TEXT №1
THE NATURE OF MEMORY
Human memory depends on a complex mental system. There are three basic
memory processes. Encoding transforms stimulus information into some type of
mental representation. Encoding can be acoustic (by sound), visual (by
appearance), or semantic (by meaning). Storage maintains information in the
memory system over time. Retrieval is the process of gaining access to
previously stored information. There are three types of memory: episodic
memory, semantic memory and procedural memory.
Any memory of a specific event that happened while you were present is an
episodic memory — such as what you had for dinner yesterday, what you did
last summer. Semantic memory contains generalized knowledge of the world that
does not involve memory of a specific event. Procedural memory, which
involves the skill learning provides the memory for how to do things — how to
ride a bike, read a map, or tie a shoelace. Often, a procedural memory consists of
a complicated sequence of movements that cannot be described adequately in
words. For example, the gymnast might find it impossible to describe the exact
motions in a particular routine.
Many activities require all three types of memory. Consider the game of
tennis. Knowing the official rules or how many sets are needed to win a match
involves semantic memory. Remembering which side served last requires episodic
memory. Knowing how to lob or volley involves procedural memory.
Memory is full of paradoxes. It is common, for example, for people to
remember the name of their first-grade teacher but not the name of someone
they met just a minute ago. Like perception, memory is selective. While people
retain a great deal of information, they also lose a great deal.
Memory is intimately tied to many other aspects of psychology. Without memory,
you would not know how to shut off your alarm clock, take a shower, get
dressed, or recognize objects.
TEXT №2
IMPROVING YOUR MEMORY
Even though some basic questions about what memory is and how it works
resist final answers, psychologists know a great deal about how people can
improve their memories. People with normal memory skills as well as braindamaged individuals can benefit from mnemonics, which are strategies for
placing information into an organized context in order to remember it. Verbal
organization is the basis for many mnemonics. You can link items by weaving
them into a story or a sentence or a rhyme.
One simple but powerful mnemonics is called the method of loci (pronounced "low-sigh"), or the method of places. To use this method, first think
about a set of familiar locations — your home, for example. Vivid images of
interactions or relationships seem to be particularly effective.
When you want to remember more complex material, such as a textbook
chapter, the same principles apply. Indeed, you can facilitate your memory for
text material by first creating an outline or other overall context for learning,
rather than by just reading and re-reading. Repetition may seem effective,
because maintenance rehearsal alone tends to be ineffective, no matter how
much time you spend on it. In short, "work smarter, not harder."
In addition, spend your time wisely. Distributed practice is much more effective
than massed practice for learning new information. If you are going to spend ten
hours studying for a test, you will be much better off studying for ten one -hour
blocks (separated by periods of sleep and other activity) than "cramming" for
one ten-hour block. By scheduling more study sessions, you will stay fresh and
tend to think about the material from a new perspective each session. This method
will help you elaborate the material and remember it.
TEXT №3
MENTAL PROCESSING WITHOUT AWARENESS
A fascinating demonstration of mental processing without awareness was
provided by an experiment with patients who were under anesthesia for surgery.
While the still-unconscious patients were in a postoperative recovery room, an
audio-tape of fifteen word pairs was played over and over. After regaining
consciousness, these patients could not say what words had been played at all.
Yet when given one word from each of the word pairs and asked to say the
first word that came to mind, the patients were able to produce the other
member of the word pair from the tape.
Even when people are conscious and alerts information can sometimes be
processed and used without their awareness. In one study of this phenomenon,
subjects watched a computer screen as an X flashed in one of four locations. The
subjects' task was to indicate where the X appeared by rapidly pushing one of
four buttons. The participants in this study had learned a complex rule-bound
strategy to improve their performance.
Information processing without awareness had also been demonstrated in
research on priming. In a typical priming study, people tend to respond faster or
more accurately to previously seen stimuli, even when they cannot consciously
recall having seen those stimuli. In one study, for example, people were asked to
look at figures and decide which of them could actually exist in three-dimensional
space and which could not. The subjects were better at classifying pictures that they
had seen before, even when they could not remember having seen them. Similar
results occur in experiments on the mere-exposure effect, the tendency for people
to like previously encountered stimuli more than new ones.
Awareness is not always required for mental operations. The priming
phenomenon shows that people's responses to stimuli are speeded and improved
as stimuli are repeated, even when the people have no conscious memory of
which stimuli are old and which are new. In the mere-exposure effect, people
tend to judge previously encountered stimuli more favorably even when they
are unaware of having seen the stimuli before.
TEXT №4
TESTING FOR INTELLIGENCE
Psychologists have not reached a consensus on how best to define intelligence.
Working definitions describe intelligence in terms of reasoning, problem solving, and
dealing with environment. IQ tests measure some, but not all, of these aspects of
intelligence. Let's look at the history of IQ tests.
In 1904 the French government appointed psychologist Alfred Binet to a
commission charged with identifying, studying, and providing special educational
programs for children who were not doing well in school. As a part of his work on the
commission, Binet developed a set, or a battery, of intellectual test items that provided
the model for today's intelligence tests. In creating his test, Binet assumed that
intelligence is involved in many reasoning, thinking, and problem-solving activities.
His tests included tasks such as unwrapping a piece of candy, repeating numbers or
sentences from, memory, and identifying familiar objects. Binet also assumed that
children's abilities increase with age. About a decade after Binet published his test,
Lewis Terman at Stanford University developed an English version known as the
Stanford-Binet. Terman added items to measure the intelligence of adults and revised
the method of scoring. Mental age was divided by chronological age, and the quotient
was meltipihied by 100; the result was called the intelligence quotient. or IQ. Thus, a
child whose mental age and chronological age were equal would have an IQ of 100,
which is considered "average" intelligence. From this method of scoring came the term
IQ test, a name of a widely used test designed to measure intelligence on an objective,
standardized scale.
Nowadays in schools the Stanford-Binet and Wechsler tests are the roost popular
individually administered intelligence tests. Both include subtests and provide scores for
parts of the test as well as an overall score. Currently, a person's IQ score reflects how
far that person's performance on the test deviates from the average performance by
people in his or her age group.
IQ tests are reasonably reliable, and they do a good job of predicting academic
success. However, IQ tests assess only some of the abilities that might be considered
aspects of intelligence, and they may favor those most familiar with middle-class
culture. Nonetheless, this familiarity is important for academic and occupational
success.
TEXT №5
THE NATURE OF EMOTION
Everyone seems to agree that joy, sorrow, anger, fear, love and hate are
emotions, but it is hard to identify the shared features that make these experiences
emotions rather than thought or impulses.
Most psychologists in Western cultures tend to see emotions as organized
psychological and physiological reactions to changes in our relationship to the world.
These reactions are partly subjective experiences and partly objectively measurable
patterns of behavior and physiological arousal. The subjective experience of emotion
has several characteristics:
1. Emotion is usually transitory; it tends to have a relatively clear beginning and end,
and a relatively short duration. Moods, by contrast, tend to last longer.
2.Emotional experience has valence, which means it is either positive or negative.
3.Emotional experience is elicited partly by a cognitive appraisal of how a
situation relates to your goals.
4.Emotional experience alters thought processes, often by directing attention
toward some things and away ford others.
5.Emotional experience elicits an action tendency, a motivation to behave in
certain ways.
6.Emotional experiences are passions that happen to you, usually with out willful
intent.
The subjective aspects of emotions are experiences both triggered by the thinking
self and felt as happening to the self. They reveal an individual as both agent and
object, both I and me, both the controller of thoughts and recipient of passions.
Objective aspects of emotion include learned and innate expressive displays and
physiological responses. Expressive displays — a smile, a frown — communicate
feelings to others. Physiological responses — changes in heart rate — provide
biological adjustments needed to perform the action tendencies generated by emotional
experience. In summary, an emotion is a transitory, valenced experience that is felt
with some intensity as happening to the self, generated in part by cognitive appraisal
of situations, and accompanied by both learned and innate physical responses.
Through emotion, people communicate their internal states and intentions to others, but
emotion also functions to direct and energize a person's own thoughts and actions.