Psychology

Psychology is a very interesting field of thought. In my class, I am very interested in psychology- it's making me consider minoring in the field.
Last week, we discussed something called the Stroop Effect, where one automatically recognizes things. Take this picture, for example:

Try telling yourself the color that the word says. In other words, the first word says "purple" but try to identity each word with the color ink that it is printed in. In this case, red.
Hard, isn't it?

This happens because the brain is so accustomed to reading the words that you will become confused on the task at hand eventually, and start saying the word rather than the color.

This week, we began to talk about infancy and adolescence.
There's this really cool experiment done with 1-2 year olds that tests something called depth perception, which is whether or not one has the spatial recognition that there is a difference in height of something. So like if you were on a mountaintop, you would know that the area below was indeed below you and dangerous to fall onto.
In this experiment, called the visual cliff experiment, a platform was built where there would be a raised part and a lowered part with a "drop-off" in the middle. This picture will explain it better:

As you can see, there is a layer of plexiglass over the lower side of the platform. Babies are placed on the upper platform and shown a toy or their mother on the other side of the platform. The question lies in whether or not the kid will cross it. Some infants crossed the barrier without any thought, showing their lack of depth perception. Others, on the other hand, saw the "drop off" and were afraid to go to the other side because they knew it was dangerous for them to fall that far down. These children understood depth perception.

For further clarification, check out this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyxMq11xWzM