Motivational Theories and Concepts
• Motives – needs, wants, desires leading to goal-directed behavior
• Drive theories – seeking homeostasis
• Incentive theories – regulation by external stimuli
• Evolutionary theories – maximizing reproductive success

Motivation
• Motivation
– a need or desire that energizes and directs behavior
• Instinct
– complex behavior that is rigidly patterned throughout a species and is unlearned

Motivation
– the idea that a physiological need creates an aroused tension state
(a drive) that motivates an organism to satisfy the need

Motivation
• Homeostasis
– tendency to maintain a balanced or constant internal state
– regulation of any aspect of body chemistry around a particular level
• Incentives
– a positive or negative environmental stimulus that motivates behavior

Figure 9.2 The diversity of human motives

Maslow ’ s Hierarchy of Needs

– desire to perform a behavior for its own sake or to be effective
– desire to perform a behavior due to promised rewards or threats of punishment

Mom: “ I ’ ll give you $5 for every A.
’’
Controlling reward
Child: “ As long as she pays,
I ’ ll study.
’’
Extrinsic motivation
Mom: “ Your grades were great!
Let ’ s celebrate by going out for dinner.
’’
Informative reward
Child: “ I love doing well.
’’
Intrinsic motivation

Critical Thinking about Motivation and
Emotion —Intrinsic Vs. Extrinsic

Views of Motivation
• Empirical View (e.g. Skinner)
– Extrinsic (incentives / disincentives)
– Rewards & punishments affect an individual ’ s tendency to respond in the way necessary for learning to occur
• Cognitive View (e.g. Piaget)
– Intrinsic (goals & objectives)
– Individual interest in a domain of cognitive activity drive learning

Empirical
• Effectiveness of incentives nonetheless derives from individual goals & objectives
– Biological in nature: goals reflect what is necessary for surviving and thriving
• Performance approach - desire to outdo others and avoid appearance of inferiority

Cognitive
• Learning motivation is a result of need to reconcile differences in our understanding of the world.
• Mastery approach - desire to learn and understand and avoid misunderstanding

Will Power
• Kelly McGonigal – Will power 101
• ‘I Will’ Challenges
• ‘I Won’t’ Challenges

Will Power
Battle between ‘two minds’ – two parts of yourself
•Pre – frontal cortex
•Amygdala
•Taking the ‘high road’ uses a lot of the brain’s energy

Train Willpower
• Sleep
• Meditation
• Physical Exercise
• Low glycemic plant based diet

Train Willpower
• Sleep intervention
– Drug addicts – taught breath focused meditation – focused on sleep 5-15 mins
– Increased sleep by at least one hour
– Incearsed sleep predicted relapse
– Minutes meditation per week also predicted relapse
– Britten et al 2010

Set back or Failure – give yourself a break
• Dieters forced to eat a donut – taste test
• Randomly assigned to control/experimental group
• Experimental group – ‘Give yourself a break’self compassion
• Eat less than ½ compared to control group
– Adams and Leary 2007

Self compassion message
• Mindfulness of thoughts and feelings
• Common humanity
• Encouragement over criticism

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Current Self vs. Future self

Future Self
• More overlap – the more ‘look after the future’
(savings) – more will power
• Future self a stranger – less likely to ‘look after the future ’
• Conversation with your future self
Ersner, Hershfield et al

Visualizing Failure vs. Visualizing Success

Visualizing Failure vs. Visualizing Success
• Imagined themselves failing – asked to focus on what the issues/obstacles – when, where
• ‘How will you defend against this’
• Double amount of exercising
• 16 weeks later x2 as likely to keep changes going compared to control
• Stadler, Oettinger & Gollwitzer 2009

Holding Breath

‘Surfing the Urge’
• Distress tolerance – stay put when it gets difficult
• Smoking – quit of 24hrs – then asked to come with unopened pack
• Power of Acceptance

‘Surfing the Urge’
• Notice the thoughts, craving, feeling
• Accept and attend to inner experience
• Breath – and give your body and brain a chance to pause and plan
• Broaden your attention and look for the actions that will help you achieve the goal

Willpower Rules
• Train your willpower physiology
• Forgive yourself – self compassion
• Make friends with your future self
• Predict failure
• Surf the urge
• Kelly McGonigal – The Willpower Instinct

Human Memory: Basic Questions
• How does information get into memory?
• How is information maintained in memory?
• How is information pulled back out of memory?

• Encoding
• Storage
• Retrieval (remembering)
• Forgetting

• Three levels of storage
• Level 1: Sensory memory
• Level 2: Short term memory or working memory
• Level 3: Long term memory

Figure 7.2 Three key processes in memory

Encoding: Getting Information Into Memory
• The role of attention
• Focusing awareness
• Divided attention

Figure 7.3 Levels-of-processing theory

Enriching Encoding
• Elaboration = linking a stimulus to other information at the time of encoding
– Thinking of examples
• Visual Imagery = creation of visual images to represent words to be remembered
– Easier for concrete objects: Dual-coding theory

Storage: Maintaining Information in Memory
• Analogy: information storage in computers ~ information storage in human memory
• Information-processing theories
– Subdivide memory into three different stores
• Sensory, Short-term, Long-term

Figure 7.6 The Atkinson and Schiffrin model of memory storage

Sensory Memory
• Brief preservation of information in original sensory form
• Auditory/Visual – approximately ¼ second

Short Term Memory (STM)
• Limited duration – about 20 seconds without rehearsal
– Rehearsal – the process of repetitively verbalizing or thinking about the information
• Limited capacity – magical number 7 plus or minus 2
– Chunking – grouping familiar stimuli for storage as a single unit
– Chimp memory

Long-Term Memory
• Unlimited Capacity and lengthy storage time
• Permanent storage?
– Flashbulb memories
• How is knowledge represented and organized in memory?
– Schemas and Scripts
– Semantic Networks
– Connectionist Networks and PDP Models

What is your long term memory?
• It has unlimited capacity, and lengthy storage time
• Information maybe stays there forever, it just can ’ t be retrieved OR it may decay
• Things will sometimes get into our long term memory as a side effect of our thinking, not always from trying to memorize - remembering is a side effect of thinking

What is your long term memory?
• We sort the stuff we remember, and remember what is important to us, or what is consistent with what we think should be there
• There are cultural differences in what is considered important to remember, and how it is remembered

Retrieval: Getting Information
Out of Memory
• The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon – a failure in retrieval
– Retrieval cues
• Reinstating the context
– Context cues
• Reconstructing memories
– Misinformation effect
• Source monitoring

Forgetting: When Memory Lapses
• Ebbinghaus ’ s Forgetting Curve
• Retention – the proportion of material retained
– Recall
– Recognition
– Relearning

Figure 7.10 Ebbinghaus ’ forgetting curve for nonsense syllables

Why We Forget
• Ineffective Encoding
• Decay
• Interference
– Proactive
– Retroactive
• Retrieval failure
• Repression
– Authenticity of repressed memories?
– Memory illusions
– Controversy

Retrieval Failure
• Encoding Specificity
• Transfer-Appropriate Processing
• Repression
– Authenticity of repressed memories?
– Memory illusions
– Controversy

TYPES OF LONG TERM MEMORY
• We seem to have different kinds of memory
• They come into the brain through different pathways
• They are stored in different ways and in different places in the brain

Figure 7.17 Theories of independent memory systems

• I am conscious that
I remember this
• Operant conditioning leads to this kind of memory
• I am not conscious that I remember this
• It shows up in my behaviour
• Classical conditioning leads to this kind of emotional memory

• The secret of a good memory is the secret of forming diverse and multiple associations with every fact we care to retain

Whereabouts in the brain are memories stored?
• We seem to have different networks operating for different kinds of memory
• Implicit memories come through the amygdala
• Explicit memories come through the hippocampus
• Once consolidated, they are stored in the original site eg. motor memory in the motor context, language memory in the language areas of the brain

Bilateral damage to the hippocampus results in anterograde amnesia (Patient H.M.)

Amygdala : emotional memory and memory consolidation
Basal ganglia & cerebellum : memory for skills, habits and CC responses
Hippocampus : memory recognition, spatial, episodic memory, laying down new declarative long-term memories
Thalamus , formation of new memories and working memories
Cortical Areas : encoding of factual memories, storage of episodic and semantic memories, skill learning, priming.

• Complex process
• We use partial cues
• Each time we remember, we reconstruct the memory
• Tip of the tongue phenomenon is when the semantic memory is there, but not the information about the name

What helps us remember?
• Context reconstruction
• Having spaces between the learning sessions
• Using lots of different ways to encode the information
(a) Overlearning
(b) Using visual imagery (method of loci)
(c) Using mnemonic devices

Forgetting – why do we forget?
• We never learned it properly in the first place because of lack of attention or lack of in depth processing
• It decays (Short term memory especially)
• Interference from other material you have learned
• Retrieval failure: cue needs to match the encoded memory
• Motivated forgetting: instructing ourselves to forget, repressed memory

Memories are imperfect reconstructions – subject to distortion
• Hindsight distortion: memory recalled is influenced by present knowledge
• Influence: we take on board what we are told, or see, or other ’ s opinions
• Source monitoring errors: we make mistakes about where we learned the information
• Stephen Wiltshire The Human Camera.mp4

Definition : Memory refers to the storage, retention and recall of information including past experiences, knowledge and thoughts
• Only some types of memory loss are associated with normal aging
• Other types are typical of disease states

Types of Memory and Loss
• Working (intermediate term) – loss occurs with normal aging
• Episodic- especially impaired in normal aging e.g. ability to process recent information
• Semantic (e.g. vocabulary) – Improves with age; lost in dementias
• Procedural (long-term memory of skills) shows No Decline with age; affected by diseases

Types of Memory and Loss
• Very long-term memory (months to years)increases up to age 50; maintained until well after 70
• Short-term memory- shows little decline; loss associated with diseases
• Older adults tend to be worse at remembering the source of their information
• Clive Wearring

• Video/How Does Your Memory Work
Pt.3.mp4
• Video/How Does Your Memory Work
Pt.4.mp4