genes is influenced by genetics, environmental factors that
influence the chemical make-up of the cells or a combination of the two
• When genes fail to express in people, they are more at risk of developing brain
disorders (Ex: Children with autism have less gene expression in their brains)
➢ Factors such as diet, stress level, and sleep can influence whether genes are turned on or off
• Epigenetics: this study of changes in gene expression that occur as a result of
experience and that do not alter the genetic code
➢ Genes can be expressed after an interaction with the environment
• Ex: serotonin is a brain chemical that is related to mood, researchers have found that
individuals who inherit two short copies of the gene are at greater risk for developing
depression and people who inherit longer copies of the gene are at lower risk. People
who inherit one copy of each type of gene experience intermediate responses to
stressful events
 •People who have two short genes and experience stressful events have far more risk
of developing depression
• The type of serotonin gene has no effect on depression only until after one or two
major stressful events
• The gene-environment interaction only becomes apparent after an accumulation of
events
• The diathesis-stress model of psychological disorder shows this interaction
o The fact that gene expression can be influenced by the environment is an
example of the social part of the biopsychological model of behavior (Nurture
can influence nature)
➢ Sociocultural factors have the potential to influence whether or not certain genes are
expressed
➢ Changes in gene expression do not alter the genetic code; some do get passed on from
generation to generation
• Chemical induced changes made to rats in their amygdala and their hippocampus had
caused rats to behave the same way for the next three generations

Evolutionary insights into Human behavior:

➢ Darwin’s theory of natural selection: the process by which favorable traits become
increasingly common in a population of interbreeding individuals while traits that are
unfavorable become less common
➢ The genes of animals would combine in a much more useful ways compared to other species,
this made their species more fit for the environment, thus causing them to reproduce and
pass their traits on to the next generation
• Term is called evolution: the change in the frequency of genes occurring in an
interbreeding population over generations
➢ Any modern species is based upon version after version after version of species that were fit
for their particular environment and time

A. Evolutionary psychology

➢ How do Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection relate to human behavior?
• Humans are likely to have experienced evolutionary challenges where they were not
physically\mentally fit for the environment. Hence, some of our ancestors dying out
• The development of traits that improve survival is based on the shuffling of the
genetic material
• Darwin’s theory can be directly linked to the fact that cytosine, adenine, guanine and
thymine can be reordered to produce different combinations of genes
➢ Evolutionary psychology: attempts to explain human behavior based on the beneficial
function they may have served in our species development

B. Intra and intersexual selection

➢ Adaptations have evolved to help some individuals increase their chances of mating
 ➢ Intersexual selection: a situation in which members of the same sex compete in order to win
the opportunity to mate with members of the opposite sex
• Ex: deer and caribou fighting (rutting)
• Evolutionary advantageous, animal that wins is strong and is most likely fit for that
time and place
➢ Intersexual selection: a situation in which members of one sex select a mating partner based
on their desirable trait (some traits are due to genetics)
• Ex : peacocks, females having certain features, males having certain features
• Men and women also look for financial status and personality
• Men are always looking for women who could reproduce so they can pass on their
traits to the next generation

C. Evolution, the Brain and Behavior

➢ Evolution has shaped our bodies and our brains

➢ Homo habilis (handy man) had his brain 50% larger than his ancestor
• One of the first ancestor to be able to use stone tools- was a monumental cognitive
leap (species could now shape its environment to suit its needs rather than passively
respond to the forces of nature
➢ Homo erectusl (Erect man): his brain size is one third larger than that of homo habilis
• Could build fires and make more precise tools
➢ Homospaiens (wise men): brains were slightly larger than homoerectus which led them to be
able to shape their world.
• They had the ability to think and communicate ensured that knowledge could passed
on from generation to generation which helped to develop modern human society
➢ Three reasons why the human brain is more powerful than any other planet:
1. Humans have more fold and grooves- which is called a cerebral cortex which provides us
with many of our cognitive abilities
2. Front third of the brain is more developed than any other specie- which is known as the
frontal lobes- form plans, make decisions, etc
3. Humans follow the process of neotony which allows humans to develop large brains
without limiting the physical dangers associated with the baby exiting the narrow birth
canal

D. Evolution and Cognition

➢ Changes in the size of different brain structures have been shaped by evolutionary forces
➢ Some of these differences allow researchers to link behaviors that were performed by our
ancestors with modern cognitive abilities
• Ex: the hunter-gather theory of sex differences in cognition which links performance
on specific tasks to the different roles performed by males and females over the
course of our evolutionary history

Ruby Red lipstick and That Sexy Red Dress

➢ Evolutionary psychologists are quick to point that red is associated with sexual receptivity in
animals
 ➢ Species that are closely related to humans have redder chests and genitals when they are near
ovulation than at other times of the cycle

Module 3.2: How the Nervous System Works: Cells and Neurotransmitters

Neural Communication

➢ Neurons: one of the major types of cells found in the nervous system, that are responsible for
sending and receiving messages throughout the body
• Billions of these cells receive and transmit signals that allow us to perform our daily
actions

A. The Neuron

➢ The primary purpose of neurons is to “fire,” to receive input from one group of neurons and
transmit the information to other neurons which eventually leads to the body to do some
action
• There are certain parts of the neuron that are specifically for receiving information
incoming from other neurons and parts of the cell specialized for transmitting that
information to other neurons
➢ All neurons have a cell body: which is called the soma (the part of a neuron that contains the
nucleus that contains the cells genetic material).
• These genes create proteins which cause chemicals to form which are used for cell
function.
➢ Dendrites: where the input is received from other cells; which are small branches radiating
from the cell body that receive messages from other cells and transmits those messages to the
rest of the cell
➢ After the dendrites receive the information, the impulses get passed down to the axon hillock,
when it receives enough impulses, it will create a chemical reaction that will travel down to
the axon
➢ The axon is a tail-like structure that transports information in the form of electrochemical
reactions from the cell body to the end of the neuron
➢ Activity then travels to the axon terminals which are filled with vesicles that contain
neurotransmitters (the chemicals that are messengers that allow neurons to communicate),
then neural communication takes place (the message gets relayed)
➢ Soma-dendrites-axon hillock-axon-axon terminals-neurotransmitters
➢ Different neurons perform different functions, they have different structures due to their
specific function
• Sensory neurons: receive information from the bodily senses and bring it towards the
brain (touch or pain sensations)- they have a very simple structure with few dendrites
• Motor neurons: carry messages away from the brain and spinal cord and toward
muscles in order to control flexion and extension
• Neurons in the cerebellum have large dendritic branches because they are used for
communication
Myths in the Mind: We are born with all the Brain Cells we will ever have

➢ Nerves do not regenerate; new neurons do not form in adults; cause we were already born
with all of them
➢ However researchers have observed neurogenesis: the formation of new neurons in a limited
number of brain regions that are for learning and memory.
➢ These neurons could be the result of stem cells which are cells that do not have a predestined
function and can specialize to become a kidney cell, bone cell or even a neuron.

B. Glial cells:

➢ They are like the support cells for the neurons.

➢ They are specialized cells of the nervous system that are involved in mounting immune
responses in the brain, removing waste and synchronizing the activity of billions cells that
make up the nervous system
➢ They insulate the axon with the myelin sheath: a fatty sheath that insulates an axon from one
another and results in increased speed and efficiency of total neuron communication
• Prevents the neuron form decaying
• The speed difference between axons with and without myelin is substantial. Axons
without myelin transmit information at speeds ranging from 0.5 to 10 m/s (metres per
second); myelinated axons transmit information at speeds of up to 150 m/s
• When it is damaged (by the immune system does not recognize it, destroys it), axon
efficiency decreases; common in diseases like MS
• When myelin sheath is gone, information will not be able to travel down axon, thus
impairing neural communication causing the body to not be able to do voluntary
movements
• Sensory neurons will not be able to send signals to the brain; causing patient to feel
numbness and tingling sensations

C. The Neurons Electrical System: Resting and Action Potentials

➢ Resting potential: it’s the relatively stable state during which the cell is not transmitting
messages
• The concentration inside the cell has less positive ions and more negatively charged
ions (chlorine)
• The outside of the cell has more positively charged potassium and chloride ions
• Differences in charges results in the net negative charge of -70MV
• There is tension caused by two forces: the electrostatic gradient and the concentration
gradient
• Electrostatic gradient: means that the inside and outside of the cell have different
charges and the concentration gradient means that there is a high concentration of
ions on one side of the membrane
➢ Particles are always moving from an area of high concentration to an area of low
concentration, when the ion channels open up that allows Na+ ions to move inside the
membrane
 • When cell is stimulated, positive ions move into the cell, making the voltage go from -
70MV to -68MV
• Once enough positive charged ions reach the cell hill lock, it pushes the cell past its
threshold (-55MV), this will initiate action potential, a wave of electrical activity that
originates at the base of the axon and travels down the axon rapidly
o In a part of the axon, the charge goes from negative to positive (-70MV to +35
MV) (gets depolarized), this depolarization starts at one part of the axon, until
it reaches the axon terminal
o As one part of the axon becomes depolarized, it forces open the ion channels
ahead of it, thus causing the action potential to move down the length of the
axon as positively charged ions rush through the membrane pores
o At each point of the axon, the ion channels slam shut as soon as the action
potential occurs.
o Eventually the cell goes back to its resting state, this caused by
hyperpolarization (process of removing sodium ions from the cell) (causes the
cell to be more negative than it actually is during RP. This additional negativity
makes the cell less likely to fire.
o It normally takes 2–3 milliseconds for the membrane to adjust back to its
normal resting potential.
▪ There is a refractory period: a brief period when the cell is not able to
fire- only happens for a few milliseconds, before cell comes back to
normal.
➢ Once the action potential reaches the axon terminal, it triggers the
release of neurotransmitters into the synapses (small spaces that
separate individual nerve cells)
➢ Presynaptic cell: “before the synapse” is the one that releases the
chemicals
➢ Postsynaptic cell: “after the synapse” receives the chemicals
• Contains dendrites that have specialized receptors that are
designed to hold specific neurotransmitters
➢ Neurons fire at the same intensity and speed regardless of the
stimulus
• All-or-none principle: individual nerve cells fire at the
same strength every time an action potential occurs
• The strength of sensation is determined by the rate at
which nerve cells fire as well as by the number of nerve
cells that are stimulated

The Chemical Messengers: Neurotransmitters and Hormones:

➢ The binding of the neurotransmitters to the postsynaptic cleft can result in two things:
• If the potential of the membrane becomes less negative; this the excitatory state
(increased probability of action potential)
• If the potential of the membrane becomes more negative; this is the inhibitory state
(decreased probability of action potential)
 ➢ Inhibitory and excitatory states depends on types of neurotransmitters that are binding
➢ Lock and key analogy: when neurotransmitters are released from the axon terminal and cross
the synapse they fit in a particular receptor of the dendrite like a key in the lock
➢ After a neurotransmitter is released into the postsynaptic cleft, they are released back into
the synaptic cleft (the minute space between the axon terminal and the dendrite)
• Allows the cell to go back to resting potential so that it can be refired
• Prolonged stimulation of receptors could result in the decrease of the number of times
that the neurons could fire
➢ Once neurotransmitters go back into the synapse, they can be broken down by enzymes or go
through the process of reuptake (a process whereby neurotransmitter molecules that have
been released into the synapse are reabsorbed into the axon terminal of the presynaptic
neuron)
• A sort of natural recycling system for neurotransmitters
• Process has been modified by some drugs which can inhibit the process, allows
chemicals, neurotransmitters to stay in synapse
• Ex: SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors); inhibit the reuptake of serotonin
and increases the amount at the synapse resulting in decreased depression and
anxiety

A. Types of neurotransmitters:

➢ Different neurotransmitters affect different parts of the brain which results in different
behaviors
➢ The most common types of neurotransmitters in the brain are glutamate and GABA
➢ Glutamate:
• Most common excitatory neurotransmitter found in vertebrates
• Helps to create memories and used in autonomic nervous system reactions
• Abnormal functioning can lead to seizures in epilepsy and damage caused by strokes
➢ GABA (gamma-amino butyric acid):
• Primary inhibitor of the nervous system, prevents neurons from generating action
potentials
• Causes neurons to go past their resting potential; causes the influx of more chloride
ions into the cell
• Facilitates sleep, lowers arousal, anxiety and excitation
• Low levels can lead to epilepsy due to imbalance in GABA and glutamate
➢ Acetylcholine:
• Found at the junctions between nerve cells and skeletal muscles (neuromuscular
junction) (connection between nerve cells and muscles) and the brain
• Important for voluntary movement and memory
• It is released from the spinal cord and binds to the receptors on muscles
• Venom from diff animals can prevent the release of acetylcholine at the presynaptic
terminal and can block the receptors on the postsynaptic cell-can result in paralysis,
etc
• Defects to acetycholine (being taken too quickly from the synapse) in the brain has
shown links to diseases such as Alzheimer’s and aging
 ➢ One specific class of neurotransmitters called Monoamines includes:
• Dopamine
• Norepinephrine
• Serotonin
➢ Dopamine:
• Controls movement, reward-seeking behavior, mood, cognition and attention
• Influences a variety of responses cause it is released by the neurons in three diff
pathways including the areas of brain related to movement (center of the brain),
reward responses (center of the brain) , and the front of the brain related to attention

➢ Norepinephrine:
• Also known as noradrenaline
• Regulates stress responses, including arousal, attention and response to stimuli,
memory and regulation of sleep and mood
• Formed in the brain stem, projects throughout the cortex influencing the activity of
different systems from wakefulness to attention
• Projects down the spinal cord, helps in “fight or flight” response to stimuli, works with
epinephrine (found in the kidneys) to help individuals become more engaged with
their activities

➢ Serotonin:
• Involved in regulating mood, sleep, aggression and appetite
• Formed in the brain stem and projects throughout the brain and the spinal cord
• Common in depression; when drugs prevent the uptake of serotonin; leaving more
serotonin in the synapse; decreases symptoms of anxiety +depression
• Related to the perception of pain, more serotonin in the brain can cause people to feel
less pain in comparison to those that have decreased levels of serotonin

B. Drug effects on Neurotransmission:

➢ Prescription or recreational drugs affect the chemical signaling between cells

➢ Agonists: are drugs that enhance or mimic the actions of a neurotransmitter
• They can be both direct (physically bind to the neurotransmitters receptors on the
postsynaptic cells-e.g nicotine binds to the receptors that acetylcholine would
normally stimulate) and they can be indirect (facilitate the effects of the
neurotransmitter but do not physically bind-e.g drugs that block the process of
reuptake and drugs that bind to different binding sites on the same receptors but does
not interfere with neurotransmitter binding)
➢ Antagonists: inhibit neurotransmission either by blocking receptors or preventing the
synthesis of a neurotransmitter
• They can be both direct and indirect. If it’s direct, it will bind to the neurotransmitters
receptors and block the neurotransmitter from binding. If its indirect, the chemical
would just effect the influence of the neurotransmitter without physically blocking it
 • Ex: of direct antagonist: botox injections; comes from the bacteria botulism blocks
acetylcholine from binding to its receptors on its postsynaptic cell which can lead to
paralysis of the heart and lungs. Used in small amounts around the eyes to paralyze
the muscles that cause wrinkles.

C. Hormones and the endocrine system

➢ Hormones: are chemicals secreted by the glands of the endocrine system

• Secreted in the bloodstream and travel throughout the body
• Effects of hormones are much slower than neurotransmitters
• Along with the brain, contributes to homeostasis balances processes such as
metabolism, temperature of our bodies so that the body can function properly
• Brain-endocrines system-brain activity
➢ Hypothalamus: the brain structure that regulates basic biological needs and motivational
systems
• Releases chemicals “releasing factors:” that stimulate the pituitary gland: master
gland of the endocrine system that produces hormones and commands other glands in
the body to secrete hormones
• Hypothalamus can help the body cope with stress, it sends signals to the adrenal
glands (near the kidneys) which releases cortisol and epinephrine which helps the
body to deal with stress (by providing energy and mobility)

➢ Endorphins: produced by the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland; its function is to reduce
pain and increase feelings of pleasure
• Released during strenuous exercise, sexual activity or injury
• Work on the areas of the brain that are attuned to reward, reinforcement, pleasure,
inhibiting the perception of pain and increasing feelings euphoria (relaxation)
• Morphine can fit into the same receptors as endorphin; thus, acting like a pain killer
and increasing euphoric effects
➢ Testosterone:
• Serves multiple functions such as driving physical and sexual development, surging
during sexual activity and in response to threats
• Assumed to cause more aggression in males
• Its correlated with more aggressive thoughts and feelings but doesn’t influence
aggressive behavior

Neurons in Context

➢ Genes are found to be related to certain neurotransmitters; they can influence how the
neurotransmitters are formed and their processes such as reuptake , can even influence how
neurotransmitters communicate with each other

Working the Scientific Literacy Model: Pain and Substance P

 ➢ Many neurotransmitters involved with pain including serotonin, norepinephrine and
dopamine
• Substance P: a neurotransmitter involved in the experience of pain

What do we know about substance P?

➢ Was discovered when a paste from the brain and intestine of a horse caused muscles to
contract
➢ Fred Lembeck determined that it was associated with the transmission of pain
• Noticed that it was in the dorsal root of the spinal cord which transmitted pain
information back to the brain, and was present in many brain areas that were related
to brain response
➢ After sensory neurons relay messages to spinal cord and brain, they release substance P which
gives rise to the perception of pain

How can science explain what substance P does?

➢ Substance P receptors are densely packed in a structure in the middle of the brain called the
“periaquedtal grey” (receives pain and temperature-related input) from the spinal cord and
sends it to different areas of the cerebral cortex
➢ Substance P receptors are also found in the amygdala (which responds to fear and arousal)
and the hypothalamus (which is related to fight or flight responses and the release of different
hormones)
➢ Pain is not just a physical sensation, it’s a combination of both sensation and an emotional
response

Can we critically evaluate this research?

➢ Congenital insensitivity to pain: these individuals lack the ability to perceive pain and in early
childhood have significant damage to the skin, joints, eyes and other body regions
➢ Lack substance P in their peripheral nerves
➢ “social pain” can activate similar areas of the brain used for physical pain
➢ Sometimes when in chronic pain, one also tends to feel depressed

Module 3.3: Structure and Organization of the Nervous System

Division of the Nervous System

A. The Central Nervous System:

➢ The Central Nervous system: consists of the spinal cord and the brain
➢ The brain is the most complex entity because of its limitless capacity to store information,
contribute to a humans persona, feelings, memories, preferences and even conscious
awareness
➢ The other part of the CNS, runs from the base of the neck to the base of the spine (spinal cord)
➢ The spine receives information from the brain, stimulates nerves and produces movements;
but it can also cause reflexes without the help of the brain
 ➢ It can also receive information from sensory neurons and transmit it back to the brain

B. The Peripheral Nervous System:

➢ Peripheral Nervous System: a division of the nervous system that transmits signals between
the brain and the rest of the body and is divided into two subcomponents: the somatic system
and the autonomic system
• Somatic system: has nerves that control the skeletal muscles which are responsible for
voluntary and reflexive movement; also has nerves that receive sensory input from
the body ( allows walking, movement in general)
• Autonomic system: controls involuntary movement, such as sweating or how fast our
heart beats; it’s the portion of the peripheral system that controls\regulates the
activity of organs and glands. It is divided into two subgroups: the sympathetic
nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system
o The sympathetic nervous system: it is responsible for fight-or-flight response
of an increased heart rate, dilated pupils and decreased salivary flow-
responses that prepare the body for action
▪ Sympathetic arousal allows the body to receive a good amount of
energy (emergency mode) so that it can take actions (blood is directed
towards your skeletal muscles, heart rate increases, and digestive
processes are slowed)
o Parasympathetic nervous system: does the opposite of what the sympathetic
nervous system does; it helps to maintain homeostatic balance in the
presence of change; following sympathetic arousal; it works to return the
body to a baseline; nonemergency state (pupil constricts, slows the heart ,
digestive activity increases)

The Brain and Its Structures

➢ The brain is divided into two symmetrical halves known as cerebral hemispheres
➢ Each hemisphere consists of the same structure but they are different in terms of the size of
the area
➢ Structures of the brain are organized in hierarchal fashion but they are all connected through
a variety of circuits (each part of the brain has an influence on the other)

A. The Hindbrain: Sustaining the Body

➢ Consists of the structures that are critical to life-sustaining processes

➢ At the top of the spinal cord is called the brain stem: this is the bottom of the brain and it
consists of the medulla and the pons
• Medulla: connects with the body to control and regulate involuntary actions such as
heart rate, breathing, sneezing, salivating and even vomiting
• Pons: contributes to levels of sleeping, wakefulness, and can also have a role in
dreaming. It can also contribute to balance, eye movements and swallowing (due to
its connection between the brain and the spinal cord)
 ➢ An additional hindbrain structure, the reticular formation , extends from the medulla upwards
to the midbrain
• Reticular formation: influences attention and alertness, can also contribute to walking
and posture
➢ An additional hindbrain structure, Cerebellum: “little brain” it is the lobe-like structure at the
base of the brain that is involved in the monitoring of movement, maintaining balance,
attention and emotional responses.
• Damage to the cerebellum can lead to uncoordinated movements, and even have
trouble paying attention, problems with emotional control such as personality
changes and impulsivity (these symptoms are called cognitive affective behavioral
syndrome)
• Can influence a wide variety of functions because its connected to so many different
parts of the brain (such as areas in the forebrain and the hypothalamus)

B. The Midbrain: Sensation and Action

➢ Midbrain: resides just above the hindbrain, primarily functions as a relay sensation between
sensory and motor areas
• Superior Colliculus: helps to orient visual attention (detecting sudden movements)
• Inferior colliculus: the ability to move your auditory attention (moving your head
when hearing a cell phone ring)
• Substantia Nigra: mid brain has connections to structures in the forebrain (allowing
dopamine cells to be released which is involved with the control of movements-
people with Parkinson’s, lose dopamine producing cells- trouble with movement)

C. The forebrain: Emotion, memory and thought:

➢ The forebrain: it’s can be clearly seen, it includes all neural structures above the midbrain. It
includes the grooves on the outer surface and has multiple interconnected structures that are
needed for processes such as emotion, memory, thinking and reasoning
• Forebrain also consists of ventricles which are filled cerebrospinal fluid which helps to
eliminate wastes, provides nutrition, and hormones to the brain and the spinal cord;
acts a cushion that impacts the brain from impact against the skull (cerebral aqueduct,
lateral ventricle, fourth ventricle, and third ventricle)
• Basal ganglia: three structures that are involved in facilitating planned movements,
skill learning, and integrating sensory and movement information with brains reward
system
o It can promote and inibit movements –it coordinates the movements of
muscles, so that they are not moving randomly
o The BG can be trained to do specific activities, like riding a bike, etc
o Diseases like Parkinson’s, Huntington’s disease and touettes syndrome can
cause people to have uncoordinated movements, uncontrollable movements
and even repetitive movements (called tics; like repetitive eye blinking etc)
 o Parts of the BG are also involved in the emotions; like the feeling of reward;
like when eating something tasty-it is coordinated with the structure called
the “nucleus accumbens” whose activity accompanies pleasurable experiences

➢ The forebrain also consists of the limbic system: a network that is involved in emotion and
memory (it includes the hypothalamus, the amygdala, and the hippocampus)
• Amygdala: mediates fear responses, facilitates memories for emotional events and
appears to play a role in recognizing and interpreting emotional stimuli (including
facial expression)
• Hippocampus: is critical for learning and memory, particularly the formation of new
memories
• Hypothalamus: like a thermostat which helps to maintain the appropriate body
temperature and it controls drives like aggression and sex cause of its interaction with
the endocrine system

➢ Thalamus: it’s a forebrain structure; it’s a set of nuclei involved in relaying sensory
information to different regions of the brain
• What we see and hear gets routed through the thalamus through specific nuclei
• Different nuclei process different info before being sent to other parts for further
processing

D. The Cerebral Cortex

➢ The cerebral cortex: the convoluted, wrinkled outer layer of the brain that is involved in
multiple higher functions such as thought, language and personality
• The wrinkled surface; allows more cells to be packed in a smaller amount of space. It
has increased the surface area for more neurons which has helped us to have greater
cognitive complexity
• It consists of the cell bodies, dendrites of neurons which gives the brain a grey brown
color and axons allow communications between different neural regions
• The cerebral cortex consists of white and grey matter which has myelinated axons
o The grey matter consists of approx. 100 billion neurons
o The white matter of a male would extend approx. 176000km and the female
brain would extend approx. 149000 km

E. The Four Lobes:

➢ In each cerebral hemisphere, the cortex forms the outer surface of four major areas known as
lobes: the occipital, parietal, temporal, and frontal lobes
➢ Each of the cerebral lobes has a particular set of functions
• But all of the nerves from each lobe are interconnected
➢ Occipital lobes: they are located at the rear of the brain and where the visual information is
processed
 • They receive visual info from the thalamus and after it has processed the information
it sends it to the temporal lobe which is involved with object recognition and it
projects it to the parietal lobes which is involved with vision to guide our movements

➢ Parietal lobes: are involved in our experiences of touch as well as our bodily awareness
• Somatosensory cortex: is at the front of the parietal lobes- it is a band of densely
packed nerve cells that register touch sensations
• The amount of neural tissues that are dedicated to each body part depends on the
number of sensory receptors present at each respective body regions (example your
face and hands would have more compared to your legs and torso)
• Regions in the parietal lobe are also used for function in performing mathematical,
visuospatial, and attention tasks
• Damage in the parietal (in the right side) can lead to neglect: which is when patient
does not attend to anything that happens in the left half

➢ Temporal Lobes: are located at the sides of the brain near the ears and are involved in
hearing, language and some higher-level aspects of vision such as object and face recognition
• The anterior portion (front portion): is involved with memory for semantic knowledge
of basic concepts (like capitals of countries, etc). Damage: called “semantic dementia”
which is a difficulty in remembering basic concepts
• The superior (top part of) the temporal cortex is called the auditory cortex: used for
our ability to hear. Damage: cortical deafness: patient cannot hear despite the perfect
anatomy of the ear
• Wernickes area: which is related to understanding language
• Structures on the bottom of the temporal lobes play a key role in memory, when the
objects are viewed, these areas of the brain send the info about the objects and their
location to the hippocampus (which is a forebrain structure)(it sends output to
different areas)

➢ Frontal lobes: needed for higher cognitive functions such as planning, regulating impulses and
emotion, language production and voluntary movement
• It allows to have your own thoughts and do any deliberate movements
• The frontal lobes are divided into different portions such as primary motor cortex
(PMC): which controls voluntary movement and allows a human to plan their
movements as well; it is divided into which body parts are required to use the most
amount of movements and the least amount of movements (fingers=most,
thighs=less)
• Prefrontal cortex: the front two-thirds of the frontal lobes, it performs many high-
order cognitive functions such as decision making
• It is connected to other parts of the brain and is able to regulate their activity, which is
known as executive functioning- it is especially used when the body encounters new
situations and when normal responses needs to be overrided
• Exercise helps to improve cognitive function like memory, planning, multitasking, etc
➢ Corpus Callosum: a collection of neural fibres connecting the two hemisphere
 • It allows the right and the left hemisphere to communicate with each other
• Shows how they would work together to produce some of the behaviors that they
would have
• Could be that each hemisphere is specialized for certain behaviors\tasks

F. Left brain, right brain: Hemispheric Specialization

➢ Hemispheric specialization: each side of the cortex performs diff functions

• Left Hemisphere: language production, language comprehension, word recognition,
arithmetic, moving the right side of the body
• Right Hemisphere: visuospatial skills, prosody (emotional intonation), face
recognition, attention, moving the left side of the body
• Most cognitive functions are spread throughout the brain; where one is superior over
the other
• Split-brain patients: the corpus callosum was surgically removed, patients that had
epilepsy were normal but responded differently when objects where hemisphere is
superior over the other
• Split-brain experiment: objects that were placed to the right of the person they were
able to visualize it and verbalize it ( because the left hemisphere controls language
production, and visualizes objects) but when presented objects were presented on the
left side, they were not able to verbalize which objects matched because the right side
of their brain is not specialized for language; hence, the patient not being able to label
the object

G. The Changing Brain: Neuroplasticity

➢ Neuroplasticity: the Capacity of the brain to change and rewire itself based on individual
experience
• For example: people who are blind, the occipital lobes will be adjusted for other
senses such as hearing or touch or like experienced musicians have a greater density
of their auditory cortex

Working the scientific Literacy Model: Neuroplasticity and Recovery from Brain injury

What do we know about neuroplasticity?

➢ Animals have the ability to regenerate parts of their brain after it has been damaged (they
have simple brains and spinal cords)
• Human brains can also do this to a certain extent in their PNS due to chemicals called
“trophic factors” which can stimulate the growth of dendrites and axons
• New neurons can form during adulthood but only in specific parts of the brain such as
the hippocampus
• Our ability to repair our brains its limited due to chemicals that inhibit the growth of
new axons around an injured area
• These chemicals are produced because they don’t want the brain to regrow\reconnect
incorrectly
How can science explain how neuroplasticity contributes to recovery from brain damage?

➢ The same area in the opposite hemisphere will take over some of the functions of the
damaged region
• Damage to brocas area produces difficulties in generating speech known as “brocas
asphia.”
• Therapy to help this involved patients singing the words instead of just saying them; it
eventually helped them to regain significant language function (while tapping their
left fingers)
• Language function was taken over by the corresponding area in the right hemisphere
➢ Another method that the brain uses to repair itself is the reorganization of the neighboring
neural regions
• For example in parts of the somatosensory cortex related to the hand to overlap with
regions related to the wrist
• If one of those sensory areas are damaged, then their still might be some undamaged
neurons associated with that body part preserved in other parts of the nearby cortex

Can we critically evaluate this research?

➢ Neuroplasticity is common in younger children than in older adults

➢ Most effective when the child is the developmental stage that is associated with the
formation of new synapses
➢ The results that seem to be due to neuroplasticity could be due to something else such as
changes in hormone levels, the brain metabolism, or growth factor levels

Module 3.4: Windows to the Brain: Measuring and Observing Brain Activity

Insights from Brain Damage

A. Lesioning and Brain Stimulation

➢ The logic of the method was that people who had a damaged area to their brain and they
exhibited specific behavior, then it was assumed that the damages caused that behavior
• Its difficult to isolate damaged areas of patients because each patient had their unique
patterns of damage and the damage did not only affect one area
➢ Inorder to gain experimental control, scientists use the technique of lesioning
➢ Lesioning: a technique in which researchers intentionally damage the brain\
• Can study animals that are lesions and that are not; so they can see the difference in behavior
• Sham group: Control subjects are part of a sham group where animals go through a surgical
procedure except the lesion (they all go through surgical procedures but they omit a key step
in the surgery)
• Rats that were lesioned and rats that were not: rats that had their hippocampus removed and
were put in a maze to find a platform, were not able to learn the location of the platform
unlike the other rats that were not lesioned, hence this showed that the removal of the
hippocampus results in lack of spatial abilities
 ➢ Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS): a procedure in which electromagnetic pulse is
delivered to a targeted region of the brain
• Treatment interacts with the flow of ions around the affected area and can cause
temporary disruption to the brain
• Has been used to investigate a number of cognitive processes like visual perception,
memory and arithmetic abilities
• Can tell the reaearcher that the area being stimulated is likely involved in that specific
process

➢ A weak impulse can be used to simulate rather than temporarily impair a specific brain region
• When this was done to increase activity in the frontal lobes( area related to planning
and inhibiting behavior), they saw that people became more cautious when
performing the gambling tasks versus those who did not have it

➢ Drawback of TMS: doesn’t provide researchers with a picture of the brains structural activity

Structural and Functional Neuroimaging:

A. Structural Neuroimaging:

➢ Structural neuroimaging: a type of brain scanning that produces images of different structures
of the brain
• It is used to measure sizes of brain areas and whether an injury has occurred
➢ Computerized tomography (CT): a structural neuroimaging technique in which x-rays are sent
through the brain by a tube that rotates around the head
• X-ray that passes through dense tissues (e.g grey matter) at a different speed then
they will pass through less dense tissues (like fluid)
• A computer then calculate these differences for each image that is taken as the tube
moves around the head and combines the info into a 3D image
➢ Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI): a structural imaging technique in which clear images of
the brain are created based on how the different neural regions absorb and release energy
while in a magnetic field
1. A brain or body part is placed inside a strong magnetic field which causes brains
hydrogen atoms to spin in the same direction
2. A pulse of radio waves is sent through the brain; energy of this pulse is absorbed by
the atoms inside the brain and knocks em out of their previous position
3. Pulse of radio is turned off; then atoms again become aligned with magnetic field, but
when they do they release the energy that they absorbed during the pulse (different
parts of the brain return to their magnetic alignment at diff speeds)
4. Computer produces a 3D image using by calculating the differences of speed
➢ They are more accurate than CT scans and have much clearer images but CT scans are the first
assessment tool for brain injuries
 ➢ Diffusion tensor Imaging (DTI): a form of structural neural imaging allowing researchers or
medical personnel to measure white matter pathways in the brain
• White matter damage has been found in an increasing number of brain disorders
• Because most brain injuries cause the brain to twist around the skull; which results
white-matter pathways connecting different brain areas are torn (mostly in people
who have concussions)

B. Functional Neuroimaging:

➢ It’s a type of brain scanning that provides info about which areas of the brain are active when
a person performs a particular behavior
➢ There are two different methods: between temporal resolution (how brief a period of time
can be accurately measured ) and spatial resolution ( a clear picture of the brain)

➢ Electroencephalogram (EEG): which measures pattern of brain activity with the use of multiple
electrodes attached to the scalp
• Can detect neural firing inside the brain can be detected with these electrodes and can
be depicted in the EEG
• When the brain is doing specific activities such as sleeping, staying awake other
cognitive activities
• EEGS have perfect temporal resolution when it comes to responding to external
stimuli, but there is a problem when linking the EEG’s output which is lines to an
actual stimuli

➢ Scientists use ERPS (event related potentials)

➢ They use the same sensors as EEGS but a computer takes note of exactly when a given
stimulus is presented
➢ Then the EEG readout is observed after the stimulus has been presented (brief period of time (
for about 1-2 seconds)
➢ Then the average brain responses for different types of experimental trials are looked at
➢ Peaks and valleys of waveforms are associated with different parts of the brain
➢ They can look at the size of the peaks and valleys to see if there was a difference in the
amount of brain activity in response to different stimulus types
➢ Missing expected waveform= problem with particular region of the brain
➢ Cannot determine where activity is taking place (problems in spatial resolution)

➢ Magnetoencephalography (MEG): a neuroimaging technique that measures the tiny magnetic

fields created by the electrical activity of nerve cells inside the brain
• MEG records the electrical activity of nerve cells just a few millaseconds after the
stimulus is presented but it still doesn’t show like where the stimulus is occurring
• DRAWBACK: poor spatial resolution (doesn’t show where the brain activity is
occurring)
 ➢ Positron Emission Tomography: (PET): a type of scan in which a low level of a radioactive
isotope is injected into the blood and its movement to regions of the brain engaged in a
particular task is measured
➢ This method works under the assumption that active nerve cells use up energy faster than do
cells that are less active
➢ Radioisotope is put inside in the blood. Areas that are more active in the brain are more likely
to receive blood flow and blood that has the radioisotope will cause more radioactivity in the
brain parts that are active during that time.
➢ Greatest strength: PET scans show metabolic activity inside the brain and measure the
involvement of specific types of receptors in diff brain regions (provide a picture of the whole
entire brain)
➢ Drawback: takes a lot of time at least 2 minutes to provide imaging , participants limited to
men because women that are pregnant would not want radioisotope being injected inside
them, very expensive

Working the scientific Literacy Model: Functional MRI and behavior

➢ Functional magnetic resonance imaging: measures brain activity by detecting the influx of
oxygen-rich blood into neural areas that were just active
➢ It produces functional images of the brain just like the PET but doesn’t use radioactivity

What do we know about fMRI and behavior?

➢ Can examine parts of the brain that are being affected by a change in blood flow (active
areas= will have more blood flow during cognitive tasks
➢ Areas that have more blood flow=means that they are the active areas that are being used
during a particular tasks

How can science explain how fMRI is used to examine behavior?

➢ When a brain area is involved with a particular function, it will use up oxygen, the result is the
blood in those areas will become deoxygenated, body responds by sending out more
oxygenated blood
➢ Each blood has its own type of magnetic properties, researchers can tell what brain areas have
what type of blood flowing into them
➢ Brain areas that are lit up will indicate that more activity has occurred there
➢ FRMRI can provide detailed images of where brain activity is occurring; it can only measure at
at the level of seconds rather than millaseconds-lacks the temporal resolution that’s given by
ERPs and MEG

Drawbacks of FMRI:

➢ Correlation doesn’t imply causation: We cannot assume that particular stimuli are causing
particular parts of the brain to be activated. Because we do not know if that is exactly true,
and brain areas that are lit up could possibly play a supporting role in the activity (more than
one brain area can be involved in a particular activity)
 Chapter 4: Sensation and Perception

Module 4.1: Sensation and Perception at a Glance:

Sensing the world around us:

➢ The process of detecting and then translating the complexity of the world into meaningful
experiences occurs in three stages:
• Sensation: the process of detecting external events by sense organs and turning those
stimuli into neural signals
• Perception: involves attending to, organizing, and interpreting stimuli that we sense
• Transduction: when specialized receptors transform the physical energy of the outside
world into neural impulses
➢ The sensory receptors involved in transduction are different for the different senses

➢ All of our senses use the same mechanism for transmitting information in the brain: the action
potential
➢ Doctrine of specific nerve energies: the idea that different senses are separated in the brain
• Proposed by Johannes Muller (1826)
• It is not the original sensory input that is most important for generating our
perception; rather, it is the brain area that processes this information
• This requires that distinct pathways connect sensory organs to the appropriate brain
structures
• As we age, the pathways in our brains become more distinct, with less useful
connection being pruned away (begins at around age 3)
• Thus, perception is a skill that our brains learn through experience
➢ Our sensory receptors are most responsive upon initial exposure to a stimulus
• Both our sensory receptors and brain areas related to perception are extremely
sensitive to change
• A change in the environment provides new info for the brain and the processing of
new info is useful for survival
• Orienting response: describes how we quickly shift our attention to stimuli that signal
a change in our sensory world
➢ We allocate progressively less attention to stimuli that remain the same over time
 • Sensory Adaptation: the reduction of activity in sensory receptors with repeated
exposure to stimulus

A. Stimulus Thresholds:

➢ William Gustav Fechner (1801-1887): coined the term Psychophysics: the field of study that
explores how physical energy such as light and sound and their intensity relate to
psychological experience
➢ Absolute threshold: the minimum amount of energy or quantity of a stimulus required for it to
be reliably detected at least 50% of the time it is presented
➢ Difference Threshold: the smallest different between stimuli that can be reliably detected at
least 50% of the time
➢ Just noticeable difference: whether you actually detect a difference depends primarily on the
intensity of the original stimulus
• The more intense the original stimulus, the larger the amount of it that must be added
for the difference threshold to be reached
➢ This study had its limitations: how do we confirm whether these stimuli were truly perceived
or whether the individuals were just guessing?

B. Signal Detection:

➢ Signal Detection theory: states that whether a stimulus is perceived depends on both sensory
experience and judgement made by the subject
➢ Requires us to examine two processes:
• A sensory process
• A decision process
➢ In developing signal detection theory, there are four possible outcomes:
• Hit: You did hear a sound
• Correct Rejection: You did not hear a sound
• False Alarm: You think you heard something that is not there
• Miss: You fail to detect that a stimulus was presented
➢ A person’s ability to accurately detect a weak stimulus appears to depend on a number of
factors:
• The sensitivity of a person’s sensory organs
• Cognitive and emotional factors
o Expectations, psychological and autonomic-nervous-system arousal level, and
motivation
• Example: If you are lost in the woods, your arousal level will be quite high (More likely
to notice the sound of something when you are lost then if you were with your friends
on a familiar trial and experiencing the same sounds)

➢ Subliminal Perception: Perception below the threshold of conscious awareness

• Do not affect behaviours
• It can activate an already existing motivational state, it cannot create a new
motivational state
• Not a form of “mind-control”
Perceiving the World around Us:

A. Gestalt principles of perception:

➢ Gestalt Psychology: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts
➢ Several key principles to describe how we organize features that we perceive:
• Figure-ground principles: Objects or “Figures” in our environment tend to stand out
against a background (applies to hearing as well)
o Example: when you are holding a conversation with one individual in a
crowded party, you are attending to the voice of that individual (the figure)
against the background noise (the ground)
o What is the figure and what is the ground in different situations depends on
many factors, including what you are motivated to pay attention to
• Proximity and similarity: the tendency to treat two or more objects that are in close
proximity to each other as a group
o Example: a dozen eggs in a carton looks like two rows of six eggs rather than
six rows of two eggs
o Similarity can be experienced by viewing people in the same uniform
• Continuity: the perceptual rule that lines and other objects tend to be continuous,
rather than abruptly changing direction
o Example: the black object snaking its way around the white object is viewed as
one continuous object rather than two separate ones
• Closure: the tendency to fill in gaps to complete a whole object
➢ These principles tell us that we create our
own organized perceptions out of the
different sensory inputs that we experience.

➢ Phonetic Reversal: when a word pronounced

backwards sounds like another word (Ex:
Dog and God)
➢ Top-Down Processing: When our perceptions
are influenced by our expectation or by our
prior knowledge
➢ Bottom-Up Processing: when we perceive
individual bits of sensory information and
use them to construct a more complex
perception
➢ We interpret patterns of stimuli in ways that
are consistent with our expectations
➢ A perpetual set: a filter that influences what
aspects of a scene we perceive or pay
attention to
B. Attention and Perception:

➢ What we pay attention to can affect what we perceive

➢ Divided Attention: paying attention to more than one stimulus or task at the same time
➢ Selective Attention: focusing on one particular event or task
• Beneficial but sometimes so powerful that we fail to perceive some very obvious
things
• Inattentional blindness: a failure to notice clearly visible events or objects because
attention is directed elsewhere
o Stimuli that were not perceived in an inattentional blindness study still
influenced performance on later memory tasks, suggesting that these stimuli
did in fact influence our perceptual system

Module 4.2: The Visual System:

The Human Eye:

A. How the eye gathers light:

➢ Primary function of the eye: to gather light and change it into an action potential
➢ Light: radiation that occupies a relatively narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum
• Light travels in ways that vary in terms of two different properties:
o Length:
▪ Wavelength: the distance between peaks of waves (differences in
wavelength correspond to different colours on the electromagnetic
spectrum) (Long = reddish) (Short = Blueish)
o Amplitude: The height of the wave
▪ Lower amplitude: dim colours
▪ High-amplitude: bright colours
• Light waves can also differ in how many different wavelengths are being viewed at the
same time
o Ex: when you look at the clear blue sky, you are viewing many different
wavelengths, but the blue wavelengths are the most dominant.
• The different characteristics of light: wavelength, amplitude, and purity are viewed by
us as:
o Hue: Colour of the spectrum
o Intensity: Brightness
▪ If a large proportion of the light waves are clustered around one
wavelength, you will see an intense, vivid colour.
o Saturation: Colourfulness or density
▪ If there was a large variety of wavelengths being viewed at the same
time, the colour will appear to be washed out
B. The Structure of the eye:

➢ Light enters the eye

through the cornea
and passes through
an opening called the
pupil
➢ The pupil regulates
the amount of light
that enters by
changing its size; it
dilates (expands) to
let in more and it
constricts (shrinks) to
let in less (performed
by the iris)
➢ Behind the pupil is
the lens
➢ The lens can change
its shape to ensure
that the light entering
the eye is refracted in
such a way that it is
focused when it
reaches the back of
the eye (Process
known as accommodation)
➢ When the light reaches the back of the eye, it will stimulate a layer of specialized receptors
that convert light into a message that the brain can then interpret, a process known as
transduction
➢ Theses receptors are part of the retina
• Contains a number of different layers
• Back of the retina: Photoreceptors: where light will be transformed into a neural
signal that the brain can understand
• Information from the receptors at the back of the retina is transmitted to the ganglion
cells closer to the front of the eye
• The activity of all the cells is then sent out of the eye to the optic nerve
➢ Because this nerve travels through the back of the eye, it creates an area on the retina with no
photoreceptors called the optic disc.
• The result is a blind spot: a space in the retina that lacks photoreceptors
• The visual areas of the brain are able to “fill in” the missing information for you

1. The Retina: From Light to Nerve Impulses:

➢ Two types of photoreceptors:

 • Rods: occupy peripheral regions of the retina; they are highly sensitive under low light
levels
o Responsive to black and grey
• Cones: are clustered around the fovea: the central region of the retina; are sensitive to
the different wavelengths of light that we perceive as colour
➢ When rods and cones are stimulated by light, their physical structures briefly changes.
• This change decreases the amount of the neurotransmitter glutamate being released,
which alters the activity of neurons in the different layers of the retina
• The final layer to receive this changed input consists of ganglion cells, which will
eventually output to the optic nerve
• 1 cone for 1 ganglion cell ----- 10 rods for 1 ganglion cell
o The input from a cone is clearly transmitted to a ganglion cell whereas the
input from a rod must compete with input from other rods to make it to the
ganglion cells
o This explains why colourful stimuli are often perceived as sharp images while
shadowy grey images are perceived as being hazy or unclear
➢ Dark adaptation: the process by which the rods and cones become increasingly sensitive to
light under low levels of illumination
• Photoreceptors slowly regenerating in the darkness (most changes – first 10 mins and
all changes -20 mins)
• We do not see colour in darkness because rods are more active than cones under low
light levels

2. The Retina and the Perception of Colours:

➢ Colour is not actually a characteristic of objects themselves, but is rather an interpretation of

these wavelengths by the visual system
➢ Two theories to explain how neurons in the eye can produce these colourful experiences:
• Trichromatic theory: maintains that colour vision is determined by three different
cone types that are sensitive to short, medium and long wavelengths of light
o Short: Blue
o Medium: Green
o Long: Red
o These three combinations allow us to see other colours (Yellow: a
combination of red and green sensitive cones. Light that stimulates all cones
equally is perceived as white)
• Opponent-process theory: we perceive colour in terms of opposing pairs: red to green,
yellow to blue, and white to black (explains what happens when ganglion cells process
signals from a number of different cones at the same time)
o Consistent with the activity patterns of retinal ganglion cells.
o A cell that is stimulated by red is inhibited by green; when red is no longer
perceived, a “rebound” effect occurs. Suddenly, the previously inhibited cells
that fire during the perception of green are free to fire, whereas the previously
active cells related to red no longer do so.
C. Common Visual Disorders:

➢ Most forms of colour blindness affect the ability to distinguish between red and green
• Some cones contain proteins that are sensitive to red and some cones contain
proteins that are sensitive to green. In people that have colour blindness, one of these
types of cones does not contain the correct protein.
➢ Most forms of colour blindness are genetic in origin
➢ Visual disorders caused by the shape of the eye itself
• Nearsightedness: occurs when the eyeball is slightly elongated, causing the image that
the cornea and lens focus on to fall of the retina
• Farsightedness: occurs when the eyeball is too short, causing the image that the
cornea and lens focus on to fall behind the retina

Visual Perception and the Brain:

➢ Optic Chiasm: the point at which the optic nerves cross at the midline of the brain
• For each optic nerve, half of the nerve fibres travel to the same side of the brain
(ipsilateral) (inside half of the retina- temples)) and half of them travel to the opposite
side of the brain (contralateral) (outside half of the retina-nose)
o Left half of your visual field: processed by right hemisphere
o Right half of your visual field: processed by left hemisphere
➢ Fibres from the ON first connect with the thalamus, the brain’s “sensory relay station”. It
consists of over 20 different nuclei. One nucleus called the “Lateral Geniculate Nucleus” is
specialized for processing visual information.
• Fibres from this nucleus send messages to the visual cortex, located in the occipital
lobe, where visual perception begins.
➢ The visual Cortex: composed of different specialized cells:
• Feature Detection cells: respond to simple and specific aspects of a stimulus, such as
angles and edges
• From the primary visual cortex, info about different features is sent for further
processing in the surrounding secondary visual cortex
o This area consists of a number of specialized regions that perform specific
functions such as the perception of colour and movement
• These regions begin the process of putting together primitive visual information into a
bigger picture and lead to the two steams of visions.

A. The Ventral Stream:

➢ Extends from the visual cortex in the occipital lobe to the anterior (front) portions of the
temporal lobe
➢ This division performs a critical function: object recognition
• Groups of neurons in the temporal lobe gather shape and colour information from
different regions of the secondary visual cortex and combine it into a neural
representation of an object and gives it a name
 • Other studies have noted that different categories of objects such as tools and
instruments are represented in distinct areas of anterior temporal lobes
• Face perception might have an entire region dedicated to itself
o Prosopagnosia: Face blindness (inability to recognize faces)
o People who have this condition all have damage in the same general area of
the brain: the bottom of the right temporal lobe
o Fusiform Face Area (FFA): this area appears to be specialized for recognizing
upright faces. When faces are inverted, they become less “face-like” and
responses in this brain region decrease. The FFA responds more strongly to the
entire face than to individual features (Ex: the entire face rather than the eyes,
nose, etc.)
o Ability to perceive faces is dependent upon experience
o Early visual input to the right, but not left, of the hemisphere of the brain is
essential for the development of normal face perception
o Our face perception skills also develop as we grow up (adults better than
children) (FFA does not show sensitivity to focus until age 10)
o Other explanations for face processing than FFA:
▪ Expertise activates FFA
➢ Perpetual consistency: the ability to perceive objects as having constant shape, size, and
colour despite changes in perspective
• Shape Consistency: we judge the angle of the object relative to our positive
• Size Consistency: how close an object is relative to one’s position as well as the
positions of other objects
• Colour consistency: allows us to recognise an object’s color under varying levels of
illumination
➢ Constancies are affected by top-down processing as our perceptions are influenced by
experience and prior knowledge

B. The Dorsal Stream:

➢ Extends from the visual cortex in our occipital lobes upwards to the parietal lobe
• Function less intuitive than that of the ventral stream
• The ventral stream allows you to identify an object while the dorsal stream allows you
to interact with the object
➢ This pathway is involved with visually guided movement

C. Depth Perception:

➢ To use our vision, we need to be able to gauge the distances between different objects as well
as to determine where different objects are located relative to each other
➢ This type of information can be detected in many ways:
• Binocular depth cues: distant cues that are based on the differing perspectives of both
eyes
o Convergence: when the eye muscles contract so that both eyes focus on a
single object
▪ Typically occurs for objects that are close to you
 ➢ One reason humans have such a fine-tuned ability to see in three dimensions is that both of
our eyes face forward. This arrangement means that we perceive objects from slightly
different angles, which in turn enhances depth perception.
• Retinal disparity (also called binocular disparity): the difference in relative position of
an object as seen by both eyes, which provides information to the brain about depth
➢ Your brain relies on cues from each eye individually and from both eyes working in concert—
that is, in stereo.
• Most primates, including humans, have stereoscopic vision, which results from
overlapping visual fields.
• The brain can use the difference between the information provided by the left and
right eye to make a judgment about the distance of the objects being viewed.
• Species that have eyes with no overlap in their visual field, such as some fish, likely do
not require as much depth information in order to survive in their particular
environment.
• These species might also be able to make use of depth information perceived by each
eye individually.
➢ Monocular cues: are depth cues that we can perceive with only one eye
• During accommodation, the lens of your eye curves to allow you to focus on nearby
objects.
• Close one eye and focus on a nearby object, and then slightly change your focus to an
object that is farther away; the lens changes shape again so the next object comes
into focus
• The brain receives feedback about this movement which it can then use to help make
judgments about depth.
• Another monocular cue is motion parallax: it is used when you or your surroundings
are in motion
• For example, as you sit in a moving vehicle and look out of the passenger window,
you will notice objects closer to you, such as the roadside, parked cars, and nearby
buildings, appear to move rapidly in the opposite direction of your travel. By
comparison, far-off objects such as foothills and mountains in the distance appear to
move much more slowly, and in the same direction as your vehicle.
o The disparity in the directions travelled by near and far-off objects provides a
monocular cue about depth.

Module 4.3 The Auditory System

Sounds and Structures of the ear

➢ The main function of the ear is to gather sound waves

➢ “hearing” : extracts meaning out of the sound waves

A. Sound:

➢ Human ear detects sound waves and converts them into neural signals
➢ Sound waves have two important characteristics:
 • Frequency: refers to the wavelength measures in hertz\ the number of cycles a sound
wave travels per second
• Pitch: “the perceptual experience” of sound wave frequencies (how sound wave
frequencies sound
• E.g:
• high-frequency sounds: have shorter wave lengths and high pitch
• Low-frequency sounds have longer wave lengths and low pitch
➢ The amplitude of a sound wave determines its loudness
➢ High amplitude sound waves are louder than low amplitude sound waves
➢ Humans are able to detect sounds in the frequency range from of 20 Hz to 20 000 Hz
➢ Loudness is expressed in decibels (DB), it is a function of sound wave amplitude

B. The human ear:

➢ The human ear is divided into outer, inner, and middle regions
➢ Pinna: flexible, outer region that helps channel sound waves into the ear and allows you to
determine the source or location of a sound that’s being heard
➢ Auditory canal: extends from the pinna to the eardrum, helps to conduct sound waves into
the ear drum
➢ Eardrum: membrane that vibrates in response to any kind of sound wave whether it is soft or
loud and is attached to the ossicles (when the eardrum vibrates, causes these bones to move)
➢ Ossicles: three tiny moveable bones in the ear, called malleus (hammer), incus (anvil), stapes
(stirrup)
➢ Cochlea: ossicles are attached to this inner-membrane structure, its fluid-filled, coiled in a
snail-like shape and has structures that converts sound waves into nerve impulses
• Conversion of sound waves into nerve impulses is due to the hair-like structures that
line the basilar membrane
• When the ossicles press\flex that causes the fluid in the cochlea to move which in
turn displaces the tiny hair cells
• Tiny hair cells move, they stimulate the auditory nerve cells, which fires signals to the
thalamus which then travels to the auditory cortex in the temporal lobes
• (ossicles-cochlea-hair cells-auditory nerve cells-thalamus-auditory cortex)
➢ Damages to the auditory system, has now been repaired with a cochlea transplant which
detects sounds from the outside world and electrically stimulates the membranes in the
cochlea

The Perception of Sound

A. Sound Localization: Finding the Source

➢ Sound Localization: the process of identifying where sound comes from (handled by both the
brain stem and the midbrain structure called the inferior colliculus
➢ There are two ways that we localize sound:
• By looking at the time difference when sound waves hit both ears, this helps to
determine the direction of the sound
 • The differences in sound intensity between the left ear and the right ear-also known
as sound shadow (when one ear can hear the sound more intensely compared to the
other)
• The differences in the time and the intensity of the sound is detected by the inferior
colliculi

B. Theories of Pitch Perfection

➢ High-frequency sounds stimulate hair cells closest to the ossicles, low-frequency sounds
stimulate hair cells towards the end of the cochlea
➢ Place theory of hearing: how we perceive pitch is based on the location along the basilar
membrane that the sound stimulates
➢ Frequency theory: the perception of pitch is related to the frequency at which the basilar
membrane vibrates
➢ The volley principle: groups of neurons alternately fire signals (that’s how we can hear
frequency of 1000 Hz- cannot be done by a single neuron

C. Auditory Perception and the brain

➢ Primary Auditory Cortex: is a major perceptual center of the brain involved in perceiving what
we hear
• Cells within different areas across the auditory cortex can correspond to different
frequencies ( higher frequencies-one end, lower frequencies-opposite end)
➢ Secondary cortex: helps us to interpret more complex sounds
• Auditory cortices in each hemisphere are not equally sensitive-right hemisphere can
detect smaller changes in pitch than left
➢ No one is born with a fully developed auditory cortex, it must learn to analyze different
patterns of sounds
• Example: children show different patterns of brain activity when hearing culturally
familiar and unfamiliar sounds.
• By 12 months of age, an infant’s auditory cortex becomes specialized for their specific
culture and at this time they will not be familiar with sounds that are outside of their
culture

D. The Perception of Music:

➢ The auditory cortex are evolved to distinguish from a wide range of pitches which are
important for understanding speech, the brain is also able to perceive different elements
music as well as allow us to make coordinated movements (tapping fingers, etc)
• Frontal lobes + cerebellum: relate to planning movements; their activity is often
increased when people are perceiving rhythms
• Basal ganglia: relates to the coordination’s of movements, research has shown that
differences in the ability to detect musical beats, are linked to a difference of activity
in this area
• Evidence for this: people with parkisons disease cannot pick out subtle musical beats
(they have damage to structures that input to the basal ganglia
Working the Scientific Literacy Model: Music, Emotion and Advertising

What do we know about music and advertising?

➢ Musical perceptions involves the emotional brain centers (such as those in the limbic system)
➢ People who have had damages to their amygdala (which is linked to fear) were not able to
recognize that certain parts of music were scary
➢ Emotional aspects of music allow us to structure our other perceptions
• Watching a horror movie-the music tells us when to be scared\when to be relaxed

How can science be used to explain the influence of music on advertising success?

➢ Musical characteristics can help consumers are useful in improving memory for a commercials
product
➢ Music that has meaningful lyrics has been shown to have a more positive effect on memory in
comparison to music that doesn’t have any instruments or is a bunch of nonsense
➢ People tend to prefer popular songs to old music because they may have already had a
positive memory with it

Can we critically evaluate this information?

➢ Music evokes visual images and images can help improve memory
➢ People learning verbal material that was sung (like a jingle) showed more firing of neurons
than the people who heard the same material spoken normally
➢ Music provides structure and structure aids memory

Module 4.4: Touch and Chemical senses

The Sense of Touch:

➢ Touch allows us to investigate our environment and the objects that are in it
➢ It allows us to get info about texture, temperature and pressure upon the skin
➢ These stimuli help us to have a vivid physical sense of every moment
➢ sensual experiences are dependent upon the receptors beneath the skin, which are then used
to send info to somatosensory cortex in the parietal lobes of the brain (which is the region
associated with touch)
➢ The two-point threshold test: used to test for acuity (sensitivity in different parts of the body)
• The fingertips (which tend to be more sensitive) can detect two separate
pressure points on the device while the lower back would only detect one
(tends to be less sensitive)
• Differences in sensitive also impact the amount of space on the
somatosensory cortex used to analyze body sensations
➢ Touch is sensitive to change
➢ Haptics: is the active, exploratory aspect of touch sensation and perception, helps to identify
objects, and prevents us from dropping or damaging objects
• Helps us to handle objects, and feel for any abnormalities (using fingertips)
 ➢ Kinesthesis: the sense of bodily motion and position
• How our fingers and hands coordinate to move
• Receptors for kinesthesis reside inside the muscles, joints and tendons; transmit info
on these to brain (send sensory messages to it) which helps us to maintain awareness
and control of our movements
• Muscle spindles and golgi tendons organs are sensory receptors that provide info
about changes in muscle length and tensions
• it helps hands and fingers to work together to for example hold things in a certain
position so that we won’t drop them\let it roll out of hands

A. Feeling Pain:

➢ Nociception: is the activity of nerve pathways that respond to uncomfortable stimulation

• Skin, teeth, and cornea contain nerve endings called “nociceptors” (which are
receptors that initiate pain messages; relay them to the brain)
• Respond to various stimuli (pin pricks, hot\cold sensations)
➢ Two types of nerve fibers transmit pain messages:
• Fast fibres: register sharp, immediate pain (when skin is cut)
• Slow fibres: register chronic, dull pain (when bumping knee on table)
• All these impulses must travel to the spinal cord before reaching the brain

➢ Gate Control Theory: our experience of pain is an interaction between nerve cells that
transmit pain messages and those that inhibit these messages
• Cells in the spinal cord regulate how much pain signals reach the brain
• Spinal cord=neutral gate that pain messages must past through; has small fibers that
transmit pain messages and larger fibers that inhibit them (and can conduct other
sensory signals; tickling, etc)
• Large fibers close the gate that is opened by small fibers
• Ex: when rubbing toe after stubbing can cause large fibers to close the “gate” that is
opened by the small fibers

➢ Large and small fibres send signals to the spinal cord and then to the brain; sensory info then
gets split up into two different areas of the brain
➢ One area called the somatosensory cortex, registers the pain sensations occurring over the
entire surface of the body
➢ The other region called the anterior cingulate gyrus influences our attentional and emotional
responses to pain (found in the middle portion of the brain) above the corpse callosum ( ex:
having frustrated feelings after you hurt yourself)

B. Phantom Limb Pain:

➢ Feeling pain in the body parts that no longer exist (experienced by amputees)
➢ Phantom limb pain: brain gets rewired after limb has been lost; when you lose that limb; area
in the somatosensory cortex does not get stimulated anymore (ex: when you lose your left
limb; the area in the right somatosensory cortex that registers the sensations will no longer
get stimulated by the left limb
 • Phantom sensations occur because nerve cells in the cortex continue to be active
(despite the absence of any input from the body)
➢ To treat phantom limb pain; the mirror box technique is often used (is a reflection of the
amputees limb; (creates a visual appearance of having the limb) (can result in reorganization
of the somasenstory cortex)
➢ When amputees see their phantom hand moving; helps to decrease phantom pain
➢ Experiment conducted showed that amputees that had the mirror box treatment had reduced
pain compared to those who had to mentally visualize that they had a hand or those that had
similar “mirror box” treatment except the mirror was covered

The Chemical Senses: Taste and Smell

➢ Chemical sensations are a combination of both taste and smell

A. The Gustatory System: Taste

➢ Gustatory system: functions in sensation and perceptions of taste

➢ Taste buds + chemical compounds from foods; can give us the taste sensation
➢ Primary tastes include: salty, sweet, bitter, sour and umami (“savouriness” that comes from
seaweed, protein foods, aged cheese, etc)
➢ Taste is registered on the tongue (9000 taste buds)
➢ 1000 taste buds are found on the roof of the mouth
➢ Sensory neurons transmit signals from the taste buds (due to responses from a variety of
stimuli (they respond best to taste)
➢ Sensation comes from the entire tongue rather than just particular parts
➢ Middle of the tongue has very few “receptors” like the blind spot on the retina (nothing is felt
on the blind spot because info is already filled in)
➢ Taste buds are the only sensory receptors that can replenish themselves quickly ( approx.
every 10 days)
➢ Receptors for taste are located in the visible, small bumps called papillae; lined with taste
buds and distributed across the surface of the tongue
➢ Bundle nerves register taste at taste buds-send signal to thalamus-reaches the gustatory
cortex (region that is located at the back of the frontal lobes-extends towards the insula)
➢ Secondary gustatory cortex: processes the pleasurable experiences associated with food.
➢ The average human has 100000 taste buds but some humans have more; often called
supertasters
➢ They are sensitive to bitter foods; have lower rates of obesity and cardiovascular diseases
because they do not like sweet\fatty foods
➢ Taste preferences can be learned or innate
➢ Babies like to eats foods that their mothers ate while they were pregnant and as people are
growing their taste buds find a liking towards the food that they grew up with it (taste buds
grew an adjustment to specific cultural food)

B. The Olfactory System: Smell

➢ The olfactory system: involved in smell-the detection of airborne particles with specialized
receptors found located in the nose
 ➢ Nasal flow brings molecules-goes to receptors on top of nasal cavity-olfactory epithelium (a
thin layer of cells that are lined by sensory receptors called cilia)- groups of cilia (tiny hair like
projections) have receptor proteins that bind with the molecules-neurons on olfactory bulb
(bottom surface of the frontal lobes, which is the central region for processing smell)-has a
tract that connects to diff regions in the brain including the limbic system (emotion) and
regions of the cortex (feelings of pleasure\disgust can occur)
➢ A particular smell is caused by a pattern of stimulation which involves more than one
receptor hence different combinations of cilia are stimulated in response to different odours

C. Multimodal Integration

➢ Multimodal Integration (MI): the ability to combine sensations form different modalities such
as vision and hearing into a single integrated perception
➢ Ex: taste and smell working together (experience of flavor) and vision and hearing
➢ It is a form of problem solving; often done depending on whether or not sensations are
present at similar locations (ex: hearing a meow and seeing a cat with its mouth open)
➢ Can also be done through temporal info: sensations that occur at the same time period are
going to be linked compared to those that do not ( ex: “hearing a cat meow before seeing its
mouth actually “moving”)
➢ MI usually occurs naturally; most of the time we are unware of them; until an outside force
interferes with it and possibly create new perceptions that did not actually occur ( ex: when
persons mouth is moving but the sound is being heard afterwards)
➢ McGurk effect: when an expectation will cause bias in the perception of a presented sound
• Experiment showed a video of a variety of actors saying “Baba” but when one actor
mouthed “gaga”, a new multimodal stimulus “dada ; viewers expected to hear what
they were presented
➢ Expectations and multimodal interactions influence our social interactions: we use vision and
hearing when communicating with someone ( ex: male like faces with deep voice more
attractive; female like faces with high pitch voice; more attractive)
➢ Brains only combine sensations when the timing, location and expectations are appropriate
➢ People who have synthesia contain sensory networks that link diff sensory areas that are not
found in other people
• Ex: whenever they read a number; they associate a particular colour with it
➢ Our experiences involve groups of brain areas working together

Working the Scientific Literacy Model: Empathy and Pain

What do we know about empathy and pain?

➢ We can experience our own pain but we also feel empathy for others that are in pain whether
it be a friend, family member or even a stranger

How does science explain the influence of empathy on pain perception?

 ➢ The emotional component of pain can influence our physical sensations (especially when we
see others suffering)
➢ Empathy can impact pain (more empathy you feel, more pain is felt)
• Participants asked to watch a video with actor going through the same pain that they
were going through; participants who had more empathy for the actor experienced
more pain in comparison to those that did not

Can we critically evaluate the research?

➢ Criticism to the research: experiment that involves pain and empathy usually causes
participants to just report what is expected from the experimenter
➢ Necessary to provide support for these experiments
➢ Research through neuroimaging has shown that the brain structure called the “insula” which
relates to bodily sensations
• Activity in this area increases when people are performing empathy related tasks
➢ Stronger support for empathy’s impact on pain perception came from the experiment done on
mice, who will not get influenced by the experimenters expectations
• Mice were injected with a pain-inducing substance, when the mice were injected with
other mice; they showed more pain-related behaviors compared to those who were
injected alone; this occurred with mice that were put with a previous cage mate. Some
male mice refused to show pain in the presence of mice they didn’t know (dependent
on levels on testosterone)
 Chapter 5: Consciousness

Module 5.1: Biological Rhythms of Consciousness: Wakefulness and Sleep

➢ Consciousness is a person’s subjective awareness, including thoughts, perceptions,

experiences of the world, and self-awareness.

What is sleep?

A. Biological Rhythms:

➢ Are neatly adapted to the cycles in their environment

• For example, bears are well known for hibernating during the cold winter months.
Because this behaviour happens on a yearly basis, it is part of a circannual rhythm (a
term that literally means “a yearly cycle”).
o This type of rhythm is an example of an infradian rhythm, which is any rhythm
that occurs over a period of time longer than a day.
o Ex: The menstrual cycle in humans
➢ More frequent biological rhythms are referred to as ultradian rhythms.
• Ex: heart rate, urination, and some hormonal activity
➢ Circadian rhythms: are internally driven daily cycles of approximately 24 hours affecting
physiological and behavioural processes (happen over the course of a day)
• Involve the tendency to be asleep or awake at specific times, to feel hungrier during
some parts of the day, and even the ability to concentrate better at certain times than
at others
• We tend to get most of our sleep when it is dark outside because our circadian
rhythms are regulated by daylight interacting with our nervous and endocrine
(hormonal) systems.
➢ One key brain structure in this process is the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the
hypothalamus.
• Cells in the retina of the eye relay messages about light levels in the environment to
the SCN
• The SCN, in turn, communicates signals about light levels with the pineal gland
• The pineal gland releases a hormone called melatonin, which peaks in concentration
at nighttime and is reduced during wakefulness.
• Information about melatonin levels feeds back to the hypothalamus (i.e., they
influence each other)
➢ But what actually causes us to adopt these circadian rhythms?
• Entrainment: when biological rhythms become synchronized to external cues such as
light, temperature, or even a clock.
o Because of its effects on the SCN-melatonin system, light is the primary
entrainment mechanism for most mammals
• Endogenous rhythms: biological rhythms that are generated by our body independent
of external cues such as light.
o A study that was conducted that had people stay in underground chambers for
four weeks observed that individuals tended to adopt a 25-hour day while
 some experiments indicated that most people fell into a 24.5-hour circadian
rhythm. (24-25 hours in length for most people)
➢ Although our sleep–wake cycle remains relatively close to 24 hours in length throughout our
lives, some patterns within our circadian rhythms do change with age
• We need much less sleep—especially a type called REM sleep—as we move from
infancy and early childhood into adulthood.
• In your teens and 20s, many of you will become night owls who prefer to stay up late
and sleep in.
• Later in adulthood, many of you will find yourselves going to bed earlier and getting
up earlier, and you may begin to prefer working or exercising before teenagers even
begin to stir.
➢ People actually do show higher alertness and cognitive functioning during their preferred time
of day
• Older adults (approximately 60–80 years of age) are tested later in the day as opposed
to early in the morning, they have a greater difficulty separating new from old
information and have a larger variability in their reaction times on a test in which they
learned to pair together a digit and a symbol

B. The Stages of sleep:

➢ Polysomnography: a set of objective measurements used to examine physiological variables

during sleep
• Some of the devices used in this type of study are familiar, such as one to measure
respiration and a thermometer to measure body temperature. In addition, electrical
sensors attached to the skin measure muscle activity around the eyes and other parts
of the body. However, sleep cycles themselves are most often defined by the
electroencephalogram ( EEG ), a device that measures brain waves using sensors
attached to the scalp
➢ The output of an EEG is a waveform
• These waves can be described by their frequency —the number of up-down cycles
every second—and their amplitude —the height and depth of the up-down cycle.
• Beta waves —high-frequency, low amplitude waves—are characteristic of
wakefulness.
o Their irregular nature reflects the bursts of activity in different regions of the
cortex, and they are often interpreted as a sign that a person is alert.
• As the individual begins to shift into sleep, the waves start to become slower, larger,
and more predictable; these alpha waves signal that a person may be daydreaming,
meditating, or starting to fall asleep. These changes in the characteristics of the waves
continue as we enter deeper and deeper stages of sleep.
➢ The EEG signals during sleep move through four different stages.
• In stage 1, brain waves slow down and become higher in amplitude—these are known
as theta waves. Breathing, blood pressure, and heart rate all decrease slightly as an
individual begins to sleep.
 o However, at this stage of sleep, you are still sensitive to noises such as the
television in the next room. After approximately 10 to 15 minutes, the sleeper
enters stage 2, during which brain waves continue to slow.
• Stage 2 includes sleep spindles (clusters of high-frequency but low-amplitude waves)
and K complexes (small groups of larger amplitude waves) , which are detected as
periodic bursts of EEG activity. What these bursts in brain activity mean is not
completely understood, but evidence suggests they may play a role in helping
maintain a state of sleep and in the process of memory storage
o As stage 2 sleep progresses, we respond to fewer and fewer external stimuli,
such as lights and sounds. Approximately 20 minutes later, we enter stage 3
sleep
• In stage 3, brain waves continue to slow down and assume a new form called delta
waves (large, looping waves that are high-amplitude and low-frequency). The process
continues with the deepest stage of sleep, stage 4, during which time the sleeper will
be difficult to awaken.
• About an hour after falling asleep, we reach the end of our first stage 4 sleep phase.
At this point, the sleep cycle goes in reverse and we move backwards (Stage 4 – 3- 2-
1)
o However, we do not remain in stage 1 sleep for long; instead, we move into a
unique stage of REM sleep — a stage of sleep characterized by quickening
brain waves, inhibited body movement, and rapid eye movements ( REM )
o This stage is sometimes known as paradoxical sleep because the EEG waves
appear to represent a state of wakefulness, despite the fact that we remain
asleep.
o The REM pattern is so distinct that the first four stages are known collectively
as non-REM (NREM) sleep .
o At the end of the first REM phase, we cycle back toward deep sleep stages and
back into REM sleep again every 90 to 100 minutes.

Why we need sleep:

A. Theories of sleep:

➢ Restore and repair hypothesis: the idea that the body needs to restore energy levels and
repair any wear and tear experienced during the day’s activities
• Although there is good evidence supporting the restore and repair hypothesis, it does
not account for all the reasons why we sleep.
o Sometimes, people go into deep sleep even if they really didn’t do anything
during the day or people who did a lot during the day, may sleep less than
people who did nothing
➢ Preserve and protect hypothesis: suggests that two more adaptive functions of sleep are
preserving energy and protecting the organism from harm
• To support this hypothesis, researchers note that the animals most vulnerable to
predators sleep in safe hideaways and during the time of day when their predators are
most likely to hunt
 • Because humans are quite dependent upon our vision, it made sense for us to sleep at
night, when we would be at a disadvantage compared to nocturnal predators
• Quantity of sleep differs between animal species as well.
o Hoofed species like antelope sleep less than four hours per day, primarily
because they have to remain alert in case a predator attacks. Conversely,
animals such as lions and bears rarely fall victim to predators and can
therefore afford a luxurious 15 hours of sleep per day. (The sleepiest animal
appears to be the brown bat. It sleeps an average of 19.9 hours out of each 24
hours . . . because really, who would eat a bat?)
• The underlying message from this theory is that each species’ sleep patterns have
evolved to match their sensory abilities and their environment.
➢ The amount that any animal sleeps is a combination of its need for restoration and repair
along with its need for preservation and protection. Each theory explains part of our reasons
for drifting off each night. Importantly, both theories would produce sleep patterns that
would improve a species’ evolutionary fitness.

B. Sleep Deprivation and sleep displacement:

➢ Sleep deprivation occurs when an individual cannot or does not sleep.

• Impairments caused by lack of sleep include difficulties with multitasking, maintaining
attention for long periods of time, assessing risks, incorporating new information into
a strategy (i.e., “thinking on the fly”), working memory (i.e., keeping information in
conscious awareness), inhibiting responses, and keeping information in the correct
temporal order
• Importantly, these deficits also appear after partial sleep deprivation, such as when
you don’t get enough sleep
• In fact, cognitive deficits typically appear when individuals have less than seven hours
of sleep for a few nights in a row
➢ Research with adolescents shows that for every hour of sleep deprivation, predictable
increases in physical illness, family problems, substance abuse, and academic problems occur
• Issues also arise with your coordination, a problem best seen in studies of driving
ability. Participants who had gone a night without sleeping performed at the same
level as people who had a blood alcohol level of 0.07
➢ Sleep displacement: occurs when an individual is prevented from sleeping at the normal time
although she may be able to sleep earlier or later in the day than usual
• Jet lag is the discomfort a person feels when sleep cycles are out of synchronization
with light and darkness

Theories of Dreaming:

A. The Psychoanalytic Approach:

➢ Most influential theories of dreams was developed by Sigmund Freud in 1899

• Freud viewed dreams as an unconscious expression of wish fulfillment. He believed
that humans are motivated by primal urges, with sex and aggression being the most
dominant.
 oBecause giving in to these urges is impractical most of the time (not to
mention potentially immoral and illegal), we learn ways of keeping these
urges suppressed and outside of our conscious awareness. When we sleep,
however, we lose the power to suppress our urges. Without this active
suppression, these drives are free to create the vivid imagery found in our
dreams.
• This imagery can take two forms.
o Manifest content involves the images and storylines that we dream about.
▪ In many of our dreams, the manifest content involves sexuality and
aggression, consistent with the view that dreams are a form of wish
fulfillment.
▪ However, in other cases, the manifest content of dreams might seem
like random, bizarre images and events.
▪ Freud would argue that these images are anything but random;
instead, he believed they have a hidden meaning.
o This latent content is the actual symbolic meaning of a dream built on
suppressed sexual or aggressive urges. Because the true meaning of the dream
is latent, Freud advocated dream work, the recording and interpreting of
dreams.
▪ Through such work, Freudian analysis would allow you to bring the
previously hidden sexual and aggressive elements of your dreams into
the forefront, although it might mean you’d never look at the CN
Tower the same way again.
➢ Many of his theories are difficult to test in a scientific manner because they cannot be falsified

B. The Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis:

➢ Activation– synthesis hypothesis: suggests that dreams arise from brain activity originating
from bursts of excitatory messages from the pons, a part of the brain stem
• This electrical activity produces the telltale signs of eye movements and the EEG
activity during REM sleep (the stage in sleep in which dreaming occurs); moreover, the
burst of activity stimulates the occipital and temporal lobes of the brain, producing
imaginary sights and sounds, as well as numerous other regions of the cortex
• Thus, the brain stem initiates the activation component of the model. The synthesis
component arises as different areas of the cortex of the brain try to make sense of all
the images, sounds, and memories.
o Imagine having a dozen different people each provide you with one randomly
selected word, with your task being to organize these words to look like a
single message; this is essentially what your cortex is doing every time you
dream.
o Because we are often able to turn these random messages into a coherent
story, researchers assume that the frontal lobes—the region of the brain
associated with forming narratives—play a key role in the synthesis process
• The activation–synthesis model, although important in its own right, has some
interesting implications. If the cortex is able to provide (temporary) structure to input
 from the brain stem and other regions of the brain, then that means the brain is able
to work with and restructure information while we dream. If that is the case, then is it
possible that dreaming is part of our ability to learn or think?
➢ Problem-solving theory: the theory that thoughts and concerns are continuous from waking to
sleeping, and that dreams may function to facilitate finding solutions to problems
encountered while awake.
• This theory suggests that many of the images and thoughts we have during our
dreams are relevant to the problems that we face when we are awake.
• Approximately 20–25% of our total sleep time is taken up by REM, or rapid eye
movement, sleep. When we are deprived of REM sleep, we typically experience a
phenomenon called REM rebound: our brains spend an increased time in REM-phase
sleep when given the chance.
• As discussed earlier in this module, REM sleep produces brainwaves similar to being
awake, yet we are asleep
o This similarity suggests that the types of functions being performed by the
brain are likely similar during the two states.
o REM sleep affects some, but not all, types of memory.
o Several studies have shown that the amount of REM sleep people experience
increases the night after learning a new task
o REM sleep and dreaming also influence our ability to problem solve
o We can’t guarantee that REM sleep is causing the improvements in memory—
just that its disruption is related to poor performance on a number of tasks
➢ Interestingly, REM sleep is not the only stage of sleep that affects our ability to learn. There is
some evidence that the sleep spindles found in stage 2 sleep are involved with learning new
movements
• This suggests that the brain has different systems for processing simple and complex
movements and that these systems are influenced by different stages of sleep

Disorders and Problems with sleep:

A. Insomnia:

➢ Insomnia: a disorder characterized by an extreme lack of sleep

• Although the average adult may need 7 to 8 hours of sleep to feel rested, substantial
individual differences exist. For this reason, insomnia is defined not in terms of the
hours of sleep, but rather in terms of the degree to which a person feels rested during
the day.
➢ Different kinds of Insomnia:
• Onset insomnia occurs when a person has difficulty falling asleep (30 minutes or more)
• Maintenance insomnia occurs when an individual cannot easily return to sleep after
waking in the night
• Terminal insomnia or early morning insomnia is a situation in which a person wakes
up too early—sometimes hours too early—and cannot return to sleep
➢ For a sleep disorder to be labelled insomnia, the problems with sleeping must be due to some
internal cause
 • Sometimes insomnia occurs as part of another problem, such as depression, pain, too
much caffeine, or various drugs ; in these cases, the sleep disorder is referred to as a
secondary insomnia
• In cases in which insomnia is the only symptom that a person is showing, and other
causes can be ruled out, physicians would label the sleep disorder as insomnia
disorder

B. Nightmares and Night-terrors:

➢ Nightmares are particularly vivid and disturbing dreams that occur during REM sleep.
• Nightmares are correlated with psychological distress including anxiety, negative
emotionality and emotional reactivity
• They are more common in females likely because women tend to have higher levels of
depression and emotional disturbances. Indeed, in individuals with emotional
disorders
• The “synthesis” part of dreaming appears to reorganize information in a way
consistent with their mental state, with a focus on negative emotion.
➢ Nightmares occur due to problems with our brains’ emotion networks
• When we dream, several brain structures related to emotion are activated
• Although the thought of these emotional systems firing when you are asleep seems
frightening, it appears that they are serving an adaptive function
• When we are awake and we experience negative events, we tend to link the event
with our emotional response (fear, anger, etc.). During dreaming, however,
recollection of the negative event is paired with a number of random images and
memories due to the random firing of the brain stem. As a result, the event-emotion
link becomes less prominent. So, these emotional brain areas are reducing our
emotional responses to negative thoughts and experiences
o During nightmares, however, this process does not occur properly, leading to
an emotionally unpleasant dream.
• Individuals with emotional disorders have a greater likelihood of having dysfunctions
with this emotional regulation system because different emotional brain structures—
particularly the amygdala—tend to be overactive in these individuals
➢ Night terrors: intense bouts of panic and arousal that awaken the individual, typically in a
heightened emotional state
• A person experiencing a night terror may call out or scream, fight back against
imaginary attackers, or leap from the bed and start to flee before waking up.
➢ Unlike nightmares, night terrors are not dreams.
• These episodes occur during NREM sleep, and the majority of people who experience
them typically do not recall any specific dream content.
• Night terrors increase in frequency during stressful periods, such as when parents are
separating or divorcing
• There is also some evidence linking them to feelings of anxiety, which suggests that
for some sufferers, counselling and other means for reducing anxiety may help reduce
the symptoms
C. Movement Disturbances:

➢ During REM sleep, the brain prevents movement by sending inhibitory signals down the spinal
cord.
➢ A number of sleep disturbances, however, involve movement and related sensations.
• For example, restless legs syndrome is a persistent feeling of discomfort in the legs
and the urge to continuously shift them into different positions
o For those individuals who are in constant motion, sleep becomes very difficult
o They awake periodically at night to reposition their legs, although they often
have no memory of doing so.
o The mechanism causing RLS is unclear; however, there is some evidence that it
is linked to the dopamine system and to an iron deficiency
➢ Somnambulism or sleepwalking: a disorder that involves wandering and performing other
activities while asleep
• It occurs during NREM sleep, stages 3 and 4, and is more prevalent during childhood
• Sleepwalking is not necessarily indicative of any type of sleep or emotional
disturbance, although it may put people in harm’s way.
• People who sleepwalk are not acting out dreams, and they typically do not remember
the episode
➢ Sexomnia or sleep sex: Individuals with this condition engage in sexual activity such as the
touching of the self or others, vocalizations, and sex-themed talk while in stages 3 and 4 sleep
• The exact cause of sexomnia is unknown, although stress, fatigue, and a history of
trauma have all been mentioned as possible factors
➢ REM behaviour disorder: People with this condition do not show the typical restriction of
movement during REM sleep; in fact, they appear to be acting out the content of their dreams
• Some individuals do not awaken until they have hurt themselves or others
• REM behaviour disorder can be treated with medication; benzodiazepines, which
inhibit the central nervous system, have proven effective in reducing some of the
symptoms associated with this condition

D. Sleep Apnea:

➢ A disorder characterized by the temporary inability to breathe during sleep

• Most common among overweight and obese individuals, and it is roughly twice as
prevalent among men as among women
• In most cases of apnea, the airway becomes physically obstructed, at a point
anywhere from the back of the nose and mouth to the neck
• In rare but more serious cases, sleep apnea can also be caused by the brain’s failure to
regulate breathing. This failure can happen for many reasons, including damage to or
deterioration of the medulla of the brain stem, which is responsible for controlling the
chest muscles during breathing.
• In fact, individuals who suffer from sleep apnea often perform more poorly on tests
requiring mental flexibility, the control of attention, and memory
E. Narcolepsy:

➢ Narcolepsy is a disorder in which a person experiences extreme daytime sleepiness and even
sleep attacks.
➢ Narcolepsy differs from more typical sleep in a number of other ways.
• People with a normal sleep pattern generally reach the REM stage after more than an
hour of sleep, but a person experiencing narcolepsy is likely to go almost immediately
from waking to REM sleep.
• Also, because REM sleep is associated with dreaming, people with narcolepsy often
report vivid dream-like images even if they did not fully fall asleep.
➢ Individuals with narcolepsy have fewer brain cells that produce orexin, a hormone that
functions to maintain wakefulness, resulting in greater difficulty maintaining wakefulness

F. Overcoming sleep problems:

➢ For some people, relief can be as simple as a snack or a warm glass of milk; it can certainly be
difficult to sleep if you are hungry.
➢ Others might have a nightcap—a drink of alcohol—in hopes of inducing sleep, although the
effects can be misleading
➢ By practising good sleep hygiene —healthy sleep-related habits—they can typically overcome
sleep disturbances in a matter of a few weeks

➢ For most of the 20th century, drugs prescribed for insomnia included sedatives such as
barbiturates (Phenobarbital) and benzodiazepines (e.g., Valium). Although these drugs
managed to put people to sleep, several problems with their use were quickly observed.
Notably, people quickly developed tolerance to these agents, meaning they required
increasingly higher doses to get the same effect, and many soon came to depend on the drugs
so much that they could not sleep without them
➢ Modern sleep drugs are generally thought to be much safer in the short term but it is safer to
change your sleep hygiene (sleeping routines) than to directly alter your brain chemistry if you
want to put your sleeping problems to rest.
Module 5.2: Altered States of: Hypnosis, Meditation, and Disorders of consciousness

Hypnosis:

➢ Hypnosis is actually a procedure of inducing a heightened state of suggestibility

• Hypnosis is not a trance, as is often portrayed in the popular media
➢ Instead, the hypnotist simply suggests changes, and the subject is more likely (but not certain)
to comply as a result of the suggestion.
➢ Although one could conceivably make suggestions about almost anything, hypnotic
suggestions generally are most effective when they fall into one of three categories:
• Ideomotor suggestions are related to specific actions that could be performed, such as
adopting a specific position.
• Challenge suggestions indicate actions that are not to be performed, so that the
subject appears to lose the ability to perform an action.
• Cognitive-perceptual suggestions involve a subject remembering or forgetting specific
information, or experiencing altered perceptions such as reduced pain sensations
➢ Hypnotists cannot make someone do something against their will
• Instead, the hypnotist can increase the likelihood that subjects will perform simple
behaviours that they have performed or have thought of before, and would be willing
to do (in some contexts) when in a normal conscious state.

A. Theories of hypnosis:

➢ Scientific research tells us that hypnosis is nothing like sleep.

• Instead, hypnosis is based on an interaction between (1) automatic (unconscious)
thoughts and behaviours and (2) a supervisory system, sometimes referred to as
executive processing.
• The roles played by these two pieces of the puzzle differ across theories of hypnosis.
o Dissociation theory explains hypnosis as a unique state in which consciousness
is divided into two parts: an observer(automatic) and a hidden observer
(executive) processing
▪ Susceptible individuals will experience less input from the executive
▪ Instead, the suggestion from the hypnotist will act as an executive,
guiding the behaviours that feel automatic
o Social-cognitive theory: explains hypnosis by emphasizing the degree to which
beliefs and expectations contribute to increased suggestibility
▪ Supported by experiments in which individuals are told either that
they will be able to resist ideomotor suggestions or that they will not
be able to resist them. In these studies, people tend to conform to
what they have been told to expect—a result that cannot be easily
explained by dissociation theory
▪ Response expectancy —whether the individual believes the treatment
will work—plays a large role in the actual pain relief experienced
▪ The idea that expectations influence hypnotic responses implies that
some form of executive processing is influencing the experiences of an
individual.
 ▪ different brain areas related to executive functions have stronger
connections (fire at the same time more frequently) in highly
hypnotizable than in less hypnotizable individuals
▪ Hypnotizable subjects also show larger changes from “baseline levels”
of activity in the frontal lobes when they view images while
hypnotized, suggesting that they are more engaged with external
stimuli (e.g., the voice of a hypnotist) than are less hypnotizable
individuals

B. Applications of hypnosis:

➢ Hypnosis has been used to treat a number of different physical and psychological conditions
• Hypnosis is often used in conjunction with other psychotherapies such as cognitive-
behavioural therapy (CBT) rather than as a stand-alone treatment.
• The resulting cognitive hypnotherapy has been used as an effective treatment for
depression, anxiety, eating disorders, hot flashes of cancer survivors, and irritable
bowel syndrome , among many others
➢ Hypnosis is far from a cure-all, however.
• Doesn’t have a lot of effect and when it does, it is usually short-term
• It shows promise, especially when used in conjunction with other evidence-based
psychological or medical treatments.
➢ Most practical use for hypnosis is in the treatment of pain
• Research has shown that hypnosis generally works as well as drug treatments for
acute pain , which is the intense, temporary pain associated with a medical or dental
procedures

Meditation:

A. Types of Mediation:

➢ Meditation is any procedure that involves a shift in consciousness to a state in which an

individual is highly focused, aware, and in control of mental processes
• In some types of meditation, the individual focuses his or her attention on a chosen
object, such as a point on the wall or a physical sensation like the feeling related to
breathing. This technique is known as focused attention (FA) meditation.
o When distracting or negative thoughts enter into one’s awareness and
interfere with meditation, people are taught to accept these thoughts in a
nonjudgmental manner, and to then nudge their attention back to its original
focus
• Open monitoring (OM) meditation technique uses focused attention to train the mind
and to reduce the influence of distractions.
o meditators pay attention to the moment-by moment sensations without
focusing on any particular object
o A key feature of OM is to attempt to experience each sensation intensely,
examining its rich sensory properties and emotional characteristics in great
 depth; however, these sensations should not become the sole focus of
attention, preventing the meditator from responding to other sensations.
o Rather than using neural regions related to focusing attention, the brain
activates structures involved with disengaging attention (i.e., letting go) and
on awareness of bodily states

B. Meditation, Cognition, and Emotion

➢ Most meditators report that they have greater emotional control than they did prior to
meditation training
➢ meditating also enhances our ability to control what we pay attention to
➢ improvements in our ability to inhibit responses (e.g., stopping yourself when you are about
to press the wrong button) that occur as a result of meditation training predict improvements
in emotional well-being
• Focusing attention on specific objects or ideas during meditation takes attention away
from more negative thoughts about the self.
➢ The idea that the feelings of happiness and relaxation associated with meditation are due, in
part, to us becoming more attentive to the present moment and less attentive to our own
“stories” has found some support in research performed at the University of Toronto.
➢ Given that numerous other studies have shown that meditation leads to decreased levels of
anxiety, it is possible that redirecting attention away from our own self-focused thoughts
might improve our ability to be happy.
➢ Meditation (in its different forms) has become a part of a number of different clinical
treatment programs.
• For example, mindfulness-based stress reduction programs have been developed to
teach and promote mindfulness meditation as a way of improving well-being and
reducing negative experiences
• can significantly reduce everyday levels of stress, depression, pain, and anxiety, as
well as more chronic psychiatric disorders

Disorders of Consciousness

➢ Neurologists distinguish between six types of consciousness, ranging from little-to-no brain
function up to normal levels of awareness
• The lowest level of consciousness in a person who is still technically alive is known as
brain death , a condition in which the brain, specifically including the brain stem, no
longer functions
o Individuals who are brain dead have no hope of recovery because the brain
stem regions responsible for maintaining basic life functions like breathing and
maintaining the heartbeat do not function
• In contrast to brain death, a coma is a state marked by a complete loss of
consciousness. It is generally due to damage to the brain stem or to widespread
damage to both hemispheres of the brain
o Patients who are in a coma have an absence of both wakefulness and
awareness of themselves or their surroundings
 o Some of the patient’s brain stem reflexes will be suppressed, including pupil
dilation and constriction in response to changes in brightness.
• If a patient in a coma improves slightly, the individual may enter a persistent
vegetative state , a state of minimal to no consciousness in which the patient’s eyes
may be open, and the individual will develop sleep–wake cycles without clear signs of
consciousness
o These patients generally do not have damage to the brain stem. Instead, they
have extensive brain damage to the grey matter and white matter of both
hemispheres, leading to impairments of most functions
o The likelihood of recovery from a vegetative state is time dependent. If a
patient emerges from this state within the first few months, he or she could
regain some form of consciousness. In contrast, if symptoms do not improve
after three months, the patient is classified as being in a permanent vegetative
state; the chances of recovery from that diagnosis decrease sharply
• Minimally conscious state (MCS) , a disordered state of consciousness marked by the
ability to show some behaviours that suggest at least partial consciousness, even if on
an inconsistent basis.
o A minimally conscious patient must show some awareness of himself or his
environment, and be able to reproduce this behaviour.
o Examples of some behaviours that are tested are following simple commands,
making gestures or yes/no responses to questions, and producing movements
or emotional reactions in response to some person or object in their
environment.
• Locked-in syndrome , a disorder in which the patient is aware and awake but, because
of an inability to move his or her body, appears unconscious
o This disorder is caused by damage to part of the pons, the region of the brain
stem that sticks out like an Adam’s apple.
o Most patients with this syndrome remain paralyzed
• Last stage: the healthy conscious brain

Module 5.3: Drugs and Conscious Experience:

Physical and Psychological effects of drugs:

A. Short-Term effects:

➢ Drugs influence the amount of activity occurring in the synapse.

• Thus, they can serve as an agonist (which enhances or mimics the activity of a
neurotransmitter) or an antagonist (which blocks or inhibits the activity of a
neurotransmitter).
➢ The short-term effects of drugs can be caused by a number of different brain mechanisms
including:
• (1) altering the amount of the neurotransmitter being released into the synapse
 • (2) preventing the reuptake (i.e., reabsorption back into the cell that released it) of the
neurotransmitter once it has been released, thereby allowing it to have a longer
influence on neurons
• (3) blocking the receptor that the neurotransmitter would normally bind to
• (4) Binding to the receptor in place of the neurotransmitter.
• In all of these scenarios, the likelihood of the postsynaptic neurons firing is changed,
resulting in changes to how we think, act, and feel.
➢ Different drugs will influence different neurotransmitter systems. For instance, the “club
drug” ecstasy primarily affects serotonin levels whereas painkillers like OxyContin™ affect
opioid receptors.
• However, the brain chemical that is most often influenced by drugs is dopamine, a
neurotransmitter that is involved in responses to rewarding, pleasurable feelings
o Dopamine release in two brain areas, the nucleus accumbens and the ventral
tegmental area , is likely related to the “high” associated with many drugs
▪ These positive feelings serve an important, and potentially dangerous,
function: They reinforce the drug-taking behaviour. This reinforcing
effect is so powerful that, for someone who has experience with a
particular drug, even the anticipation of taking the drug is pleasurable
and involves the release of dopamine
➢ The effect that a certain drug will have on someone is also dependent on the type of
environment it is taken in (Ex: alcohol)
• Overdoses of some drugs are more common when they are taken in new
environments than when they are taken in a setting that the person often uses for
drug consumption
• When people enter an environment that is associated with drug use, their bodies
prepare to metabolize drugs even before they are consumed (i.e., their bodies
become braced for the drug’s effects).
o Similar preparations do not occur in new environments, which leads to larger,
and potentially fatal, drug effects
➢ Another psychological factor that influences drug effects is the person’s experience with a
drug.
• It takes time for people to learn to associate taking the drug with the drug’s effects on
the body and brain.
• Therefore, a drug might have a much more potent effect on a person the third or
fourth time he took it than it did the first time, which is very common with some
drugs, such as marijuana.
➢ Finally, a person’s expectations about the drug can dramatically influence its effects.
• If a person believes that alcohol will make him less shy, then it is likely that a few
glasses of wine will have that effect.

B. Long-Term Effects:

➢ Tolerance: when repeated use of a drug results in a need for a higher dose to get the intended
effect
 • It is actually the brain’s attempt to keep the level of neurotransmitters at stable
levels.
• When receptors are overstimulated by neurotransmitters, as often happens during
drug use, the neurons fire at a higher rate than normal.
• In order to counteract this effect and return the firing rate to normal, some of the
receptors move further away from the synapse so that they are more difficult to
stimulate, a process known as down-regulation
➢ Physical dependence: the need to take a drug to ward off unpleasant physical withdrawal
symptoms.
➢ Psychological dependence occurs when addiction develops without any physical symptoms of
withdrawal. (to cope with emotional symptoms)
➢ Numerous factors— biological, psychological, and social—influence whether someone will
become dependent upon a drug as well as the severity of that dependence.
• Research shows that genetics may play a role as well
• Early experiences with different drugs plays a role as well
• Dependence is also influenced by the fact that drugs are often taken in the same
situations, such as a cup of coffee to start your day or alcohol whenever you see
particular friends.
• Addiction rates are also affected by the culture in which the person lives; for instance,
alcoholism rates are lower in religious and social groups that prohibit drinking
• A person’s personality; individuals with impulsive personality traits are more likely to
become addicted to drugs regardless of their early experiences or cultural setting

Commonly Abused Illegal Drugs:

➢ Psychoactive drugs: substances that affect thinking, behaviour, perception, and emotion.

A. Stimulants:

➢ Stimulants are a category of drugs that speed up the nervous system, typically enhancing
wakefulness and alertness
➢ Cocaine, one of the most commonly abused stimulants, is synthesized from coca leaves
• It is typically snorted and absorbed into the bloodstream through the nasal passages
or, if prepared as crack cocaine, smoked in a pipe.
• Cocaine influences the nervous system by blocking the reuptake of dopamine in
reward centres of the brain, although it can also influence serotonin and
norepinephrine levels as well
• By preventing dopamine from being reabsorbed by the neuron that released it,
cocaine increases the amount of dopamine in the synapse between the cells, thus
making the postsynaptic cell more likely to fire. The result is an increase in energy
levels and a feeling of euphoria.
➢ Amphetamines, another group of stimulants, come in a variety of forms.
 • Some are prescription drugs, such as methylphenidate (Ritalin) and modafinil
(Provigil), which are typically prescribed for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD) and narcolepsy, respectively.
• When used as prescribed, these drugs can have beneficial effects; oftentimes,
however, these drugs are used recreationally
➢ Methamphetamine, which stimulates the release of dopamine in presynaptic cells, may be
even more potent than cocaine when it comes to addictive potential.
• It is also notorious for causing significant neurological as well as external physical
problems.
• For example, chronic methamphetamine abusers often experience deterioration of
their facial features, teeth, and gums, owing to a combination of factors.
• First, methamphetamine addiction can lead to neglect of basic dietary and hygienic
care.
• Second, the drug is often manufactured from a potent cocktail of substances
including hydrochloric acid and farm fertilizer—it is probably not surprising that these
components can have serious side effects on appearance and health.
➢ Long-term use of potent stimulants like methamphetamines can actually alter the structure of
the user’s brain. Compared to non-users, people who have a history of abusing
methamphetamine have been shown to have structural abnormalities of cells in the frontal
lobes, which reduces the brain’s ability to inhibit irrelevant thoughts
• This ability can be measured through the Stroop task, which challenges a person’s
ability to inhibit reading a word in favour of identifying its colour.
➢ Changes in brain structure have also been noted in chronic users of ecstasy (3,4-
methylenedioxyN -methylamphetamine or MDMA) , a drug that is typically classified as a
stimulant, but also has hallucinogenic effects
• Ecstasy exerts its influence on the brain by stimulating the release of massive amounts
of the neurotransmitter serotonin; it also blocks its reuptake, thereby ensuring that
neurons containing serotonin receptors will fire at levels much greater than normal
• Ecstasy heightens physical sensations and is known to increase social bonding and
compassion among those who are under its influence.
• Heat stroke and dehydration are major risks associated with ecstasy use, especially
when the drug is taken in a rave where there is a high level of physical exertion from
dancing in an overheated environment.

B. Hallucinogens:

➢ Hallucinogenic drugs are substances that produce perceptual distortions

• These distortions may be visual, auditory, and sometimes tactile in nature, such as the
experience of crawling sensations against the skin.
➢ Hallucinogens also alter how people perceive their own thinking.
➢ Hallucinogenic substances:
• LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide)
• Psilocybin (a mushroom)
• Mescaline (derived from the peyote cactus)
• Ketamine
 • DMT (dimethyltryptamine)
➢ Hallucinogens can have very long-lasting effects—more than 12 hours for LSD, for example.
➢ These drugs may also elicit powerful emotional experiences that range from extreme euphoria
to fear, panic, and paranoia.
➢ Ketamine induces dream-like states, memory loss, dizziness, confusion, and a distorted sense
of body ownership (i.e., feeling like your body and voice don’t belong to you)
• Blocks receptors for glutamate, which is an excitatory neurotransmitter that is
important for, among other things, memory.
➢ DMT Users frequently report having intense “spiritual” experiences, such as feeling connected
to or communicating with divine beings (as well as aliens, plant spirits, and other beings that
aren’t part of most modern people’s version of reality)

C. Marijuana:

➢ Marijuana is a drug comprising the leaves and buds of the Cannabis plant that produces a
combination of hallucinogenic, stimulant, and relaxing (narcotic) effects.
• These buds contain a high concentration of a compound called tetrahydrocannabinol
(THC).
• THC mimics anandamide, a brain chemical that occurs naturally in the brain and the
peripheral nerves.
• Both anandamide and THC bind to cannabinoid receptors and induce feelings of
euphoria, relaxation, reduced pain, and heightened and sometimes distorted sensory
experiences
➢ They also stimulate one’s appetite
• This is an incredibly important benefit for cancer sufferers who use medicinal
marijuana to counteract the nausea and lack of appetite that occurs following
chemotherapy

C.1: Opiates:

➢ Opiates ( also called narcotics ) are drugs such as heroin and morphine that reduce pain and
induce extremely intense feelings of euphoria
• These drugs bind to endorphin receptors in the nervous system. Endorphins are
neurotransmitters that reduce pain and produce pleasurable sensations—effects
magnified by opiates.
• People who are addicted to opiates and other highly addictive drugs enter a negative
cycle of having to use these drugs simply to ward off withdrawal effects, rather than
to actually achieve the sense of euphoria they may have experienced when they
started using them.
➢ Methadone is an opioid (a synthetic opiate) that binds to opiate receptors but does not give
the same kind of high that heroin does.
• A regimen of daily methadone treatment can help people who are addicted to opiates
avoid painful withdrawal symptoms as they learn to cope without the drug.
➢ Another opioid, oxycodone (OxyContin ®), has helped many people reduce severe pain while
having relatively few side effects.
 • Unfortunately, this drug, along with a similar product, Percocet ®, has very high abuse
potential

Legal Drugs and their effects on consciousness:

A. Sedatives:

➢ Sedative drugs, sometimes referred to as “downers,” depress activity of the central nervous
system.
➢ Newer forms of sedative drugs, called benzodiazepines, include prescription drugs such as
Xanax, Ativan, and Valium.
• These drugs increase the effects of gammaaminobutyric acid (GABA), an inhibitory
neurotransmitter that helps reduce feelings of anxiety or panic.
• They do not specifically target the brain regions responsible for breathing and, even
at high doses, are unlikely to be fatal.
• However, people under the influence of any kind of sedative are at greater risk for
injury or death due to accidents caused by their diminished attention, reaction time,
and motor control.

B. Prescription Drug Abuse:

➢ Users typically opt for prescription drugs as their drugs of choice because they are legal (when
used as prescribed), pure (i.e., not contaminated or diluted), and relatively easy to get.
• Prescription drugs are typically taken at large doses, and administered in such a way
to get a quicker, more intense effect—for example, by crushing and snorting
stimulants such as Ritalin
➢ Some of the most commonly abused prescription drugs in Canada are painkillers such as
OxyContin.
• When used normally, OxyContin is a pain-reliever that slowly releases an opioid over
the course of approximately 12 hours, thus making it a relatively safe product
• However, crushing the OxyContin tablet frees its opioid component oxycodone from
the slow-release mechanism; it can then be inhaled or dissolved in liquid and injected
to provide a rapid “high”
➢ Approaches to reducing this problem include efforts to develop pain medications that do not
act on pleasure and reward centres of the brain.
➢ Many communities offer prescription drug disposal opportunities, which helps remove unused
drugs from actual or potential circulation.

C. Alcohol:

➢ It initially targets GABA receptors, and subsequently affects opiate and dopamine receptors.
• The stimulation of opiate and dopamine receptors accounts for the euphoria
associated with lower doses as well its rewarding effects.
• The release of GABA, an inhibitory neurotransmitter, reduces the activity of the
central nervous system, which helps explain the impairments in balance and
coordination associated with consumption of alcohol.
➢ Alcohol inhibits the frontal lobes of the brain.
 • One function of the frontal lobes is to inhibit behaviour and impulses, and alcohol
appears to impair the frontal lobe’s ability to do so—in other words, it inhibits an
inhibitor.
➢ Alcohol abuse has been linked to health problems, sexual and physical assault, automobile
accidents, missing work or school, unplanned pregnancies, and contracting sexually
transmitted diseases
• Tendency to focus on short-term rewards rather than long-term consequences
(“Alcohol myopia”)
 Chapter 6: Learning

6.1: Classical Conditioning: Learning by Association

➢ Learning: is a process by which behavior or knowledge changes as a result of experience

➢ There are two types of learning:
• Cognitive learning: when students do a variety of activities such as reading, listening
and taking tests to retain information
• Associative learning:

Pavlovs Dogs: Classical Conditioning of Salivation

➢ Pavlovs used dogs as his model organisms to perform his experiments. He found that dogs
would salivate before the meat powder was even brought out
• He felt that dogs could learn to salivate based on the anticipation of food
• He conducted an experiment where he would use a metochrome (which makes ticking
sounds) and then present food to the dogs
o When he paired the metochrome with the food, he found that the dogs began
to salivate
o After, doing this a couple of times he began to see that when he just presented
the monochrome; the dogs began to salivate

➢ Classical Conditioning (also called pavlovian conditioning) : learning that occurs when a neutral
stimulus elicits a response that was originally caused by another stimulus
• Pavlovs experiment: the tone was the neutral stimulus and the meat powder was the
original stimulus (which caused the dogs to salivate originally)

➢ Stimulus: is an external event or cue that can initiate a response

• Examples include food, water, pain or sexual contact, elicit different types of responses

➢ Unconditioned Stimulus (US): it is a stimulus that elicits a reflexive response without learning
• An example would be the “meat powder”

➢ Unconditioned Response (UR): is a reflexive, unlearned reaction to an unconditioned stimulus.

• The meat powder caused the dogs to salivate, the dogs did not learn how to salivate
from their parents.
• It is something that occurs “naturally”
o Other examples of relations between US and UR include: flinching (UR) & loud
noise (US), blinking (UR) & response to a puff of air to the eye (US)

➢ In Pavlov’s experiment the tone as originally the neutral stimulus because it did not cause
salivation, but when it was paired with the meat powder, it caused salivation
• Eventually, it led to salivation (when the metrochrome alone was presented to the dogs)
 ➢ Conditioned Stimulus (CS): a once neutral stimulus that later elicits a conditioned response
because it has a history of being paired with an unconditional stimulus
• Ex: meat powder + tone= CS WHICH CAUSES CR

➢ Conditioned Response (CR): is the learned response that occurs to the conditioned stimulus
• Unconditional stimulus + neutral stimulus (get paired continuously)= CS=CR
o To establish that the conditioning has taken place, the CS must cause a response
in the absence of a US

➢ The main difference between a UR and CR is that a UR occurs naturally while a CR must be
learned
• Salivation is a UR if it is caused by the US, which is the meat powder
• Salivation is a CR if it is caused by the CS which is the tone

A. Classical Conditioning and the Brain

➢ Usually the US will automatically trigger the UR but what happens with US and the CS get
triggered at the same time is ( according to Hebbs rule)
• When a weak connection between neurons gets stimulated at the same time as a strong
connection, the weak connection tends to get stronger. Overtime, it will cause the
same response as the strong connection.
• Ex: when the puff of air and the tone gets stimulated at the same time; the connection
between the puff of air and the blinking is already strong; but the weak connection
between the tone and the blinking becomes enhanced. Eventually, the tone will cause
the blinking of the eye

Processes of Classical Conditioning

➢ Conditional responding may be diminish over time, or it may occur with new stimuli with which
the response has never been paired.

A. Acquisition, Extinction and Spontaneous Recovery

➢ Acquisition: is the initial phase of learning in which a response is established
• When the US and the CS are being paired together constantly; CR response eventually is
being conditioned
• Pavlovs experiment: tone-food pairing

➢ When the US and the CS are not paired together often, the CR would be weak (wouldn’t occur
as often)
• Synapses would be weaker if the simultaneous firing of the CS and US did not occur all
the time
 • When the tone was presented and the food was delivered only sometimes, the dogs
would not salivate a lot

➢ Extinction: is the loss or weakening of a conditioned response when a conditioned stimulus and
unconditioned stimulus no longer occur together
• Eventually if the tone is presented without any food; the dogs will salivate less and less
o No food, no need to salivate
o The areas of the brain the fired the neurons based on the learned association no
longer work

➢ Even when a conditional response is extinct, it could quickly reappear if the CS and the US ever
got paired together
• The brain areas related to the conditioning got preserved in some form
➢ Spontaneous Recovery: the reoccurrence of an previously extinguished response, typically after
some time has passed since extinction
• Dogs began to salivate again in response to the tone
o Due to the fact that extinction can lead to evolving and learning something new
o The dogs learned that the food will not appear at the sound of the tone
o Spontaneous recovery: Dogs would have lost the memory of extinction (the fact
that food does not come at the sound of the tone), gained back old memory; CR
response
➢ Extinction and spontaneous recovery are evidence that classically conditions can change once
they are acquired

B. Stimulus Generalization and Discrimination

➢ Generalization: is a process in which a response that originally occurs to a specific stimulus also
occurs to different, through similar, stimuli
• Dogs salivating to similar tones other than the original
o This can occur because the stimulus activates not only our brains representation
of that one item but also our representation of similar items
o Additional representations can be activated at the same time as the synapses
involved in CR
➢ Generalization can cause learning to become too flexible

➢ Discrimination: it’s when an organism only learns to respond to one stimulus but not to new
stimuli even though they may be similar
➢ If the CS is presented without the US it its less likely that these stimuli would lead to stimulus
generation
 Applications of Classical Conditioning
➢ Can be applied to many situations including emotional learning, aversions to certain foods,
advertising and sexual responses

A. Conditioning Emotional Responses

➢ Conditioned emotional responses (CER): consist of emotional and physiological responses that
develop to a specific object or situation
• Watsons experiment on “little albert”; they made him afraid of white rats or anything
furry (and that’s white)
o At first he wasn’t afraid of the white rat, but when the rat was there and they
startled him by striking a steel bar with a hammer; he quickly associated the rat
with the steel bar and became afraid of the rat
o Loud noise was the US and the fear was the UR and the rat since it was there at
the same time became the CS and fear became the CR
o The conditioned eventually generalized to anything that is white and furry
➢ CER can also be used to explain phobias which are intense, irrational fears of specific objects or
situations
➢ When an organism learns a fear-related association; activity will occur inside the amygdala

➢ Contextual Fear conditioning: when a person learns to fear a specific location, brain activity will
occur inside the hippocampus and it will interact with fear-related activity inside the amygdala
• Ex: cage and electrical shock

➢ Psychopaths do not react to the CS that is presented to them

o When a face is presented (CS) with a painful stimulus (US); only the painful stimulus
triggers an emotional response
o Normally, people would eventually respond to the CS

B. Evolutionary Role for Fear Conditioning

➢ Preparedness: the biological predisposition to rapidly learn a response to a particular class of
stimuli
• Humans have a strong predisposition to fear snakes that has caused death and severe
injury in their past history
➢ Psychologists conducted experiments to test this idea
➢ Generally, the UR that occurs due to the shock is that sweat builds up on the hand ; it is known
as the skin conductance response
• They found that eventually after the CS (snake photos) is paired with the US (
Shock); that people showed a high SCR compared to when they showed the CS (flower
pictures) with the shock and even when they showed the CS (gun) with the US (shock)

C. Conditioned Taste Aversions

 ➢ Conditioned taste aversion(CTA): Acquired dislike or disgust of a food or drink because
it was paired with an illness
• First when the person eats the food ( which is the neutral stimulus); there is no response
• Then, once they become sick (that is the US); the respond through aversion (UR)
• After a while once the food gets encountered again, the clams become a (CS) and the
aversion becomes the CR (when the CS and the US are linked together they can produce
feelings of aversion even if physical sickness is not present)
• It’s a “naturally occurring experience”

➢ Aversion involves both a feeling of disgust and a withdrawal or avoidance response

➢ CTA can develop in a variety of ways such as through illness, the flu, medical procedures
or excessive intoxication
➢ CTA is just focused on the flavour of the food; doesn’t involve other external stimuli
• Shows that humans can biologically associate food with illness

➢ CTA cannot be used to describe certain illness such as food poisoning due to difference
in timing (between the CS and the US)
• One usually gets food poisoning after a while, the time interval between the CS
and the US is prolonged, most conditioning that happens usually occurs when
the CS and the US interact more quickly (short time interval between them)

➢ Latent inhibition: this occurs when frequent experience with a stimulus before it is
paired with a US makes it less likely that conditioning will occur after a single episode of
illness
• It can be applied to many instances not just CTA
➢ Unfamiliar foods are more likely to cause CTA than familiar foods because the brain is
more prone to remembering the first bad experience that a person has had with the
food even after a considerable amount of time has passed

Learning without Awareness

A. Drug Use and Tolerance

➢ Conditioned Drug tolerance: when the body is changed to the point where it is braced
for the drug to be metabolized from CS cues of the drug. Drug will be needed to
override these preparatory responses so that the desired effect will be obtained
• As a person keeps consuming drugs, anything to do with that drug (equipment,
injections) will serve as a CS (cues) that a drug (US) is going to be taken into the
body (UR)
 ➢ Sometimes when the drug is taken in a different way (not the usual way; take in a diff
environment, diff body part) this can be lethal because the CS that were normally paired
with the delivery of the drug has changed which makes the body not prepared for the
delivery of the drug
➢ When there is no conditional preparatory response that prepares the body for the drug
effects, normal doses can be lethal too.

B. Sexual Arousal
➢ Sexual arousal can be influenced by classical conditioning
• Male quails mated (CR) with model birds (CS), that had a history of mating with
female birds (the US)
• Represents fetish found in humans
➢ A fetish involves sexual attraction and fixation on an object (such as leather, lace, shoes, boots
and undergarments)

C. The paradox of “diet” beverages

➢ The body becomes conditioned to the food and drink that is consumed, especially ones that are
sweet
• The candy bar is the (CS- conditioned stimulus) tells the gut that the high amount of
calories (US) is on its way to the gut
o Body uses this relationship to control sweet intake
o Since pop beverages do not really have this sugar they interrupt the relationship
between the sugary sweet and the high calories because artificial sweetener is
not followed by calories
o As a result, the body continues to send out hunger messages for unhealthy
foods. Hence, obesity occurs.

Working the Scientific Literacy Model: Conditioning and Negative Political Advertising

What do we know about classical conditioning in negative political advertising?

➢ Negative political advertising is often associated with “unflattering images.”

• Opponents often use black and white images and always associate political leader (the
one that they are against) with negative emotions and expressions to make voters feel
that this leader will behave negatively towards them; causing them to less likely vote for
this person
o The CS would be the attacked politician, the US would be the negative imagery
and the UR would be the negative emotional response to the imagery.
o Eventually, the opponents would want a CR (negative emotional response;
including “I will not vote for him\her”

How can science help explain classical conditioning in negative political advertising?
 ➢ Evaluative Conditioning: is an attempt to use negative emotions to alter peoples opinion of
political candidates is similar to psychology research
• Experimenters pair a stimulus with either a positive or negative stimuli and this
repeated association of a stimulus with an emotion leads participants to develop a
positive or negative feeling toward that stimulus

Can we critically evaluate this information?

➢ A major question both with negative political advertising and with the Gorn is whether
producing a negative opinion automatically means that you are producing a positive opinion of
the other option
➢ Cannot tell if the results are due to liking one option or disliking the other option
• Can be applied to political ads; the party creating the negative political ads may not
necessarily boost opinions of the parties running them
➢ Different people depending on their culture, education, socioeconomic status react differently
to ads
• Ads are always geared to a specific group of individuals; not towards every single person
(e.g students)
o Doing this will increase the likelihood that viewers will have the emotional
reaction that makes up the US and the CR in the conditioned emotional
response

Why is this relevant?

➢ Third-person effect: when people assume that others are more affected by advertising and
mass media messages than they themselves are

6.2 Operant Conditioning: Learning through Consequences

➢ Operant Conditioning: a type of learning in which behavior is influenced by consequences
• The individual acts or operates on the environment
• It involves voluntary responses, whereas classical conditioning focuses on “reflexive
responses”
• Operant learning involves having a “response” and a “consequence”
o e.g behavior that leads to a negative outcome- such as eating disgusting food
and that causes you to gag (consequence) and your response would be not eat
the food again

Processes of Operant Conditioning

➢ Contingency: it simply means that a consequence depends upon an action

• Earning good grades is generally contingent upon studying effectively
 a. .Reinforcement and Punishment

➢ Reinforcement: is a process in which an event or reward that follows a response increases the
likelihood of that response occurring again
➢ From his experiments, Throndike proposed the law of effect: the idea that responses followed
by satisfaction will occur again and those that are not followed by satisfaction become less
likely to occur again
➢ Reinforcer: is a stimulus that is contingent upon a response and that increases the probability of
that response occurring again
• Reinforcer: would be a stimulus like food and the reinforcement would be the changes
in the frequency of behavior as a result of the food reward
➢ Punishment: is a process that decreases the future probability of a response
➢ Punisher: is a stimulus that is contingent upon a response and that results in a decrease in
behavior
• They are not defined based on stimuli but rather on their effects on behavior
• Regardless of the punisher; they always make it less likely that a particular response will
occur again

b. Positive and Negative Reinforcement

➢ Positive: means that a stimulus is being added to the situation (can refer to both punishment
and reinforcement)
➢ Negative: this means that the stimulus is removed from a situation (can refer to both
punishment and reinforcement)
➢ Positive Reinforcement: refers to the strengthening of behavior after potential reinforces such
as praise, money, or nourishment follow that behavior ( the positive indicates an “addition” of
the reward)
• Laughing at your profs jokes, laughing seems rewarding-causes the prof to tell more
jokes
➢ Negative Reinforcement: involves the strengthening of a behavior because it removes or
diminishes a stimulus
• For instance, taking an asprin will help to remove the painful headache
• Asprin=negative reinforcement
• Painful headache=stimulus

➢ Negative reinforcement can be further classified into two categories:

• Avoidance learning: is a specific type of negative reinforcement that removes the
possibility that a stimulus will occur
o Paying your bills on time to avoid late fees
o Increased activity in the orbital frontal cortex when avoid a negative outcome
• Escape Learning: occurs if a response removes a stimulus that is already present
o When hearing overly loud music, a person usually covers their ears. In this case,
they are avoiding the “aversive stimulus” which is the loudness of the music but
they cannot get rid of the music because it its already present
➢ Positive Punishment: is a process in which behavior decreases in frequency because it was
followed by a particular, usually unpleasant stimulus (the stimulus is positive because it is often
increased)
• Spraying a cat with water, helps to stop the cat from jumping on the counters
➢ Negative Punishment: this occurs when a behavior decreases because it removes or diminishes
a particular stimulus
• Withholding someone’s privileges due to negative behavior

c. Primary and Secondary Reinforcers

➢ Primary Reinforcers: consist of reinforcing stimuli that satisfy basic motivational needs-needs
that affect an individual’s ability to survive (and even reproduce) (reinforcing stimuli include
food, water, shelter, etc)
➢ Secondary reinforcers: consist of stimuli that acquire their reinforcing effects only after we
learn that they have value.
• Examples include money and praise- they do not directly affect survival

➢ The nucleus accumbens becomes activated during the processing of all kinds rewards including
primary ones and “artificial” ones

➢ Dopamine gets released into the brain when receiving rewards and it can be released depending
upon the kind of behaviors that individuals are engaged in (people who are implusive, or people
who like to engage in more risky behavior)
➢ Secondary reinforcers also trigger the release of dopamine in the brain (such as money);
particlulary the basal ganglia
➢ When a particular behavior gets rewarded for the first time, dopamine is often released
• The dopamine releasing neurons in the nuclear accumbens help them brain to keep
record of which behaviors got rewarded and which ones did not
➢ Discriminative Stimulus: a cue or event that indicates a response, if made it will be reinforced
• A pigeon in an operant chamber will learn pecking will be reinforced when the light is
turned on (light is like the cue\event)
• Shows that humans and other species use cues from the environment to help us decide
whether or not to perform a certain behavior

d. Delayed Reinforcement and Extinction

➢ Delayed Reinforcement: can influence a number of human behaviors; it happens when the
reward is delayed
• When there is a time lapse between the action and the consequence; reinforcement is
less effective
o Example: a drug that presents its “reward” right after its taken will be much
more effective compared to a drug that’s effects occur much later
 o The time lapse (difference) often makes it harder for the brain to mentally
associate the reinforcement from the drug (the consequence) with drug-taking
(action)

➢ Extinction: the weakening of an operant response when reinforcement is no longer available

• Losing the internet connection would stop a person from refreshing their browser
because there is not reinforcement from doing so

e. Reward Devaluation
➢ When a reward becomes devalued, the response rate for that devalued reward often decreases
➢ Behaviors can change when the reinforce loses some of its appeal
• Experimenters pre-feeding rats with food and then once that food is given to them
versus another type of food during the experiment; the rats will find that the food that
was not given to them during the experiment to be more rewarding
➢ Reward devaluation can occur by making one of the values less appealing
• Making one type food cause illness while the other does not; will make the food that
causes illness more rewarding

Application of Operant Conditioning

A. Shaping
➢ Shaping: is a procedure in which a specific operant response is created by reinforcing successive
approximations of that response
• Step by step processes are taken until the desired response is learned
o Teaching rats how to eventually touch the lever by reinforcing behaviors that
approximate lever pressing (such as standing up, facing the lever, etc)
➢ Chaining: involves linking together two or more shaped behaviors into more complex action or
sequence of actions

B. Schedule of Reinforcement
➢ Schedules of Reinforcement: rules that determine when reinforcement is available
• Reinforcement can available highly predictable or very irregular times
• A given behavior is usually rewarded according to some kind of schedule

➢ Continuous Reinforcement: every response made results in reinforcements and learning initially
occurs rapidly
• Vending machines deliver a snack every time the correct amount of money is inserted

➢ Partial (intermittent) Reinforcement: only a certain number of responses are rewarded or a

certain amount of time must pass before reinforcement is available

➢ There are four different types of partial reinforcements possible:

1. Ratio Schedules: means that reinforcement is based on the amount of responding
2. Interval Schedules: are based on the amount of time between reinforcements
 3. Fixed schedule: the schedule of reinforcement remains the same over time
4. Variable schedule: even though the schedule of reinforcement is linked to an average, it
varies from one reinforcement to the next
➢ Fixed-ratio schedule: reinforcement is delivered after a specific amount of responses have been
completed
• Rat having to press the lever ten times in order to receive food
➢ Variable-ratio schedule: the number of responses required to receive reinforcement varies
according to an average.
• VR5 (variable –ratio with an average of five trials between each reinforcement). This can
include trials that require 7 lever presses to receive the reward, then 4, then three, etc.
However, when all of the lever presses are added together from each trial, you will get
five. On average, to receive a reward you will need to press the lever five times
• According to animal studies, variable-ratio schedules will lead to the highest rate of
responding of the four types of reinforcement schedules

➢ Fixed-interval schedule: reinforces the first response occurring after a set amount of time
passes
• Responding will drop when reinforcement is delivered and responding will increase
because the reinforcement becomes available soon
• When your pysc prof gives you an exam every three weeks, your reinforcement of
studying will be on a fixed-interval schedule
• More studying will occur near the tests date and less studying will occur after the test is
over

➢ Variable-interval schedule: in which the first response is reinforced following a variable amount
of time
• When a sales person approaches customers can increase the chance of making sale
(even when they approach those customers at different times)

➢ Partial Reinforcement effect: refers to a phenomenon in which organisms that have been
conditioned under partial reinforcement resist extinction longer than those conditioned under
continuous reinforcement
• Due to the fact that an individual is not used to getting a reinforcement for every
response, so when a lack of reinforcement occurs it doesn’t affect their motivation to
produce a response; even if the reinforcement is no longer available.

C. Applying Punishment
➢ People tend to be more sensitive to the unpleasantness of punishment than they are to the
pleasures of reward
➢ Spanking is generally a very effective punisher when it is used for immediately stopping a
behavior
➢ While punishment may suppress an unwanted behavior temporarily it doesn’t teach which
behaviors are appropriate
 ➢ Punishment of any kind is most effective when combined with reinforcement of an alternative,
suitable response

D. Are Classical and Operant Learning Distinct Events?

➢ It is possible that a complex behavior is influenced by both types of learning; either classical
conditioning

Working the Scientific Literacy Model: Reinforcement and Superstition

What do we know about superstition and Reinforcement?

➢ Reinforcement is often systematic and predictable, if it is not then behavior will be extinguished
➢ Sometimes it is not clear what brings about the reinforcement
➢ Many of the superstitions that humans have can be explained by operant conditioning

How can science explain superstition?

➢ Humans are superstitious; many psychologists did tests to see whether superstitious behavior
had any effect on performance outcomes
• College students who participated in a golf club game were either given a golf ball that
was said to have good luck while the other did not. Students who were given the ball
that was the one with good luck performed better than the ones who were given the
other ball.

Can we Critically Evaluate these findings?

➢ Superstitious may enhance individuals belief that they can perform successfully at a task; this
finding is best applied to situations where the participant have some control over the outcome
(such as taking an exam or playing a sport)
➢ Superstitions are also prone to confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out evidence in favor of
your existing views and ignore inconsistent information

Module 6.3: Cognitive and Observational Learning

Cognitive Perspectives on Learning

A. Latent Learning

➢ Learning and reinforcement for learning may not be expressed until there is an opportunity to
do so
• Learning occurs even if there is no behavioral evidence of it taking place
➢ Latent learning: learning that is not immediately expressed by a response until the organism is
reinforced for doing so
• Example: the experiment done on rats running through a maze
 o First group: these rats would obtain food; each time they navigated through the
maze correctly (done for 10 trials-food waiting at the end of the maze)
o Second group: allowed to explore the maze but were not given food until they
completed the 11th trial
o Third group: never got food while in the maze
o Results: the first group learnt the best way to shuttle through the maze because
they were constantly being reinforced with food. The second group only had a
similar performance when they were being “reinforced” or rewarded with food
at the end of the 11th trial
o Conclusions: Rats and humans have similar cognitive maps of their environment.
Also, that humans and rats acquire information in the absence of immediate
reinforcement and that we can use that information when circumstances allow
➢ Latent learning did not disprove the operant learning research that highlighted the importance
of reinforcement
➢ Later research that rats could have learned different parts of the maze were located in relation
to each other rather than forming a complete cognitive map of the environment

B. S-O-R Theory of Learning

➢ Operant conditioning studies (focuses on the relationship between the stimulus and a response)
➢ S-O-R theory (Stimulus-organism response theory): when an individual is actively learning info
and processing it and that influences their behavior as well as their mental internal lives
➢ S-R and S-O-R theorists agreed on the idea that thinking occurred but they disagreed on the
content and what caused the thinking
➢ S-R psychologists: assumed that thoughts are based on what the organism has learned
throughout its life. The varying ways in which individuals respond is based on what kind of
learning history they had.
➢ S-O-R psychologists: individual differences vary due to the how they in how they interpret
situation; what the stimulus means to them
• Same stimulus in the same situation could produce different responses based on
different factors (including individuals fatigue, mood and presence of other organisms)
• “O” represents how organisms will interpret a situation in a variety of ways

Observational Studies

➢ Observational Learning: involves changes in behavior and knowledge that result from watching
others
• Examples: cultural customs, trends, rituals, preferences exist through observation
➢ Socially transmitting behavior is the primary way in which adaptive behavior is transmitted
• Examples: children learning what\what not to do based on their parents actions, rats
using each other’s breath to know what food to eat and cats learning how to avoid
obstacles based on how other cats do so

A. Processes Supporting Observational Learning

➢ Albert Bandura identified four processes involved in observational learning which include:
attention, memory, reproducing the action and motivation
• Without a single one of these processes, observational learning would not occur
➢ Attention:
• Seeing someone being of afraid of something can result in one to have the same fear
even with lack of experience
• Paying attention while watching a scary movie can result in fear of something particular
in the movie, even if not having direct experience with that particular scary character
(e.g sharks)
➢ Observational learning can extend to observational conditioning
• Observing someone being rewarded for their actions can result in a person doing those
actions
➢ Memory:
• Really important in observational learning
• When a behavior is learnt there is often a delay before the opportunity to perform the
behavior arises
• FMRI has shown that when humans observe others receiving something; that leads to
activity in the hippocampus (which is an area related to memory formation)
• Memory for how to reproduce a particular behavior can be found at a very early age

➢ Reproduction of the behavior:

• Can very difficult and often depends on the task that’s being mimicked
o Simple daily activities can be reproduced easily while special techniques (that
require much more skill) can take longer
➢ Researchers have found that observational learning is most effective when we first observe,
practice immediately and continue practicing
• Observing helps us to understand what mistakes are being made

➢ Motivation:
• When one has desires or aspirations that will make them observe certain behaviors and
actually do them
o Being hungry=makes a person want to search for the food where others are
looking, a person who doesn’t have any aspiration to learn how to play the
piano will not likely observe their piano teacher

➢ Observational Punishment also works but it is not as effective as reinforcement

• Witnessing others committing negative behavior may prevent one from doing it; not
always the case

B. Imitation and Observational Learning

➢ Imitation: recreating someone else’s motor behavior or expression, often to accomplish a
specific goal
 • Ability seems to be very common among humans
o Children get positive reinforcement when they properly imitate the behavior of
an adult; seen as a form of operant learning
o Imitation might involve a more cognitive representation of one’s own actions as
well as the observed actions of someone else
➢ Children may imitate beyond what is needed
• They can imitate parts of the process that may be unnecessary

C. Mirror Neurons
➢ Parts of the frontal lobes have been associated with planning movements can become active
when an action is being done or when observing another do an action
➢ Mirror neurons are found in several areas of the brain and have been linked to functions ranging
from understanding other people’s emotional states to observational learning
➢ Groups of neurons can be sensitive to the context of the action
• People can be viewing similar actions but different mirror neurons can be fired in
response to those actions
➢ Has not been determined whether or not mirror neurons can be fired in response to viewing
violent movies, games, hearing songs about violence, etc.

Working the Scientific Literacy Model: Linking Media Exposure to Behavior

What do we know about how media effects on behavior?

➢ Learning from the media involves direct imitation and what humans observe shapes what we
view as normal or acceptable behavior

How can science explain the effect of media exposure on children’s behavior?

➢ There were many experiments that showed how violent behavior, films and music can cause a
person\child to mirror those types of actions
• Video of adults beating a doll: children who viewed this video and were given a chance
to play with a doll; imitated the same actions as the adult versus those who didn’t
• Aggressive film leads to aggressive actions and desensitization to violence: children who
watched a aggressive film before playing a hockey game ended up being more violent
while playing the game
• Listening to aggressive music: studies have found that men who listed to sexually
aggressive music towards women; acted that way towards them when given the chance
to interact (same thing occurred when done with females)

Can we critically evaluate the research?

➢ The research that is being performed does not answer several questions such as “does exposure
to violent behavior cause violent behavior or desensitization?” or “does early exposure to
violence turn children into violent adolescents or adults?”
➢ Even though there is a positive association between violent exposure and violent actions it
doesn’t mean that it causes it
➢ Most studies do not focus on why aggressive behavior occurs: After some research has been
done; here is some reasons:
• Frontal and parietal lobes showed reduced activity as people became less sensitive to
aggression
• Another experiment demonstrated that: people who had less of a history of being
exposed to media violence showed more activity in the parietal and frontal lobes related
to inhibitory responses compared to those who did
 Chapter 7: Memory

7.1 Memory Systems

➢ Memory: is actually a collection of several systems that store information in different forms for
differing amounts of time

The Atkinson-Shiffrin Model

➢ This model was created by Richard Atikinson and Richard Shiffrin in the 1960’s
➢ Fig. 7.1: Memory is a multi-stage process. Information flows through a brief sensory memory
store into short-term memory, where rehearsal will encode it into long-term memory for
permanent storage. Memories are retrieved from long-term memory and brought into short-
term storage for further processing.
➢ The model includes three memory stores:
• Stores: retain information without using it for a specific purpose
• The three different stores include sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term
memory
• Control processes: shift information from one memory store to another (represented by arrows
in the model)
• Information enters the sensory memory through vision, hearing and other senses
• Attention: selects which information will be passed on to STM
• Encoding: the process of storing information in the LTM system
• Retrieval: brings information from LTM back into STM (what happens when you become aware
of existing memories)

A. Sensory Memory
➢ Sensory Memory: is a memory store that accurately holds perceptual information for a very
brief amount of time (how brief depends on which sensory system we talk about)
• Iconic memory: the visual form of sensory memory is held for about one-half to one
second
• Echoic memory: the auditory form of sensory memory which is held considerably longer
but still only for about five seconds
➢ George Spirling devised an experiment to test the storage capacity of iconic memory
• He flashed a grid of letters on a screen for a second and participants had to report what
they saw
• In the whole report condition: participants attempted to recall as many letters as
possible but they were actually only able to report three of the four letters and these
would all be in the same line
• Based off the results from this experiment, he hypothesized that the memory of the
letters faded faster than the participants could report them
• To test his hypothesis he conducted a partial report, in which participants were shown
letters on a screen followed by a tone (low, medium, high)
• Participants were able to report four letters but this time from different lines and
because the tone came after the screen was blank the only way for the person to
remember the letters was by memory
 • Spirling concluded from this experiment that the participants were able to remember all
12 letters but they were not present long enough in the sensory memory for the
participants to be able to report them.

➢ Attention allows us to move a small amount of the information from our sensory memory into
STM for further processing
• This information is referred to as being within the “spotlight of attention”
• Information that is outside the spotlight of attention is not transferred into the STM and
is quite unlikely to be remembered
➢ Sensory memory and attention are related to each other through the phenomena of “change
blindness.”
• In the “change blindness” experiment, participants will be shown two photographs that
will have only one difference between them and the goal of the experiment is to identify
the difference
• Photograph 1, blank, photograph 2
• If the difference is not the focus of attention , then the participants will likely fail to
notice the change (change blindness)
• This is because one version of the change fades from sensory memory as the other
comes in
• If the participant is paying attention to that changing element, the image of the first
version of the item will be transferred into STM when the second changed version
appears on the screen
B. Short-term memory and the magical number 7
➢ Transferring information from sensory memory into short term memory is not guaranteed to be
remembered
➢ This is because short term memory: is a memory store with limited capacity and duration (less
than a minute)
➢ Miller came up with the idea of “the magical number 7” after which he conducted an
experiment where participants were able to remember 7 units
➢ STM can only rehearse seven units of information at once before forgetting something
➢ A “unit of information” varies from situation to situation
➢ Our memory capacity gets expanded with “chunking”: organizing smaller units of information
into larger more meaningful units
➢ The ability to chunk out information varies from situation to situation
• This suggests that experience or expertise plays a role in our ability to chunk large
amounts of information so that it fits into our STM
• This is displayed through the example of chess; most people would memorize the
position on the chess board individually; chess experts would be able to see it as a singe
unit (able to remember more positions than others)
• Would only work when the chess pieces are aligned in meaningful chess positions; when
they are randomly placed on the board the experts memory advantage disappears
• Chunking would allow chess masters to envision what the chess board will look like after
future moves
 ➢ Expertise is not based on some innate talent; it can be learned through intensive practice

C. Long-Term Memory
➢ Only a small amount of information from STM is encoded or transformed into memory traces
➢ Encoding allows info to enter the final memory store in the Atkinson-Shiffrin model
• This store is referred to as long term memory: holds information for extended periods
of time if not permanently
• Long-term memory has no capacity limitations
• All of the information that undergoes encoding will be entered into LTM
➢ Once the information enters the LTM, the information needs to be organized.
• Its organized based on the semantic categories that the items belong to
• The mental representation of the cat, would be stored near the mental representation
of other animals such as mouse and a dog
• Semantically related items are stored near each other in the LTM
➢ LTM is organized based on sounds of the word and how the word looks
• This explains the tip of the tongue phenomena which is when you are able to retrieve
similar sounding words or words that start with the same letter but can’t quite retrieve
the word that you want
➢ Having the info in the LTM doesn’t mean that you can access it when you want
➢ The likelihood that a given piece of information will undergo retrieval-the process of accessing
memorized information and returning it to short term memory is influenced by a number of
different factors including the quality of encoding and the strategies used to retrieve the info

Working the Scientific Literacy Model

Distinguishing short-term from Long-term Memory Stores

What do we know about short term and long term memory stores?

➢ STM lasts for approximately 30-60 seconds and usually contains 7+ units of information and LTM
has no fixed time limits or capacity
➢ “The serial position curve”- U shaped graph
➢ Serial position effects: in general most people will recall the first few items from a list and the
last few items but only an item or two from the middle
➢ Primary effect: the first few items get remembered easily because they have begun the process
of entering LTM
➢ Recency effect: the last few items are remembered well because the items are still within our
STM
➢ The letters that are in the middle is more difficult to determine as they would be in the process
of being encoded into LTM

How can science explain the difference between STM and LTM stores?

➢ Proactive interference: a process in which the first information learned occupies memory,
leaving a fewer resources left to remember the newer information
➢ Retroactive interference: the most recently learned information overshadows some older
memories that have not yet made it into long-term memory
 ➢ These two types of inferences would result in poorer memory performance for items that are in
the middle of the list.
➢ When volunteers remembered information from early in the serial position curve; the
hippocampus was active
➢ The brain areas associated with sensory information-hearing or seeing the words were more
active when people recalled items at the end of the serial position curve.

Can we critically evaluate the distinction between STM and LTM?

➢ To evaluate the idea that the serial-position effect is caused by two interacting memory systems
we need at least two types of tests
• First we need evidence that it is possible to change the performance on one test but not
the other
• We need to find medical cases in which brain damage affected one system, but not the
other
➢ When items on a list are presented quickly it becomes more difficult to encode those items into
long-term memory (which results in a reduction in the primary effect)
➢ The STM will contain what is most recently presented; thus leaving the recency effect
unchanged
➢ The recency effect can be reduced by inserting a delay between the presentation of the list and
the test (allow info to be stored in the STM; LTM and the primary effect will be unaffected)
➢ STM defecits can occur after damage to the lower portions of the temporal and parietal lobes as
well as to lateral (outside) areas of the frontal lobes
➢ Damage to the hippocampus will prevent the transfer of memories from the STM to the LTM
• These patients will have relatively preserved memories of their past, but will be unable
to add to them with new info from short-term memory

The Working Memory Model: An Active STM System

➢ Rehearsal: repeating the information until you do not need to remember it no more
➢ Working memory: a model of short-term remembering that includes a combination of memory
components that can temporarily store small amounts of information for a short period of time
• Working memory can also draw from older information that stored in a relatively stable
way
➢ A feature of working memory is that it recognizes that stimuli are encoded simultaneously in a
number of different ways (e.g with vision and hearing) rather than simply a single unit of
information)
➢ The model for short term memory is divided into three sub categories: the phonological loop,
the visuospatial sketchpad and the episodic buffer
➢ These storage components are then coordinated by a control center known as the central
executive

A. The Phonological Loop

 ➢ The phonological loop: is a storage component of working memory that relies on rehearsal and
that stores information as sounds or an auditory code
• It engages some portions of the brain that specialize in speech and hearing and it can be
very active without affecting memory for visual and spatial information
➢ Based on the word length effect, we know that people are more likely to remember words that
have one word syllables rather than four or five word syllables
➢ Research indicates that working memory can store as many syllables as can be rehearsed in
about two seconds and that this information is retained for approx. 15 seconds

B. The Visuospatial Sketchpad

➢ The visuospatial sketchpad: is a storage component of working memory that maintains

visual images and spatial layouts in a visuospatial code
• It keeps you up to date on where objects are around you and where you intend to go
• It engages the parts of the brain related to vision and space and does not affect memory
for sounds
• Items stored in visuospatial memory is based on shapes, colours and textures
➢ Visuospatial working memory may use a form of chunking: the process of combining visual
features into a single unit (known as feature binding)
➢ Working memory can store information as separate chunks (colour, shape and the texture)
➢ After visual feature binding, visuospatial memory can accurately retain approx. four whole
objects regardless of how many individual features one can find on those objects

C. The Episodic Buffer

➢ Episodic buffer: a storage component of working memory that combines the images
and sounds from the other two components into coherent story-like episodes
➢ The episodic buffer seems to hold 7 to 10 pieces of information which may be combined
with other memory stores
➢ People usually remember a meaningful prose (prose=words strung into sentences) than
remembering a list or random words

D. The Central Executive

➢ The central executive: is the control center for working memory; it coordinates
attention and the exchange of information among the three storage components
• It does so by examining what information is relevant to the persons goals,
interests and prior knowledge and then focusing attention on the working
memory component whose information will be most useful in the situation

Long-Term Memory Systems: Declarative and Nondelcarative memories

➢ Declarative memories (explicit memories): are memories that are consciously aware of
and that can be verbalized including facts about the world and ones own personal
experience
 ➢ Nondeclarative memories (implicit memories): includes actions or behaviors that you
can remember and perform without awareness

A. Declarative Memory
➢ Declarative memories come in two varieties:
• Episodic memories: are declarative memories for personal experiences that
seem to be organized around “episodes” and are recalled from a first-person
(“I” or “my”) perspective
• Example: would be first day of university
• Semantic memories: are declarative memories that include facts about the
world (captials of provinces, etc)
➢ Your semantic memory is your knowledge of what a bike is and whereas your episodic
memory the time you rode the bike
➢ As people get older, their episodic memory declines more rapidly than their semantic
memory
• Older people are more likely to forget where they went on vacation five years
ago than they are to forget something like the names of provincial capitals
B. Non declarative Memory
➢ Nondeclarative memories occurs when the previous experience influence performance
on a task that does not require the person to intentionally remember those experiences
• A woman who learned how to make dresses following her injuries but doesn’t
have any memory of learning to do so
➢ Procedural memories: are patterns of muscle movements such as how to walk, play
piano or drive a car
• We often don’t think of these individual steps that are involved in these
behaviors, yet we excute them flawlessly most of the time
➢ Another form of non-declarative memory is classical conditioning (the neutral bell, and
the response of salivating)
➢ A method of testing non-declarative memory is through priming: idea that previous
exposure to a stimulus will affect an individual’s later responses
• If the word chase was flashed on the screen and you were asked to complete
the word “cha—“ the first word that comes to mind would be chase even
though there are other words that start with “cha.”
➢ Distinction between the two types of memories doesn’t mean that they work in isolation, many
day to day experiences are influenced by declarative and non-declarative memory

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory

A. Memory at the Neural Level

➢ “Cells that fire together, wire together.”
➢ Hebb suggested when neurons fire at the same time that leads to chemical and physical changes
in them, which makes them more likely to fire again
➢ He was proven correct through the process of Long-term potentiation (LTP): demonstrated that
there is an enduring increase in connectivity and transmission of neural signals between nerve
signals that fire together
➢ The discovery of LTP occurred when researchers electrically stimulated two neurons in a rabbits
hippocampus
➢ The finding that they got from this experiment didn’t demonstrate that LTP is memory but the
strengthening of synapses shown in LTP studies may be one of the underlying mechanisms that
allow memories to form
➢ Lasting memories require consolidation: the process of converting short-term memories into
long-term memories in the brain which may happen at the level of small neuronal messages
groups or across the cortex
➢ Cellular consolidation: when neurons fire together a number of times, they will adapt and make
the changes more permanent
• This process involves physical changes to the synapse between the cells so that
the presynaptic cell is more likely to stimulate a specific postsynaptic cell
➢ Without the consolidation process, the initial changes to the synapse eventually fade away, and
presumably so does the memory.
➢ The initial strengthening of synapses and long term consolidation of these connections allow us
to form new memories, thus providing us an ability to learn and to adapt to our behavior based
on previous experiences.
• The process are not performed in all areas of the brain
B. Memory, the Brain and amnesia
➢ Henry Molison was suffering interactable epilepsy; he got referred to DR. William. Dr.
William went through a resection (removal) of his medial temporal lobes-including the
hippocampus-on both sides of his brain
➢ However after the surgery, H.M had amnensia: a profound loss of atleast one form of
memory
• However, he could recall some memories but he wasn’t able to form new ones
• The doctors discovered that he had a subtype of amnesia called anterograde
amnesia: the inability to form new memories for events occurring after a brain
surgery
➢ His LTM was intact but he could not transfer declarative memories from STM to LTM
➢ Because the damage of his hippocampus and the missing medial temporal lobes (as well as
surrounding lobes and amygdala); this region of the brain must be involved with consolidating
memories, enabling information from STM to enter and remain in LTM
➢ The Hippocampus may not be where declarative memories are not stored, but it does maintain
LTP networks until the acquired behavior can form more connections throughout the brain
• The hippocampus is not needed to retrieve memories but without it these coritical
networks will never be formed because the original LTP and consolidation process
would not have been completed
• Damage to the hippocampus prevents future consolidation (refer to figure 7.11 page
284)
 ➢ The hippocampus also appears to be essential for spatial memories this is because
remembering spatial information often involves updating a memory with new
information such as learning alternative routes to get to your destination
• People who are required to remember more routes often have bigger
hippocampus’s
➢ Reconsolidation: when the hippocampus functions to update strengthen or modify
existing long term memories
• These memories form networks in the cortex; where they can be retrieved
when necessary
➢ These long-term declarative memories are distributed throughout the cortex of the
brain rather than being localized in one central region
• The longer the networks are used, they will eventually not need any input
from the hippocampus
• The cortical networks will become self-sustaining; the more memory that is
retrieved, the larger and more distributed the cortices will become.
➢ Newer memories are more likely to be lost following brain damage than older
memories because they haven’t had as much time to form extensive networks using
cross-cortical storage
• This brain damage disrupts the consolidation of recently experienced
memories; causing them to fade away
➢ Retrograde amnesia: a condition in which for the events preceding a trauma or
injury is lost
• It is caused by damage to the medial temporal lobes or to the cortex of the
frontal lobes
• It is quite common following head injuries, including minor ones such as
concussions
• The “lost time” is generally limited to the seconds or minutes leading up to
the injury

7.2 Encoding and Retrieving Memories

Encoding and Retrieval

➢ Encoding: is the process of transforming sensory and perceptual information into

memory traces
➢ Retrieval: is the process of accessing memorized information and returning it to
short-term memory
➢ In between these two processes is the concept is storage: which refers to the time
and manner in which information is retained between encoding and retrieval

A. Rehearsal: The basis of Encoding

 ➢ Many people tend to repeat the words that they hear in order to remember it, many
teachers call this process “learning by rote”
➢ An experiment that was conducted found that it does have some benefits but it does have
limited effects on long-term memory
➢ Refer to figure 7.13 in the textbook for the experiment (page 288)
➢ It turns out that it is not how long we rehearse the information but rather how we rehearse
it that determines the effectiveness of the memory
➢ Individuals in the study were engaged in maintenance rehearsal: prolonging exposure to
information by repeating it which does very little to facilitate encoding that leads to the
formation of long-term memories
➢ Elaborative Rehearsal: prolonging exposure to information by thinking about its meaning
significantly improves the process of encoding
• Imagining the word (like what it looks like) and what it is used for
➢ Although maintenance rehearsal helps us remember for a very short time, elaborative rehearsal
improves long-term learning and remembering

B. Levels of Processing
➢ Not all elaborative coding is created equal. Different levels of elaborative coding can produce
markedly different levels of recall
➢ The levels of processing (LOP) begins with the understanding that our ability to recall
➢ Refer to figure 7.14 (page 289)
➢ information is most directly related to how that information was initially processed
➢ Differences in processing can be described as a continuum ranging from shallow to deep
processing
• Shallow processing: involves more superficial properties of a stimulus such as the
sound or spelling of a word
• Deep processing: is generally related to a meaning or its function
• Deep processing provides better retention and retrieval
➢ The effects of LTM get effected and STM memory rates are unaffected by shallow or deep
processing
➢ There are two other forms of deep processing
1. The self-reference effect: when you think about information in terms of how it relates to
you or how it its useful to you
2. Survival processing: items that are processed and as they relate to survival

C. Retrieval
➢ There are two forms of memory retrieval
• Recognition: involves identifying a stimulus or piece of information when it is presented
to you
• Ex: taking a multiple choice test
• Recall: involves retrieving information when asked, but without the information being
presented during the retrieval process
• Ex: short-answer questions on a test
➢ Recall is helped when there are hints or retrieval cues that help to prompt memory
 •The more detailed the retrieval cue, the easier it is for us to produce the memory
•Ex: key words in a list, and other retrieval cues in the real world often involves places,
people, sights and sounds
➢ Encoding Specificity Principle: retrieval is the most effective when it occurs in the same context
as encoding
➢ Context-dependent forgetting: the change in the environment has influenced forgetting
• Going into the room and forgetting what you had to pick up
➢ Context reinstatement effect: which occurs when you return to the original location and
suddenly the memory comes back

D. State-dependent Learning
➢ State-dependent memory: retrieval is more effective when your internal state matches the
state you were in during encoding
• Ex: people who overly drink and then they become more drunk the next day; the state
of intoxication served as a retrieval cue for the participants memory
➢ This effect appears to be strongest for declarative memory which is the form of memory that
requires the participant to generate the response of her own

E. Mood-dependent Learning
➢ People remember better if their mood at retrieval matches their mood during encoding
➢ Mood has a very small effect on recognition based memory but has much larger effects on recall
based tests
➢ It produces larger-effects must generate both the to-be remembered information than if the
stimuli are externally generated (“remember the word: “guitar”)
➢ Mood-dependent memory does show that a person’s emotional state can have an effect on
encoding and retrieval

Emotional Memories

➢ Emotion seems to act as a highlighter for memories, making them easier to retrieve than neutral
memories
• Emotional stimuli and events are generally self-relevant and are associated with arousal
responses such as increase in heart rate and sweating
➢ Research has shown that this beneficial effect of emotion is strongest after long (one hour or
more) rather than short delays
➢ Emotions largest influence is on the process of consolidation which is after memories have been
transferred from the STM into the LTM is strengthen and made permanent
➢ Emotion has less of an effect on STM and on recognition memory; these types of memory have
much less variability than LTM thus leaving less room for emotion to influence accuracy levels
➢ Emotion also changes the type of information that is encoded
• Central information about the gist of a scene (ex: snake) receives extra attention and is
more likely to be remembered than peripheral information (the flowers near the snake)
 • In the courtroom, many eyewitnesses to crime often have shown a reduction in memory
accuracy due to weapon focus; or the tendency to focus on the weapon at the expense
of peripheral information including the identity of the person holding the weapon

➢ Damage to the amygdala eliminates these effects, suggesting that this emotion-related
structure in the formation of emotional memories
➢ Emotional material received deeper rather than shallow processing
➢ Emotion can influence memory consolidation even if the stimuli themselves are not
emotional in nature
• In a study participants were asked to study a list of words and then either watched a
surgery video or a brushing teeth video
• After the slideshow, the group members who viewed the surgery tape remembered
more of the words
• Emotions lead to a stronger memory formation even if the info is not directly related to
the emotional event
➢ There are biological mechanisms that allow emotion to influence memory
• The relationship is found between the hippocampus (the structure associated with the
encoding of long-term memories) and the amygdala (the structure involved in
emotional processing and responding)
➢ Brain imaging shows that emotional memories often activate the amygdala, whereas non-
emotional generated at the same time do not
➢ Activity in the amygdala then influences the firing patterns of other temporal-lobe structures;
including the hippocampus; this link is a major part of the emotion-memory relationship.
• It is also quite time-sensitive-amygdala responses to individual stimuli predict later
memory accuracy for those items
A. Flashbulb Memories
➢ Flashbulb memories: an extremely vivid and detailed memory about an event and the
conditions surrounding how one learned about the event
➢ These highly charged emotional memories typically involve recollections of locations of location,
what was happening at the time of the event and the emotional reactions of self and others
• Some may be personal memories such as the memory of an automobile accident other
events are so widely felt that they seem to form flashbulb memories for the entire
society (e.g assassination of president Kennedy)

Forgetting and Remembering

A. The forgetting curve: How soon we forget

➢ Hermann Ebbinghaus who many psychologists consider the founder of memory
research
• In his experiment he would study hundreds of nonsense syllables for later memory
tests and then tested himself repeatedly
• The results was that he forgot about half of a list in an hour
• After a day, he could generally remember about one-third of the material and he could
still recall between one-fifth and one-fourth of the words after a week
• He created the forgetting curve
 ➢ It clearly shows that most forgetting occurs right away and that the rate of forgetting
eventually slows to the point where one does not seem to forget at all

B. Mnemonics: Improving your memory skills

➢ Mnemonic: a technique intended to a improve memory for specific information
➢ Method of loci: a mnemonic that connects words to be remembered to locations along
a familiar path
• To use method of loci, one must first imagine a route that has landmarks or
easily identifiable spaces
• Once the path is identified, the learner takes a moment to visually relate the
first word on the list to the first location encountered
➢ Acronyms: pronounceable words whose letters represent the initials of an important phrase or
set of items
• ROY G. BIV
➢ First letter technique: uses the first letters of a set of items to spell out words that form a
sentence
• Similar to an acronym, but it is often used when the first letters of a list words do not
make a pronounceable word
• Ex: King Phillip came Over for Good Spaghetti

➢ Acronyms and first letter techniques work by organizing the information into a pattern that is
easier to remember than the original information
• Acronyms have meanings of their own, so the learner gets the benefit of elaborative
rehearsal and deeper processing
➢ Dual coding: occurs when information is stored in more than one form
• Verbal description, visual image or a description and a sound
• It regularly produces stronger memories than the use of one form alone
• Dual coding leads to the information receiving deeper, as opposed to shallow, this is
because the additional sensory representation create a large number of memory
association
• This leads to a greater number of potential retrieval cues that can be accessed later

➢ Desirable difficulties: can aid learning, these techniques make studying more slower and more
effortful but result in overall remembering; including spacing out your studying rather than
studying the night before
➢ When studying with flashcards, it is better to use one big stack of cards rather than smaller piles
to take advantage of the spacing effect
➢ Some students become overconfident and put away their flashcards thinking that they have
learned the material
➢ Testing effect: the finding that taking practice tests can improve exam performance, even
without additional studying
• Researchers have directly compared testing to additional studying and have found that,
in some cases, testing actually improves memory more
 Working the Scientific Literacy Model
(Context-Dependent Memory)
➢ The encoding specificity principle can take many forms
➢ One of the intuitive is context-dependent memory, the idea that retrieval is more
effective when it takes place in the same physical setting (context) as encoding

What do we know about context-dependent memory?

➢ The initial demonstration of context-dependent learning and memory used very simple cues
such as word that are like related to each other or words that rhyme
➢ However, the found that performance improved when the original context was reinstated and
could serve as a retrieval cue; the more the original context was included, the better the level of
retrieval
➢ In this experiment, the made people memorize a list of words while diving and while being on
land
➢ They found that those who were tested in the same context as where encoding took place
remembered approx. 40% more items than those who switched locations

How can science explain context-dependent memory?

➢ When we encode information, we are also encoding information from a number of different
senses
➢ Each of these sense trigger memories
• When you experience the fact that odour brings back memories
➢ Increased activity in the hippocampus and parts of the pre-frontal cortex (part of the frontal
lobes) when the retrieval conditions match the context in which the memory was encoded
➢ Activity in the right frontal lobes is particularly sensitive to context, likely because this region is
known to be critical for the retrieval process
• The size and area of the frontal lobes that is activated varies dependent upon the
context in which retrieval occurs (environmental context can influence the firing of brain
networks)

Can we critically evaluate this evidence?

➢ Recognition memory is not significantly helped by context memory this likely due to the fact
that the presence of the item serves as a very strong retrieval cue (MCQS and the options)
➢ Recall on the other hand requires you to generate the to-be remembered info without any
external cues. In this case, returning to the context, could help to prompt a memory
➢ A second limitation to context-dependent memory not all types of memory are equally affected
• Information that is central to the memory episode is more likely to be unaffected
compared to the peripheral information
➢ When returning a person to a context in which he encoded information can improve recall and
increase the number of false positives (saying “I remember” to things that were never seen)
• Participants viewed a stage crime in a small\large room; they were asked to return a
week later to identify the culprit
 • The results of the test demonstrated the effect of context: performance was much
higher when the testing took place in the same room as initial coding
• Participants who took the test in the same context as they saw the video were more
likely to claim that a photo looked familiar even in the target absent condition
• Trend was due to retrieval cues associated with the environment leading to a feeling of
familiarity that is mistakenly attributed to the to-be remembered information

Why is this relevant?

➢ Context-dependent memory research is that it implies that some forgotten information is not
gone forever but is simply inaccessible because the proper cues have not been provided

Module 7.3: Constructing and reconstructing memories

How memories are organized and constructed

A. The Schema: An active organization process

➢ Schemas: organized clusters of memories that constitute knowledge about events,
objects and ideas
• Whenever we encounter familiar events or objects these schemas become active
and they effect what we expect, what we pay attention to and what we
remember
• The schemas about the self are based on past experiences and are used to
organize the encoding of self-relevant information in a way that can influence our
responses
• The ability to form schemas, particularly self-schemas plays a critical role in our
ability to form memories about our lives

Working the Scientific Literacy Model: How Schemas influence Memory

What do we know about schemas?

➢ We have personal schemas used for a variety of processes that we use in our daily lives
(e.g doing the laundry)
➢ Our schemas are involved in all three stages of memory: the guide what we attend to
during encoding, organize stored memories and served as cues when it comes time to
retrieve information
➢ Schemas are products of culture and experience
• Individuals within a culture tend to have schemas related to gender roles
• Even if an individual realizes that these schemas are not accurate, he or she is
likely to engage in schematic processing when having difficulty remembering
something specific
➢ Research indicates that we remember events using Constructive memories: a process by which
we first recall a generalized schema and then add specific details
➢ Schemas can affect our memories in two ways:
 1. Organization: some objects and events will fit our schemas better than others and when the
information makes sense and fits into our schema it will be easier to recall
2. Distinctiveness: some of the new information does not fit into our schema. If the information
is weird or unusual, it would be easier to recall but if it is not that it most likely will be forgotten
(and will not fit into our schema)

Can we critically evaluate the concept of a schema?

➢ You cannot record activity and expect to see particular schema and individuals are
generally not aware that they are using schematic processing
➢ Recent brain scanners have shown that both encoding and retrieving information that
was consistent schema learned during the experiment led to greater activity in a network
involving parts of the medial temporal lobes and the frontal lobes
➢ When your are adding new info to the schema , that changes the expression of genes in
the frontal lobes
➢ It’s possible to see how schemas influence brain activity while new information is
encoded and entered into the structure of our LTM

Why Is this relevant?

➢ Schemas are not limited to memories for other people; in fact we have schemas about ourselves
➢ Self-schemas can be attributed to psychological problems
• A person who has clinical depression , it likely to have a negative schema which means that he
will pay attention to things that are consistent with the depressive symptoms

Memory Reconstruction

➢ The past that we remember is influenced by our mental state and our view of ourselves in the
present
➢ False memory: remembering events that did not occur, or incorrectly recalling details of an event.
• Having a false memory doesn’t indicate a dysfunction of the memory, it means that normal
memory processes are very much imperfect
• Every time a memory is retrieved, it is reconstructed and it is influenced by the demands of the
current situation
A. The Perils of Eyewitness Testimony
➢ The wording of a specific question can alter the memory of a witness to a particular event,
for instance, the word “smashed” caused certain participants to add false attributes to
the situation-such as the glass being smashed
➢ Another factor that can alter memories of an event-and that has implications for the legal
system is the information that is encoded after the event has occurred
• Sometimes this information could improve people’s memories but this
information is not always accurate
➢ Misinformation effect: when information occurring after an event becomes part of the memory
for that event
➢ Researchers attempted to use this misinformation effect to change the details of peoples
memories
➢ One can change the details of an experiment by asking a leading question ( “was there a yield sign
in the video?”
➢ Children are particularly susceptible to misinformation effects and to the effects of a questions
wording
• Children observed a janitor where he was cleaning some dolls in the play room.
For some children he was behaving innocently and for the others he was playing
abusively with the dolls. The children to hewere questioned by three interviewers
accusatory (not doing his job), innocent (doing his job) and neutral (nothing).
When the interviewers tone, matched what the children saw, the children’s
report of the behavior were quite accurate when the interview technique did not
match the observed behavior, the childrens report matched the interviewers
tone (tone altered the details of the information that the children retrieved and
reported)
➢ Children also see adults as schemas
• If child has observed a situation and the details of that situation are retrieved in
their memory, and adult says something that contradicts that memory, a child
would add that information to their report even though it never happened.

B. Imagination and false memories

➢ Imagination Inflation: the increased confidence in a false memory of an event following repeated
imagination of the event
➢ The more readily and clearly we can imagine events, the more certain we are that the memories
are accurate
➢ Imagination inflation is very similar to guided imagery a technique used by some clinicians to help
people recover details of events that they are unable to remember
• It involves a guide giving instructions to participants to imagine certain events
• Guided imagery can be used to alter memories for actual events but it can also
create entirely false memories
C. Creating False memories in the Laboratory
➢ The DRM procedure: participants study a list of highly related words called semantic
associates (which means they are associated by meaning)
• The word that would be the most obvious member of that list just happens to be
missing (critical lure)
• when participants are given a memory test, many of them remember the critical
lure even though it wasn’t in the list
• Intrusion: is a false memory sneaking into the existing memory

➢ In routine studies, the DRM lures as many as 70% of the participants

➢ To reduce intrusion, participants would just be told of the DRM procedure and warn them
of false memories
➢ Intrusions are difficult to get rid of and it is not because memories are not accurate but
the DRM effect reflects the fact that normal memory processes are constructive
 ➢ Researchers can create false memories through:
1. Photographs: can be used to make participants have a memory of an event and can
leave it up to the participant to figure out what happened on the balloon ride (go
through guided imagery as well)
2. Videotapes: they take a video of two separate actions, splice them together; making
the volunteer watch an event that they didn’t actually see (saw only separate videos).
Individuals reported that they did form memories of the event which they didn’t
witness.

D. The Danger of False remembering

➢ Recovered Memories: a memory of a traumatic event that is suddenly recovered after
blocking the memory of that event for a long period of time
• Repression: when traumatic memories are being suppressed can lead people to
suffer and sometimes if a repressed memory is recovered it can help an individual
cope with the trauma
➢ Recovered memories like many other types of long-term memory are difficult to study
because one can rarely determine if they are true or false
➢ Recovered memory controversy: a heated debate among psychologists about the validity
of recovered memories
• One side: clinical psychologists attempt to recover memories that have been
repressed
• On the other side: those techniques used to recover a memory bear a striking
resemblance to those that are used to create false memories in a laboratory; they
often involve instructions to remember, attempts to form images and social
reinforcements for reporting memories
➢ The method of brain imaging can be used to distinguish between true and false memories
• When people recount information that is true, the visual and sensory areas of the brain
become more active
• When revealing false remembered information have much less activity in the sensory
regions- the brain is not drawing mental imagery because it was not there in the first place
• These brain results do not always map onto the participants conscious memories of what
they had seen
• Thus, this method can be used to distinguish between true and false memories better
than the participant
 Chapter 8: Thought and Language
8.1 The Organization of Knowledge
• A concept is the mental representation of an object, event, or idea.
o There are very few independent concepts. You do not have just one concept for chair, table, or
sofa. Each of these concepts can be divided into smaller groups with more precise labels such
as arm chair or coffee table. Similarly, all of these items can be lumped together as furniture.
• Categories refer to these clusters of interrelated concepts.
o We form these groups using a process called categorization.
• Classical categorization is the theory that claims that objects or events are categorized according to a
certain set of rules or by a specific set of features.
o Graded membership is the observation that some concepts appear to make better category
members than others.
o Psychologists have researched classical categorization using a behavioral measure known as
the sentence verification technique, where volunteers wait for a sentence to appear in front of
them on a computer screen and 44 respond as fast as they can with a yes or no answer to
statements such as A sparrow is a bird, or, A penguin is a bird. In most cases, subjects almost
always answer “yes” faster to sparrow than to penguin. While both are equally good fits for the
definition, this occurs because sparrows are somehow more bird-like than penguins.
• Prototypes: Categorization by Comparison o Prototypes are mental representations of an average

category member.
o For example, given a robin, a sparrow, and a blue jay, your prototypical bird would look
something like a mixture or the average of all three.
o If you encounter a little creature you have never seen before and its basic shape resembles
your prototype of a bird, you may classify the creature as a bird.
o The main advantage of prototypes is that they help explain why some category members make
better examples than others. Ostriches are birds just as much as blue jays, but they do not
resemble the rest of the family very well. In other words, blue jays are closer to the
prototypical bird.
• Networks and Hierarchies o A semantic network is an interconnected set of nodes (or concepts) and
the links that join them to form a category.
o A Semantic Network Diagram for the Category “Animal” (Figure 8.3) o Nodes are
circles that represent concepts, and links connect them together to represent the structure
of a category as well as the relationships among different categories.
o Figure 8.3 is arranged in a hierarchy – that is, it consists of a structure moving from
general to very specific. This organization helps us understand how categories work in daily
thought and language by identifying the basic level category, which is located in the middle
row of the diagram (where the birds and fish are).
o Basic level categories are the terms used most often in conversation.
 o They are the easiest to pronounce. o They are the level at which prototypes exist. o
They are the level at which most thinking occurs.
• Priming and Semantic Networks o Priming is the activation of individual concepts in long-term
memory.
o Psychologists can test for priming through reaction time measures such as the
sentenceverification task or through a method called the lexical decision task.
o A volunteer sits at a computer and stares at a focal point. Next, a string of letters
flashes on the screen. The volunteer responds yes or no as quickly as possible to
indicate whether the letters spell a word. Using this method, a volunteer should
respond faster that “apple” is a word if it follows the word “fruit” than if it follows the
word “bus.”
o Average response times were also faster when the holiday-themed words were
congruent (in season). For example, words such as “nutcracker” and “reindeer”
showed priming effects during December.
• Culture and Categories
▪ The human brain is wired to perceive similarities and differences, and the end result of this
tendency is to categorize items based on these comparisons.
▪ Our natural tendency to do so interacts with our cultural experiences; how we categorize
objects depends to a great extent on what we have learned about those objects from others in
our culture.
▪ Categorization is based – at least to some extent – on cultural learning.
▪ Cultural factors not only influences how we categorize individual objects, but also how they
relate to one another.
▪ Brain regions that are involved in object recognition and processing are activated differently in
people from Western and Eastern cultures. Brain regions that are involved in processing
individual objects are more highly activated when Westerners view focal objects against
background scenery, whereas people from East Asian countries appear to attend to
background scenery more closely than focal objects.
• Linguistic relativity (or the Whorfian hypothesis) is the theory that the language we encounter and
use determines how we understand the world.
▪ For example, the word “empty” when describing a gasoline barrel could describe that it was no
longer full in a useful way; in other words, there was not a usable amount of gasoline in it. It
could, however, also mean that there is absolutely no gasoline in the barrel (not even a drop).
▪ Eskimos have multiple words for snow. This does not mean that Eskimos perceive snow
differently from everyone else, as many other cultures also have multiple words for snow.
Therefore, the difference in vocabulary for snow does not lead to differences in perception.
 8.2 Problem Solving, Judgment, and Decision Making
• Psychological science has shown that the luxury of choice might actually be better described as
a burden. The more choices you have for something, the less likely you are to be satisfied with your
decision. It has also been found that individuals who regularly strive for perfection in their decisions –
maximizers, as they are called – are generally less satisfied than people who simply try to find what is
good enough to suit their purposes (satisficers).
• Problem solving means accomplishing a goal when the solution or the path to the solution is
not clear.
• States and Stages
▪ The initial state describes what the condition is at the outset of the problem.
▪ The goal state describes what you need or desire as an outcome.
▪ Obstacles are things that slow or prevent progress toward the goal state.
▪ Operators are techniques we use to overcome the obstacles to reach the goal state.
▪ A well-defined problem is a problem that has a clear initial state and goal state.
o For example, the initial state, “I’m cold,” has the operator, “Put on a sweater,” and so
the goal state, “I’m comfortable,” is achieved.
• An ill-defined problem is a problem that may be lacking definition in one or more ways, such as
an ambiguous initial state or a lack of familiar operators.
o For example, the initial state, “I need to think of a topic for my term paper,” has the
operator, “Flip through your favorite chapter in the textbook to find what interests
you,” and so the goal state, “I’m going to write about culture and language,” is
achieved.
• Problem-Solving Strategies and Techniques

• Algorithms are problem-solving strategies based on a series of rules.

o They are very logical and follow a set of steps, usually in a preset order. Computers are
very good at using algorithms because they can follow a preprogrammed set of steps
and perform thousands of operations every second.
o Humans are not always so careful and tend to rely on intuition to find operators and
solutions that “just seem right.”
• Heuristics are problem-solving strategies that stem from prior experiences and provide an
educated guess as to what is the most likely solution.
o For example if you were deciding whether you would like to accept a dinner invitation,
the intuitive approach (accept it) usually makes the most sense.
• Cognitive Obstacles

• A mental set is a cognitive obstacle that occurs when an individual attempts to apply a routine
solution to what is actually a new type of problem.
o For example, The Five Daughter Problem: Maria’s father has five daughters: Lala, Lela,
Lila, and Lola. What is the fifth daughter’s name?
 o Your mental set may have caused you to believe the answer is Lula, but it is actually
Maria.
• Functional fixedness occurs when an individual identifies a potential operator, but can think of
only its most obvious function.
• Representativeness and Availability
• Conjunction fallacy is the mistaken belief that finding a specific member in two overlapping
categories (i.e., a member of the conjunction of two categories) is more likely than finding any
member of one of the larger, general categories.
• Representativeness heuristic is making judgments of likelihood based on how well an example
represents a specific category.
• The availability heuristic entails estimating the frequency of an event based on how easily
examples of it come to mind.
o In other words, we assume that if examples are readily available, then they must be
frequent.
o For example, most of us can think of examples of police brutality, kidnapping, and
terrorist attacks – these are events that easily come to mind. However, we are also
likely to overestimate the risks of each of these events, in part because it is easier to
think of examples of these events than to think of all of the times they did not occur.
• The anchoring effect occurs when an individual attempts to solve a problem involving numbers
and uses previous knowledge to keep (i.e., anchor) the response within a limited range.
• For example, “When was George Washington elected president?” Participants would reply
with thoughts such as, “The U.S. declared independence in 1776 and it probably took a few
years to elect a president, so Washington was elected in… 1789.” Thus, the signing of the
Declaration of Independence in 1776 serves as the anchor for Washington’s election.
• Humans have bounded rationality. We may be rational up to a point, but then heuristic
thinking takes over. Use of heuristics leaves us open to biases and potentially costly mistakes.
• A benefit of heuristic thinking is that, knowing people are susceptible to errors can help us to
be better critical thinkers, allowing us to spend time evaluating our solutions, judgments, and
decisions.
• Belief perseverance occurs when an individual believes he or she has the solution to the
problem or the correct answer for a question and accepts only evidence that will confirm those beliefs.
• For example, a dealer removes cards from a box and counts to make sure they are all present.
At first he comes up with 51 cards, then on the second try, he gets 52 – the correct amount. He
proceeds to carry on with the game.
• The dealer did not consider that the 52 may have been a miscount, which was shaded by his
knowledge that there should be 52 cards in a deck.
• Confirmation bias occurs when an individual searches for only evidence that will confirm his or
her beliefs instead of evidence that might disconfirm them.
 8.3 Language and Communication
• Language is a form of communication that involves the use of spoken, written, or gestural
symbols that are combined in a rule-based form.
• Phonemes and Morphemes: The Basic Ingredients of Language

• Phonemes are the most basic units of speech sounds.

o For example, the phoneme /t/ found in pot, and stop.
• Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of language.
o Some morphemes are simple words, whereas others may be suffixes or prefixes.
o For example, the word pig is a morpheme – it cannot be broken down into smaller
units of meaning.
o You can combine morphemes, however, if you follow the rules of the language. For
example, to pluralize pig, you can add the morpheme /-s/, which will give you pigs.
• Semantics is the study of how people come to understand meaning from words.
o Humans have a knack for this kind of interpretation, and each of us has an extensive
mental dictionary to prove it. Not only do normal speakers know tens of thousands of
words, but they can often understand new words they have never heard before based
on their understanding of morphemes.
• Syntax: The Language Recipe
• Syntax is the rules for combining words and morphemes into meaningful phrases and
sentences.
• Children master the syntax of their native language before they leave elementary school. They
can string together morphemes and words when they speak, and they can easily distinguish
between well-formed and ill-formed sentences.
• Despite mastering those rules, most speakers cannot tell you what the rules are; syntax just
seems to come naturally.
• Syntax helps explain why the order of words in a sentence has such a strong effect on what the
sentence means.
o For example, the following sentences have the same words, but their rearrangement
results in different meanings:
▪ A unicorn is in the garden.
▪ Is a unicorn in the garden?
• Pragmatics is the study of nonlinguistic elements of language use.

• Pragmatics is guided by the cooperative principle, which states that pragmatic rules apply to
conversation so entering into a conversation is essentially agreeing to cooperate.
• Pragmatics reminds us that sometimes what is said is not as important as how it is said.
• Flouting is the blatant disobeying of a rule of language in a way that is obvious.
 o For example, if a student says, “I ate a 50 pound cheeseburger,” you would know he is
stretching the truth, but you wouldn’t call him a liar. Pragmatics would help you
understand that he implied the cheeseburger was really big.
• Language in the Brain

• Aphasias are language disorders caused by damage to the brain structures that support using
and understanding language.
• Wernicke’s area is the area of the brain most associated with finding the meaning of words.
o Damage to this area results in Wernicke’s aphasia, a language disorder in which a
person has difficulty understanding the words he or she hears.
o The problem is known to be associated with semantics rather than syntax, because an
individual’s speech sounds normal at first – the syntax, intonation, accent, and
demeanor are normal, but the word choices do not make sense.
o For example, a reply such as, “Yes, I, ugh, cannot kill all of my way. I cannot talk all of
the things I do, and part of the part I can go alright, but I cannot tell from the other
people. I usually most of my things.”
• Broca’s area is a frontal lobe structure that controls our ability to articulate speech sounds that
compose words.
o Broca’s area appears adjacent to a strip of the brain known as the motor cortex that
helps us control body movements. Given its proximity to the motor cortex, Broca’s
area has long been associated with the production of speech.
o Besides just signaling the muscles to move, it is also involved in adding grammatical
flourishes to words that have already been selected and combining them into
syntactically appropriate phrases.
o Damage to this area will result in Broca’s aphasia.
o Although most of these individuals can still speak, doing so is obviously very difficult
for them, and as a result, their speech is limited to a series of single words intertwined
with filled pauses (uh, er, …).
▪ For example, when asked, “Tell me, what did you do before you retired?” the
person with aphasia would give a reply such as, “Uh, uh, uh, pub, par,
partender, no.”
o The individual has no trouble understanding the question or coming up with the
answer. His difficulty is in getting the word carpenter into an appropriate phrase and
pronouncing it.
• The cerebellum is known for its role in balance and coordination, as well as coordinating and
organizing speech.
• The basal ganglia help control voluntary movement, including learning and making speech
sounds.
• People with Parkinson’s diseases – a condition that adversely affects the basal ganglia – have
difficulty using irregular verbs.
• Age of Acquisition: The Sensitive Period for Learning a Language
 • The sensitive period for a language is a time during childhood in which children’s brains are
primed to develop language skills.
• Children can absorb language almost effortlessly, but this ability seems to fade away starting
around the seventh year. Thus, when a family immigrates to a country that uses a different
language, the younger children are able to pick up this language much more quickly than their
parents.
• Patterns of Language Acquisition

• Although it is true that imitation and reinforcement are involved in the process of learning a
language, they are only one part of the complex process.
o Children often produce phrases that include incorrect grammar or word forms.
Because adults do not use these phrases, it is highly unlikely that such phrases are
imitations. o Children learn irregular verbs and pluralizations on a word-by-word basis.
At first they will use “ran” and “geese” correctly. However, when children begin to use
grammar on their own, they over-generalize the rules. A child who learns the /-ed/
morpheme for past tense will start saying runned instead of ran. When she learns that
/-s/ means more than one, she will begin to say gooses instead of geese. It is also
unlikely that children would produce these forms by imitating.
o When children use poor grammar, or when they over-generalize their rules, parents
may try to correct them. Although children will acknowledge their parents’ attempts at
instruction, this method does not seem to work. Instead, children go right back to
overgeneralizing.
• Rapid growth of vocabulary in children has been attributed to a process called fast mapping.
• Fast mapping is the ability to map words onto concepts or objects after only a single exposure
o The fact that children seem to learn language differently than adults has led psychologists to
use the term language acquisition when referring to children instead of language learning.
• Can Animals Use Language?
• Formal studies of language learning in nonhuman species gained momentum in the mid-1950s
when pschologists attempted to teach spoken English to a chimpanzee named Viki. Viki was
cross-fostered.
• Cross-fostered means that she was raised as a member of a family that was not of the same
species.
• Like humans, chimps come into the world dependent on adults for care, so the humans who
raised Viki were basically foster parents. Although psychologists learned a lot about how smart
chimpanzees can be, they did not learn that Viki was capable of language – she managed to
whisper only about four words after as many years of trying.
• Other studies involving chimpanzees taught them to communicate using sign language or
artificial languages instead. This proved to be more effective than using human language as a
frame of reference.
• Take into consideration, an alternate universe where dolphins attempt to teach humans their
own system of communication. It is likely they would end up publishing skeptical critiques
about the miniscule skills their human subjects acquired.
• Humans have evolved a remarkably complex capacity to use language for communication, and
non-humans have their own systems serving unique and adaptive functions.