IB Psychology HL

exploringmetro.wordpress.com Brefczynski-Lewis et al. (2007) Aim: To investigate the brain regions that are involved in meditation and which brain regions might show the effects of training Procedure: The researchers compared brain activity of highly-experienced Tibetan monks during meditation with the activity of novice meditators. To see the brain activity they used fMRI scans. They also played sounds to test how distractible the participants were during the meditation. Results: They found that meditations activated attention-related brain regions in both expert meditators and novices. Meditators with more practice showed more activity in attention regions, however the ones with the most practice had activity drop after less than half a minute, when their concentration may have settled into a tranquil but alert awareness. The most practised meditators showed the least reaction to the distracting sounds. Conclusion: The results from this study give evidence that conce...

Martinez and Kesner (1991) Aim: To determine the role of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine on memory Procedure: Rats were trained to go through a maze and find the end, where food was located. When the rats learned how to get through the maze, he divided them into three groups. The first group was injected with scopolamine, which blocks the acetylcholine receptor sites. The second group was injected with physostigmine. Physostigmine blocks the production of cholinesterase which does the “clean-up” of acetylcholine from the synapse and returns the neuron to its “resting state”. The third group was not injected because they were the control group. Results: The results showed that the group that had been injected with scopolamine were slower and made more errors than the two other groups. The physostigmine group was faster than both groups and also made less errors when running through the maze. Conclusion: The researchers could from the results conclude that the neurotr...

Schemas are cognitive structures that organise the knowledge that is stored in our memory. To be able to create schemas, we must already have previous knowledge which will influence the outcome of information processing. The schema theory states that all knowledge is organized into units. Encoding: transforming sensory information into a meaningful memory Storage: creating a biological trace of the encoded information in memory, which is either consolidated or lost Retrieval: using the stored information Types of schemas Scripts: provide information about the sequence of events that occur in particular contexts Self-schemas: organise information we have about ourselves Social schemas: represent information about groups of people Evaluation: Research supports that the schema theory affects cognitive processes (for example memory). It is useful when trying to understand how people organise and process information, but also about memory distortions and social cogniti...

Aim: To investigate if schema processing influences both encoding and retrieval Procedure: The participants were given one schema at the encoding stage and one schema at the retrieval stage, to see if they were influenced by the last schema when they had to recall the information. The participants heard a story that was based on 72 points. Half of the participants were asked to read the story for the point of view of a house-buyer and the other half from the point of view of a burglar. After a break, half of the participants were given a different schema, so the burglars switched to the buyers and vice versa. The other half were tested on their original schema again. Results: The researchers found that the group of participants in the changed schema group were able to recall 7 percent more points on the second test than on the first one. Recall of points that were directly linked to the new schema increased by 10 per cent, whereas recall of points that were important to the pr...