Nash Psychology

A verbal summary of Samuel and Bryant’s (1983) study. Good for auditory learners.

A verbal summary of Savage-Rumbaugh et.al.(1986) study. Good for auditory learners.

Rumbaugh and Savage-Rumbaugh (1994) report findings of Panzee (a common chimp) and Panbanisha (another Bonobo/or Pigmy Chimpanzee, like Kanzi), who were raised in the same ‘language-rich’ environment Within two years they had both ‘picked up’ language without any formal, explicit, language training, with Panbanisha proving to be much more competent.

The clip below shows Savage-Rumbaugh’s work with Bonobos, which can understand spoken language and learn tasks by watching. This is fascinating and thought provoking, illustrating the similaries between Bonobos and our ancestors. You will see Kanzi and Panbanisha playing musical instruments and ……watch to see!

Very useful for the Savage-Rumbaugh study; a few minutes of Kanzi (bonobo) using the lexigram system and demonstrating understanding of speech.

Stage 1: The Sensorimotor Stage: between 0 and 18 months. Piaget believed that babies learn through their senses and only experince the present, with no memories or thoughts.  He claimed that babies ‘reflex activity’ becomes the foundation for all cognitive functioning in the future, through the process of assimilation and accomodation.

Stage 2: The Pre-Operational Stage: between 18 months and 7 years. The major distinction between the sensorimotor stage and the preoperational stage is the degree of development and the use of internal images and symbols (e.g. words) as is marked by the establishment of object permanence.

The child uses symbolic functions, their language development accelerates and imaginative play becomes more apparent as they spend a lot of their time engaged in make-believe.

Another important difference seen in this period is that children can imitate (copy) another’s behaviour after some time has passed, implying that they have a way of symbolically remebering the original behaviour that they observed.

These actions suggest an internal cognitive mediation process between incoming stimuli and later responses.

Stage 3: The Concrete Operational Stage: between 7 and 12 years. Operations are logical rules and it is thought that children in this stage are able to use logical rules to deal with problems.

Stage 4: The Formal Operational Stage: between 12 years and above, when thoughts are governed by logical reasoning and cause and effect can be considered.

The Stroop Effect test is a cool brain teaser which exercises your brain. To play the game, you start by pronouncing the color of the following words. Don’t read the words, just pronounce the colors of the words.

Green Red Blue
Purple Blue Purple

Easy enough, right? Now, do the same for this second group of words. Again, don’t read the words, just pronounce the color of the words.

Blue Purple Red
Green Purple Green

Ahh… That time is was a little more difficult wasn’t it? It took you a little more time to go through the list of words. The reason is that the color of the second group of words does not match the actual word itself. This causes a delay in the time it takes to name the color of the words in the second group. This is called the Stroop Effect.

The Stroop Effect test exercises the portion of the brain which is considered to be responsible for higher order executive functions (frontal lobe).

Check out the YouTube video below based on the Stroop Effect test.

Click here to read Harlow’s famous experiment first published in the American Psychologist, 13, 673-685.