Psychology Slides E
Psychology Slides E
Psychology Slides E
Introduction
CH1: Introduction to
Psychology
:
Introduction
Introduction to Psychology
In general, psychology is defined as the scientific study behavior and mental processes and how they are affected by an
organism’s: • physical state (biological), • mental state (psychological), and • external environment.
1. “A change in human disposition or capability that persists over a period of time and is not simply ascribable to
processes of growth.”
2. “Learning is the relatively permanent change in a person’s knowledge or behavior due to experience. This definition
has three components:
1) the duration of the change is long-term rather than short-term;
2) the locus of the change is the content and structure of knowledge in memory or the behavior of the learner; The
cause of the change is the learner’s experience in the environment rather than fatigue, motivation, drugs,
physical condition or physiologic intervention.”
3. “We define learning as the transformative process of taking in information that—when internalized and mixed with
what we have experienced—changes what we know and builds on what we do. It’s based on input, process, and
reflection. It is what changes us.”
Learning
Factors affecting learning
1- Heredity: A classroom instructor can neither change nor increase heredity, but the student can use and develop it. Some
learners are rich in hereditary endowment while others are poor. Each student is unique and has different abilities. The
native intelligence is different in individuals. Heredity governs or conditions our ability to learn and the rate of learning.
The intelligent learners can establish and see relationships very easily and more quickly.
2-Status of students: Physical and home conditions also matter: Certain problems like malnutrition i.e.; inadequate supply
of nutrients to the body, fatigue i.e.; tiredness, bodily weakness, and bad health are great obstructers in learning. These
are some of the physical conditions by which a student can get affected. Home is a place where a family lives. If the
home conditions are not proper, the student is affected seriously. Some of the home conditions are bad ventilation,
unhygienic living, bad light, etc. These affect the student and his or her rate of learning.
3- Physical environment: The design, quality, and setting of a learning space, such as a school or classroom, can each be
critical to the success of a learning environment. Size, configuration, comfort—fresh air, temperature, light, acoustics,
furniture—can all affect a student's learning. The tools used by both instructors and students directly affect how
information is conveyed, from the display and writing surfaces (blackboards, markerboards, tack surfaces) to digital
technologies. For example, if a room is too crowded, stress levels rise, student attention is reduced, and furniture
arrangement is restricted. If furniture is incorrectly arranged, sightlines to the instructor or instructional material are
limited and the ability to suit the learning or lesson style is restricted. Aesthetics can also play a role, for if student
morale suffers, so does motivation to attend school.
Learning
4-Goals or purposes: Each and everyone has a goal. A goal should be set to each pupil according to the standard expected
to him. A goal is an aim or desired result. There are 2 types of goals called immediate and distant goals. A goal that
occurs or is done at once is called an immediate goal, and distant goals are those that take time to achieve. Immediate
goals should be set before the young learner and distant goals for older learners. Goals should be specific and clear, so
that learners understand.
5-Motivational behavior: Motivation means to provide with a motive. Motivation learners should be motivated so that
they stimulate themselves with interest. This behavior arouses and regulates the student's internal energies.
6-Interest: This is a quality that arouses a feeling. It encourages a student to move over tasks further. During teaching, the
instructor must raise interests among students for the best learning. Interest is apparent (clearly seen or understood)
behavior.
7-Attention: Attention means consideration. It is concentration or focusing of consciousness upon one object or an idea. If
effective learning should take place attention is essential. Instructors must secure the attention of the student.
8-Drill or practice: This method includes repeating the tasks "n" number of times like needs, phrases, principles, etc. This
makes learning more effective.
9-Fatigue: Generally there are three types of fatigue, i.e., muscular, sensory, and mental. Muscular and sensory fatigues are
bodily fatigue. Mental fatigue is in the central nervous system. The remedy is to change teaching methods, e.g., use
audio-visual aids, etc.
Learning
10-Aptitude: Aptitude is natural ability. It is a condition in which an individual's ability to acquire certain skills, knowledge
through training.
11-Attitude: It is a way of thinking. The attitude of the student must be tested to find out how much inclination he or she
has for learning a subject or topic.
12-Emotional conditions: Emotions are physiological states of being. Students who answer a question properly or give
good results should be praised. This encouragement increases their ability and helps them produce better results.
Certain attitudes, such as always finding fault in a student's answer or provoking or embarrassing the student in front of
a class are counterproductive.
13-Speed, Accuracy and retention: Speed is the rapidity of movement. Retention is the act of retaining. These 3 elements
depend upon aptitude, attitude, interest, attention, and motivation of the students.
14-Learning activities: Learning depends upon the activities and experiences provided by the teacher, his concept of
discipline, methods of teaching, and above all his overall personality.
15-Testing: Various tests measure individual learner differences at the heart of effective learning. Testing helps eliminate
subjective elements of measuring pupil differences and performances.
16-Guidance: Everyone needs guidance in some part or some time in life. Some need it constantly and some very rarely
depending on the students' conditions. Small learners need more guidance. Guidance is a piece of advice to solve a
problem. Guidance involves the art of helping boys and girls in various aspects of academics, improving vocational
aspects like choosing careers and recreational aspects like choosing hobbies. Guidance covers the whole gamut of
learners problems- learning as well as non-learning.
CH6: SOME COGNITIVE
PROCESSES RELATED TO
LEARNING
1 MEMORY
Memory
Memory
Learning is a relatively permanent change in an organism that occur as a result of experience and is often pressed in overt
behavior. Memory is the ability to recall past events, images, ideas, or previously learned information or skills. Memory is
also the storage system that allows the person to retain and retrieve previously learned information. Learning and memory
are two facts of the process of acquiring of information, storing it, and using it. The acquisition part is learning, and the
storage and accessing of learned information comprise memory.
What are the types of memory storage?
Storage is the process of maintaining or keeping information readily available. It also refers to the locations where
information is held, which researchers call memory stores. The duration of storage may be few seconds or many years.
There are three-stage model for memory storage:
1-sensory memory.
2-Short-term storage.
3-Long term memory.
Each type of storage has different characteristics and limits.
Memory
Sensory memory
Sometimes called the sensory register, is the mechanism that performs initial encoding of sensory stimuli and provides
brief storage of them. When you hear a song, see a photograph, or touch a piece of silk, sensory memory starts. Sensory
memory captures a visual, auditory, tactile, or chemical stimulus (such as an odor) in a form the brain can interpret. This
visual sensory representation is sometimes called an icon, and the storage mechanism is called icon storage. For the
auditory system, the storage mechanism is called echoic storage.
Sensory memory lasts very briefly, for example, when you locate a phone number or phone book page, the number is
established in your visual sensory memory (in iconic storage), but unless you quickly transfer it to short-term storage by
repeating it over and over to yourself, writing it down you will forget it .
Short -term storage
This relates to the ability to retain information just long enough to use it. Typically it is the memory involved in retaining a
telephone number just long enough to dial it after looking it up in a directory. Short-term memory contains material which
needs to be kept in store for not longer than 30 seconds as opposed to long-term memory.
Memory span
It's the amount of material that can be stored in the shortterm memory at any one time. Once material has been selected
by means of the immediate memory processes (the iconic or echoic memories) it passes into short-term memory. The
capacity of this store is limited to seen, plus or minus two items.
Memory
Duration of short-term memory
Unless it is possible to rehearse material to be recalled, it will very quickly be forgotten.
The trace decay theory of forgetting
It was found that recall was higher after short intervals such as 3 or 6 seconds, but by 18 seconds' interval participants
were recalling only about 10% correctly. They suggested that the duration of short-term memory was only about 6 to 12
seconds if unrehearsed.
Long-term storage
This relates to the ability to retain information over almost indefinite periods of time. While it is possible to characterize
short-term memory in terms of its duration and its capacity, it is much more difficult to do this for long-term memory.
There seem to be known limits to the duration or to the capacity of long-term memory storage. It is important that
semantic connections (that is to say, understanding of meaning) are involved in the process of coding for long-term
memory. There is great diversity, not only in what is stored- all kinds of knowledge and beliefs, objects and events, people
and places, plans and skills but also how it is stored.
Some of the factors involved in organization and retrieval in long term memory, including distinctions between episodic
and semantic memory, interference effects and the ways in which it seems that materials is organized within our memory
systems.
(2)
PERCEPTION
Perception
What Is Perception?
Perception includes the five senses; touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste. It also includes what is known as proprioception, a set of
senses involving the ability to detect changes in body positions and movements. It also involves the cognitive processes required
to process information, such as recognizing the face of a friend or detecting a familiar scent.
Learn more about how we go from detecting stimuli in the environment to actually taking action based on that information.
Types of Perception
Some of the main types of perception include:
• Vision
• Touch
• Sound
• Taste
• Smell
There are also other senses that allow us to perceive things such as balance, time, body position, acceleration, and the perception
of internal states. Many of these are multimodal and involve more than one sensory modality. Social perception, or the ability to
identify and use social cues about people and relationships, is another important type of perception.
How It Works
The perceptual process is a sequence of steps that begins with the environment and leads to our perception of a stimulus and
action in response to the stimulus. It occurs continuously, but you do not spend a great deal of time thinking about the
actual process that occurs when you perceive the many stimuli that surround you at any given moment.
Perception
For example, the process of transforming the light that falls on your retinas into an actual visual image happens
unconsciously and automatically. The subtle changes in pressure against your skin that allow you to feel objects occur
without a single thought.
Perception acts as a filter that allows us to exist and interpret the world without becoming overwhelmed by the
abundance of stimuli.
(3)
ATTENTION
Attention
Definition of Attention
Right now, as you watch this video, you are exercising your attention. Attention is a topic that has been studied often by cognitive
psychologists. It refers to focusing and processing information from our surroundings. While it involves our tending to facets of our
environment, the nature of our attention can vary from event to event. There are four main types of attention that we use in our
daily lives: selective attention, divided attention, sustained attention, and executive attention.
Types of Attention
Selective attention
Have you ever been at a loud concert or a busy restaurant, and you are trying to listen to the person you are with? While it can be
hard to hear every word, you can usually pick up most of the conversation if you're trying hard enough. This is because you are
choosing to focus on this one person's voice, as opposed to say, the people speaking around you. Selective attention takes place
when we block out certain features of our environment and focus on one particular feature, like the conversation you are having
with your friend.
Divided attention
Do you ever do two things at once? If you're like most people, you do that a lot. Maybe you talk to a friend on the phone while
you're straightening up the house. Nowadays, there are people everywhere texting on their phones while they're spending time
with someone. When we are paying attention to two things at once, we are using divided attention.
Some instances of divided attention are easier to manage than others. For example, straightening up the home while talking on
the phone may not be hard if there's not much of a mess to focus on. Texting while you are trying to talk to someone in front of
you, however, is much more difficult. Both age and the degree to which you are accustomed to dividing your attention make a
difference in how adept at it you are.
Attention
Sustained attention
Are you someone who can work at one task for a long time? If you are, you are good at using sustained attention. This happens
when we can concentrate on a task, event, or feature in our environment for a prolonged period of time. Think about people you
have watched who spend a lot of time working on a project, like painting or even listening intently to another share their story.
Sustained attention is also commonly referred to as one's attention span. It takes place when we can continually focus on one
thing happening, rather than losing focus and having to keep bringing it back. People can get better at sustained attention as they
practice it.
Executive attention
Do you feel able to focus intently enough to create goals and monitor your progress? If you are inclined to do these things, you are
displaying executive attention. Executive attention is particularly good at blocking out unimportant features of the environment
and attending to what really matters. It is the attention we use when we are making steps toward a particular end.
For example, maybe you need to finish a research project by the end of the day. You might start by making a plan, or you might
jump into it and attack different parts of it as they come. You keep track of what you've done, what more you have to do, and how
you are progressing. You are focusing on these things in order to reach the goal of a finished research paper. That is using your
executive attention.
Attention Changes in Life
Researchers have studied how attention changes over our lifetime, especially our sustained attention. Lucy is five years old. Her
mother puts Barney on the television for her while she makes lunch in the kitchen. Her mother hopes that Lucy will stay
interested and seated long enough for her to finish up. But as usual, Lucy is not able to stay focused for more than 15 minutes. At
first, she was mesmerized with the show, but then she loses interest and comes over to tug at her mom.
HOW TO IMPROVE
COGNITIVE PROCESSES
Eight Habits That Improve Cognitive Functions
Eight Habits That Improve Cognitive Function
What daily habits improve brain structure and cognitive function?
1. Physical Activity
researchers at Boston University School of Medicine discovered more evidence that physical activity is beneficial for brain health
and cognition. The study found that certain hormones, which are increased during exercise, may help improve memory. The
researchers were able to correlate blood hormone levels from aerobic fitness and identify positive effects on memory function
linked to exercise.
2. Openness to Experience
A 2013 study, "The Impact of Sustained Engagement on Cognitive Function in Older Adults: The Synapse Project," found that
learning new and demanding skills while maintaining an engaged social network are key to staying sharp as we age.
3. Curiosity and Creativity
A 2013 study from Michigan State found that childhood participation in arts and crafts leads to innovation, patents, and increases
the odds of starting a business as an adult. The researchers found that people who own businesses or patents received up to eight
times more exposure to the arts as children than the general public.
4. Social Connections
In 2014, John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago presented findings which identified that the health consequences of
feeling lonely can trigger psychological and cognitive decline.
Cacioppo's research found that feeling isolated from others can disrupt sleep, elevate blood pressure, increase morning rises in
the stress hormone cortisol, alter gene expression in immune cells, increase depression, and lower overall subjective well-being.
All of these factors conspire to disrupt optimal brain function and connectivity, and reduce cognitive function.
Eight Habits That Improve Cognitive Functions
5. Mindfulness Meditation
A 2013 pilot study by researchers at Harvard's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center identifed that the brain changes
associated with meditation and subsequent stress reduction may play an important role in slowing the progression of age-
related cognitive disorders like Alzheimer's disease and other dementias.
6. Brain-Training Games
Scientists are beginning to better understand the specific mechanisms of how patterns of electrical pulses (called “spikes”)
trigger a cascade of changes in neural circuits linked to learning and memory. In a 2013 report, Tel Aviv University
researchers found that "stimulant-rich" environments and problem-solving puzzles could be contributing factors in
preventing or delaying the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in some people.
7. Get Enough Sleep
Scientists have known for decades that the brain requires sleep to consolidate learning and memory.
8. Reduce Chronic Stress
Neuroscientists have discovered that chronic stress and high levels of cortisol can damage the brain. A wide range of
recent studies have affirmed the importance of maintaining healthy brain structure and connectivity by reducing chronic
stress, which lowers cortisol.