Intelligence

Talking about intelligence, who is the first person that popped up from your mind?

Me? Hhmm Albert Einstein. But what is actually intelligence? Does it the same with the word “smart”? According to Quora.com website, intelligence is like a great hardware and smart is like a great software. I’m sure that you can differentiate those two. In a more psychological way, intelligence is define as the ability to learn from one’s experiences,acquire knowledge, and use resources effectively in adapting to new situations or solving problems (Sternberg & Kaufman,1998; Wechsler, 1975)

There are three theories of intelligence which are Spearman’s G Factor, Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences and Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory.

Spearman’s G Factor

Charles Spearman saw intelligence as two different abilities.

G Factor : The ability to solve problems and to reason.

S Factor : The ability to perform specific task abilities such as music, business and art.

Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence

According to Howard Gardner, he believes and listed nine types of intelligence:

1. Verbal Intelligence

2. Musical Intelligence

3. Logical Intelligence

4. Visual Intelligence

5. Movement Intelligence

6. Interpersonal Intelligence

7. Intrapersonal Intelligence

8. Naturalist Intelligence

9. Existentialist Intelligence

Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory

This theory includes:

ü Analytical

n Ability to break problems into component parts or analysis of problems.

ü Creative

n Ability to deal with new and different concepts and ways to solve problem

ü Practical Intelligence

n ‘street smarts’ or the ability to use information to get along life.

Learning through songs and games

Forget,forget little star'

Oh my memory where you are?

Encoding failure makes you high,

Decaying memory says goodbye,

Forget, forget little star,

Interference cause you are,

pro is where the old meets new,

there is also retro too,

Forget, forget all the night,

All my memory say goodbye.

This week our classes are out of the ordinary which switches the orthodox class system to where we are learning by playing games and creating songs. For our group we had to make a song about forgetting using the song 'twinkle, twinkle little star' as could be seen above. These classes are surely interesting and quite helpful as it helps us to remember what we have learned in a fun way. Although at first it seems like it is just all fun and games but it is totally a great way to learn.

Crash course in learning

Learning

Learning is essential in our everyday life. Everything that we encounter in our daily life is learning as long as it cause you to change. To put in useful definition, learning is any relatively permanent change in behavior brought about by experience or practice.
Dr. Ivan Pavlov discovered Classical Conditioning which is a kind of learning that involve reflex (involuntary response) and stimulus (anything that trigger the response). He first discovered it by experimenting it with the salivating dogs.

Based on the diagram above, there are several key elements that must be present and experienced in a particular way for conditioning to take place.
Unconditioned Stimulus (UCS): the naturally occuring stimulus that leads to involuntary response. In the case of Pavlov's dogs, the food is the UCS.
Unconditioned Response (UCR): involuntary response to the UCS. In Pavlov's experiment, the salivation to the food is the UCR.
Conditioned Stimulus (CS): If neutral stimuli (NS) is paired with the UCS often enough, it will turn into CS. After being paired with the food so many time, the bell came to produce a salivation response,
Conditioned Response (CR): The response that is given to the CS is not usually quite as strong as the original UCR, but it is essentially the same response. However, because it comes as a learned response to the CS, it is called the CR.

Extinction happen when the absent of UCS after such a lost time, and the CS start to be dysfunction and CR will not happen.

Crash Course on Memory

A cool and helpful video by crash coarse to understand better about memory.

Memory

Have you ever wondered how you manage to remember information for a test? The ability to create new memories, store them for periods of time, and recall them when they are needed allows us to learn and interact with the world around us. Consider for a moment how many times a day you rely on your memory to help you function, from remembering how to use your computer to recollecting your password to log-in to your online bank account. 

The study of human memory has been a subject of science and philosophy for thousands of years and has become one of the major topics of interest within cognitive psychology. But what exactly is memory? How are memories formed? The following overview offers a brief look at what memory is, how it works, and how it is organized.

What is Memory?

Memory refers to the processes that are used to acquire, store, retain, and later retrieve information. There are three major processes involved in memory: encoding, storage, and retrieval.

In order to form new memories, information must be changed into a usable form, which occurs through the process known asencoding. Once information has been successfully encoded, it must be stored in memory for later use. Much of this stored memory lies outside of our awareness most of the time, except when we actually need to use it. The retrieval process allows us to bring stored memories into conscious awareness.

The Science of Psychology

Some may ask 'what is psychology?' 

The answer is simple. It is a scientific study of behavior and mental processes.

But why must be something scientific? Will it work without science? Or it is there just to make it sound fancier and more intelligent?

Everything has i own purposes and adding science to study behavior and mental processes are also important. But why? We need science in this to eliminate bias and to reduce error in measurement. Without science, to people may get different results on the same experiment in the same conditions due to the bias or error they made. Therefor, science is really important in psychology.

But how do we use science to study someone's behavior and mental process?

Is there anything that we should try to look for while using scientific methods?

Surely there are and they are known as psychology's goals which consists of 4 things which are:

1. Description
2. Explanation
3. Prediction
4. Control

To understand these 4 things better I will give a example of a behavior of a person which in this case is someone who is scared of dogs.

Firstly we will need to know what is happening,which is just observing that the subject's behavior and nothing everything about it. So through our observation we would see that the subject is afraid of dogs.

Secondly, we should explain why is it happening. In simpler word we should ask the question in this case 'why is the subject afraid of dogs?' From the question, we have to come out with a tentative explanation on the behavior that would explain the behavior then form a theory. So in the second goal, we should be able to explain why the subject is afraid of dogs and for this subject we just accept the subject is afraid of dogs because he was attacked by dogs when he was younger.

Next, we have to make predictions on when the behavior would happen again in the future. The prediction should be made by previous results. through our observation we had known that the subject will be afraid of dogs when he encounters dogs that are in defensive mode especially the dog from the same breed as the dog that attacked him.

Last but not least, is how we control that behavior. In this case we want to make the subject not afraid of the dog. So we could maybe let the subject to interact with a tame dog so that he would not be afraid at the same time make him more comfortable around dog. Thus making us to be able to control his behavior of being afraid of dogs.