Sunny's AP Psychology Blog

review essay #3

Question 3 (10 marks)Much of human processing is below the level of conscious awareness:Explain with reference to the following:

· Insight: a sudden and often novel realization of the solution to a problem. We are unaware of the intermediate steps to the insight and inisight often occurs when one isn’t consciously thinking of the problem.

· Use of heuristics: rule of thumb strategies that often allow us to make judgments and solve problems efficiently. For example, with availability heuristic, where we judge the likelihood of an event based on how easily instances come to mind, an unconscious process is taking place. Say a person reads articles of crimes in New York; this information sinks into the person’s memory, and so when asked what he thought of the city he would say it is a dangerous place, but unable to give reasons for this judgment. Such heuristic-based judgments take place before we consciously think out the problem.

· Dreams: A dream is an altered state of consciousness that takes place during REM. We often do not remember our dreams, and so whether dreams be our brains’ method of reviewing important information, of forgetting unneccessary information, whatever takes place is below our level of consciousness.

· Perception: Perception is the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information, enabling us to recognize meaningful objects and events. This involves converting stimulus energy into neural messages that the brain processes without our awareness. Other processes such as the calculation of distance based on minute differences between the perceptions of either ear or eye take place without our awareness. Humans are aware of only the end products of perceptual processing.

· Motivated forgetting: the unknowing revision of one’s own memories to enhance self-image. One explanation for this would be Freud’s concept of repression in which we unconsciously repress our painful memories to protect our self concept and minimize anxiety.

posted by 미카 @ 8:29 AM