Habituation is generally defined as a decrease in response to a stimulus after repeated exposure. For example, the first time you walk into your friend’s room you notice the smell of dirty gym clothes, and you gag from the terrible odor. After walking into your friend’s room over and over you begin to not even notice the smell of the dirty clothes, and subsequently you no longer gag. In this example the odor from the dirty clothes is the stimulus and the gagging is the response. Please read the article by Rankin and colleagues (2009) and answer the following questions:
Come up with your own example of habituation in your daily life and identify the stimulus and response. Choose any three of the characteristics of habituation described in the article (link posted bellow) and describe how those characteristics can (or could) be seen in the example of habituation that you’ve come up with.
Example
of a Good Post:
Q1:
Read the article “Seven Sins of Memory.” Choose two of the
“sins” to discuss and explain how these particular memory flaws have
affected your life. Please use the article and Chapter 7 of the textbook
to support your thoughts.
In his article, “The Seven Sins of Memory,” Daniel L. Schacter
outlines the seven major “ sins” that attribute to human memory being fallible
at times. Two of these sins that I felt most certainly
applied to me are “absent mindedness” and “ blocking.” Schacter explains that the sin of absent mindedness occurs when we
place insufficient attention on a stimulus at the time of encoding or retrieval
or the attended information is processed superficially (Schacter, 1999). For example, if someone is in a big hurry to get out the door for
work, they may forget where they put their cell phone down, as their focus was
primarily on getting themselves out the door. I think absent mindedness is something that happens to me on a
daily basis. For example, if I’m having a
conversation with someone, but have something on my mind, like studying for an
upcoming exam, I will have a full conversation with that person, but remember
little to nothing when the conversation is over. On a few occasions, I’ve asked the same person the same
questions I did in our previous conversation without realizing it, simply
because I wasn’t paying attention to the information when it was being encoded
in my mind, as Schacter would put it. I think
the concept of absent mindedness would also explain behaviors I occasionally
find myself doing, such as forgetting where I put my car keys or leaving perishable
food out of the refrigerator.
The other
sin I find myself guilty of from time to time is what Schater refers to as
blocking. Blocking occurs when a deeply encoded fact or event, which has
not been lost over time, is temporarily unavailable and can not be retrieved
(Schacter, 1999). As Schater explains in his
article, one of the most common examples of this phenomenon is the “tip of the
tongue” experience. For example, if a friend asks
you the name of a famous actor in a movie and you know that you know the
answer, but can’t recall it at the moment even though you feel like at any
moment you’ll be able to blurt it out, then you’ve experienced blocking. I think that the concept of blocking coincides much with what
chapter 7 of the text terms as an “intrusion error.” An intrusion error occurs when other knowledge intrudes into the
remembered event (Reisberg, 2010). For example, once a friend
asked me what kind of car was parked across the street from my house. For whatever reason I couldn’t think of the name even though I had
seen them a hundred times (blocking) and for some reason I wanted to say it was
a vintage Mustang (intrusion error), even though I knew it wasn’t. Overall I found Schacter’s article to be very insightful as to the
potential pitfalls in human memory.
References:
Reisberg, D. (2010). Cognition. (4 ed., p. 93). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company.
Schacter, D. L. (1999). The seven sins of memory. American Psychologist, 54(3), 182-203.
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