Psychologist Tom Stafford's Understanding Of The 'Doorway Effect'

“Decay theory-- we forget memories because we don’t use them and they fade away over time

Eugene could never remember the “correct” object, and he couldn’t remember previous sessions the experiment was done. Eugene was exposed to a cue, routine, and a reward, the cue being a pair of cardboard rectangles always presented in the same combination, routine being choosing an object and checking to see if it had a “correct” sticker on its, and as reward being the satisfaction of selecting the “correct” object. Habits can emerge without our permission, for example, a family may eat out at a certain fast food restaurant multiple times on the way home, but if the fast food place shuts down, the family would naturally stop eating at the fast food place. Seven years after Eugene’s accident, his life achieved an equilibrium, he had a sedentary lifestyle. Later, Eugene experienced a heart attack, he continuously kept pulling cords off him since he had amnesia, so doctors left a note by his hospital bed explaining why he was there to remind him.

The Giver book and The Giver movie are interchangeable in many ways. One of the similarities between The Giver book and The Giver movie is the Utopian society. In order to achieve a perfect world, you need Sameness. Also, in both The Giver movie and The Giver book Jonas is assigned receiver. Furthermore, in both the book and the movie there is precision of language.

Memory retrieval skills gradually deteriorate over a person’s lifespan. It becomes harder to remember events and recall what was learned. Forgetting something doesn’t mean the memory is gone, it’s just a retrieval failure. Inside Out displays what happens to long term memories when they are forgotten. We see that the glassy memory orbs darken and desaturate in color, and ‘mind workers’ regularly clean out the old memories. This is quite similar to pruning, as it shows how not all memories retain the same duration. There are ways, however, to improve retrieval. Professors McDermott and Roediger suggest, “Relating new information to what one already knows, forming mental images, and creating associations among information that needs to be remembered. (McDermott & Roediger,

Beginning on August fourth of 1950, and lasting until September eighteenth of the same year, the North Koreans waged a battle against the United States and UN forces. The UN forces along with the United States were forced back to the Pusan Perimeter, a defensive line set up around the very southeastern tip of the Korean Peninsula. Inside of this protected area was the port of Pusan.

Hannula’s research is based on, “memory for different kinds of relations (i.e., spatial and nonspatial relations) is tested with different paradigms under long- and short-lag conditions” (Hannula, 2014). Hannula also showed detailed information about the experiments such as stimuli design, procedure, and statistical analyses. Hannula describe the history and condition of the participants that was involved in the experiment. “Participants in both experiments were six patients (three male, three female) with amnesia, and six neurologically intact comparison participants, each matched to one of the patients individually with respect to age, education, and intelligence quotient”(Hannula, 2014). The method that was used in the first experiment is eye-movement methodology. The “eye-movement methodology to explore the status of relational memory representations that are to be maintained over the course of a very brief delay in work involving presentation of scenes that were exact matches or were manipulated versions of scenes viewed just seconds earlier”(Hannula,

Additionally, to further support these theories, researchers tend to conduct studies on the famous patient case, HM, to propose the consolidation deficit theory, in which those with amnesia cannot turn short-term memories into long-term memories (Dewar et al., 2010). However, researchers Dewar, Della Sala, Beschin, and Cowan (2010), mentioned that HM’s case does not fully explain why a patient with anterograde amnesia has the ability to get better at cognitive tasks despite being unable to recall having performed those tasks at a previous time. On the same hand, Duff, Wszalek, Tranel, and Cohen (2008) mentioned that most individuals with anterograde amnesia experience heightened intelligence, attention, skill, and reasoning levels (procedural memory).

After reading chapter 1 of Ronald J. Comer’s book, Fundamentals of Psychology, I now have a clear understanding of what clinical psychologists and psychologists, in general, deal with on a daily basis when faced with people who have psychological problems. These psychological problems all have some common features to these abnormalities. These four common features are deviance, distress, dysfunction and danger. To start off, deviance can be described as actions, behaviors, thoughts and emotions that are mostly different than those people who are within the cultural norm. People who break these cultural norms are considered to be deviant, but it is based off of what people consider to be “normal.” These

may cause a person to be more susceptible to invasive memories such as ADHD, damage to the prefrontal cortex, or depression. Moreover, even if episodic memory is impaired, “conditioning and perceptual fluency associated with the experience may remain”, (Anderson) for example, producing fear of something without deliberately recalling

The two most significant experiments were 3 and 4. Experiment 3 used 648 subjects, split into two different groups, who saw slides depicting and automobile-pedestrian accident. Each slide was shown for approximately 3 seconds. The difference between the 2 groups of subjects was that one group had a critical slide containing a stop sign while in the other group the slide contained a yield sign. After viewing the slides, both sets of subjects filled out a questionnaire along with a force-choice recognition test. However, the force-choice test was administered to the subjects after a retention interval 72 subjects filled out the questionnaire followed by the force-recognition test immediately after seeing the slides, while 144 subjects were tested for each retention interval of 20 minutes, 1 day, 2 days or one week. Each questionnaire contained at critical question mentioning either a stop signs, yield sign or no sign at all, what sign mentioned was evenly distributed among the subjects. The results of this experiment showed that long retention intervals worsened a subject’s memory of the depicted slides, it also concluded that subjects who received consistent information had a better performance

After a motor vehicle accident Tom was left with an acquired brain injury with damage to the frontal lobe and the left temporal lobe. As a result Tom has been experiencing many difficulties, in particular with his memory. Memory refers to the mental capacity to retain information and convert it into a form that can be stored and retrieved at a later time. Storing and retrieving memories involves passing information from one stage to the next and then retrieving that information from long-term memory. (Burton, Westen & Kowalski, 2012, p.261) Memory is an integral part of human survival and without it, learning new skills, such as the ones required by Tom to regain his loss of function, could never prevail.

Memory in the human brain is a complex process which is easier understood by the use of theoretical constructs. Memories begin as sensory stimuli which become sensory memory which only last about one second, from there it moves into working memory which lasts for about twenty to thirty seconds and is used to process information. Within working memory there are a few separate processes, the central executive which directs attention, the episodic buffer which is a secondary storage lasting ten to twenty seconds, this area communicates with long term memory as well as the central executive. The visuospatial sketchpad which is used to visualise visual and spacial

Associating various words, happenings, or "triggers" to the actual event which then causes a "flashback".

Amnesia is a critical health issue that happens to all us in our lifetimes. Whether it is from sports, a health condition that turn for the worst, or our body just slowly deteriorate and break apart. Scientists and doctors collaborate to find a way to prevent amnesia or put it to a standstill. The sole reason why Amnesia struck me is because I personally experience some small form of amnesia. When I was younger, I got hit near my right eyebrow by a hockey puck. I lost consciousness for a minute and woke up on the ground, not remembering what happened and to discovered my head is bleeding. I often find myself forgetting a lot of things such as things that was recently spoken or discussed. However, it is not just me that prompted me to learn and research about Amnesia. My father often forget things as well. He is only in his 50’s and had multiple surgeries that made me wonder if his surgeries has to do anything with it.

Interference of other material also plays a role in the short-term forgetfulness. It is hard for the brain to focus on committing more than one thing memory at a time. The old stuff is bumped out by the new stuff, which is a big contributor to why you forget. Our short-term memory seems to have a limited amount of places to hold this temporary data. This is an area that has been studied a lot. There are different theories about how much we actually retain before it is pushed out by the next thought. Chunking makes remembering easier as well. It involves grouping information into familiar stimuli so it can be stored as a single unit. This takes up fewer memory slots and makes remembering smoother. The chunks are effective when they are associated with something familiar to the individual. This ties into the long-term memory because that is where you draw the familiarity.