PSY 1010 Module 2 Memory and Learning Written Assignment Example

Why My Heart Jumps at a Ringtone and How I Finally Learned to Study: Conditioning, Observation and Memory in Daily Life

Student Name

Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, Thomas Edison State University

PSY-1010: Introduction to Psychology

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

Why My Heart Jumps at a Ringtone and How I Finally Learned to Study: Conditioning, Observation and Memory in Daily Life

This assignment applies the learning and memory chapters of the textbook (Feldman, 2021) to my own experience as a 911 dispatcher and an adult student returning to college. Each answer starts with something that happened to me and explains it with the concepts from the module.

Question 1: Classical Conditioning in Everyday Life

A few months after I started dispatching, I noticed that my heart raced whenever a phone near me played a particular two-tone ring, even at the grocery store on my day off. Classical conditioning explains this. Before training, the ring was a neutral stimulus; it meant nothing to me. At work, that same tone signaled incoming emergency calls, and frightening calls produced a stress response without any learning. In Pavlov's terms, the frightening call was the unconditioned stimulus and the racing heart was the unconditioned response. After many pairings, the ring alone became a conditioned stimulus that produced a conditioned response, the racing heart.

Two related ideas fit as well. Stimulus generalization explains why similar tones, such as a coworker's text alert, now start the same reaction. Extinction would occur if I heard the tone many times without frightening calls following; on vacation the reaction weakens, but after a week back at work it returns quickly, an example of how a conditioned response can reappear after a break, which Feldman describes as spontaneous recovery.

Question 2: Operant Conditioning and Observational Learning

Operant conditioning is learning in which behavior is strengthened or weakened by its consequences (Feldman, 2021). I used it to rebuild my study habits. At first I studied whenever I had free time, which usually meant never. I set a rule that after forty-five minutes of reading, I could watch one episode of a show. Watching was positive reinforcement because something pleasant was added after the behavior, and my study sessions became more frequent. I also used a form of negative reinforcement: finishing my reading early removed the nagging worry I felt all evening, which made finishing early more likely.

Because a full chapter seemed overwhelming, I used shaping, reinforcing closer and closer approximations to the goal. In the first week I rewarded myself for fifteen minutes of reading, then thirty, then a full section with notes. My phone, on the other hand, works against me through a variable-ratio schedule: I never know which check will bring an interesting message, and behavior reinforced on that schedule is very hard to extinguish. Keeping the phone in another room removed the opportunity.

Not all of my learning came from consequences. During my first month I sat beside a senior dispatcher and watched how she controlled panicked callers with short, firm questions. Bandura's work on observational learning, summarized in the textbook, explains this: we learn by watching a model, paying attention, remembering what we saw, being able to reproduce it and being motivated to do so. I copied her phrasing almost word for word before I had any reinforcement of my own.

Question 3: How Memory Works on a Call and at a Desk

The textbook describes memory as passing through three systems: sensory memory, which holds information very briefly; short-term memory, which holds a small amount for about fifteen to twenty-five seconds unless it is rehearsed; and long-term memory, which stores information relatively permanently. Short-term memory's limited capacity is often described, following Miller (1956), as about seven items, plus or minus two.

On a call, a caller's address enters sensory memory as sound and must be moved into short-term memory by attention. I hold it there by repeating it back to the caller, which is rehearsal, while I type it. Chunking helps: a callback number is easier to hold as three groups than as ten separate digits. Working memory, the part of short-term memory that manipulates information, is under heavy load when I am listening, typing and thinking at the same time, which is why our protocol requires typing the address before anything else.

Long-term memory explains why I can recite our street grid without effort. It also explains one kind of forgetting. When the township renamed several streets, I kept typing the old names; that is proactive interference, in which older learning disrupts recall of newer information.

Applying Memory Research to Studying

These ideas changed how I prepared for the midterm. Instead of rereading chapters the night before, I spread my study over two weeks and tested myself with the quizzes and flash cards. Research supports both habits. Cepeda et al. (2006) combined hundreds of comparisons and found that spacing study sessions apart improved later recall compared with massed study. Roediger and Karpicke (2006) showed that practicing recall of a passage produced better retention after a week than spending the same time rereading it. Because the course lets me take each quiz as many times as I like, the quizzes became retrieval practice rather than only a grade.

Conclusion

Classical conditioning explains a reaction I did not choose, operant conditioning and observational learning explain habits I did choose, and the stages of memory explain both how I handle information on a call and how I can study more effectively. Seeing these principles in my own life has made them easier to remember, which is itself a lesson about memory: meaningful information is encoded more deeply.

References

Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354-380. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354

Feldman, R. S. (2021). Essentials of understanding psychology (14th ed.). McGraw Hill.

Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81-97. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043158

Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249-255. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01693.x