Face Blindness

In class we have talked about prosopagnosia, otherwise known as face blindness. This disorder prevents people from being able to recognize faces of people the have met or know. Some people are even unable to recognize their own family members unless a cue is put to their face. Prosopagnosia is a disorder inherited through genes. About 2.5% of people in the world are believed to have this disorder through genetic inheritance. A small part of the underside of the brain allows people to be able to recognize faces. Damage to this part of the brain causes people to lose the ability to recognize people's faces and develop prosopagnosia.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/face-blindness-super-recognizer-try-online-tests-205200765.html

In the link posted above, it shows two sides to the disorder. The first video shows multiple people with prosopagnosia. One woman in particular was shown a picture of her daughter's face. At first she was told it was someone she knew. Then she was told it was someone in their family. After much thinking, she could not recognize the face. She was finally told that it was her own daughter. She was surprised she didn't get it, but after it was mentioned that it was her daughter, she said that she saw it. This is the brain trying to compensate for the damaged part of brain. It is using auditory parts of the brain to link faces to recognition rather than visual to faces. This disorder demonstrates the danger in any damage to the brain. I cannot imagine being unable to recognize my own family members.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, one woman is called a super recognizer. She has the ability to recall any face she has ever seen. The second video does a good job of showing how well she does this. She is shown a series of "before they were famous" celebrity photos. She clearly knew them right away seeing them. Once she revealed the name to us, we could finally link the face to the name. Try these two pictures for instance. See if you can guess them without looking at the answers below.

Vince Vaughn and Brad Pitt.

I will be willing to bet that it took you a while to recognize the faces or recognize them at all. But as soon as you read or hear the names, you can automatically recognize the face by relating it to present day faces. Crazy stuff the brain pulls on us.

Memory

This week we learned about memory. Memory goes through three stages: Encoding, Storage, and Retrieval. In encoding, the brain determines if information is important to remember. If not, this information is discarded within minutes of hearing it. If the brain decides that the information is important, the brain stores this information, either as short term, long term, or sensory memory. Once this memory is stored, the information can be later accessed through retrieval. Retrieval of information is easier to recognize than it is to recall information in any given situation. For instance, if you are given a list of numbers to remember, you will have a higher correct percentage if you are given a list of numbers to choose from. If you are asked to recall the numbers, the likelihood of remembering the numbers better than recognizing the numbers from a list is vastly lower. Two ways information is encoded efficiently is through rehearsal and spacing. An example of spacing would be, instead of cramming the night before a test, studying over the course of a couple of days before. Rehearsal is also an effective way to encode information for storage. The more you repeat something, the more likely you are going to remember it. The movie Finding Nemo clearly uses this form of memory encoding. Dory uses repetition of the address on the back of the swim goggles, P. Sherman, 42 Wallaby Way, Sydney.

http://www.hark.com/clips/hkfcgctrkm-im-going-to-p-sherman-42-wallaby-way-sydney


Fast Forward to Minute 7

Dory repeated the address over and over again until it was stored in her memory. When she read Sydney on one of the underwater pipes, she recalled the address, using recognition. This is the perfect example of recognition and memory. The use of repetition as well as recognition better helped her remember the address. To this day, even I remember this address because it has been imprinted into my long term memory for no use of any relevance to anything besides the fact that I know its from Finding Nemo.

Classical Conditioning

This week’s chapter was about learning and the different ways our brains learn. In class, we focused greatly on classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Classical conditioning is taking a neutral stimulus and turning it into a conditioned stimulus. The original test that Ivan Pavlov conducted for classical conditioning was with a dog and its response to food. When the unconditioned stimulus, the food, was presented to the dog, the unconditioned response was salivation. Pavlov then tested the neutral stimulus, the bell, which had no connection to the dog food and came to the conclusion that the bell had no effect on salivation in the dog. When the bell was rung with the presentation of food, the dog would salivate. After conditioning, the bell became the conditioned stimulus, and when rung without food, the dog would salivate. Pavlov thus discovered that a neutral stimulus could be conditioned to be a conditioned stimulus. The video I posted represents classical conditioning.

In this video, the unconditioned stimulus is the slap to the head. The unconditioned response is pain to the individual being slapped. The neutral stimulus is the song on the phone. When the song on the phone was played, the guy in the video would slap the other guy. Eventually on the fourth day, the other guy reacted by trying to protect himself. Thus the conditioned stimulus became the song on the phone and the conditioned response was defense from being slapped or not wanting to experience pain from the slap. Another example would be giving a nickname to a friend. For example, my friends name is Matt, but everyone calls him Coop. When he was first given the nickname, he did not react to it, but as more people called him Coop, he responded to it. Now he is called Coop so often that he thinks getting called by Matt is weird. This is a perfect example of classical conditioning.