Understand Psychology

by Nicky Hayes

actually learn this from a very early age – numbers, for ins...

as we approach adulthood...

by the time we are approaching adulthood,

We can use enactive representation, iconic representation, symbolic representation, or schemas, as well as some more specific modes

All our memories are linked with other ones,

A very large part of that answer is to do with how we go about storing the information in the first place.

interesting is that the amount of processing we carry out affects how well we remember things.

someone who thinks they have a bad memory has no problem remembering their social life,

they were processing the information.

as good at remembering things by giving them another set of scores to remember, which had been made up. In this case, the football supporters were just as bad at remembering as the others. It was because they knew that these were real results that they put the effort into processing the information.

Human beings have learned to live in almost all parts of the world, under wildly different physical conditions. That learning is only possible because we have evolved such a large amount of flexibility and adaptability in both our brains and our immune systems.

also need to be cautious when we are trying to generalize from other animals to human beings, because of the very diverse ways that other animals have evolved.

Nature may use the same materials but in very different ways. Some studies of animal physiology, for example, have shown that the same brain chemical, in apparently the same part of the brain, can produce completely different behaviours in rats and cats – behaviours as different as sleeping and aggression.

Animal social organization varies widely, sometimes even in the same species – for example, plains baboons have a much more rigid social hierarchy than forest baboons, which are more relaxed and ‘egalitarian’ in their relationships with one another. So we should be very careful in making our comparisons.

Learning in context

first half of the twentieth century psychologists mainly studied association learning in the laboratory, investigating how animals can learn new behaviours and complex tasks by using different kinds of reinforcements or rewards.

second half of the twentieth century, though, comparative psychologists became more interested in investigating animal behaviour in the natural environment. This approach is known as ethology

Animal learning is closely tied up with the animal’s evolutionary history, and what the demands on that particular species have been.

Evolution

Comparative psychology is firmly based on the idea that all animals, including human beings, have evolved from primitive common ancestors.

theory of evolution,

Charles Darwin ...

Evolutionary change is slow, because it happens through

tiny changes in genetics, which are passed on from parent to offspring.

NATURAL SELECTION

Our genes tell our bodies what characteristics to develop. They contain strands of DNA which add up to a ‘pattern’ for development. But how well that development happens depends on the environment that the individual grows up in.

We all have cells for storing fat, for example, but we can only become fat in an environment where food is plentiful. Sometimes the combination of genes that an individual inherits is particularly beneficial. As a result, and given the right environment, the individual may be stronger, or healthier, than others of its kind.

Sometimes, though, there are small errors in copying the DNA when the special reproductive cells are made, and these result in the new individual becoming different in some way. These differences are known as genetic mutations

Survival of the fittest

One of the ‘classic’ examples of evolution is that of the finches on the Galapagos Islands.

when he examined the different finches, it was apparent that, at some time in the past, they had all developed from just one species of finch. That species had originally colonized all the islands. But because each island presented a slightly different environment, natural selection meant that the birds had gradually adapted to their particular island. In the process, they had become different from the finches on the other islands.

Natural selection is all about the survival of the fittest – and ‘fittest’ means best adapted to its environment.