SJ Psyche

psych-facts: Source

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 11:14:52 -0500

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A few days ago my Biological Psychology professor showed us this...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 02:38:37 -0500

A few days ago my Biological Psychology professor showed us this video. It is basically an idea that one would probably expect much later in the future or just in SciFi movies. This is ‘visual reconstruction’ and it is probably the most exciting thing I’ve seen so far preparing my journey into Psychology. Basically the idea behind it is that the brain has certain activities going on when you’re watching something, dreaming, etc. Of course if you’re alive there is some brain activity going on, but the point this visual reconstruction makes is to do just what it sounds like. An fMRI device that decodes the activity in your brain and gives a go at giving a visual replication of what you’re seeing. More of course is in the video and one could visit the source link I posted that has the article for this study. It’s exiting stuff! :)

Shinji Nishimoto, An T. Vu, Thomas Naselaris, Yuval Benjamini, Bin Yu, Jack L. Gallant, Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies, Current Biology, Volume 21, Issue 19, 11 October 2011, Pages 1641-1646, ISSN 0960-9822, 10.1016/j.cub.2011.08.031.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982211009377)

<3 psychologystudentplatypus: Not sure if this is how you do...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:13:17 -0500

psychologystudentplatypus:

Not sure if this is how you do it, but I made a punny love note from my freshman-level knowledge of psych.

I just read about pronunciation duration in my book for...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:39:40 -0500

I just read about pronunciation duration in my book for Cognitive Psychology! :)

psych-facts:

Chinese can remember more numbers than Malay since Chinese digit names have shorter pronunciation duration.

In their study, Chan and Elliott tested whether the Chinese’s better performance in digit memory span task was due to shorter pronunciation duration of Chinese digit names or to better visuospatial sketchpad abilities, or both. Eighteen Chinese and 18 Malay Singaporean psychology undergraduates participated in the experiment. All participants went through 3 conditions: No suppression (N-S), Phonological loop suppression (PL-S), and Visuospatial sketchpad suppression (VSSP-S). The order of the conditions was counterbalanced. At each trial, the string of digits was presented both visually and orally to the participant (e.g., digits were read out while the corresponding card containing Arabic digits were shown). After viewing and hearing the numbers, participants recalled them by writing the digit names in their respective language. In the PL-S condition, participants had to repeatedly utter an irrelevant word during the presentation of the digits. In the VSSP-S condition, the participants were shown a set of visual distracters after the presentation of the string of digits. After each trial, the length of the digits that a participant recalled correctly was measured. The result showed that under the N-S condition and VSSP-S condition, the Chinese digit span was significantly larger than the Malay digit span. However, under the PL-S condition, the Chinese digit span was not significantly different from the Malay digit span. These results showed that Chinese participant attained a significantly larger digit span than Malay participants when phonological loop was not suppressed. In other words, they showed no difference in digit span when phonological loop was suppressed by uttering irrelevant word repeatedly. Therefore, this study showed that Chinese outperform their Malay counterparts in digit span task because they have shorter pronunciation duration for digit names not because they have better visuospatial sketchpad abilities.

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How am I spending my Christmas morning? Reading a Psychology textbook for next semester. I think...

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 00:49:02 -0500

How am I spending my Christmas morning? Reading a Psychology textbook for next semester. I think this was the right major for me. Excuse me, I KNOW this IS the right major for me!