Interference and facilitation are two important aspects of automatic processes. Interference refers to the range to which one process encumbers performance of another, whereas facilitation indicates the extent to which one process assists performance of another.
Through practice and maturation, reading progresses from a controlled process to one that is automatic, lessening the demands on attentional resources. Stroop reported one of the first studies, which provided support for this, in 1935. He combined the word object/property dimensions in the same stimulus to create one of the most researched phenomena in cognitive psychology: The Stroop effect (MacLeod, 1991). He found that it was faster to read words than it was to name the corresponding object or their properties, including their color.
Due to its key in understanding attention, the study that lead to many other related investigations, originated by examining interference in reading automaticity. Stroop furthered his research by creating tasks involving color naming and reading. He first compared the time it took to read color names printed in incongruent ink colors to a base line reading of color words. For the second part of his study, Stroop compared the time it took to name the ink color when congruent with the color word (e.g., blue printed in blue ink) to the time it took to name the ink color.
By comparing the response times in the interference conditions to the control conditions he found that it took people longer to respond to the color of the ink when printed in a color incongruent to the color word (Stroop, 1995). The words interfere with naming the color; yet, the color does not interfere with reading the word.
The nature of the Stroop effect results as a consequence of automaticity. People have difficulty ignoring the meaning of a word because, through practice, reading has become an automatic process. The two main explanations accounting for the Stroop effect in the past have been cognitive attentional processes involved in learning, controlled and automatic. As previously mentioned, when a process is automatic (for example reading), it is not only faster; it also does not rely on other cognitive resources. Controlled processes, for example color naming, are slow and demand more attentional resources. The theory is that an automatic process cannot successfully suppressed without causing interference of a controlled process. The second explanation, relative speed of processing, argues that the two processes involved in color naming and word reading are accomplished in parallel, but that word reading is carried out faster, assuming that the faster process will then interfere with the slower ones such as color naming (Dunbar and McLeod, 1984 as cited in Mel, 1997)
...and Roberson (2008) emphasized how their experiment continued to support the Brown and Lenneberg question of their 1954 article regarding the relationship between color labeling and cognition.
As technology stem cell research intensifies, so does the controversy about whether such scientific progress is moral. In the past millennium to today the present stem cell research has become a controversial topic across the world. Stem cells are unspecialized cells that have unique regenerative abilities, allowing them to divide into specialized cell types. Understanding why these processes occur is essential to curing disease. Critics of stem cell research argue that the extraction of embryonic stem cells involves destroying an early embryo, equating the act of killing a human. Although stem cell research is a highly controversial topic, it is compulsory to continue stem cell research within ethical boundaries for the benefit of mankind.
If a person is asked to identify the color of a rectangle, and is subsequently asked to read a randomly generated color name, it is well-known that a matching color name will be called out faster than a mismatching color name.
The Salem Witch Trials was mostly just about the fear, and sicknesses, or blaming of other people in Salem. They sometimes blamed other people for bewitching them to save themselves from getting killed, and to imagine it was just two little girls that started this whole conflict. The conflict made people scared, and afraid of what could happen in their near future.
Harvard University political philosopher and professor Michael J. Sandel highlights the ethical arguments concerning embryonic stem cell research in his article “Embryo Ethics – The Moral Logic of Stem-Cell Research”. He mainly addresses the argument that some individuals hold that “despite its worthy ends, stem cell research is wrong because it involves the destruction of human embryos.” Although Sandel sta...
Stem cell research is becoming an issue that is one of the most profound of our time. The issue of research involving stem cells derived from human embryos is increasingly the subject of dinner table discussions and a national debate. The issue is confronted every day in laboratories as scientists ponder the ethical consequences of their work. It is agonized over by parents and many couples as they try to have children, or save children already born. The issue is debated within the church, with people of different faiths, even many of the same faith coming to different conclusions. Many people are finding that the more they know about stem cell research, the less certain they are about the right ethical and moral conclusions.
Tugend goes over the impact of interruptions on work. She states that it takes a long time to get refocused after an interruption. Tugend notes that work gets done quicker when a person endures interruptions, but the work quality suffers greatly because of the increase in stress. She states that while other people are interruptions, the biggest interruption is ourselves (Tugend 717). Along with that, human attention spans are decreasing making interruption much more likely to happen. The time people spend on an activity before switching is not enough to really get into it (Tugend 717).
Stuart, M., Masterson, J. & Dixon, M. (2000). Spongelike acquisition of sight vocabulary in beginning readers?. Journal of Research in Reading. 23 (1), p12-27.
...ly asked them to name the color of the ink in which the words appeared; and the rate of their responses were recorded.
Life of Pi begins with an author’s note in which Martel describes being told by the character Mamaji that Pi has “‘a story that will make you believe in God’” (ix). This essentially sets up the basis for the entire theme of the novel. The main character, Pi, claims to practice three religions simultaneously: Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam (Martel 81). Much of Pi’s explanation of his own childhood consists of his own religious journeys. He begins with an explanation of how his aunt introduced him to Hinduism upon ...
Life of Pi, written by Yann Martel, is a novel that tells the story of an Indian boy named Piscine (Pi) Patel. He is the protagonist who tells the story through his point of view. He and his family travel on a ship called the Tsimtsum to travel from India to Canada. This ship also contains many animals since Pi’s family owns a zoo. Unfortunately, a ship wreck occurs, killing Pi’s family and he is left as the only survivor. He is stranded on a lifeboat with a hyena, orangutan, zebra and a Royal Bengal Tiger for around 227 days. Throughout the book, Pi struggles to survive this long journey and faces many life or death situations. Yann Martel expresses the growth of characters and the importance of the themes and settings in the novel, Life of Pi.
The second stage is autonomy verses shame and doubt. This occurs from about 18 months of age to 3 years old. The basic virtue of this stage is will; can they do things on their own or do they require the help of others? Erikson believed that children around this age wanted to develop a greater sense...
Erik Erikson is possibly one of the best known of Sigmund Freud’s loyal followers. His psychosocial model can be explored, evaluated, and picked apart, in terms of its concepts and assumptions. Erikson has influenced the way psychologists view the importance of identity during adolescents, enhancing, and slightly altering the ideas originally laid out by Freud. Using Freud’s broader ideas and theories, Erickson was able to develop a more continuing developmental timeline of a person’s life. (Schultz and Schultz, 2012, p.164) Agreeing on ideas such as human instinct and basic development was how Erickson was able to feed off Freud’s thoughts in light on constructing his own. Erickson's eight stages of psychosocial development uniquely exhibit asp...
The phenomenon of ‘Divided attention’ is the idea that an individual has the ability to divide their attention between two or more tasks (multi- tasking). Focused attention models such as Broadbent’s theory, Treisman’s theory and Deutsch and Deutsch model explains how all our inputs are focused on one task at a time, however it is clear from looking at everyday life that we are able to divide our attention, successfully being able to complete more than one task at the same time.
McClelland, J. L., & Rumelhart, D. E. (1981). An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: I. An account of basic findings. Psychological review, 88(5), 375.