Understanding Learning, Memory, and Personality Development

Learning and Memory

Learning: is a modification of relatively permanent behavior that occurs as a result of practice.

Learning by Observing:

  • Acquisition: The model is observed or conduct is repeated.
  • Retention: Retain the behavior.
  • Execution: The behavior is performed.
  • Reinforcement: Reinforcing and maintaining the behavior.

Memory:

  • Perception: Sensing something impressive, which may be unintentional.
  • Consolidation: Retaining information and ordering.
  • Storage: The information is saved and becomes part of memory.
  • Recovery: The ability to retrieve stored information.

Stages of Cognitive Development

Sensorimotor Intelligence: (0 – 2 years) Instrumental reflexes: there is no control by the body, only reactions.

Habits: Begin to coordinate movements and perception. Sensorimotor intelligence or practice: (1.5 to 2 years) learn to coordinate, learn to manipulate objects and control walking movements.

Pre-Operational Stage: (2 to 6 years): Learn the language: this can rebuild stocks, thought arises as dialogue with oneself.

  • Animism: Giving human characteristics to inanimate objects or animals.
  • Artificialism: Thinking that all things were created by someone, man.

Concrete Operational Stage: (7 to 11 years) – Use of reason, has the ability to do mental operations but concretely. There is Reversibility: that is, it includes the making and unmaking of objects. And Reciprocity: you can put yourself in another’s shoes.

Formal Operations Stage: (12 years and up), have an opinion, argue, generate abstractions and intellectual egocentrism (believing to be always right, the truth).

Personality Development (Freud)

Theory of Psychosexual Development:

Psychoanalysis: Trying to decode unconscious processes to solve them.

There are unconscious phenomena and pressure.

There are 2 structures of personality according to Freud:

Before 1920:

Trying to let the outside world in, lies in the conscious.

Preconsciousness: is composed of those learnings and memories we have but are dealing with.

Censorship: Not allowing the conscious to connect with the unconscious.

Unconscious: Repressed memories and feelings are there, we do not know they are there, no access to the unconscious. This wants to date certain forces, called Drives:

  • Sex: Pleasure
  • Self-preservation: Necessary for life (Hunger, etc.) to survive.

After 1920:

The outer world lies in the conscious, where the I, which consists of:

  • Perception: (Aware)
  • Preconsciousness: Memories and feelings they are dealing with.
  • Defense Mechanisms: (Unconscious, to repress these IT) this appears at 2 years.

After this comes the superego, which is unconscious and appears at 5 or 6 years, are all prohibitions, would not do anything. And then comes this: unconscious, is always already are needs that are always triggered by threatening the YO.

Other drives appear:

  • Thanatos: Instincts of destruction and death.
  • Ethos: They are self-preservation instincts and the sexual.