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Five Concepts of Psychology

 

            My family is big on having well-behaved dogs, as well as teaching them tricks. We just recently taught our lab/retriever to hold popcorn on his nose. By doing this we used operant conditioning. This is learning in which a certain action is reinforced or punished, resulting in behavioral change. So when we first started to put the popcorn on his nose, he wouldn't hold his head still and tried to eat the popcorn before we could get it near his nose. That resulted in him not getting the popcorn (treat) and him getting yelled at. Time after time we tried, and he started to realize that he wouldn't get the treat unless he held his head still to put the popcorn on his nose. Once we finally got one on his nose he got to eat it afterward, and since then he realized he would get to eat popcorn if he let us put a piece on his nose and him hold it there. This could also or more likely fall under Shaping, because it is the process of gradually refining a response by successively reinforcing closer versions of it like teaching animals tricks or learning a new skill.
             Falling under the concept of perception, most of us are reasonably good at recognizing people's faces. This is thanks to regions of the brain that specialize in perceiving facial patterns. Super-recognizers represent a small minority of people with extraordinary abilities to remember faces. At the other extreme are people with face blindness, an equally rare disorder that makes it extremely difficult for them to recognize faces at all-even those of friends and family. For me, I can recognize people's faces fairly easily, it's remembering their names that is the hard part. Super-recognizers are able to recognize another person despite significant changes in appearance, such as aging or a different hair color. One super-recognizer said she had identified another woman on the street who served her as a waitress five years earlier in a different city.


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