my memory is working...is yours?

Working memory is memory that is interacting with the environment. It is the memory that doesn't allow you to concentrate on a boring text book, it's the memory that makes you think "what did I just read?" after getting to the bottom of the page. I found an article on working memory from Science Daily. It was kind of funny for me to read because at the beginning they start off with, "Odds are, you're not going to make it all the way through this article without thinking about something else." They were right! I got though part of the article and then I found myself wondering, thinking about the free response tomorrow, what I'm going to wear to school, what I'm going to say in this blog. When i finally started paying attention to the article again, I was almost done reading it! I went back and reread. In Madison they were doing experiments with people's working memories by giving them each a task to do. This with higher working memory capacities were more prone to start wondering than those with normal working memory capacities.

Heres the article, I hope you like it!
Working Memory

memories you shouldn't remember

This week in class we learned about memory: long-term, short-term, false, deja vu, memory storage, source amnesia, etc..
I found false memory very interesting. False memory is a memory of an event that did not actually happen. People often think of their memories an exact recording of their life events so, naturally, everything remembered must be true. False! Sometimes people remember a event that never even happened. In a video I found, this boy was reading a journal that his family wrote about happenings throughout the years. One of the stories was about how he had gotten lost in a mall when he was 5 years old. He went on to tell the story of what happened, how he felt, and who he encountered while lost in the mall. Little did he know, the story was actually placed in the journal just before he was told to read it, so it never actually happened. He had false memory.

Conditioning...Classically

This week in psych we learned about classical conditioning. According to our text, classical conditioning is a type of learning in which one learns to link two or more stimuli and anticipate events. In order for classical conditioning to work, there needs to be an unconditioned stimuli, an unconditioned response, a neural stimuli, a conditioned stimuli, and a conditioned response. In the video I found on classical conditioning, the Nerf gun was the unconditioned stimulus and getting mad is the unconditioned response. The maker of the video added in a "quack" every time they shot the Nerf gun. The quack is the neural stimulis because it has nothing to do with a Nerf gun. Eventually, the "quack" became the conditioned stimuli and being mad or expecting to get mad became the conditioned response.

unconditioned stimuli = something that triggers a response automatically
unconditioned response = the automatic response
neural stimuli = something that has nothing to do with the unconditioned stimuli
conditioned stimuli = the old neural stimuli
conditioned response = unconditioned response