Readings Week of Jan 22

This week’s readings includes some more historical background, sensory memory and an overview of brain structure and function. The focus of the historical background portion of the reading was Hermann Ebbinghaus. His main contribution was that he saw psychological research as something that can be studied scientifically and experimentally. Through this type of research, Ebbinghaus discovered the forgetting curve which indicates that when one learns something (ie memorizes things on a list) there is a huge initial drop in performance after only a few minutes, but this drop in performance is minimal after more time passes. This is great news for college students who hope to retain some of the information they learn through out their undergraduate careers.
The second portion of the reading focuses on sensory memory, which is where we store all of sensory experiences. Two studies help us see how sensory memory works. George Sperling performed the first study. This study tests information persistence of sensory memory, which is defined as being able to extract information about a stimulus even after it is gone. In his study, Sperling showed subjects a series of letters in numbers organized neatly into columns and row. At first, he showed them the series of characters and asked them to recall what they saw. On average people could report 4 letters/numbers but these subjects told him that they could see more, but they were unable to recall them. Hearing this feedback from his earlier subjects made Sperling revise his study by giving subjects a cue that would indicate which row they needed to recall (known as partial report). He plotted this data and found out that partial report gave subjects an advantage only when the cue was given within 500ms.
The second study was performed by Haber and Standing. This study examines stimulus persistence of sensory memory, which is when a stimulus seems to persist even after the stimulus is absent. In their study Haber and Standing, showed subjects a visual stimulus and asked them if they perceive it as a continuous or discontinuous. Subjects reported that they saw a continuous stimulus, when the duration of the blinking of stimulus was 250-300ms. People experience this persistence of stimulus in their daily lives when they hear a high pitch sound and continue to hear it ringing in their ears even after it is gone.
The third part of the reading, I think is the most interesting part. I think this section is interesting because we learn about the brain. The brain is interesting both functionally and structurally. The part of the brain that we will get know inside and out in this class is the hippocampus because it is said to play a very important role in memory. This section of the readings is also interesting because it discusses the two types of amnesia: retrograde and anterograde. I never get tired of learning about amnesia. People with retrograde amnesia do not remember the events prior to them getting the amnesia. The way that I remember this type of amnesia is by thinking about “retro” fashion and how it is in the past. Those with anterograde amnesia can not form new memories. Whenever I think about this type of amnesia, the first thing that comes to mind is the film Memento. In this movie, the protagonist Leonard Shelby who suffered from anterograde amnesia had to tattoo his new memories on his body in order to remember them. Every time I learn about amnesia, all I can think about is how hard it should be for the family members of amnesiacs.