Thursday, March 18, 2010
Hypothesis
The crossing of the hands and feet will improve the student’s ability and performance on the Stroop Color and Word Test because tactile kinesthetic may provide an internal link for the left brain and right brain function.
Backround
The brain is the source of all our behavior, thoughts, feelings, and experiences. An organ that is very complex. It allows us to think, move, feel, see, hear, taste, and smell. The brain produces electrical signals, which, together with chemical reactions, let the body communicate. Nerves send these signals through the body. The different areas of the brain are used for different activities, such as, memory, language, problem-solving, and so on.
The brain has three main parts: the cerebrum, the cerebellum, and the brain stem (medulla). The cerebrum or cortex is the largest part of the human brain, associated with higher brain function such as thought and action. The cerebral cortex is divided into four sections, called "lobes": the frontal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, and temporal lobe. The frontal lobe is associated with reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement, emotions, and problem solving. The parietal lobe is associated with movement, orientation, recognition, and perception of stimuli. The occipital lobe is associated with visual processing. The temporal lobe is associated with perception and recognition of auditory stimuli, memory, and speech. The cerebral cortex is highly wrinkled. Essentially this makes the brain more efficient, because it can increase the surface area of the brain and the amount of neurons within it.
The cerebellum, or "little brain", is similar to the cerebrum in that it has two hemispheres and has a highly folded surface or cortex. This structure is associated with regulation and coordination of movement, posture, and balance.
The limbic system, often referred to as the "emotional brain", is found buried within the cerebrum. This system contains the thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdale, and hippocampus.
Underneath the limbic system is the brain stem. This structure is responsible for basic vital life functions such as breathing, heartbeat, and blood pressure. Most of the cranial nerves come from the brainstem. The brainstem is the pathway for all fiber tracts passing up and down from peripheral nerves and spinal cord to the highest parts of the brain.
The average human brain weighs about 3 pounds, and at birth, the human brain weighs less than a pound, but as a child grows, the number of cell remains relatively stable, but the cells grow in size and the number of connections increases. The human brain reaches its full size at about 6 years of age.
Many people develop a left or right brain dominancy. People who develop left brain dominance tend to have certain characteristics and certain areas of interests in common. The left side of the brain is often considered or thought of as the logical or thinking side. Also, people of the left brain dominance tend to choose similar occupations. People who are left brained usually like or prefer things like Classical music, reading, they are good at math, and usually like instructions to be done verbally.
As well as people having left brain dominancy, people also have right brain dominancy. They are thought of as the dreamers, the artists, and the musicians of the world. Many think of these people as if they are “dumber” mainly because they aren’t as good with numbers and remembering facts but this isn’t necessarily true. This just means they have different strengths. They also have different preferences such as, liking rock music, visual examples, they are good at sports, or even enjoy working in groups rather than working alone.
Say you wanted to determine whether you are right brained or left brained. One way would be to take a spare sheet of paper and write your name. The first time you write your name use your right the use your left hand. You were probably more comfortable using your dominant hand. This is interesting because there’s no real difference in the strength or dexterity of the hands themselves. The agility of your dominant hand is an apparent expression of superior motor control on the one side of the brain. If you are right handed, there is literally more area on the left side of your brain devoted to controlling your right hand. If you are left handed the reverse applies.
About 90 percent of all humans are right-handed; 10 percent are left-handed. Most people (about 75 percent) are strongly right- or left-handed. The rest showed some inconsistency in hand preference.
Sidedness is often measured by assessing hand, foot, eye, and ear preference. We also generally prefer breathing thru one nostril over the other and even have a preference for which direction we lean our head when kissing. Nevertheless, handedness remains the single most important behavioral indicator of sidedness.
About 97 percent of right-handers process speech in the left hemisphere and are left brain dominant. A good 68 percent of left-handers produce speech from the left hemisphere, just as right-handed people do. About 19 percent of all lefties and 3 percent of righties use their right brain for language. Some left-handers (approx. 12 percent) use both sides of the brain for language processing. All told, 94 percent of the population uses the left brain for language.
Now a day, there are video games made to help you train your brain to be more ambidextrous. Stations such as DS and Wii have designed games to help you play fun and mathematical exercises. Games like Brain age and right brain left brain are just a few of many games specialized to expand the way we think. This helps people with making their brains work evenly. Meaning, instead of always using your dominant side you can learn to use both sides of your brain with ease.
Many people disagree with the importance of knowing whether or not you are right-brained or left-brained, but being right-brained or left-brained has a lot to due with the way you act, think, and even speak. The brain dominance shows us just a few reasons why we are right handed or left handed.
Our brain has the power to move our bodies anyway possible. Without the brain we would not be able to function. The human brain is one of the most complicated organs, if not the most complicated. This organ makes us human.
Our brains mostly function subconsciously, meaning you don’t have to pay attention in order to breathe, walk, or process visual input. At the same time the highest brain functions allow us to attend to a subset of the sensory information coming in, our internal thought, and even many of our automatic functions. You can voluntary control your breathing if you attend to it, otherwise your ingenious brainstem will happily breathe on its own without your conscious control.
The Stroop Color and Word Test was developed from the observations by early experimental psychologists that the naming of color hues is always slower than the reading of color names in literate adults. The earliest published report of this phenomenon was offered by Cattell in 1886.
Cattell found that words could be read and identified in 1/4 of a second, while it took twice as long to recognize and identify a simple color hue. In order to further study the relationship between color naming and word reading, Stroop devised the test which has come to be called the Stroop Color and Word Test. The earliest version of the Stroop consisted of three pages. The first page consisted of the words red, green, brown, blue, and purple printed on a page consisting of ten rows and ten columns. Each word was printed in colored ink, but never in the color hue represented by the word. For example, the word ‘red’ could be printed in blue ink, but never in red ink. Another page of the test would consist of colored ink printed as small rectangles, which were later replaced by swastikas. The final page consisted of names of colors, red, green, blue, brown, and purple.
When the subject was asked to read the words, it was found that this could be done as fast as when the words were printed in black ink. However, when the subject was asked to name the color of the ink rather than read the word, the time to complete the page was almost fifty percent below the time to name colored ink printed as rectangles. This large decrease in color naming speed was called “the color word interference effect.”
The interest in the Stroop interference effect was so great that numerous attempts have been made to develop other tests measuring the same dimension. For example, Shor presented a series of arrows pointing up, down, left, and right that also had words printed above the arrow in an opposing direction. This study showed a smaller percentage increase of recognition time than the Stroop Test, being only a ten to twenty percent increase.
In modern times, a majority of the things that are read are printed in black ink. The Stroop Test is printed in various colors, causing confusion to the reader. In most cases, the reader completed the Stroop with both responses sequentially (for example, reading the word followed by naming the color) or by suppressing the automatic word reading response through volitional control.
Stroop results can be used in the diagnosis of brain dysfunction and in the evaluation of stress, personality, cognition, ADHD, and psychopathology. Because it is brief, it requires very little education, and it is not culturally biased, this unique test is an ideal way to screen for neuropsychological deficits.
Actually, this test is checking your brains ability to separate the left brain functions and right brain functions. The problem is that the left side of your brain is trying to tell you to read the word, while at the same time, the right side of your brain is trying to tell you to identify the color.
The process of translating letters into words becomes so automatic that we cannot stop that part of our language center from doing it. It is thought, in fact, that most people do not even have the pathways in the brain that would enable us to inhibit that part of language function – it is literally impossible.
The left-brain/right-brain conflict reflects the popularity of this concept. It is a highly overused concept, and is simply wrong in this case. Language is indeed typically programmed in the left temporal lobe (although about 5% of people are dominant for language on the right side and this is more common in left-handers). But color is not a right-brain process. Both hemispheres (the occipital lobes specifically) are able to see and process color information.
How people learn and know, (“cognize” means know) is a question much older than organized psychology. Philosophers and biologists have wondered and investigated how people perceive, know, and learn ever since the time of the ancient Greeks. Their ideas shaped and continue to shape how psychologists study learning and the theories they have constructed to explain learning and cognition.
Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology that studies mental processes including how people think, perceive, remember and learn. As part of the larger field of cognitive science, this branch of psychology is related to other disciplines including neuroscience, philosophy, and linguistics.
The core focus of cognitive psychology is on how people acquire, process and store information. There are numerous practical applications for cognitive research, such as ways to improve memory, how to increase decision-making accuracy, and how to structure educational curricula to enhance learning.
Until the 1950s, behaviorism was the dominant school of thought in psychology. Between 1950 and 1970, the tide began to shift against behavioral psychology to focus on topics such as attention, memory, and problem solving. This is often referred to as the cognitive revolution, this period generated considerable research including processing models, cognitive research methods and the first use of the term "cognitive psychology."
Cognitive psychology differs from behaviorism, which focuses only on observable behaviors; cognitive psychology is concerned with internal mental states. Unlike psychoanalysis, which relies a vast deal on subjective perceptions, cognitive psychology uses scientific research methods to study mental processes.
The brain has three main parts: the cerebrum, the cerebellum, and the brain stem (medulla). The cerebrum or cortex is the largest part of the human brain, associated with higher brain function such as thought and action. The cerebral cortex is divided into four sections, called "lobes": the frontal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, and temporal lobe. The frontal lobe is associated with reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement, emotions, and problem solving. The parietal lobe is associated with movement, orientation, recognition, and perception of stimuli. The occipital lobe is associated with visual processing. The temporal lobe is associated with perception and recognition of auditory stimuli, memory, and speech. The cerebral cortex is highly wrinkled. Essentially this makes the brain more efficient, because it can increase the surface area of the brain and the amount of neurons within it.
The cerebellum, or "little brain", is similar to the cerebrum in that it has two hemispheres and has a highly folded surface or cortex. This structure is associated with regulation and coordination of movement, posture, and balance.
The limbic system, often referred to as the "emotional brain", is found buried within the cerebrum. This system contains the thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdale, and hippocampus.
Underneath the limbic system is the brain stem. This structure is responsible for basic vital life functions such as breathing, heartbeat, and blood pressure. Most of the cranial nerves come from the brainstem. The brainstem is the pathway for all fiber tracts passing up and down from peripheral nerves and spinal cord to the highest parts of the brain.
The average human brain weighs about 3 pounds, and at birth, the human brain weighs less than a pound, but as a child grows, the number of cell remains relatively stable, but the cells grow in size and the number of connections increases. The human brain reaches its full size at about 6 years of age.
Many people develop a left or right brain dominancy. People who develop left brain dominance tend to have certain characteristics and certain areas of interests in common. The left side of the brain is often considered or thought of as the logical or thinking side. Also, people of the left brain dominance tend to choose similar occupations. People who are left brained usually like or prefer things like Classical music, reading, they are good at math, and usually like instructions to be done verbally.
As well as people having left brain dominancy, people also have right brain dominancy. They are thought of as the dreamers, the artists, and the musicians of the world. Many think of these people as if they are “dumber” mainly because they aren’t as good with numbers and remembering facts but this isn’t necessarily true. This just means they have different strengths. They also have different preferences such as, liking rock music, visual examples, they are good at sports, or even enjoy working in groups rather than working alone.
Say you wanted to determine whether you are right brained or left brained. One way would be to take a spare sheet of paper and write your name. The first time you write your name use your right the use your left hand. You were probably more comfortable using your dominant hand. This is interesting because there’s no real difference in the strength or dexterity of the hands themselves. The agility of your dominant hand is an apparent expression of superior motor control on the one side of the brain. If you are right handed, there is literally more area on the left side of your brain devoted to controlling your right hand. If you are left handed the reverse applies.
About 90 percent of all humans are right-handed; 10 percent are left-handed. Most people (about 75 percent) are strongly right- or left-handed. The rest showed some inconsistency in hand preference.
Sidedness is often measured by assessing hand, foot, eye, and ear preference. We also generally prefer breathing thru one nostril over the other and even have a preference for which direction we lean our head when kissing. Nevertheless, handedness remains the single most important behavioral indicator of sidedness.
About 97 percent of right-handers process speech in the left hemisphere and are left brain dominant. A good 68 percent of left-handers produce speech from the left hemisphere, just as right-handed people do. About 19 percent of all lefties and 3 percent of righties use their right brain for language. Some left-handers (approx. 12 percent) use both sides of the brain for language processing. All told, 94 percent of the population uses the left brain for language.
Now a day, there are video games made to help you train your brain to be more ambidextrous. Stations such as DS and Wii have designed games to help you play fun and mathematical exercises. Games like Brain age and right brain left brain are just a few of many games specialized to expand the way we think. This helps people with making their brains work evenly. Meaning, instead of always using your dominant side you can learn to use both sides of your brain with ease.
Many people disagree with the importance of knowing whether or not you are right-brained or left-brained, but being right-brained or left-brained has a lot to due with the way you act, think, and even speak. The brain dominance shows us just a few reasons why we are right handed or left handed.
Our brain has the power to move our bodies anyway possible. Without the brain we would not be able to function. The human brain is one of the most complicated organs, if not the most complicated. This organ makes us human.
Our brains mostly function subconsciously, meaning you don’t have to pay attention in order to breathe, walk, or process visual input. At the same time the highest brain functions allow us to attend to a subset of the sensory information coming in, our internal thought, and even many of our automatic functions. You can voluntary control your breathing if you attend to it, otherwise your ingenious brainstem will happily breathe on its own without your conscious control.
The Stroop Color and Word Test was developed from the observations by early experimental psychologists that the naming of color hues is always slower than the reading of color names in literate adults. The earliest published report of this phenomenon was offered by Cattell in 1886.
Cattell found that words could be read and identified in 1/4 of a second, while it took twice as long to recognize and identify a simple color hue. In order to further study the relationship between color naming and word reading, Stroop devised the test which has come to be called the Stroop Color and Word Test. The earliest version of the Stroop consisted of three pages. The first page consisted of the words red, green, brown, blue, and purple printed on a page consisting of ten rows and ten columns. Each word was printed in colored ink, but never in the color hue represented by the word. For example, the word ‘red’ could be printed in blue ink, but never in red ink. Another page of the test would consist of colored ink printed as small rectangles, which were later replaced by swastikas. The final page consisted of names of colors, red, green, blue, brown, and purple.
When the subject was asked to read the words, it was found that this could be done as fast as when the words were printed in black ink. However, when the subject was asked to name the color of the ink rather than read the word, the time to complete the page was almost fifty percent below the time to name colored ink printed as rectangles. This large decrease in color naming speed was called “the color word interference effect.”
The interest in the Stroop interference effect was so great that numerous attempts have been made to develop other tests measuring the same dimension. For example, Shor presented a series of arrows pointing up, down, left, and right that also had words printed above the arrow in an opposing direction. This study showed a smaller percentage increase of recognition time than the Stroop Test, being only a ten to twenty percent increase.
In modern times, a majority of the things that are read are printed in black ink. The Stroop Test is printed in various colors, causing confusion to the reader. In most cases, the reader completed the Stroop with both responses sequentially (for example, reading the word followed by naming the color) or by suppressing the automatic word reading response through volitional control.
Stroop results can be used in the diagnosis of brain dysfunction and in the evaluation of stress, personality, cognition, ADHD, and psychopathology. Because it is brief, it requires very little education, and it is not culturally biased, this unique test is an ideal way to screen for neuropsychological deficits.
Actually, this test is checking your brains ability to separate the left brain functions and right brain functions. The problem is that the left side of your brain is trying to tell you to read the word, while at the same time, the right side of your brain is trying to tell you to identify the color.
The process of translating letters into words becomes so automatic that we cannot stop that part of our language center from doing it. It is thought, in fact, that most people do not even have the pathways in the brain that would enable us to inhibit that part of language function – it is literally impossible.
The left-brain/right-brain conflict reflects the popularity of this concept. It is a highly overused concept, and is simply wrong in this case. Language is indeed typically programmed in the left temporal lobe (although about 5% of people are dominant for language on the right side and this is more common in left-handers). But color is not a right-brain process. Both hemispheres (the occipital lobes specifically) are able to see and process color information.
How people learn and know, (“cognize” means know) is a question much older than organized psychology. Philosophers and biologists have wondered and investigated how people perceive, know, and learn ever since the time of the ancient Greeks. Their ideas shaped and continue to shape how psychologists study learning and the theories they have constructed to explain learning and cognition.
Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology that studies mental processes including how people think, perceive, remember and learn. As part of the larger field of cognitive science, this branch of psychology is related to other disciplines including neuroscience, philosophy, and linguistics.
The core focus of cognitive psychology is on how people acquire, process and store information. There are numerous practical applications for cognitive research, such as ways to improve memory, how to increase decision-making accuracy, and how to structure educational curricula to enhance learning.
Until the 1950s, behaviorism was the dominant school of thought in psychology. Between 1950 and 1970, the tide began to shift against behavioral psychology to focus on topics such as attention, memory, and problem solving. This is often referred to as the cognitive revolution, this period generated considerable research including processing models, cognitive research methods and the first use of the term "cognitive psychology."
Cognitive psychology differs from behaviorism, which focuses only on observable behaviors; cognitive psychology is concerned with internal mental states. Unlike psychoanalysis, which relies a vast deal on subjective perceptions, cognitive psychology uses scientific research methods to study mental processes.
Significants
The testing of this project is significant because the naming of color hues is always slower than the reading of color names in literate adults as a key to the mental thought processes. The difference between crossing hands and feet could be the internal link for the left brain and right brain function.
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