baixx078: October 2011 Archives

Learning behavior as the core study area of behaviorism has high importance, and it does, may explain, how people are unique, as professor Briggs referred in first lecture.
There are two things I want to write in this blog. First is how I figure out that I could apply operant conditioning and classical conditioning into my daily life, or maybe, in the future, applying into education field. Second is that I am still wondering whether we could trying to explain learning behavior in an evolutionary respect, which may related to functional psychology. As well as I found a really interesting article about memory and our emotion from the web.

I think that most of our behavior is actually acquired through operant conditioning because there are not that much things which could cause an automatically unconditioned response. Most of the behaviors are result of conduction of our brain work and conducted of motor muscle. Like learning how to swim when I am quite young, a good move in water set me free from feeling suffocated and will not be chocked by water, which was a negative reinforcement. Also, more commonly behavior such as walking, getting what we want is a positive reinforcement which encourage our move another step and walk further and further. I think that this operant behavior is more involved after we have developed our sensation fully and have "kind of independent thinking ability". Because I think that compared with classical conditioning which requires an instinctive respond, operant conditioning requires more on logic thinking, which we have to actively connect two things together. When learning, we have to think the connection between two things.

Another topic is that whether we could using evolutionary respect to explain learning behavior. When reading the classical conditioning part, I was thinking that did at the beginning of learning, the UCR appeared are actually a result of learning through evolution? Millions of years of evolution left the creatures with ability to reflect these stimuli survive, and then those animals using these so called instincts to learn new behavior in order to survive and reproduce. Also, I believe, as far as I know about "feeling of safe", the conditioning responds should be the behavior should make the animal feel safe, could be safely survive. I am thinking whether fields of Maslow's safety theory and learning behavior as well as evolutionary respect of psychology could be combined together to understanding human behavior.

Here is an article I found on the internet about our emotion and memory from NYU, which I think are closely related to the learning behavior we learnt at the beginning of last week.
http://psych.nyu.edu/phelpslab/papers/04_CON_V14.pdf

According to the description and video in the lecture as well as lack of efficient evidence to support the explanation of existence OBD and NDE, more scientist assume that two phenomenon is illusion caused by our sensory mistake.

Current NDE research, as read in the text, are based on description of people who believed that the experienced OBD and NDE, as far as I know, I think it is more like the introspection because it depend heavily on personal description instead of valid and repeatable data base.

In personal opinion, I believe, that OBD and NDE is the illusion caused by overload information from our sensory. It is just a guess inspired by the text. As far as I concern, based on the situation which OBD and NDE phenomenon happened, it might because that under certain situation, especially emergency, our sensory become extremely sensitive which enable us catch even the smallest changes around. Tons of information then pass our nerve system and processed by our brain which may lead some mistakes because of the amount of information needed to be analysis simultaneously.

I personally don't have any experience and have never do any research in the field and the theme This guess needs sufficient evidences to supported because OBE and NDE involves mental activities a lot which is hard to accurately measured even us EEG. If I could conducted a experiments, I would like to inmate the few different situations under which NDE and OBE are mostly occurred and then detected the electronic wave changes in one's brain. Then according to the different reflection areas , we might could figure out whether the brain is actually super "busy" at that time. By analyze the data and MRI graph, more information could be provided and evidence might be founded as well.

Critical thinking as have been learnt in Chapter one, the concept includes six principles, ruling out rival hypotheses, correlation and causation, falsifiability, replicability, extraordinary claims and occam's razor.

Ruling out rival hypotheses means that we need to check if there was alternative explanation for a finding or statement.

Correlation VS. Causation represents that the correlation between two things doesn't represent the logic causation between them. Those two concept should be think separately.

Falsifiability shows that for a scientific statement, whether we could disprove it. A scientific hypotheses should be able to be disproved by people.

Replicability is the way to show the valid of a test. During experiement and research, we need to make sure that our result could be repeat and has the same result again and again to show that it is a valid answer instead a product of consequences.

Extraordinary claims is that when notice some really extraordinary claim or findings, same extraordinary evidences should be showed to prove the hypotheses and the claim.

The last one, occam's razor, is saying that sometimes, the simplest answer may the best answer to explain.

I think these six principles important because it is the way we could get over traps in daily life not only about scientific statement as well as daily life affairs. Also, since I want to learn social psychology which involve with not only individual human, small environment around him, but the whole society as well as many different kinds of person in it. There are so many different element involve in social psychology making it quite hard to isolate all the procedure in behaviors. Especially the second principle, causation and correlation, which is one of the most confused part in social psychology I think, because many people in our daily life has tendency of saying "A cause B" just because they show up together. I believe, remembering and learning analysis correlation and then using logical details to track causation is the way a social psychologist do. Also, I am still trying combine scientific thinking principles and oriental philosophy to learning the social effect and position of it in oriental culture.