psychology – Page 3 – Cognition in Class

April 29, 2023March 12, 2024

Put down that Phone and Focus!

By Odessa Grove

Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, and iHeartRadio are all amazing apps created to provide people, from anywhere, music at any time. Music provides everyone with a sense of feeling all different kinds of moods and can be listened to for whatever occasion. Some people want to dance around their kitchen, while others just want to scream a breakup song in the privacy of their cars. Finally, what my friend and I like to do is carpool to karaoke. However, some people find themselves listening to music while they are studying. I know I am no saint when it comes to watching YouTube videos or streaming Hulu while I am studying for tests or writing a paper. I mean, it is impossible not to when my phone is right there. However, whatever I might be listening to while studying or writing a paper, I often find myself being very distracted and end up procrastinating on my assignment. I always stress about my grade, so I know I should focus on the task in hand. However, I always get stuck on what is happening on social media right now, or, depending on the song, I will just start to sing my heart out and not even care about my assignment anymore. Why, why is this a difficult task to do? Well, the answer is the result of divided attention, or more well-known name, multitasking.

April 25, 2023March 12, 2024

What Were You Thinking?

By Scott Dockins

Though I lack statistical data, I am willing to bet it is safe to assume that most have heard “What were you thinking?” a time or two. Am I right? As a child, I heard this often. As a parent, I say it often. I still hear it, too, but not from my parents, from my wife. As Forrest Gump said: “Sometimes we all do things that, well, just don’t make no sense.” (1). You may be wondering what this has to do with being a college student, and I must confess, I am wondering the same. Just kidding. Or am I? Implicit in Forrest Gump’s statement is our ability to use reason to form conclusions, i.e., make decisions, and as you have likely “deduced,” the more adept our reasoning abilities, the greater the probability that we avoid “…do(ing) things that, well, just don’t make no sense.” (1), both in and out of academic and professional settings. Now, my exploration of reasoning and decision-making will be broad and terse; my goal is too “prime” that gelatinous thing between your ears, a.k.a. your brain, so you begin your college career thinking about thinking (metacognition) and thus improving your ability to think critically and efficiently in and out of the classroom. First on the agenda is metacognition, then inductive and deductive reasoning, and finally, I will conclude with decision-making, all of which are skills every college student needs to hone to be successful, whether a freshman or beyond.

December 1, 2021March 12, 2024

Is My Memory Correct?

By Annalise Siegler

A flashbulb memory is what you would call a “core memory”. This type of memory is where you remember where you were, how you felt, and what you were doing. Some would say this memory is “carved” into your brain. A flashbulb memory is a newsworthy event that has personal value to it. The journal article “Flashbulb Memories in Older Adults” by Gillian Cohen, Martin A. Conway, and Elizabeth A. Maylor, explains that “The term flashbulb memories, which was introduced by Brown and Kulik (1977), has been used to denote unusually vivid and detailed veridical memories that persist unchanged over long periods of time”. The article also describes flashbulb memories as “ The existence, nature, and aetiology of flashbulb memories have been the subject of considerable debate and remain controversial. According to one view (Brown & Kulik, 1977; Gold, 1987; Schmidt & Bohannon, 1988), flashbulbs are a distinct type of memory created by a special encoding mechanism that is triggered by high levels of emotion, surprise, and consequentiality ( Cohen, Conway, and Maylor 1).

November 30, 2021March 12, 2024

Imagery Within Cognitive Psychology

By Christion Beamon

Imagery is defined simply by the APA Dictionary of Psychology as “cognitive generation of sensory input from the five senses, individually or collectively, which is recalled from experience or self-generated in a non experienced form”. Imagery is also associated with the ability to form mental images about certain things you think about. This is something that occurs with people everyday. You create mental images of different thoughts every single day. The most relatable thing I could compare it to is when you go a certain amount of time without eating and you have that one craving in your mind. You can see it and almost perfectly imagine what it will taste like once you can eat it.

Individual differences shape the content of visual representations - ScienceDirect — This is an explanation of the entire process in a picture.

November 29, 2021March 12, 2024

Collaborate to Retain

By Tara Traughber

Learning to retain material that is taught rather than memorizing it will ease the stress of future courses. There are many subjects that overlap information and courses are going to build on each other from one semester to the next. Being a full-time college student is time-consuming! Courses like anatomy and physiology (AP) are often deemed highly difficult, which leads to high failure and withdraw rates (DFW) — there is so much memorization involved as well as difficult concepts to understand. So, what can incoming students do to prevent becoming quickly overwhelmed?

November 28, 2021March 12, 2024

Everyday Memory: College Edition

By Brooklyn Lyles

College is typically overwhelming for many, but is also considered to be one of the best times of your life. There are various ways in which each student navigates their way throughout these years whether it pertains to studying, learning, finding your way to different buildings on campus, where resources may be located, and much more. It comes down to what works best for each individual themselves. Another aspect of everyday memory is remembering directions, which typically applies to your everyday driving route whether that be to work, to campus, or back home. As it is time to transition to the new chapter in your life(college), it is crucial knowing the ins and outs of things as well as what your professor expects from you and how to engage/interact with the environment cognitively in order to learn better. However, something we all have in common that can be used to benefit/improve these different aspects is something called everyday memory.

November 28, 2021March 12, 2024

Perceptual Organizing Our School Work

By Zachary Briggs

As a business major at the college I am enrolled in, I initially anticipated my psychology course to not have any meaningful value to my life in the future. Do not… I repeat, do not approach this subject with that mindset. This semester I learned about many concepts within psychology that affect our lives daily such as sensory & short-term memory, long-term memory, attention, reasoning; the list can go on. One concept that was very intriguing to me and I would like to share my understanding and knowledge about is Perceptual Organization. Perceptual Organization is something we all use in our daily lives without even knowing as college students. We are using Perceptual Organization when studying for quizzes, finishing projects, taking tests, completing math problems, or even organizing our dorm rooms, we are constantly using Perceptual Organization.

November 28, 2021March 12, 2024

Combination or Consolidation?

By Peyton Grantham

Imagine yourself sitting in math class learning the Pythagorean Theorem. You might have spent hours upon hours studying and using the theorem to understand it. Doing this may have exercised your brain so much that you still remember the formula in your long term memory. This is what memory consolidation is for.

What are Memories?

Memory is defined as retrieving information, storing said information, and then remembering it at a later time (1). Memory involves various parts of the brain, but the hippocampus is a big part of that. The hippocampus is situated between the brain’s temporal lobes and takes a huge role in memory and emotions. When we take in information, the data goes through the brain using neurons, synapses, and neurotransmitters. The neurons communicate with one another through electrical and chemical currents and the synapses are a small space on a neuron that allows information to be passed on to other neurons, through this process neurotransmitters help by TRANSMITTING chemical signals that move the data along into storage. Through these chemical signals, memory is created. Memory consolidation causes short term memories to be stored as long term memories.

November 28, 2021March 12, 2024

To study or to not study?

By McKenna Gann

As a college student have you ever had a test that you spent hours studying for? You’ve never felt more confident about another test in your life perhaps? But.. It’s now test day, the test is sitting right in front of you, you’re reading over the questions, and you can’t remember anything that you spent all night studying. How can this be happening? How can studying cause a bad grade? Trust me, I’ve been there before too. We all have. Let’s talk about how availability heuristics can affect our studying.

November 28, 2021March 12, 2024

The Psychological Version of a Web Diagram

By Kelton O’Grady

“School.”

Your brain has just been primed. Before you even finished reading the word above, you had many things popping into your head. Mental images such as a building, teachers, homework, or even a classroom. (1). The effects on priming are predicted only when assuming that the typical time of activation-spread is in the order of hundreds of milliseconds. Let’s take a second and reflect on how your mind created these images, maybe a web diagram, (like you were taught at a young age to use for essays) connecting all similar ideas once you saw the word. This is one idea I wish I would have used more often my freshman year of college to better understand a wider variety of information and how they connect to many other things in life in different ways.