People Flashcards
Bubbles P.
Professional gambler with no formal education. Has no difficulty in naming off 20 numbers, in either forward or backward order, after just a single glance. Most people can remember a list of numbers that’s no more than seven digits long.
Simonides
Poet; left a banquet, then the ceiling collapsed and killed everyone. Able to recall every one of the dead by visualizing each chair around the table and who was sitting there.
HM
Suffered from intractable epilepsy. Doctors removed part of his temporal lobes, including the hippocampus and some surrounding regions. After he could converse, use and understand language, and perform well on intelligence tests, but he could not remember anything that happened to him after the operation. Only had short term memory. Worse anterograde than retrograde, so hippocampal region is not involved in long term memory.
Greg
Interviewed by Oliver Sacks; unable to make new memories, but events that happened to him did seem to leave a mark.
HM and Greg
Behaved as though they were remembering things while claiming to remember nothing at all. Suggests that there must be several types of memory, some accessible to conscious recall and some we cannot consciously access.
K.C.
Could not recollect any specific episodes from his past and could not imagine a future episode, it was “blank” for him.
Ebbinghaus
Notes a rapid drop off in retention during the first few tests followed by a slower rate of forgetting on later tests.
Diana Halbrooks
A few months of psychotherapy caused her to recall disturbing childhood memories that never happened. Techniques used were suggestive. Imagining past events and hypnosis can help create false memories.
Melinda Stickney-Gibson
Artist; fire caused her painting to become darker instead of happy and abstract like prior to the fire.
Watson
Fueled the behaviorist movement, arguing that psychologists should “never use the terms and consciousness, mental states, mind, content, introspectively verifiable, imagery, and the like.” Influenced by Pavlov. Proposed fear could be learned.
Pavlov
Studied the digestive processes of laboratory animals by surgically implanting test tubes into the cheeks of dogs to measure their salivary response to different foods. Revealed a fork of learning called classical conditioning.
Watson and Rayner
Used 9 month old Albert for their experiments. Presented him with a variety of stimuli: white rat, dog, rabbit, various masks, and a burning newspaper. Showed no fear towards the items. While Albert watched Rayner, Watson struck a steel bar with a hammer and caused Albert to cry. When Albert reached for the rat, they hit the bar again until the rat by itself could produce fear. Also had stimulus generalization.
Rescorla and Wagner
First to theorize that classical conditioning occurs when an animals has an expectation.
Thompson
Focused on classical conditioning of eye blink responses in the rabbit, in which the CS (tone) is immediately followed by the US (puff of air), which elicits a reflexive eye blink response. Eventually the eye blink occurs in response to the CS alone. Showed that the cerebellum is critical for the occurrence of eye blink conditioning.
Broberg and Bernstein
Cancer patients who experience nausea from their treatments often develop aversions to foods they ate before the therapy. Gave patients an unusual food (coconut- or root-beer-flavored candy) at the end of their last meal before undergoing treatment. Conditioned food aversions developed were for one of the unusual flavored instead.