Module 3
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Module 3: The Psychological Level
Monday, May 27 – Sunday, June 2

Required Reading/Viewing:

Principles of Psychology, Chapters 5, 6, 7 (Pages 194-229; 240-271; 291-309)

Module 3 online content 

JLC CHAIRS (2020, April 18). Discovering psychology: “The Developing Child” Produced by WGBH Boston with the American Psychological Association. (1990, 2001) [Video]. Annenberg Learner.

JLC CHAIRS (2020, April 18). Discovering psychology: “Language Development”  Produced by WGBH Boston with the American Psychological Association. (1990, 2001) [Video]. Annenberg Learner.

Discussions:	
Module 3 Discussion

Initial responses due Thursday, May 30, 9:00 AM ET
Two peer response due Sunday, June 2, 9:00 AM ET
Leader response due Tuesday, June 4, 9:00 AM ET
Assignments:	
Research Article Paper Topic and Reading Indication Form due Thursday, May 30, 9:00 AM ET
Film Response worksheet 2 (based on the two Discovering Psychology films) due Sunday, June 2, 5:00 PM ET
Live Classrooms:	Monday, May 27, 7:30–9:00 PM ET
Activity:	Complete Module 3 Review and Reflect, due Monday, June 3, 11:59 PM ET
Welcome to Module 3

 

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Learning Objectives

Describe the classical conditioning model and give two examples.
Describe the operant conditioning model and give examples.
Compare and contrast positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, and negative punishment.
List the four schedules of partial reinforcement and describe their impact.
Describe the stage model of memory.
List strategies for enhancing memory.
List stages of sleep and describe the activities during each stage, including body position, type of stage, presence of dreaming activity, and restoration of body and mind.
Explain the difference between dyssomnias and parasomnias and give an example of each.
Learning
Introduction

psychological level
Good day! Today we are going to focus on learning. If you go back to the first lecture, you may remember the second of the concentric circles from our overall framework—the psychological level. We can think of the study of learning as fitting within that level. At the same time, learning often takes place between individuals, so the concentric circle above the psychological level—small interpersonal interactions—is also relevant here.

How Do Psychologists Define Learning? General Types of Learning

For the purposes of psychology, I’m going to define learning as a lasting change in behavior caused by experience. The study of learning is very tied with the study of memory, which is our next section. Because scientists have studied learning separately in laboratories, we are going to talk about it separately. Learning is essential as we adapt to a complex environment.

braod types of learning
We can separate learning into two broad types associative and non-associative learning. We will spend the bulk of our time talking about associative learning, but let me spend just a minute talking about non-associative learning. Non-associative learning focuses on a single stimulus. There are two types of non-associative learning.

The first is habituation:

Habituation is a decrease in response after repeated exposure to a stimulus.
You may remember about sensory adaptation from our discussions of sensation and perception. Sensory adaptation is a specific type of habituation—habituation of the sensory systems. But the idea of habituation is more general.
One example: exposure to a new toy is quickly followed by habituation. Once a child has played with the new toy, it often ends up under the bed, at the bottom of the toybox, or on the floor of the closet. The child habituates to the new toy, loses interest and moves on to something new. This can be a good thing because once you’ve learned everything you can about the new toy, experience, situation, you need to move on to other things.
Another example: walking on a new surface takes a while to adjust to, but over time you cease to have difficulty. Your body has habituated to this new stimulus and you’re able to manage it with little attention paid to it.
You might notice that sometimes it’s very hard to habituate to a sound or an experience. For example, babies and toddlers have a lot of trouble habituating to loud noises, and they often do not like fireworks. Their neural systems have not developed in a way that allow them to habituate to noise of this type. Also, habituation does not occur when the situation/stimulus is constantly changing.
Habituation is adaptive. We only have so much attention to allocate, and we don’t want to allocate it in areas where we don’t need to. Once you’ve learned everything you need to know about a particular stimulus, you can move on to the next thing.
Sensitization is a somewhat different process from habituation:

Sensitization leads to an increase in response.
One example: think about a time when you were young and perhaps had stayed alone in an empty house at night, and you heard a noise that startled you. You began to become more sensitive to noise, and you may have become startled more and more easily. Your neural systems have become sensitized to that noise.
As another example: imagine you are out walking alone in the woods and you hear a branch snap as if something had stepped on it. Your “antennae” are up! Now you are more sensitive to the little sounds around you. You can imagine how this could be adaptive in situations of danger, where the sound of a branch snapping might indicate the presence of some kind of predator.
I think it’s important to remember that this kind of learning is essential for survival. We soon learn what is important to pay attention to (sensitization) and what is important to ignore (habituation).

Non-associative learning has been studied a lot in very simple animals (e.g., sea slugs). As I noted before our focus will be primarily on associative learning. Associative learning is then we make connections between stimuli, and this type of learning happens in many situations. Think about learning song lyrics or the rules to a game. Think of the times that a song reminds you of a particular situation or occurrence in your life or of a particular person or activity. These are all examples of associative learning.

Perspectives for Understanding Learning

In this lecture, I’m going to focus on three perspectives on the study of learning. This is not because these are the only ones, but these are influential ones. The first is the behavioral perspective, and I will spend most of our time on that one. The behavioral perspective arose in the middle of the last century and was highly influential. After a brief period where it lost some of its influence, it has resurged in importance in the field of psychology. The behavioral perspective focuses on outwardly observable behavior. The second is the cognitive perspective. This perspective focuses more on internal events (e.g., thoughts, ideas). The final perspective is the ecological perspective. The ecological perspective focuses on species-specific learning patterns.

Categories of Learning 
Behavioral Perspective

So, let’s start with the behavioral perspective. In talking about the behavioral perspective I’m going to focus on two basic types of learning referred to as conditioning. Conditioning really is another word for learning. The two types of conditioning are classical conditioning and operant conditioning. I will talk about each of these in turn.

Classical Conditioning

Pavlov's dog cartoon
Source: ©2006 Mark Stivers stiverscartoons.com. Used with permission.
Many of you may have heard of Pavlov’s dog, but I’m going to focus on this again. I hope you enjoy this cartoon! I think it illustrates that maybe, while Pavlov was training his dog, the dog was also training Pavlov. Pavlov was a physiologist and he was interested in understanding digestive processes, and the dog was his subject. The dog was restrained (not uncomfortably) and Pavlov was observing their salivation. (I’m assuming here that the dog was a boy, but perhaps it was a girl). In any case, Pavlov thought of salivation as a reflex. You put food in the mouth, and the body produces saliva to help moisturize that food and make it easier to swallow and digest. Pavlov was giving the dog meat powder (doesn’t that sound unappetizing?) and then studying its salivation. However, Pavlov noticed something odd—the dog began to salivate before the food was placed in its mouth! Now why is that odd? Well, a reflex should not occur before the stimulus has impacted it—salivation shouldn’t occur before the introduction of the meat powder. Indeed, the dog began to salivate when Pavlov entered the room. It is from this observation that Pavlov began to develop his idea of classical conditioning.

If you look at this image below it shows you the classical conditioning model.

examples of classical conditioning
In this model an unconditioned stimulus is one that provokes a certain kind of response without any previous learning history. An unconditioned response is the response that is naturally produced by the unconditioned stimulus. I want to emphasize here that no previous learning is required. So, meat powder (yuck) when placed in the dog’s mouth naturally produces salivation. Meat powder is an unconditioned stimulus producing salivation which is an unconditioned response. It helps to think of unconditioned as unlearned. What happens here though is interesting—the presence of the experimenter (Pavlov) is a neutral stimulus and certainly shouldn’t produce salivation. However, the presence of the experimenter is repeatedly paired with the presentation of the food. Over time, due to this repeated pairing, the presence of the experimenter becomes a conditioned stimulus and produces a conditioned response, the salivation. Now Pavlov need only enter the room and the dog salivates.


The Psych Show

There are many examples of classical conditioning, and the more that you can think of on your own, the better off you’ll be in trying to remember this idea. Let me give you a few examples:

Example 1: How many of you have ever had what is called an acquired taste aversion? I bet many of you have. Are there foods that you avoid because just the thought of them makes you feel a little queasy? Here’s how it typically works. You have a stomach virus, but you don’t know it yet, and you eat a certain kind of food, let’s say meatloaf. A little while later you become violently ill, and from that point on you hate meatloaf; just the thought of it makes you sick. This is an acquired taste aversion and an excellent example of classical conditioning. The stomach virus is an unconditioned stimulus, and it produces the unconditioned response of nausea and vomiting. You don’t have to have any learning history at all to have this happen. It’s unconditioned. Unfortunately, you have paired the unconditioned stimulus (the stomach virus) with the meatloaf. Now the meatloaf has become a conditioned stimulus that produces nausea.

Example 2: I had a friend who hated the smell of lilies. They made her feel so depressed. Here’s why. When her father was dying in the hospital, friends often sent lilies to the hospital room. Each time she would go in to see her father, she would smell those lilies. Now just smelling those lilies makes her feel sad. So, in this case, seeing someone you love ill and dying is an unconditioned stimulus producing sadness, which is unconditioned response. In her case seeing someone she loved ill and dying was paired with a neutral stimulus, the smell of lilies. Over time that smell became the conditioned stimulus, and just that odor would make her feel sad.

Example 3: Drug addiction is a big problem in our society, leading to many ruined lives, overdoses, and anguish for many families. Classical conditioning can help us understand some aspects of drug addiction. For an individual who is addicted to heroin, the typical way to take the drug is through injection. Heroin is an unconditioned stimulus; it affects certain neurochemicals that produce an unconditioned response known as “euphoria” or an intense high. This effect is short-lived, and individuals often increase their use quickly to keep chasing that high. Interestingly, some individuals who are addicted to heroin would tell you that the high begins a little bit before the injection. The heroin user prepares the needle to inject, and that preparation is quickly followed by the injection. So, what we have here is an unconditioned stimulus, heroin, that produces an unconditioned response, euphoria. The heroin is paired with a neutral stimulus, the syringe. As a function of this pairing, the syringe can become a conditioned stimulus producing some euphoria on its own. This doesn’t last, and the heroin user eventually needs the heroin for that euphoria, but it’s an interesting example of classical conditioning.

Example 4: Let me tell you about the case of little Albert. An early behaviorist named John Watson conducted an experiment, a highly unethical one, to see if he could condition a fear in a 9-month-old child. He sounded a very loud noise behind the child’s head. In a 9-month-old child, a very loud and unexpected noise is an unconditioned stimulus producing an unconditioned response of severe distress and upset. Watson did this repeatedly and each time before the loud noise he showed the child a little white rabbit. Soon the little white rabbit, previously a neutral stimulus, became a conditioned stimulus and elicited severe upset and fear in the child. Little Albert would cry when he saw the little white rabbit. This is clearly an example of classical conditioning, but it is also an awful example of the misuse of power and was unethical.

Example 5: On a much lighter note, I’d like you to watch the video where I explain how potty training can be understood from a classical conditioning perspective and how treatments for kids who have trouble with bedwetting work by using a urine alarm to establish a classically conditioned response.

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Here are some factors that impact classical conditioning:

The first is timing. For classical conditioning to be optimal the neutral stimulus should just precede the unconditioned stimulus in time. For example, in the case of Pavlov’s dog, the experimenter (neutral stimulus) showed up right before the meat powder (unconditioned stimulus) was put in the dog’s mouth. In the case of my friend who hated the smell of lilies, that smell (neutral stimulus) always preceded, by only a few seconds, her seeing her father lying in bed ill and dying (unconditioned stimulus). In the case of the heroin user, the syringe (neutral stimulus) always preceded the heroin injection (unconditioned stimulus). In the case of the urine alarm (as illustrated in the video), the bladder sensations (unfortunately, neutral stimuli) indicating a need to urinate preceded the activation of the alarm and subsequent loud noise (unconditioned stimulus).
Stimulus generalization can happen. Sometimes, depending on one’s learning history, an individual can demonstrate stimulus generalization whereby not only the conditioned stimulus but other similar stimuli will produce the conditioned response. For example, in the case of little Albert, he became fearful not only of a little white rabbit but also a little white rat and a fluffy white pillow. He had demonstrated stimulus generalization. In the case of the heroin user, sometimes other aspects of the drug set up (not just the syringe) can also become conditioned stimuli; another example of stimulus generalization.
On the other hand, depending on one’s learning history, an individual can demonstrate what we call stimulus discrimination. My friend only associated the smell of lilies with death and sadness. She still loved the smell of roses, carnations, and many other flowers. In her experience it was ONLY lilies that became a conditioned stimulus. The pairing of that smell with that sad situation was very specific.
Extinction is what happens when the neutral stimulus is presented over and over again without the unconditioned stimulus. For example, let’s say that, had he been ethical, John Watson had begun to present little Albert with the little white rabbit without the accompanying loud noise. Over time the classically conditioned response would begin to weaken and hopefully disappear. This idea of extinction underlies the treatment of certain kinds of phobias. A phobia is an irrational fear. So, for example, say someone has a phobia of snakes. Through classical conditioning (and potentially other mechanisms), the person sees a snake and is extremely fearful. Using exposure methods, the person stays in a room with a snake, and the classically conditioned fear response eventually weakens. This assumes of course that the snake really is a harmless one (as most are) and not a cobra!
Spontaneous recovery is when a conditioned response that has undergone extinction reappears. Let’s say that Pavlov stopped feeding the dog. For arguments sake we’ll pretend that he invented a dog feeding machine and no longer needed to come into the room to give the dog food. Over time, the conditioned response (salivating) would no longer be linked to the conditioned stimulus (the presence of the experimenter, Pavlov). In this case extinction would have occurred. However, one day Pavlov again brings in the meat powder and gives it to the dog (maybe his machine wasn’t working that day), and we see spontaneous recovery of the conditioned response—the dog again begins to salivate every time he sees Pavlov.

Operant Conditioning

Now let’s move on to another type of conditioning. This one we call operant conditioning. This type of conditioning was described in studies by B. F. Skinner. Operant is a strange word, and Skinner used it to describe voluntary behavior in which an individual acts or operates upon the world. The major idea of operant conditioning is that the likelihood of behavior occurring is influenced by the past consequences of that behavior.

BF Skinner did a lot of his research with pigeons, which are some of the dumbest creatures in the world. I hope you don’t think I’m being biased, but I’m really not crazy about pigeons. Skinner recognized that when he gave a pigeon a treat for pecking at a disk, pecking would increase. So he did research with pigeons, giving them treats and observing the impact on their behavior.



Let’s define some terms. The first is reinforcement. Reinforcement is defined as a consequence which increases the likelihood that a behavior will occur again. There are two types of reinforcement. The first is positive reinforcement. When we use positive reinforcement, we add a reinforcing stimulus and the result is that the behavior is more likely to occur again. For example, Skinner used pigeon treats to increase pecking behavior. Each time the pigeon pecked a disc, he or she would receive a treat.

You can probably think of many examples where this works. One thing about classical and operant conditioning is that if you can think of an example you are more likely to understand the concepts. So I encourage you to generate your own examples. But I will also provide some! Let’s say that you love M&M's candy, as so many of us do. So let’s say I gave you a worksheet of math problems to solve. For each math problem I would give you an M&M’S candy. You would increase the rate and productivity of your math solving problems very rapidly. Let’s say I want to teach my dog to sit when I say “sit.” Each time the dog sits when I say “sit,” I give him a little treat. He soon learns to “sit” using this kind of positive reinforcement.

On the other hand, negative reinforcement is when I take away a punishing stimulus and it increases the behavior. For example, think about when you go to drive a car and you sit down in the driver seat and start the engine. The first thing that happens is you hear a very irritating (I’ll call it “punishing”) stimulus—that buzzing sound. When you fasten your seatbelt, that sound goes away. The idea here is to train you to immediately fasten your seatbelt when you get in the car. By using negative reinforcement—the removal of the punishing stimulus—we increase the seatbelt-using behavior. The key feature of reinforcement is that, and I want to emphasize this strongly, it increases the behavior in question. Both positive and negative reinforcement increase the behavior.

Punishment on the other hand decreases the likelihood of behavior will occur. As with reinforcement, there are two types of punishment. The first is punishment by addition, also called positive punishment, where a punishing stimulus is added. For example, if every time you talk in class I walk over and hit your hand with a ruler, ouch, you are likely to decrease your talking in class. As another example, there’s a device some people use to decrease barking in a dog. You strap it to the dog’s neck, and when the dog begins to growl or bark, they get a very mild (not painful but certainly uncomfortable) shock. This leads to a decrease in growling and barking behavior. Some of you might think this is not the best way to go, and you may be right, but it is an example of a punishment. Another type of punishment is punishment by removal, also called negative punishment. In this case we take away a reinforcing stimulus to decrease behavior. Let’s say that you drive your car too fast, and the police catch you and take away your driver’s license. The idea here is punishment by removal, and hopefully you are less likely to drive your car too fast in the future. I think probably all of you can think of examples of where punishment by removal, or negative punishment, was used to try to change your behavior when you were young.

I think people often get confused by the idea of punishment and reinforcement—the important thing to remember is that in reinforcement behavior increases, and in punishment behavior decreases. When we say positive reinforcement or positive punishment, we are not using “positive” as a value judgment but rather positive means the addition of the stimulus. Similarly, when we talk about negative reinforcement or punishment, we are not using “negative” as a value judgment but rather negative means that we take away or subtract a stimulus.

emoji of Dr. Tompson with the words, Careful not to confuse negative reinforcement and punishment

I think this all begs the question of what is a reinforcer? Well, some stimuli have natural reinforcing properties, for example, food when we are hungry or a drink when we are thirsty. These are what we call primary reinforcers—they have natural reinforcing properties for our species. Another primary reinforcer for human beings is what we call social reinforcement. When we are praised, when someone smiles at us, when we get attention from others we care about—these are very reinforcing stimuli for us. Social reinforcement is very powerful for our species. Some of my students questioned whether reinforcement really works for adults. I can tell you without question it works. One of my teaching fellows told me a story about a professor. In this case the class decided to play a trick on the professor during his lecture, and each time he would walk forward a step they would smile and nod. Unfortunately, he was lecturing from a stage. Each time he stepped forward, they smiled and nodded, and eventually he stepped right up the front of the stage! Now obviously this is not a nice thing to do. But I do think it illustrates the power of positive reinforcement, and social reinforcement in particular. Even more clear to many of us, it the power on social media of “likes”. The developers of social media have created a system whereby individuals spend increasing amounts of time on social media because they are getting these “likes”. Your attention is a product, and companies are using behavioral (reinforcement principles) to shape your behavior!


Learning: Negative Reinforcement vs. Punishment


Let’s focus on some additional terms. A discriminative stimulus is something in the environment that indicates to you that if you engage in a particular behavior you are likely to be positively reinforced. For example, B. F. Skinner taught his pigeons that when a particular light was on and they pecked the disc, they would be positively reinforced with a pigeon treat; and when the light was off, they would not receive positive reinforcement. The pigeons quickly learned and only pecked the disc when the light was on. The light had become a discriminative stimulus.

Think about a child in the classroom. Let’s say this particular child is a very good soccer player. If the ball rolled in front of her and she kicked it very hard and made a goal on the soccer field, she would certainly get a lot of positive social reinforcement. On the other hand, if a ball were to roll by her by mistake in the classroom and she were to give it a good hard kick, the consequences would be quite different. She would likely be sent to the principal’s office, where her parents would be called, and she would probably get in a lot of trouble. There are many things in our environment that function as discriminative stimuli, and in this case the context, be it classroom versus soccer field, is critically important. We quickly learn as a species which circumstances are likely to lead to reinforcement and which are not. We learn the discriminative stimuli.

Some of you might ask, well, how do we train more complex behaviors? After all, in learning we often want to develop more complex behaviors than, say, kicking a ball, pecking a disc, or taking a step forward on the stage. One way we can do this is through something called shaping. In shaping we reinforce successive approximations to the desired behavior. I know that sounds complicated, but in the next video I’ll give you an example.

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Operant Conditioning and Parenting

So how can we help parents who are having difficulties with their kids? We can use a lot of what we know from operant conditioning. First, it is important to stop reinforcing problem behavior. One of the mistakes we often make is to confuse reinforcement and punishment. Sometimes when parents or teachers scold a child, they think they are punishing the child, but the behavior increases. Well if the behavior increases, it’s been reinforced not punished! Sometimes attention, even “negative” or unpleasant attention, can be powerfully reinforcing. If behavior is mildly annoying, ignoring it and not reinforcing it can often be enough to get it to stop. So, it’s very important to stop reinforcing problem behavior. Second, you can use a “timeout” to change a child’s behavior. A timeout is actually a punishment, because it is designed to induce the problem behavior to decrease.

For example, when I was training, I did some consulting with a preschool. One big problem they had was a child who was a "biter". This is a very bad thing in a preschool, when one child bites another child! No one wants their child to be bitten. We encourage the staff to use timeout as one strategy to reduce the child’s biting behavior. The next time the child made any moves to bite another child, he was immediately removed and placed in a playpen alone with no interesting toys and ignored for one minute. We call it a timeout because it’s a timeout from positive reinforcement. All the fun things he had been doing were no longer available to him, so we can think of it as a punishment by removal, or negative punishment. Another strategy is to reinforce the nonoccurrence of problem behavior. I remember when my two boys were small. I wanted to increase their cooperative play and to decrease fighting, particularly at the Lego table. When I saw them playing nicely and sharing well, I would praise them and suggest a reward (maybe some Goldfish crackers). One can also reinforce incompatible behavior. Let’s say that a teacher wants to stop a child in her classroom from chatting with his peers during work time. When she sees him working hard on his math problems (incompatible with socializing) she adds a reinforcing stimulus, say five minutes of playtime with a peer after he finishes his page of math problems.

You may have noticed that the emphasis here is on reinforcement rather than punishment. In working with parents, the focus is on reinforcement. Reinforcement tends to work better than punishment for variety of reasons. First, it is not always clear to the young child or to an animal (or often to one of us) exactly what it is that is being punished. Second, we tend to habituate to punishments. Punishments tend to have to get stronger over time. Think about nagging as an example. At first, when you are nagged you may respond right away and take care of whatever it is you’re being nagged about. But over time, the nagging just becomes background noise—easily ignored. The nagger has to get louder and more insistent. The punishing stimulus doesn’t have the same impact that it once did—habituation occurs. Third, if punishment is harsh, the individual can begin to fear the punishing agents (a parent or teacher). This is not our goal. Overall, there are a number of drawbacks with punishment.

Moving from Continuous to Partial Reinforcement

If you want to train a new behavior, it is often best to use what we call continuous reinforcement. That is, you reinforce each time the behavior occurs. So, for example, if I want you to do long division, I might give you an M&M’S candy for every problem you do that is correct. However, over time you might gain a lot of weight, encounter some health problems, or just lose your appetite! At this point I might want to move to what we call partial reinforcement where you only receive reinforcement some of the time. The question B. F. Skinner had was what is the best reinforcement “schedule”? He examined various reinforcement schedules with his pigeons. So let me describe partial reinforcement schedules.

Partial Reinforcement Schedules

examples of partial reinforcement schedules
Fixed Ratio Reinforcement

The first is what we call fixed ratio (FR) reinforcement. In a fixed ratio schedule, reinforcement comes after a certain number of occurrences of the behavior. So, for example with Skinner, he might put his pigeons on an FR5 reinforcement schedule, that is, a fixed ratio reinforcement schedule of 5:1. The pigeons would have to peck the disc five times in order to get one pigeon treat. He found that with this schedule, behavior increased at a rapid rate—lots more pecking. Let’s think of an example from our world. How many of you have ever gotten “credits” from a pizza parlor? For each pizza you buy you get a point, and after you get five points you get a free pizza. My kids are on one of these at Domino’s Pizza. The idea here is that you are going to buy more pizza in order to get your free pizza (your reinforcer). Does this work? Well it seems to. Recently my son told me about this place in town where the kids get a free sandwich after they buy five, and he proceeded to explain how the kids went there as often as they could to get sandwiches so that they might get a free one. This is the perfect example of the fixed ratio reinforcement schedule.

Variable Ratio Reinforcement

Another type of reinforcement schedule is what we call variable ratio reinforcement schedule (VR). In this schedule, reinforcement is random in relation to occurrences of the behavior. Sound confusing? It’s not really. Let’s say I have you on a variable ratio of 10:1 (VR 10) schedule. So, ON AVERAGE, you get reinforced every 10 times you engage in the behavior. BUT that reinforcement could come after two occurrence of the behavior or after 20 occurrences of the behavior. The impact on behavior here is the behavior tends not to extinguish. We also call this the gambler's reinforcement schedule.

I don’t know how many of you all have ever been to a casino in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, or elsewhere. Folks will sit in front of slot machines and play for hours at a time. They keep putting more money in, but the old gambler's fallacy keeps them coming back for more. The idea is that you don’t know when the payout is going to come, but you know that it will come eventually. Somebody has to win, right? And it might as well be you! So, you hold onto that slot machine and keep putting money in it. Maybe reinforcement will come on the next play, maybe it won’t come for 3,000 plays, but it will eventually come—you just know this. The casino has you on a variable ratio reinforcement schedule, and your slot machine playing behavior is just not going to extinguish easily at all (that’s how they make their money, folks!).

As another example I think of how we can put children’s irritating behavior on a variable ratio reinforcement schedule. Let’s say you’re at the grocery store and your 6-year-old child is nagging and whining for a cookie (if ever there was a punishing stimulus, whining is it). The child whines and whines and whines, and you ignore and ignore and ignore. Finally, you throw up your hands and give her a cookie. Now she has you! You have just put her on a variable ratio reinforcement schedule. She’s learning that if she just keeps at it, keeps on whining, eventually you will give in. Maybe it will take 5 more minutes, maybe half an hour, maybe an hour, but eventually it will pay off. Eventually she will get that cookie. So she keeps at it. The sad part here is that you’ve reinforced the very behavior you hate (whining); it is an example of positive reinforcement on a variable ratio reinforcement schedule. Another thing that is happening here, though, is that your behavior (giving in) is also being negatively reinforced. When you gave in, she finally stopped the whining, and the punishing stimulus was removed; so maybe you’re more likely to give in in the future. You are positively reinforcing her for whining by giving her the cookie; she’s negatively reinforcing you for giving in by stopping whining! It’s not a pretty picture, is it?

Fixed Interval Reinforcement

A third kind of reinforcement schedule is fixed interval reinforcement. On this schedule you are going to get reinforced, but the emphasis is really on time rather than the behavior. So, with Skinner, he put his pigeons on this schedule—a fixed interval schedule of 5:1 (FI5), which meant that they got a pigeon treat every 5 minutes. They would peck lots for the treat right at the 5-minute point, then hang out for a while; as the 5-minute interval began to come to an end, they would peck again. So overall pecking increases at a moderate rate, but it tends to have this pattern. It reminds me of when I worked at the movie theatre as a teen. About every hour my boss would come out to check on us. Right before he was scheduled to come out, we would all start cleaning furiously; he would then praise us for all our hard work and disappear back into his office. We would then sit around and socialize. About 5 minutes before he was due to come out again, we would begin to furiously work . . . looks a little like Skinner’s pigeons, eh?

Random Interval Schedule

Last kind of schedule we’ll talk about is the random interval schedule. This is a weird one. It’s when the reinforcement comes at a random time that seems pretty unrelated to the behavior. So when Skinner used this schedule with his pigeons, he got some unpredictable changes in their behavior—one pigeon got a treat when he happened to be hopping on one foot, and he kept hoping on that foot over 1,000 times!

This is what Skinner dubbed "superstitious behavior". You’re not sure what is happening, so you start engaging in this behavior. I think about sports fans—let’s say baseball. In baseball a home run is pretty rare; we all hope for one, and they are hard to predict. So, you just happened to have your cap on backwards when the Red Sox batter hit a home run, so now you wear your cap backwards all the time thinking it increases the odds of a homerun—that’s superstitious behavior! The homerun is random interval reinforcement . . . not really related to your behavior. On this reinforcement schedule, you can end up with behavior changes than are not desired. It’s not such a good schedule.

Cognitive Perspective

Robert A RescorlaRobert A Rescorla
From the behavioral perspective, internal mental processes were not considered to be worthy of study, as these could not be observed. However, the cognitive perspective emerged as an approach for studying learning that emphasized the role of expectations, mental representations, and other mental processes. Robert A Rescorla was an American psychologist who began to demonstrate the role of cognitive processes in classical conditioning. From his point of view, classical conditioning was learning the relationship between events. His studies illustrated that for classical conditioning to occur, the conditioned stimulus had to become a reliable predictor of the unconditioned stimulus.

Edward C. TolmanEdward C. Tolman
Another important person was Edward C. Tolman, who demonstrated that cognitive events could play a factor in animal learning. Tolman worked with rats; he would put them in mazes and observe their behavior. If we are to believe the behavioral perspective thinkers, we would believe that learning only occurs as a function of reinforcement; however, Tolman illustrated that this is not the case. He found that when he placed animals in mazes and let them wander around for a bit, they were much more likely to find the food quickly when the reinforcer, the food, became available. To him this illustrated that the animals were learning something even in the absence of reinforcement. He referred to this as latent learning, that is, learning in the absence of reinforcement or reward. He used the term cognitive map to define a mental representation of the layout of the familiar environment. The rats would wander around the maze engaging in latent learning and then, when the food became available as a reinforcer, they would show what they knew.

Bobo doll experiment
Albert Bandura was another American psychologist and he focused on the role of observational learning and emphasized the importance of cognitive factors. Bandura suggested that individuals learn a lot by observing the behavior of others. One of the things that Bandura studied was the learning of aggressive behavior. He used the “Bobo doll” to illustrate this modeling behavior.

He found that children who had observed an adult being aggressive toward the Bobo doll were more likely to engage in this behavior themselves when given the chance. However, if the children saw the adult being scolded for this aggressive behavior, they were then less likely to engage in it. Clearly the children had learned the behavior, but they had also learned the consequences of the behavior. In this case, one did not have to be directly reinforced but could instead observe the reinforcement or punishment of others and learn from that. Bandura suggests that cognitive processes are at play in determining whether imitation would occur. First, individuals had to be paying attention to the other person’s behavior. Second, they had to remember what the other person did. Third, they had to be capable, from a motor standpoint, of reproducing the behavior. Fourth, and finally, they had to be motivated to imitate the behavior with some expectation that doing so would be associated with the reinforcement or reward.

The quality of the video that follows isn't the best, but it is an actual video of Albert Bandura describing the Bobo doll experiment.


Everywhere Psychology

As an example, consider how young Mayan girls learn to weave. Weaving is an important activity in traditional Mayan culture. Young girls learn to pay attention when their mothers are weaving, to remember the steps involved in weaving even before they are able to reproduce these steps. At a certain age when their hands are big enough, their mother will introduce them to the loom, and they are then able motorically to produce the movements needed. They are then reinforced for that behavior. I think this is a good example of observational learning.

Ecological Perspective

The ecological perspective emphasizes that to understand learning fully, we must consider that different species have unique behavior patterns; these behavior patterns have evolved over millennia to help the animal adapt to their natural environment. The ecological perspective does not deny that the behavioral perspective has validity, but it places limitations on what behavior can be learned. The radical behaviorist would say that you can teach any behavior if you have the right consequences. However, the ecological perspective would suggest otherwise. Let’s explore some background about this perspective and give you some examples to illustrate.

John Garcia
John Garcia was an American psychologist and he experimentally demonstrated how taste aversions can develop in animals. Some of his findings challenged the behavioral idea that any behavior could be taught. Let us consider conditioned taste aversions. I mentioned this earlier in the section on classical conditioning. As a reminder, most of you have probably developed a conditioned taste aversion. Think about a time when you didn’t yet realize that you had a stomach virus and you ate some food that you liked; but then, after a night of vomiting, you find that you never want to have that food again. You have a conditioned taste aversion. These taste aversions easily happen in humans and other animals. For example, the use of conditioned taste aversions has been used to try to reduce the poaching of sheep by coyotes. A sheep laced with a chemical that caused nausea (lithium chloride) was left out in the open, and coyotes fed upon it. The coyotes became violently ill. After that they began to avoid sheep. There was even a story of a coyote who saw a sheep and began to retch just looking at it! I think we can all relate to that if we’ve ever had a conditioned taste aversion; clearly this coyote had a severe conditioned taste aversion to sheep. No more mutton for dinner! There are several factors that make taste aversions interesting:

First, in a classical conditioning model, conditioning is most likely to occur when the unconditioned response follows the neutral stimulus close in time. However, in the case of conditioned taste aversions, you may eat the food hours before you begin vomiting and yet you still remember and you make that association.
Second, certain associations are more likely to be made than others. For example, Garcia found that rats were more likely to be able to make an association between external stimuli, like flashing lights or noise, and the experience of pain due to a shock; at that same time, they were likely to associate a taste stimuli with internal sensations, like nausea. However, it was REALLY hard to get them to experience nausea when they saw flashing lights! Let’s face it, it would be very hard to learn to associate noise with nausea. It’s just not natural. If you think of it from the perspective of adapting to the environment, what would be the value to the rat of becoming nauseous when it heard a loud noise? Or what would be the value to rats or to us of experiencing fear when you tasted a certain food? It's easy for us to make an association between taste and nausea; and that’s probably because this is adaptive in the world we live in. Creatures survived by learning quickly which foods were not good to eat, and the cues for that are smell and taste. Creatures also survived by learning quickly which noises could signify a threat and the cues for that are auditory and visual (things we hear and see).
Biological preparedness is the notion that we are innately predisposed to make certain associations and not others. This biological preparedness has likely emerged over millennia to help animals adapt to their environment. As an example, I want you to think about phobias. Phobias are excessive or irrational fears. The most common phobias include insect phobias (particularly spiders and stinging insects), large carnivores (like dogs), and such things as heights. Now if you think back over our evolutionary history, it was probably good to be able to be afraid of such things, as through much of human existence these were threats to our survival. On the other hand, most of us are not threatened by these in any real way in the world we currently live in (death from insect bites or from being ingested by a large carnivore is, thankfully, rare). However, these continue to be the stimuli that elicit fear in many people. Interestingly, things like automobiles or light sockets are much more dangerous in today’s world, but you rarely find someone fearful of automobiles or light sockets—these just don’t become the focus of people’s phobias. It looks like human beings are biologically prepared to associate certain stimuli with fear (ones that were threats throughout our evolutionary past) but not so much other stimuli. This is not to say that no one ever had an automobile or light socket phobia, but they’re pretty rare.

You may find it extremely interesting to view the video below, in which Dr. Robert Batsell discusses flavor aversion, and then goes on to talk about it in relation to cancer treatment.


Flavor Aversion Learning in Cancer Treatment | Robert Batsell | TEDxKalamazooCollege


It’s also the case that animals’ natural behavior patterns can interfere with the learning of new behaviors. B. F. Skinner trained many young psychologists, and some of them went on to work in Hollywood training animals to act in movies and to do all sorts of strange things! However, they were more successful in their training efforts in some instances than in others. For example, in one situation they tried to teach pigs to play soccer, which is hardly an activity that pigs naturally engage in. They found that they could teach the pigs to hit the ball with their snouts and move it up and down the field, and yet at times the pigs would stop and begin to root around the ball and attempt to bury it. Well, that’s kind of what pigs do in their natural environment. The pigs’ natural behavior patterns were interfering with their ability to learn this new, and somewhat useless, behavior. Instinctive drift is a term used to describe the tendency of creatures to revert back to their natural instinctive behaviors.

As another example, Skinner students tried to teach raccoons how to play poker. This didn’t work so well. The trainers would give a raccoon a poker chip, and then give the creature a second poker chip. But the raccoons didn’t like to give the poker chips back, rather they would rub the two chips together. If you want to join the poker game you have to “ante up” with a chip, and the raccoons didn’t want to do it! I like to think about this image in my mind. Raccoons are pretty cute despite how very destructive they can be. What was happening here? Well, raccoons do not have salivary glands, and to clean their food they tend to rub bits of it together; so when they were given the poker chips, the raccoons reverted to their natural behavior—they demonstrated instinctive drift.

Do You Remember and Conclusion

See what you can remember from the material on learning by matching the terms with their definitions.


 

In conclusion, behavioral principles have been used to understand behavior and they remain a useful and important strategy for changing behavior. At the same time, we need to be able to understand cognitive factors that impact learning, and we need to recognize that learning promotes adaptation for species in unique environments and that each species has its own evolutionary history that influences its ability to learn specific new behaviors.

Memory
Introduction

I think memory is an interesting topic. If you think about your own memory, it in some sense defines who you are as a human being. Your memory is all those episodes in your life that identify you, form who you are. Your memory is your knowledge base, what you know about the world, and what you value. All these things are part of your memory. If you think about a life without memory, it’s a moment-to-moment existence. I’ll talk about some cases where this actually happened to people. In this section I am going to talk about what psychologists and other researchers have discovered about the nature of memory. I am also going to talk about some weird cases of repressed memories and other kinds of unique phenomena that we encounter in our culture.


Waster Time: How Does Our Brain Store Memories?

An Information Processing Approach: Three Processes

When we think about memory, we think about it often as an information processing model. People have often used the computer as a model for human memory, and it’s not a bad model (although it has its detractors and certainly there are some questions on its validity). I think it provides a useful metaphor for thinking about memory. Based on this model, here are the three processes involved in memory.

three processes involved in memory
Encoding

If you are going to remember something, you first need to get it into your memory. Many things can get in the way of you being able to adequately encode information. One of those things is attention. Before you can remember things, you have to pay attention. One of the problems that people have with this is multi-tasking. Multi-tasking is very interesting because we tend to overestimate our ability to do this. We think that we can answer our email and write our paper and do our math homework and check our social media accounts all at the same time. Is this possible? No! The answer is definitely no. We seriously overestimate how good we are at multi-tasking. We think we are good at it, but we stink at it! The bottom line is that when you multitask, you don’t remember nearly as much as you do when you focus on one thing at a time.

I have been trying to do this. I have tried to set aside the time when I want to write, and during that time I do not answer my email. Yet I am drawn to my email in this inexplicable way. How many of you are drawn to Facebook or Twitter or some other thing? It’s a bad deal, because you are being drawn away from the thing you have been focusing on. Before you can encode items, before you can enter them into memory, you have to pay attention to them. So let’s all stop multi-tasking!

Storage

Second, after encoding, you have to retain items in memory—that’s storage. Once you have encoded those items, you have entered them into memory and you have to send them somewhere where you can keep them. Research has shown that memory storage is not located in one part of the brain; you don’t have a big storeroom in your brain where all those memories go to be housed. Memory is fairly widely distributed in the cortex of the brain, so there are a lot of places where memory is stored. You can see evidence of this in people who have dementia or other kinds of neurological problems where the brain is deteriorating—memory goes in bits and pieces. In one area, the brain is deteriorating, so some memories are gone; and this can be a gradual kind of process.

Retrieval


Source: ©Bill Whitehead. Used with permission.
Third, you need to recover items from memory, and this is a process known as retrieval—where you go in and pull out the thing that you need to recall. How many of you have ever had the experience of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon? This is that frustrating experience where you are just sure you know the information but can’t quite come up with it. Studies have demonstrated that people who report this tip-of-the-tongue experience have what we would call a partial retrieval. They may get the first letter of the person’s name, for example, but can’t remember the whole name. This illustrates that retrieval is not an all-or-nothing process; sometimes we partially retrieve information but can’t dredge up the whole memory. Probably most of you have had this experience. Your memory was encoded, you got it in there somewhere, but you just can’t fully access or retrieve it.

So problems with memory can happen in each of these processes: maybe you never encoded in the first place; maybe you had a brain injury and your storage is gone; maybe it’s in there but you are just having trouble with retrieving it. You can have trouble at each of these points.

Stage Theory of Memory

So those are the basic processes in memory—encoding, storage, retrieval. But I also want us to think about memory in terms of stages that you go through when you are adding a memory. The stage theory of memory has been very influential. Let’s talk about the three stages; I am going to talk about each stage according to its capacity, duration, and function, and they are outlined on the next slide.

attributes of sensory memory
Sensory memory is the first stage of memory. When I am look out at a classroom full of students, I am taking in a tremendous amount of information into sensory memory. Looking at the world that you are walking through, you are taking in a huge amount of information. The capacity of sensory memory is extremely large. On the other hand, it doesn’t last very long—its duration is very short. Sensory memory allows us to briefly store impressions so that they overlap in time. You see one image, and you hold it very briefly. You see the next one, and you hold it briefly, and so on. In this way, you have an experience of the world that is continuous. There are two kinds of sensory memory that I am going to mention, one is called echoic—this is auditory sensory memory. When you hear people talking you can take in a lot of information, and that auditory sensory memory is called echoic memory (like an echo in your mind!). You are keeping that sensory memory (the thing that you have just heard) for a short amount of time. The echoic sensory memory is 2–3 seconds. It’s so short! But it allows you to follow the conversation. Iconic sensory memory is visual sensory memory. You have a very brief visual impression of what you just saw. The iconic sensory memory is just about half a second. Its function is to briefly store impressions so that they overlap in time. We all have the experience of the world as continuous. When you hear me speaking, you don’t remember the words that I say, you remember the gist of it—the message. You are not going to remember word for word; that echoic memory only lasts for a few seconds so that you can follow what I am saying, and I can follow what you are saying. This is the whole point of the sensory memory. George Sperling did much of the original research on this kind of memory. What are the other stages of memory?

Short-Term Memory

The next stage is short-term memory. Let’s talk about the capacity of short-term memory.


I want you to pull out a piece of paper and click on the video below. I am going to read some digits, and I want you to listen and to try to remember them, and when I finish with the list, I want you to write them all down as fast as you can. I am testing your short-term memory. How many things can you hold in your short-term memory?

cas_ps101_19_su2_mtompson_memory_test_1 video cannot be displayed here. Videos cannot be played from Printable Lectures. Please view media in the module.
You might say, professor, why are you torturing me like this? Well, what I am trying to show is the limits of what we call short-term memory.

Short-term memory has limits. You can hold 7 ± 2 items (between 5 and 9 items) in your short-term memory. We think that there may be biologically-based limitations on what can be held in short-term memory. How many of you use what is called maintenance rehearsal to hold things, like a telephone number, in short-term memory? In maintenance rehearsal, you basically repeat the information to be remembered multiple times. Do you do that? That’s what most people do when they are holding digits in short-term memory. Short-term memory is only about 30 seconds, but you can extend it through maintenance rehearsal. There are other ways to expand your short-term memory. Let me illustrate: I want you to take a piece of paper and I am going to list some letters and I want you to listen to the whole list and then I want you to write them down as fast as you can.

cas_ps101_19_su2_mtompson_memory_test_2 video cannot be displayed here. Videos cannot be played from Printable Lectures. Please view media in the module.
By chunking material into meaningful units, you can hold more in your short-term memory. Sometimes people do this with digits. Instead of saying 4 and 9, they’d say 49. So you can hold 7 ± 2 meaningful chunks in your short-term memory. With phone numbers, this is kind of handy! You probably know several area codes by heart (for me these include 617 Boston, 781 farther from Boston, 512 Austin, TX, 310 and 213 Los Angeles, etc.). We use these chunks to expand our memory. That three-digit area code just became one meaningful chunk. The next part of the phone number is the exchange. After the area code, the exchange is a smaller unit of geography. In my town there are two primary local exchanges, and for me these are meaningful chunks. I can remember the area code, which is a chunk, the exchange, which is another chunk, and then only four more unique digits. We are able to expand our short-term storage through chunking. As another example, if I have you repeat a sentence, you are not going to remember each individual letter, you will remember the words, as each of those words is a meaningful chunk. You are able to keep a lot more information in short-term memory using this chunking strategy. Of course, in the age of cell phones probably none of us remembers phone numbers!

Your short-term memory is indeed short, lasting about 30 seconds, and it is a temporary storage for information currently in use—we often talk about it as working memory. That’s the stuff you are using right now. You may take that memory and put it into long-term storage, or it might be something that you pulled out of long-term storage and are working on in this minute. For something to make it into long-term storage, it first has to go through the sensory memory, into the short-term storage, and then it finally makes it to long-term storage.

Long-Term Memory


Your long-term storage is theoretically limitless. You can fit a ton of information in there. Think about all the things you know. You know tens and tens of thousands of words and mathematical formulae; you have memories of events in your life; you have stored facts, stories, ideas, and so on. You have so many memories already in your long-term storage, and these memories can last for years and years. How many of you can remember things from childhood? My mother who is 81 can tell me about her experiences from her childhood, and that was 70+ years ago. The function of long-term memory is to store huge quantities of information, experiences, skills; then you have access to all these memories going forward. You can see that each of these stages is important to understand in terms of their different capacities, different durations, and different functions.

Types of Long-Term Memories

There are different types of information in long-term memory. We generally think of these memories as fitting into two broad categories. One is what we call implicit memory, and the other is what we call explicit memory.


Psychology Unlocked: Long-Term Memory | Tulving (1972) | Procedural, Semantic & Episodic


Implicit memories are ones that you may not even really be aware that you have, but you do. Here are two kinds:

Procedural or skill-based—these are the “how-to” memories. If you haven’t ridden a bicycle in years, you can likely get on and still remember how to do it. How to ride a bike is one of those procedural memories. How many of you have played a musical instrument? If you don’t play your instrument for a number of years, you still might pull that instrument out and be able to play it (even though you’re very rusty). Your procedural memories are implicit. You may not remember when you learned them, you may not have been aware of their existence, but they are there.
Classically conditioned memories are also there, and you may not have any awareness of them. For example, your fears may fall into this category. Something may have happened to you as a child and you retain that classical conditioned fear for decades, and it comes up again and again. Also, recent research in social psychology has focused on attitudes, and how some attitudes are classically conditioned. Say, sometimes types of prejudices can be classically conditioned or learned vicariously; these may guide our behavior out of our awareness. So classically conditioned responses are also implicit memories.
Explicit memories are those “you know that you know.” If I ask you who the first president of the United States was, most of you born in the United States would know the answer. There are all sorts of things that you know explicitly; here are two types of explicit memories:

Sematic memory is your knowledge-base, including words you know, facts you know, etc. Think about the many words you’ve learned over the years but haven’t heard recently; if you read a passage of literature and come upon these words, you’d be able to recognize and know what they mean. This is your semantic memory
Episodic memory is your autobiographical memory. It’s called episodic because it’s the “episodes” of your life. You might remember a championship game that you played in your sport, a particular concert you attended or performed in, your graduation, a special birthday celebration, etc. You all have memories of your life that form part of who you are. That is your episodic memory.
So we have our implicit memory—those things we are not aware of—and explicit memory—those things that we know about, things that we can speak to.

Types of Processing and Organization in Memory


Remembering and Forgetting: Crash Course Psychology #14

Two Types of Processing: Automatic vs. Effortful

One type of processing is automatic processing, which involves a lot of implicit memories. I’ll give you an example. We learn how to navigate our environment. When I first moved into my house, I found that all the cabinets in my kitchen were magnetized. When they are nearly closed, the magnet engages, and they finish closing very rapidly. At first, this drove me mad. I cannot tell you how many times my fingers were smashed in the cabinet doors! I had all these bruises! Now I have learned to navigate that space—I am not even aware of it, explicitly, but implicitly I know when to let go of the cabinet and not to put my finger there. I don’t even think about it. The last time I squished my finger in a cabinet was probably a couple of years ago. I use automatic processing to navigate that space. We use automatic processing in many situations. How many of you have had this experience where you are driving somewhere, and you arrive and have no memory of the drive? You were on autopilot! So much of what we do is automatic.

The second type of processing is called effortful processing. That’s what you are doing when you are studying. You are trying to take that information and put it into memory. This is what we do with many of our semantic memories. You have to put in a lot of effort to remember the material. Sometimes over time that effortful processing becomes automatic. Think about when you first started to read. At the beginning, it’s so effortful to read, but now you can be half asleep and you can read. You may find this is true of many things—simple mathematical procedures, playing and instrument, etc.

Retrieval Processing

So, now you have that information in there and you need to get it out or retrieve it. What happens then? Let’s talk more about retrieval. Let me go back a little bit. I want to talk a little bit more about long-term memory.

First, recite the days of the week quickly!!

Was that hard? No. I didn’t think so.

Now, I want you to recite them again, but this time in alphabetical order? Quickly!!

This is hard, isn’t it? I think this tells us something important. Information is not just like a dictionary in alphabetical order in your brain. You have organized information in your brain; you have put it where it is useful. What would be the point of knowing the alphabetical order of the days of the week? It is not helpful in any way. What is important is that the days of the week occur in a particular order and you have organized your memory to reflect that, to make information useful.

Information is organized in your long-term memory—it’s not just an alphabetical list of things that you know.

How do you best get information into long-term memory? One way is a strategy we mentioned before—maintenance rehearsal (we just keep repeating it again and again). Maintenance rehearsal is a pretty good for extending short-term memory for a brief period but a pretty lousy way to transfer information to long-term memory. A better way is through elaborative rehearsal. In elaborative rehearsal you consider how the new information is related to what you already know about the topic and how this new information relates to other information that you are putting into memory. How does it relate to the other concepts? How is it different from the other concepts? How does it contradict or reinforce other information I already know? That’s elaborative rehearsal.

Your memory is what we call “schema-based.” A schema is a framework for understanding information about a particular area and the scaffold upon which you build up your new knowledge. You are always trying to figure out how to fit new information with previous information that you have. If you can fit it into your schemas, you are going to remember it better. For example, everything that I know about speaking Italian is in my Italian schema—my personal framework (based on previous experience) for understanding Italian language. A schema can be a framework of everything that you know about a particular topic. For some of us, we may take a new class and have no schema at all, and this is really hard—to remember things when you don’t have a schema to start with. This is why I think it is super important when you are learning new material to look at the structure—this helps you form a schema; it helps you with elaborative rehearsal. When you go into a book, there are headings and sub-headings etc. These are the structures that you can use to help you remember material, because memory is structured. So, if you can start to integrate into that structure, it’s going to be a lot easier for you to remember the material. The best structure is the one you create yourself, and your own schema is going to be different from other peoples’.

emoji of Dr. Tompson with the question, so what are some good ways you can use aelaborative rehearsal to improve memory

Here is an example of a kind of schema—a script. We all have scripts—these are schemas for how everyday activities work. I have this schema for the grocery store: I drive to the grocery store; grab my bags from my car; walk in; find a cart; head to the produce section first; then go to the processed foods section; then I go along the back wall for my dairy and meat products; etc. This is an example of a script; once you have one in memory you don’t have to re-invent it every time. You know how it works at the grocery store and what needs to be done. Most of us have a restaurant schema: You enter a restaurant; walk up to the host or hostess; say “I need a table for X (number) of people"; you follow them to the table where they leave the menus; the server comes and pours water; etc. Sound familiar? We all have our own schema for these things, but you can see there is some familiarity here. These scripts allow us to engage in everyday activities in a pretty seamless way, and the more you engage in that activity the more elaborate that script is. I went cross-country skiing with my kids, which was very fun, but I have only been three times in my life. For me there is only a basic script here, so every time I go, they have to explain to me how to put the boots on, etc. I don’t yet have a fully developed script for how all of this goes.

More on retrieval. How do we get information out of memory so that we can use it again at times that we need it? One important factor in getting information out of memory is what we call a retrieval cue. A retrieval cue is a hint or a prompt that allows you to pull information out of your memory. Sometimes the reason you can’t remember things is because you have what is called retrieval cue failure. It’s not that the memory is not in there, but how do you get at it when you don’t have anything around you that is a prompt or a hint? Have you ever had the following experience? You had an experience a long time ago and haven’t thought about or remembered it for a long time, but then you go back to the scene where it happened, and suddenly your memory is improved—you can recall it with clarity! Let’s say that you are at your grandparents’ house one day, go in the attic and open an old trunk. You see the little stuffed animal that you had as a child and you start to remember all your experiences with this creature when you were a child. You haven’t thought about all of these things for years, but your stuffed animal is your retrieval cue that allows you to go back to those memories. It’s funny because I feel like there are parts of my life that I have no memory of, but that’s not true. I grew up in Austin, Texas, and I don’t spontaneously remember lots of experiences, but when I go to visit my sisters in Austin, it’s amazing how much I recall about particular events! Even seeing the old locations can be a powerful retrieval cue—it’s a prompt that allows me to pull up all kinds of memories. You probably all have these experiences as well.

Testing Memory

How do we test retrieval? There are lots of different ways:

One way is  free recall; that is recall with no retrieval cues. What if on the next test for a class the professor gave you a blank piece of paper and ask you to write down everything you learned since the last exam? Actually, you're doing free recalls every week during this course—a great way to learn but a painfully difficult way to be tested!
A second way is  cued recall. Let’s say that I had an exam that was essay questions, and I’d ask you to tell me about three processes of memory and describe them. The essay questions themselves give you some clues—retrieval cues to assist your recall. Fill in the blank is also a form of cued recall. I ask you the definition of ___, and you fill in the blank. What I did is that I provided you with a retrieval cue and you have to pull up the information.
A third way is recognition. I show you the material and you have to recognize it. A true/false exam or a multiple-choice exam are examples of testing recognition memory. You have to recognize what is accurate and what it inaccurate.
Watch this pretty amazing example of a memory champion in action.


Speed Cards World Record - Simon Reinhard from Germany
Factors Affecting Recall

What are some factors that impact the likelihood we will be able to retrieve information? I’d like to illustrate a few.

I am going to give you a list of words and I want you to remember them and write them down as soon as I say “go.” Now, click on the video link.

cas_ps101_19_su2_mtompson_memory_test_3 video cannot be displayed here. Videos cannot be played from Printable Lectures. Please view media in the module.
I’d like you to think about where the items you remembered occurred on the list that I gave you. Were they in the beginning, the middle, the end? I’d bet that for most of you, items at the beginning of the list and ones at the end were more likely to be remembered.

This is what we call the serial position effect. Basically, the serial position effect is the idea that where an item occurs in a list is important and will determine the likelihood that item is remembered. The serial position effect involves two pieces. First, primacy is the idea you are more likely to remember items at the beginning of the list. How many of you used maintenance rehearsal to try to remember the items? If so, the items at the beginning got the most rehearsal, and so you are more likely to enter those into your long-term memory. Second, recency is the idea that the items you heard last are more likely to be remembered. These items are still sort of hanging out in your short-term memory, so you are more likely to remember them. The serial position effect suggests that where an item occurs in a list is going to impact your likelihood to remember it. How about an example? Let’s say that I am driving home from work, and my husband calls me because he wants me to pick up some items from the grocery; he gives me a list of 10 items over the phone. (He should send them as a text!) I am likely, as a function of the serial position effect, to bring home items 1–2 and 7–10. Oops, those other ones may be forgotten!

Another factor that impacts retrieval is known as encoding specificity: when the conditions of encoding are similar to the conditions of retrieval, you are more likely to remember. Let me give you some examples of this. One is what we call the context effect. If the context in which you encoded the material is the same as the context in which you retrieve it, you are more likely to remember it. Let’s say that every time you study you sit in a certain place in the library. You are more likely to remember the material when you are back sitting in that same chair in the library in your special place than you are in other places. In fact, if you want to do better in the exam, study in the place where you’ll take the exam! Context is important and perhaps that has to do with retrieval cues—you have those cues around you from when you learned it.


Harvard Psychologist Daniel Schacter on Memory Storage and Recall

Another aspect of encoding specificity is state dependence. If you develop a memory in a certain physiological state, you will be more likely to retrieve that memory when in that physiological state. Let’s say that every time before you study you smoke some marijuana, so you are a little bit stoned every time you study (please, don’t!). You are going to be more likely to retrieve that information if you are again stoned at the time of the exam (again, I don’t recommend it). There is this old Charlie Chaplin movie (one of those old silent movies) where Charlie is drunk and having a wonderful conversation with a fellow; they get really chummy and are singing and enjoying one another’s company. The next morning when Charlie Chaplin has a hangover, he walks to town, sees the fellow from the previous night, and doesn’t even recognize him. But the next night, Charlie Chaplin goes out to the bar, gets drunk, sees the fellow, and says “My old friend!” This is an example of the state-dependent memory: when he was drunk, he remembered what happened when he was previously drunk, but when he was sober, he didn’t remember. Those physiological changes can influence memory.

Another aspect of encoding specificity is mood dependence. If you develop a memory during a certain mood state you are more likely to retrieve it during that mood state. I have noticed this in psychiatric circumstances, with individuals who are profoundly depressed. When they are depressed, they can remember some many events from a previous depression, but when they are not depressed, they don’t remember that depressed period all that well. It’s an interesting example of mood dependent memory.

Improving Memory (We Could All Use This!)

How can you use what we know about human memory to be a better student? I think that’s really important. Let’s apply what we know!!

Here, another memory athlete explains techniques for enhancing memory.


How to use memory techniques to improve education | Boris Nikolai Konrad | TEDxDenHelder

First, you need to focus attention! You need to put away your smartphones, turn off the TV, etc. Focus on the material, because you need to focus to encode accurately. How many of you listen to music while you study? Music can help you focus, BUT, have you noticed—and there has been research about this—that music that has lyrics is more distracting than music without lyrics when you study? I like to listen to classical music or jazz when I am working, because I can still focus on what I am doing and yet enjoy music. There is actually data that suggests that listening to music helps you encoding, EXCEPT when the music has lyrics.

Second, you need to commit the necessary time. There is a strong correlation between practice time and performance across many activities. The night before the exam is not an adequate amount of time to study for the exam!

Third, space your study sessions. There is a difference between what is called massed practice (all at once) and distributed practice (spread out over time). Let’s say that I want to learn my foreign language vocabulary. I can use massed practice: every Sunday afternoon I am going to study my vocabulary words for 7 hours. Not the best idea. I can use distributed practice: I study 7 hours over the course of the week, 1 hour a day. Distributed practice typically works better than mass practice. The worst kind of massed practice you can do is the all-nighter before the exam. Don’t do this!!

Fourth, organize information. Use the natural organization in your books and lectures to help develop a schema for the material, and you can begin to put that material into that schema.

Fifth, elaborate the material. Ask yourself: How does this relate to other things that I know? How does this relate to my expectations? Does it seem like something that makes sense or is it counterintuitive? Can I come up with my own examples? If you can, you’re golden. You elaborate the material in the best way that makes sense for you.

Sixth, use visual imagery. The studies that have examined visual imagery as a mnemonic technique show that it really works quite well.

Seventh, explain it to a friend: if you can’t explain the concept to a friend that means you probably don’t understand it yourself.

Eighth, reduce interference within the topic. You may find that certain terms appear similar, yet they are different. You want to make sure that you are not getting interference within a topic. It’s not just about how things are similar, it’s also about how they are different.

Ninth, counteract the serial position effect. This is an interesting one. When you are studying vocabulary, do you always start with the letter A? Don’t do that—start with an M sometimes. Start in different places, because then the start of the list and the end of the list are going to be in different places each time.

Finally, when you are taking the test, use contextual cues to jog your memory. We have all had that tip-of-the-tongue experience. Mentally put yourself back in the position you were in when you first learned that information. By doing this you can use the context in which you learned the material as a retrieval cue.

All of these ways are ways to make those memories last, and you want to be able to do that. There is one more thing that is super, super important—GET YOUR SLEEP. Sleep is essential for memory consolidation!! This is another important reason to forgo the all-night study session.

Why Do We Forget??


Do You Keep Forgetting Things? Scientists Say This Is the Reason Why

What happens when we forget? There can be a number of reasons that we forget:

One is the encoding failure. If you never got it in there in the first place, you sure as heck aren’t going to remember it when you need it.
A second reason is called interference—when previously learned information can get in the way of learning new information, and new information can get in the way of remembering the old. There are two different kinds of interference.
One is retro-active. This is where new memory interferes with your memory of older material. The new memory sort of pushes out the old. For example, I lived at the same address in West L.A. for years, but now I can’t remember that address at all. The new information, my current address, sort if pushed that old address information out and I can’t easily remember it. You may have that experience with your old phone number. This is retro-active interference.
Another type is pro-active interference. This is where old info can sometimes rear its ugly head when you are trying to remember the new information. When I go to the bank to deposit checks, I have to endorse them (put my signature on them) on the back, of course. I have lived in this part of the country since 1997 and have had a bank account at Brookline Bank, and for some reason one day I couldn’t remember my current bank account but could remember my Wells Fargo bank number from West Los Angeles—yikes! This is a perfect example of pro-active interference. That old information got in the way of my remembering my new information.
Motivated forgetting. Sometimes we want to forget . . . Have you ever done something truly embarrassing? Or had an experience that was really upsetting? Sometimes we are motivated to forget.
Suppression is when we actively and consciously push away a memory. You can say, “I am not going to think about that.” I do that with medical procedures. I suppress those memories, and that’s my choice (who wants to remember those?).
Repression, on the other hand, is part of Sigmund Freud’s theory (we will address this later in the semester) and is unconscious. According to Freud, some thoughts, wishes, memories are so overwhelming that you hide them from yourself. You push them out of consciousness, deep into the unconscious mind, entirely out of memory. Freud would say they continue to impact your behavior in ways you are completely unaware of. So repressed memories have been a focus of interest by psychologists and others, and there are debates on whether or not they can occur.
Decay theory. This is the idea that we have metabolic processes within the brain and some memories just decay over time due to these normal metabolic processes. And 100% this happens. It’s the case that some metabolic processes sweep away memories, but, on the other hand, some memories stick around for a very long period of time.
Amnesia. This is another cause of forgetting. There are two kinds of amnesia:
Retrograde amnesia is forgetting the past. It has been fodder for some really dumb (and some good) movies—the protagonist gets hit on the head and now has no idea who they are and no memory of their past. It can happen, but maybe this notion of amnesia is really not the most common type of amnesia.
Anterograde amnesia is more common—you have trouble remembering new information. That is what happens when people begin to show symptoms of dementia. They don’t have retrograde amnesia —they can often remember long-distant events from their lives. However, they can’t find the keys or glasses, remember to turn off the stove, recall what they had for lunch or where they are supposed to meet someone, etc. Eventually when dementias (like Alzheimer’s) get very far along, individuals also develop retrograde amnesia, but for a long time they predominantly have anterograde amnesia. It’s the new information that they are unable to hold onto. Anterograde amnesia is forgetting the NOW.
cover of the book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat Although Dr. Oliver Sacks died a few years ago, during his amazing life he wrote some fascinating books. One was titled, The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. It contains very interesting stories of people with very severe memory impairments, visual impairments, and people with all kinds of diseases of the brain that result in fascinating behavior. He gives an example in his book of a man who he calls the Lost Mariner. This was a guy who was in the navy during World War II and was a patient during the 1960s in the long-term hospital where Sacks worked. This individual was a heavy drinker of alcohol and, as a result of many years of heavy drinking, developed something called Korsakoff syndrome, which is characterized by severe anterograde amnesia. This gentleman awoke one morning and believed that it was still 1945 and the war was still going on. He could remember nothing after 1945; although he was still alive, his remembered life ended there. Every morning Sacks came in to talk to him and the guy had no idea who Sacks was and reintroduced himself; this happened daily. Once Sacks asked him how old he was and he responded that he was 19 years old. Sacks showed him a mirror and the guy freaked out—in his mind he was still this 19-year-old guy, but in the mirror he looked like a much older man. As soon as Sacks put the mirror away, the man forgot about it. When his brother came to visit him, the man was deeply disturbed by how old and bad the brother looked (after all, in his mind, the brother was only in his 20s). A fascinating case!
In full anterograde amnesia people do not form new episodic memories, but sometimes they can form some procedural memories. In the case of the lost mariner, Sacks every day asked him if he wants to play checkers, but the man denied knowing how to play. So, Sacks taught him every day. Even though he still had no memory of ever playing checkers, his game improved over time. Clearly he’s remembered something (implicitly), but it’s a procedural memory as opposed to an episodic memory.
How Long Do We Remember?

"Uncontaminated" Memory

Now I am going to talk about more research on memory. Herman Ebbinghaus lived a century and a half ago and studied memory. He wanted to study memory “uncontaminated by prior learning,” so he came up with long lists of nonsense syllables (three-letter combinations like NIM or MIK that have no meaning). He just wrote down pages and pages of these nonsense syllables, spent hours at a time memorizing the syllables, and then tested his memory for them. (Isn’t this so boring? But this is what he did.)

He wanted to understand how long such memories would last. Based on this work, he developed the forgetting curve. This curve illustrates that most forgetting occurs very early on, with the majority occurring in the first 24 hours, and then it levels off, as in this illustration. I think this makes some sense. If you have ever taken a foreign language, a lot of forgetting of vocabulary happens in the first 24 hours (that’s part of why you have to review it again and again), but the ones that you actually learned you remember for way longer. There is this idea of the forgetting curve—a lot of forgetting occurs early on in learning and then it levels out. If you really want to learn things, you have to do it again and again and think of the serial position effect, and hopefully over time what’s remembered is increasing. But obviously there is going to be a lot of forgetting too.

The Forgetting Curve
The original uploader was Icez at English Wikipedia. [Public domain]
How Do We Pull up Memories from Long-Term Storage?

Reconstructing Memory

What happens when we reconstruct memory? Memories are an active reconstructive process. Some people think memory is like a video recording, but it’s not. Memory is not a videorecorder (or audio recorder); it’s not like the little strand of memory that in the Harry Potter books the wizard Dumbledore pulls from his head and places in his “pensieve” to relive in detail. Memory is an active reconstructive process where you pull that memory back together. Every time you do this, the memory changes a little bit because of current events and new information.

Errors and distortions can occur. These can happen before the memory occurs. Maybe you encoded it inaccurately, and you don’t really have a good memory of it. So that would lead to errors. These can happen after the memory occurs, when new information can change that memory. Have any of you ever had the experience of someone stealing your memory? My sister used to do this to me. She’d tell a story about something that happened to her, and it would be my experience! It made me so mad. But it’s so interesting because she probably had heard the story so many times that it started to feel so real to her that she in fact “remembered it.” The fact is that after the memory occurs and you re-tell it again and again, it changes slightly. I sometimes wonder about those old family stories we all have that we tell again and again, and how those have changed over time, and I wonder if there remains any resemblance to what actually happened. The story has been altered, messed with, and things have happened since. So, errors and distortions occur.


Reconstructing Memories
Schemas

Memory is schema based. Let’s say that you went to a restaurant the other day, and you had a bad experience. If I asked you specifics about it, you might be able to tell me some things but not everything. If I asked you if the waitress served you water when you sat down, you might say, “Yeah of course, that always happens.” But did it happen? Or is it your schema? Your current schema is going to influence what is remembered (maybe even including some things that didn’t happen in that instance). For one thing, your current schema is going to influence what you encode—what you think is important. But it is also going to influence your reconstruction, when you put that memory back together, and your expectations for those situations are going to be included. So schemas are going to influence what is going to be remembered, but those memories can also be changed by new info. Let’s say you are going out with someone really special, and you adore this person. And then you find out this person was also seeing a good friend of yours romantically in their spare time. Now I want you to think about your memories of the relationship and how they might change. You have new information. Remember the time that this person got you that nice gift out of the blue? Oh! Instead of thinking what a nice person and considerate partner they are, you think, “Guilty!”. This new information changed everything. So, memories can be changed by new information, and they are easily distorted. We have distortion in memory because we have this new information and it alters that reconstruction. Again, you are reconstructing memories, so you are putting in the new information with the old info that was already there. So memory is a compilation of many things. Our memories are vulnerable, but they are pretty decent for basic information. We have to rely on our memories, and I think most of the time we do a pretty good job.

Why Don’t We Remember Our Childhood??

Have any of you heard of childhood amnesia? This is the idea that we forget much of our early childhood. Why is that? Here are three likely contributors:

Poor encoding strategies—as a child you don’t encode very well!
Immature neural structures—your ability to store memories may be poor due to this important limitation.
Changed environment—many of the retrieval cues that would assist your memory are no longer present.
Childhood amnesia occurs because of problems in the three memory processes—encoding, storage, and retrieval.


BrainStuff: Why Can't People Remember Being Born?
Memory Is a Lot like Perception…

I want us to circle back for a minute. I want you to think about some of the things we learned about perception and think about how they also impact memory. In perception, we are filling in the gaps—we are making hypotheses of what we are seeing based on the pieces that are there. The same is true of memory. We have little pieces, we put them together, and we make a hypothesis about what exactly happened. But sometimes we don’t have the full information, sometimes our memories are spotty, and yet we try to fill in the gaps so that we have a coherent story to tell, a coherent memory to experience.

Do You Remember?

Test your memory by matching the terms to their definitions.


Sleep
Focus on Sleep

Let’s talk a little bit about consciousness. When we think about consciousness we can talk about it in a variety of ways, but I am going to focus on one aspect of consciousness—and that’s sleep. For so many years, people thought of sleep as a time of inactivity, when nothing was really going on. But two developments really changed that perspective on sleep:

One was the invention of the electroencephalograph. We have talked about this briefly when we were reviewing methods for understanding brain activity, and the EEG was the thing that really helped us understand a lot more about what happens when folks sleep. So, if you are a participant in a study or for a clinical evaluation for a sleep disorder, you can go into a sleep lab and the technicians will hook you up to an EEG, let you fall asleep, and then track what is happening in your cortex during sleep. So how active is the brain? What is happening? By looking at the EEG, we can answer some of those questions. That was one important development.

The second important development was the discovery of rapid eye movement sleep, or what we call REM sleep. This is a period of sleep where your brain activity seems to change and your eyes start moving very rapidly, as if you’re scanning the environment, as if you are looking at things, as if you are taking in information. It’s very interesting because REM sleep seems to be that period of sleep when dreaming occurs. So, this rapid eye movement sleep quickly became something of great interest to sleep researchers.

What is REM sleep?
What Happens When We Sleep?

So let’s review some of what we know about sleep. . .

AH, FALLING ASLEEP . . .

Alright, let’s start at the beginning of the night. You have your pajamas on, climb into bed, adjust your pillow, and begin to drift off to sleep. What happens now? There are common things that frequently happen around the time of sleep onset. You may be very familiar with these kinds of things.

Hypnagogic hallucinations. As you are falling asleep, you may hear sounds or see unusual visions—odd perceptual experiences. Sometimes they may sort of wake you up because they are pretty surprising. These hypnagogic hallucinations are not abnormal—they are really a common phenomenon, and although we call them hallucinations, they are in no way a sign of anything bad or disturbing.
Myoclonic jerk. Another thing that happens is what we call the myoclonic jerk—you are falling asleep and suddenly your whole body jerks. That myoclonic jerk is something that happens to a lot of people and is not abnormal.
What happens in your brain when you fall asleep? Well, the EEG can track your brain waves to get a sense of how active your cortex is during sleep, and there are different types of waves. There are beta waves, which are small waves we often see during waking hours. The alpha waves are longer waves, and these are more relaxed waves—so when you are there sitting, drinking your cup of tea, listening to music, you have a lot of alpha waves going. Theta waves are longer than alpha waves; delta waves even longer. For much of sleep we have a combination of different kinds of waves. When you are deeply asleep, you get this longer wave pattern on the EEG (more delta waves) and, if you are aroused from sleep, it’s going to be difficult to wake up.

Sleep Stages

Let’s talk about stages of sleep. You go in and out of these stages throughout a night of sleep. For each stage, I’m going to tell you about typical EEG patterns, level of arousal, body position, type of stage (true or transition), and time spent in that stage.


2-Minute Neuroscience: Stages of Sleep

The Different Stages

Stage 1

Your EEG reflects a combination of wave types (beta, alpha). You are drifting into sleep, yet you are still easily aroused. When you are just falling asleep and you hear a loud noise outside, you are going to wake up. Your body position is relaxed. This stage is a transition stage, as you are moving from one state of consciousness—your awake stage—to another stage—your sleep stage, where you are going to spend the next couple of hours. Stage 1 lasts from about 5 to 15 minutes. So, you are transitioning into sleep.

Stage 2

Now the stage of sleep following stage 1 could be REM or could be stage 2. So, for ease of explanation, let’s start with stage 2. During this stage 2 we see these sleep spindles on the EEG—a sudden burst of activity in a certain region of the brain (reticular thalamic nucleus). Mild sounds will not arouse you during this stage of sleep; if there is a voice talking very quietly or you have music on, it’s not going to arouse you. But if there was a very loud noise or an alarm going on, you would awaken. The body position is very relaxed during this stage of sleep. It is a true sleep stage, and you are going to stay in here a while—from about 10 to 40 minutes.

REM Sleep

Now REM sleep can come before stage 2 sometimes. The EEG during REM looks like when you are awake with lots of low amplitude beta waves. Your level of arousal is similar to stage 2; it’s not easy to wake you during REM sleep, but you can be woken. You have very little muscle tone during this kind of sleep. Your body is really not moving much at all, and this is a true stage of sleep as it lasts for 5 to 40 minutes. The amount of REM sleep increases as your night of sleep goes on.

Stage 3

You now enter stage 3 sleep. The sleep technicians begin to see more long waves on your EEG—about 20% of activity can be delta waves. It’s very difficult to arouse someone during stage 3 sleep. Your breathing is slow, your pulse is low, your body is very relaxed, and you are transitioning into the deepest stages of sleep. So, this transitional period only lasts 5 to 10 minutes.

Stage 4 Sleep

Here the technicians see predominantly delta waves on the EEG; about 40% are these long waves. It’s very difficult to arouse someone during stage 4 sleep. Interestingly enough, this is where sleepwalking occurs—it’s very hard to arouse someone who is a sleepwalker. It’s hard to wake them up, even though they are walking around. I remember my little sister coming into my room when I was a teenager. She looked like she was awake and said to me and my other sisters, “I am going backstage.” So, we kind of guided her gently back to her bed, said “here is the stage,” and helped her lie down. We covered her up, and that was that; we didn’t get up again until morning. It was a funny thing, but we knew better than to try to wake her up, because it is hard to wake a sleepwalker! Stage 4 is a true stage of sleep. It lasts about 20 to 40 minutes.

Throughout the night you go through these stages of sleep. You go down to stage 4, you go back up, you go back down. For most people, you can go through all of these stages in about 90–120 minutes (1 1/2 to 2 hours).

What about napping? It’s crucial that the nap be the right length! “Power napping,” involving a 15–20-minute nap, can be recharging. This allows you to go through stages 1–2 and feel re-energized. A longer nap (maybe 1.5 hours), where you go through all sleep cycles, can feel great. But watch out for a nap that takes you into the deeper stages right as your alarm goes off—you wake up all groggy and have a hard time getting your head straight!

Now you wake up many times during the night, but you don’t really remember it. You come out of stage 1 sleep, may pick up your pillow, fluff it, lay down again, turn over, and go back to sleep. You go through the whole sleep cycle maybe four times if you get a good 8 hours of sleep.

Changes in Sleep Across the Lifespan

People experience changes in sleep patterns throughout their lives.

When you are baby, you might be sleeping 14 hours a day—parents love that—but you also sleep in smaller patches. You sleep a couple of hours, then wake up, then they go back to sleep, etc.
As you become a toddler, then a preschooler, you sleep a little less and even less as an elementary-aged child. In this culture, little children tend to go to bed early, but then they are up early with the birds as well.
One of the periods of life when people need the most sleep is during the adolescent years, and, unfortunately, in this period of history in this country, adolescents are notoriously under-slept. It’s so common for them to go to bed very late, text with friends while in bed, and then need to wake up very early in the morning to go to school. Also, during the teen years, sleep cycles begins to shift: Teenagers tend to stay up later and sleep in longer. That’s why a lot of school districts in this country are moving to later start times—in order to match school hours to those adolescent sleep patterns. The total amount of sleep that adolescents need is probably around 9 hours per night, but most teens tend not to get that. It doesn’t happen, especially in high school, when teens have way too much to do in our culture.
Adults typically need 8 or more hours of sleep—again, as with teens, many adults in our country are chronically under-slept.
Among the elderly the need for sleep is still prominent, but elderly folks may have more trouble achieving that in a single block of uninterrupted sleep. They may also tend to spend more time in stage 2 sleep.
Theories for Why We Sleep

Russell Foster is a circadian neuroscientist, and his TED Talk is fascinating.




Now one of the great questions of sleep researchers is: Why do we sleep?? There is more than one theory of sleep, so I am going to talk about a couple.

Biological Need. There is certainly an abundance of data to suggest that that we have a powerful biological need for sleep.
Effects of being under-slept. Whenever we have those periods in our lives when we are under-slept—maybe sleeping 5 to 6 hours per night—we are more likely to get ill, get headaches, have troubles with some basic daily functions, and forget things more easily. All this is evidence of our biological need for sleep.
Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI) is a disease that powerfully illustrates our need for sleep. FFI is a genetic disorder and it affects a very small number of families in the world. People who develop this syndrome die rather quickly. They wake up one day and they never sleep again, and within two weeks they die. Most of us are not at risk of this because it’s a very rare, genetic problem, but it really illustrates the profound need we have for sleep. It’s a biological imperative.
REM rebounds. Another thing we know is that people who don’t sleep begin to experience what is called REM rebound. When you pull an all-nighter, for example, and then go to bed, you may wake up the next morning remembering that you had a very weird dream. That night you were dreaming all night because your body is going back and trying to make up for the lost REM sleep. The more you lose sleep, the more your body persistently tries to achieve REM sleep. You need REM sleep, you need that stage of sleep, and your body is going to try to make it up if you don’t have it. So, this is an example of the profound way in which we need sleep, and sleep of a particular kind.
There Are Two General Theories for Sleep

Restorative Theory

The idea here is that during sleep important things happen that help restore your body and restore your mind. And I’ve certainly noted facts that support this idea. Indeed, during stage 4 sleep our bodies do a lot of repair, and we need that. Our metabolic processes take care of us. We also know that REM sleep seems to be essential for memory consolidation. During REM your hippocampus is hard at work consolidating memories. So mental well-being and ability are being taken care of in a lot of way during those periods of REM sleep. So, we know that sleep restores the body and mind in many ways. This is strong evidence for this restorative theory.

emoji of Dr. Tompson with the words,Sleep is esential to good physical and mental health

Evolutionary Theory

I just love the evolutionary theory of sleep. This is the idea that our sleep patterns have evolved over millennia to support us in our activity, and these patterns vary by species (which have different evolutionary histories). When you look at different species you see very different patterns of sleep, and those patterns of sleep support our survival. They enhance survival. Here are some examples:

How Patterns of Sleep Enhance Survival
Think of the chipmunk—cute, destructive little beast. During the long hours of summer, the chipmunk spends many hours outside foraging, building its nest. Then in the winter months when it’s very cold and food is hard to come by, that little gal or guy goes into the burrow and hibernates—sleeps. The chipmunk’s temperature goes down, respiration goes down, demands on the physical body go down . . . all during times when it’s very difficult to live out there. So, hibernation is one example of how species’ specific sleep patterns support survival and enhance adaptation.

Lions are very interesting from a sleep perspective. The male lion is one of the most elegant creatures to look at, but these guys have short, violent, brutish lives. The male lions have two jobs really—first to protect the pride and territory (from hyenas, other predators, and other male lions) and second, to mate with the females so that they have cubs. The females do the hunting, and are pretty good at it. The male lion eats first from their kills. Interestingly, when a rival lion comes in and kills the alpha male lion and takes over the pride, that new lion will often kill the cubs (whose father was the previous alpha) as well. Then when the females come into heat, he mates with them— so then he can protect his own progeny instead of some other lion’s. So, it’s kind of a gruesome thing, but . . . let’s return to sleep. The male lion expends a tremendous amount of energy in his daily activities. So, in his off hours, which are most hours, he does a lot of sleeping. Male lions can sleep up to 20 hours a day. Imagine, you sleep 20 hours a day, get up, mate a little, eat some food, kill another rival (or scare him off), intimidate some hyenas, and go back to bed. Now, this big male can sleep as much as he wants because no one is going to mess with him. So, he is lying under an acacia tree, and life is good for that moment. He sleeps A LOT.

How about herd animals? Consider the gazelles. They don’t sleep a whole lot, and when they sleep, they generally do so standing up. They sleep lightly and in short bursts. They maybe sleep 4 hours a day. And part of this is adaptation. If you lie down for a deep sleep, and a hyena comes over, you are lunch. So, it enhances your adaptation, your survival, if you are standing there, sort of sleeping, and then you can just jump and run. You wake up very fast and are able to respond very quickly—you survive.

How about birds? You know the owl sleeps during the day. Owls have incredible night vision, and during the day they don’t have a huge hunting advantage. But at night they are top predators. Their feathers are constructed to allow for almost silent flight and they have wonderful night vision. The little creatures they are hunting have no advantages at night, and the owls are able to hunt very effectively. On the other hand, the same kind of ecosystems that support the owl during the night support the hawk during the day. It has incredible vision during the day, can hunt from very high up, and strikes its prey very quickly. Its prey is awake and about during the day, and the hawk sleeps at night.

You can see how these patterns of sleep have evolved to support the animals’ adaptation over many millennia. As human beings, we have pretty poor vision during the night, but we are pretty good during the day. Our sleep patterns (during the dark night hours), like that of other primates including chimpanzees, have evolved to support our needs and to enhance our adaptation. So, the evolutionary theory really underscores those differences.

Sleep Problems

Now, what happens when sleep doesn’t go well? How many of you have ever experienced a night of insomnia? What are some of the causes of sleep problems?

picutres of ducks being sleepy doing things during the day and then being wiede-awake at night
Fowl Language Comics by Brian Gordon
Medical conditions. Diabetes, blood pressure problems, chronic pain, and a variety of other medical challenges can interrupt sleep. There are lots of mental health problems that interrupt sleep. For example, bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety can really interfere with sleep.

Drugs. Many can interfere with sleep. Caffeine, for example. Have you ever had a cup of coffee too late in the afternoon and then you weren’t able to sleep all night? Another example of a drug that interferes with sleep is cocaine. Cocaine is a stimulant, it makes people feel pretty good, and it gives them a lot of energy. People who are using a lot of cocaine may go for days with very little sleep—their brain is awash in neurochemicals, they are full of energy, and they are not sleeping. There are a number of drugs that can disrupt your sleep cycle. There are also certain drugs that are made to help you sleep. Some of these help you fall asleep, but they disrupt your sleep architecture (the stages) and, in the end, you wake up in the morning and you don’t feel like you slept well. It is an interesting example of how there are a number of processes involved with sleep, and we have to get them all right.

Brain damage. There are certain kinds of brain damage that can lead to problems with sleep.I remember when I was working at Children’s Hospital, there was a kid who had brain damage. He would sleep no more than 6 hours a night and his parents were exhausted. One would go to bed early and get up early; the other would go to bed later and sleep later—that way they could tag-team to take care of their youngster.

Inappropriate conditioning is the cause of the vast majority of sleep problems. Classical conditioning is very important in sleep, as you associate certain circumstances with sleep. Think about what you do when you go to bed. Many people have a little ritual before going to bed. That ritual prepares you for sleep and you begin to associate all kinds of things with sleep. Maybe you have a warm cup of milk that preps you for sleep, and you get used to that. If you don’t have your cup of milk, it’s hard to fall asleep. People are more likely to sleep better in their own bed because of classical conditioning. My husband, for example, likes to go to sleep with music—and I can’t go to sleep with music. So, if we go to bed at the same time we listen to music and the moment he falls asleep, I go and turn it off. Many people have a favorite pillow or blanket or stuffed animal—those are things that help us go to sleep. So sometimes what is happening when people are having sleep problems is that the things that they are conditioned to sleep with are not there. Imagine if you enter stage 1 sleep in the middle of the night and someone stole your pillow. You’d wake up and you’d have a hard time trying to fall back asleep because the conditions under which you fall asleep have changed. Click on the video below and I’ll describe a real sleep challenge!

cas_ps101_19_su2_mtompson_mod3_sleep_conditioning video cannot be displayed here. Videos cannot be played from Printable Lectures. Please view media in the module.

Sleep Disorders

This seems like a nice segue into sleep disorders. Let’s talk about two types of general classes of sleep disorders: dyssomnias and parasomnias.

Dyssomnias are problems in the quality, amount, or timing of sleep. I am going to mention two of these.
Narcolepsy. In narcolepsy, people suddenly experience an overwhelming need to sleep. Their muscle tone goes, and they might fall asleep at very inappropriate times, which is very bad if you are driving. People who have narcolepsy may fall asleep very suddenly during the middle of the day. They have this overwhelming need to sleep. Now narcolepsy is fairly rare, thankfully, and it can be treated with drugs, and also with some kinds of classical conditioning interventions.
Circadian Rhythm Sleep Disorder. Now this next one is not so rare, and some of you have probably had it. If you have ever traveled internationally you probably have experienced jetlag. Jetlag is not a disorder; it’s a natural thing that happens, but it can lead to circadian rhythm sleep disorder. In this disorder your biological sleep pattern does not match the needs of the environment. So, if you fly to Australia, you are going to be up at 2:00 a.m. reading magazines, watching TV, or doing other things. You are still on U.S. time, so in Australia you are going to be awake in the middle of the night and sleeping in the middle of the day. Your sleep pattern doesn’t match the Australian clock. This can be corrected over time—this is what usually happens with jetlag, and it resolves in several days.
Little Johnny
Let me tell you a story of a kid that I saw at Children’s Hospital who had very bad circadian rhythm sleep disorder. He came in to see me, he was on my schedule, so I walked out into the waiting room and called his name: “Little Johnny!” He stood up, and Little Johnny was 13 years old, 6 ft 6 in tall, and 280 pounds. Wow!

Turns out this poor boy had severe depression and with it he had what’s known as complete circadian reversal—his sleep-wake pattern was completely flipped. At 10:00 p.m. he would start to go to sleep; even though he couldn’t sleep, he would keep trying; and then finally at about 6:00 a.m. he would fall asleep. He’d miss school, of course, because he would sleep from 6:00 a.m. to about 2:00 in the afternoon. He would get up at 2:00 p.m., watch a little TV, try to catch up on homework, and then at 10:00 pm he would try again to go to sleep. The same pattern happened each night. It was awful—it made it impossible to function in his life.

We needed to treat his depression and also address his sleep problem. Unfortunately, he was trying to go to sleep when he was not tired. It’s very hard to fall asleep when you are not tired at all.

One way to treat it is to shift to bed LATER, rather earlier. Here’s the idea: instead of trying to go to bed at 10:00 p.m., Johnny should try to stay up until 8:00 a.m.—which is really hard, because he will be really tired by then. He should do this for a couple of nights. Now the next night he should stay up until 10:00 a.m. Then we are going to move him to a 12:00 noon bedtime, then to 2:00 p.m., 4:00 p.m., 6:00 p.m., 8:00 p.m. At 10:00 p.m., he stops! This is where he should stay.

It can take a week or so, but it works. You can make yourself stay up a little longer, but it is really hard to make yourself go to bed earlier if you are not tired.

Circadian rhythm sleep disorder can occur for lots of reasons. One of the worst work schedules is the third or night shift. Shift workers work in factories, hospitals, etc. That third shift is 11:00 p.m.–7:00 a.m. It’s the worst. In hospitals, more medical mistakes get made on the night shift than on all the other shifts because people are not functioning optimally. That’s when people screw up most—when industrial accidents occur, when people get injured the most, etc. Our nature is to be awake during the day. This night shift is not natural for us. To make it worse, the shift worker wants to be a normal person on the weekends (who wouldn’t?) and so he/she tries to shift back into what most of us experience—being awake during the day—and that’s really hard. These are the people who can get serious circadian rhythm sleep disorders. Again, this is a dyssomnia—a problem with the amount, quality, or timing of sleep.

Parasomnias. I would define parasomnias as weird stuff that happens during sleep. They are odd happenings.
One is the sleepwalking disorder. Sleepwalkers get up in the night, may eat, wake up in the morning, find empty cereal bowls on the counter, and have no memory of having eaten during the night. People will often assume that this must be during REM sleep, but that’s not true. When you are dreaming, the body cannot move, and that’s a good thing (we don’t get up and act out our dream). Sleepwalking takes place in stage 4 sleep, in the deepest phase of sleep. You get up and you wander around the house. What amazes me is that people don’t fall down the stairs while they are sleepwalking, and I think this speaks to the level of automatic processing we do around space. You walk through the house and your body knows what it is doing even though you have no awareness of it.
Sleep terror disorder. The person who has sleep terror disorder is also in stage 4 sleep and they may sit up very suddenly and start screaming, and they appear to be terrified. My daughter had this. She was about 3 years old, and I remember it so well. She seemed to be tossing in her bed, and I went to her and I asked her if she was okay and she turned around, looked at me (eyes wide open) and started screaming at the top of her lungs. I was terrified! She was staring straight at me—well, really through me, didn’t seem to see me at all, and kept screaming, “I don’t want to drink the milk!” My husband comes in, grabs her, and puts her on a big bed. We are dodging around her trying to make sure she doesn’t fling herself off and break her leg. I was in a panic and thought she was having a seizure! So I called the pediatrician, at midnight, and the pediatrician says to me (in quite an irritated voice) that she is not having a seizure, as people never scream during seizures. Then, she tells me that I just need to make her stop throwing a tantrum. After about 45 minutes of screaming, my child suddenly wakes up and says, “Hi Mommy, can I have some milk?”—I just about fainted. She’d had a sleep terror. You can understand how people in ancient times might have thought of these as incidents of demon possessions! She was 3 years old, had a couple other sleep terrors in the next year, and experienced no more (thankfully) after age 4 years old. This is usually how these things go—sleep terrors are not terribly uncommon in childhood. Part of what is happening here with sleep terrors in childhood is that the brain is developing and some of those pathways controlling sleep might not be completely formed.
Watch Psychiatry – Sleep Disorders: By Elliott Lee M.D. at youtube.com


Dreaming

Speaking of events during sleep . . .What happens with dreaming? What do we dream about?

surreal image of a book floating in the sky
Image by Rogier Hoekstra from Pixabay
A study done about 20 years ago compared Japanese college students to American college students. The study asked them what they dream about, and some of these things may be very familiar to you. The top items were being attacked or pursued. Another one is trying again and again to do something. School, teaching, studying are other things that were dreamt. Being frozen with fright is another common one, and it seems like the Japanese students reported it slightly more than the American students’ sexual experiences: only two-thirds of the people reported this, and the other third was probably lying (just joking). Arriving too late is another one, like missing a plane. Dead people appearing as if they were alive is one. A loved person being dead is one—this doesn’t mean you want them dead. Falling, failing an exam, flying through the air, being unable to breathe, seeing oneself being dead, being nude—all were common.

When do we remember our dreams? Some people report that they do not dream; other people can remember many dreams. But truth told, we all dream. When are we most likely to remember them? If you are awakened during the dream, you are much more likely to remember it. Also, you are more likely to remember the dream if it is vivid, bizarre, or emotionally intense and/or you are not distracted upon waking. Now, if you really want to start to remember your dreams, you need to keep a notebook or an audio recorder beside your bed. When you wake up, you record your memory right away. Even as you begin to record your dream, the memory is fading. We are not good at consolidating memories of our dreams, so we tend not to remember them. That’s why some people think they don’t dream. We all have dreams, but many of us just don’t remember them.

What is the significance of dreaming? Why do we dream? Here are two dream theories:

Two Dream Theories
Psychoanalytic theory
The founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, whose theory we will review later in the semester, believed that our dreams are symbolic or disguised expressions of unconscious wishes. Freud focused a lot on the unconscious. He said that we are not aware of what is happening deep within ourselves—in the unconscious mind—but it influences our behavior in lots of ways. One of the ways our unconscious expresses itself is in dreams; Freud believed dream interpretation could reveal the unconscious mind. I am not a big fan of this theory about dreams, and I think there is a better theory.

Activation-synthesis theory of dreams
This theory was proposed by J. Allan Hobson. According to this theory, when you go to bed, certain neurocircuits are still activated from the day. While you are asleep you also have random activations of other neural circuits. What we try to do in perception, in memory, in so many other ways, is to try to make sense of the complex stimuli in the world that we live in. What your brain does during sleep is to take information from these activated circuits and try to make sense of them by weaving them into a story. So, you had this random activation of a memory of your third-grade teacher, you remembered today that you have an exam coming up, and suddenly you had a dream that your third-grade teacher is sitting next to you during the exam, etc. You have these little random activations of circuits in the cortex and memories still activated from the day, and you put them together into this weird story. That’s what Hobson says. It’s activation of neurocircuits and synthesis into a new story.

Practical Advice Based on Research

Here is some practical advice based on what we know about sleep: 1) you probably need more of it; 2) you need to have it on a schedule (you do best with sleep when you have predictable sleep); 3) you need a ritual—a classically conditioned experience; 4) memory and physiological functioning are all improved by sleep. Go to bed right on time tonight and snooze away!! Sweet dreams!!

tips for sleeping
Source: National Institute for Aging
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