Creating a False Memory and the Serial-Position Effect

My first volunteer was my boyfriend, Kheland. I read him the first list of words and he remembered six out of the fourteen words. He remembered seven out of fourteen words in the second list. He wrote needle from the first list and did not write sleep for the second list. Kheland wrote down the words from the beginning and of the end of the first list and did not write the middle and the same thing goes for the second list.
My second volunteer was my brother, Jonah. I read him the two lists of words and he did about the same as Kheland. Jonah remembered eight out of the first list and six out of the second list. He didn't write sleep or needle and he too wrote mostly words from the beginning and end of the lists and wrote one from the middle of the first list.
My boyfriend was disappointed with how his results turned out, but he actually did better than I thought that he would because he does not remember anything that I tell him and he doesn't have the best memory. Kheland did create a false memory by writing down the word needle when it wasn't actually on the list. He just wrote it because the other words can be associated with the word needle. Jonah didn't create a false memory, but him and Kheland both found themselves using the serial-position effect. They both mainly recalled words from the beginning and the ends of the lists.

Memory

I am all too familiar with memory related disorders because of my late grandmother. The last five years of her life were probably not the best because she was diagnosed with dementia. She suffered from severe memory loss and as time went on she was unable to communicate her needs and take care of herself. My grandmother had thirteen children and was unable to remember who they were and she often confused one of them for another. She had no sense of time and could never remember what month, day or year it was, but she was able to remember things from when she was a young lady. She would as a lot of the same questions too. It was pretty awful watching your family members go through something that is not very treatable. There are clinical trials and medications that can delay the progression and help with the different symptoms of dementia. There are pharmacological trials that happen in phases and they start with testing on a few people and then a larger group. When results are shown an even bigger group is used to get more information. After those stages and it is approved by the FDA the drug is eligible to be sold on the market. They also use clinical trials that have no drug effect at all and those just use placebos and make that patient improve because they believe that they are improving thus improving the quality of life.

Learning

Learning

We all learn and we never stop learning our entire lives. We also learn without even realizing we are doing it. Ivan Pavlov trained dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell because they recognized that when the bell was rung food was given to them. The sound of the bell meant absolutely nothing to them until the ring was followed by food every time, it went from a neutral stimulus to a conditioned stimulus. 

On the popular television show  The Office, Jim does something very similar to Dwight as Pavlov did to the dogs in his experiment. Jim reboots his computer multiple times and every time the computer makes a distinct sound and followed by the sound Jim asks Dwight if he would like an Altoid peppermint. After doing that for a little while Jim reboots his computer again and does not offer Dwight and Altoid, but Dwight reaches his hand out expecting Jim to give him one and comments on how badly his mouth tastes without understanding why. Dwight learned that when he heard that sound an Altoid was following it and he learned that without knowing. 

Another example of learning and changing behavior is in the television show The Big Bang Theory. Sheldon tries to train Penny so that she uses behavior that he feels is appropriate. He uses chocolates as a positive reinforcment when she corrects what she is doing wrong. Sheldon predicts to Leonard that he can change her voice, her talking during movies, and other minor behavior changes by the next week.  

People learn everyday without realizing that they are. Say a brand like Adidas comes out with new styles of shoes that look really nice. Celebraties and professional athletes take a lot of liking into the new shoes and they wear them often and begin to be photographed wearing them. Other people who look up to the people in the medias eye notice the shoes and think that if they look nice wearing them that they will too. Those people start wearing them and then people around them start wearing them because the same type of conditioning happens.