Cognitive Psychology of Adults and Children - Essay Example

COGNITIVE 2. Describe some research results that provide evidence that learning can result in the growth of new neurons in adults. How might such growth be measured and/or tracked in the brain? There is evidence that adults can produce new neurons. This runs contrary to the popular belief that there is a window of cognition that opens and closes during early childhood, during which language and other skills are assimilated very quickly by the brain, but which reduces in power as the person goes out of childhood, develops more complex strategy based thinking styles, and does not grow new neuron pathways in the brain. It is valuable of neuroscience to run contrary to the status quo and show that adults can still have cognition in this manner. However, upon closer inspection, it may come out that there are more complicated categories of cognition than just neurons, such as where these neurons are located in the brain exactly. However, proven research in journals has shown that adult primates, which includes humans because they are in the class of primates along with chimpanzees, can produce new neurons in the brain as adults. This finding has generated a lot of excitement in the scientific community of neuroscience. Despite the excitement of the idea of adults growing new neurons in the brain, there is also some amount of questioning. “Ever since, scientists have been searching for further evidence, in various parts of the brain, that this is indeed the case. According to a study published in the current issue of the journal Science though, adults primates cant create new neurons in the most sophisticated part of the brain, the neocortex” (Graham, 2009). As neuroscience and brain chemistry understandings develop, these issues will become more clear in the future, when there will perhaps be more understanding of genetic causes as well. The growth of neurons might be tracked or measured in the brain in any number of ways. Thanks to the sophistication of neuroscience, there are many relatively recent progressions in medical and diagnostic technology which can be used to see the human brain and its activities in comparatively clear detail. During the mid 20th century, when psychoanalytical explanations for brain activity were foremost, there was no where near the degree of technical and technological sophistication, or knowledge of neurochemistry and brain science, which there is today. The growth of neurons in the brain today can be traced in a number of ways, involving advanced medical imaging techniques and equipment such as MRI scans, CAT scans, PET scans, and other magnetic based scans based on brainwaves. 3. Given that perception, attention, and memory activities are not wholly independent from one another, explain how these functions interact. Give specific examples to illustrate your ideas. Perception, attention, and memory activities are not totally independent. They are all brain functions, and they might be inter related or they might not be. It is all up to the circumstantial example to illustrate how perception, attention, and memory can be inter related. For example, perception and memory can be easily linked when a person sees another person whom they remember, and it triggers a response of recognition in their memory due to the perception. This act, seeing a person and remembering seeing them before somewhere, involves perception (seeing the person), attention (focusing on the person’s features and appearance to compare it to a person in the memory), and memory (remembering the person correctly and being able to recall information about them) activities, which are all acting congruously. The concepts can also be found to work in terms of complementary cause-and-effect relationships. Perception, attention, and memory can also be linked through examples of a person’s cognition styles, their attitude and self-confidence, and component processes involved in cognition including forethought and reflection. Another example of the relationship between perception, attention, and memory, is in the task of recalling information for a school test. First, there is the perception, or the student reading the material or hearing it explained during a seminar or lecture type of presentation. The attention comes when the student is able to translate this information into something that they can relate to and understand, and often takes the form of notes. So, the perception of the lecture and class material is the perception, which is related to the attention of note taking, or in the case of reading, doing chapter review questions. Finally, the memory skill is the final step in the process, impossible without the first two, in which the student recalls the information they have perceived and given their attention to, for the test proper. 4. Discuss the reliability of certain memory phenomena, such as autobiographical, flashbulb, false, and recovered memories. What implications might these reliability issues have in real life? Few memories are really reliable. We are all victims to things like hindsight bias, in which we look back on the past in a way that makes it basically a hostage to our present mood in looking back. For example, three people who went to the same wedding, may remember completely a different event each, a year later. Memory has a way of playing tricks on people, so that the oft repeated maxim that the mistakes of the past must be learned from, is actually a truism that is never really fulfilled. People forget more than they remember, and they remember in a sporadic, and often random manner. Flashbulb, autobiographical, recovered, and false memories are all basically different ways of showing the unreliability of memory. Recovered memories may have happened in childhood or later, but one trait they share is that they tend to be traumatic for the individual. To block out the trauma, the individual tends to block out the memory, and then the memory is lost, and needs to be recovered. These memories may be brought up by psychotherapy or other means, and are often disturbing and emotional to the person. “The term recovered memories broadly refers to the reporting of memories of childhood events for the first time by adults who have previously been unable to recall or report these events or the circumstances surrounding them” (Menon, 2009). Because they are often clouded by emotion, recovered memories may be unreliable. If recovered memories may be unreliable, flashbulb and autobiographical memories are inherently unreliable. For a flashbulb memory, the person remembers a whole experience or complicated event as a sort of snapshot or headline. Major events are often reduced in this manner. And in autobiographical memories, the ideas and needs of personal self efficacy often becomes more important than true recall. Self-efficacy pertains to self-confidence, basically: it assays the degree to which an individual believes that they can succeed at a given task. Successful self-regulators are adaptive in method and will find the correct individualized self-regulatory procedure to help them overcome obstacles and achieve goals. While self-efficacy may measure a person’s confidence in their knowledge of a subject, self-regulation is a process by which this person may, for example, take notes or attempt to solve a problem from different angles. Like self-efficacy, self-regulation is a process of cognitive monitoring, but unlike self-efficacy, self-regulation pays more attention to the ends than the means. A high degree of self-efficacy could lead to patterns of successful self-regulation, while the converse may be less likely. 5. Discuss the role of schemata in memory and in understanding concepts and categories. Schemata are the foundation, if memory is something that is understood to be built over time. “Memory is always constructive. People create the past based on the information that remains in memory, their general knowledge, and the social demands of the retrieval situation. Thus, memories will often contain some small errors and occasionally some large errors” (Graham, 2009). Schemata is basically the translation of experience of translating real world examples into information that can be stored in the brain, and schemata are ways of doing this. For example, delay of gratification is also about related concepts like the development of schemata for self-regulation. Basically, the relationship between the schemata for making the memory, and the memory itself as a concept, is synchronous and complementary, especially considering the fact that issues of forethought that arise with schemata are directly related to self-regulated learning. Therefore, schemata work as a sort of foundation upon which memory and cognition are constructed. In this manner, the construction of knowledge is seen to proceed from the individual. REFERENCE Graham, S (2009). http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=study-suggests-limit-to-n Memon, G (2009). http://cogprints.org/642/0/memon.rec_mem_review.html Read More