It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
Little Albert Experiment Summary
Watson and Raynor presented Little Albert with a white rat and he showed no fear.
Watson then presented the rat with a loud bang that startled Little Albert and made him cry.
After the continuous association of the white rat and loud noise, Little Albert was classically conditioned to experience fear at the sight of the rat.
Albert's fear generalized to other stimuli that were similar to the rat, including a fur coat, some cotton wool, and a Father Christmas mask.
now in the future when you see the word corona, it invokes tension, stress, apprehension,
originally posted by: GUGLiL
....now in the future when you see the word corona, it invokes tension, stress, apprehension,
Abstract
Our daily behavior is dynamically influenced by conscious and unconscious processes. Although the neural bases of conscious experience have been extensively investigated over the past several decades, how unconscious information impacts neural circuitry and behavior remains unknown. Here, we recorded populations of neurons in macaque primary visual cortex (V1) to find that perceptually unidentifiable stimuli repeatedly presented in the absence of awareness are encoded by neural populations in a way that facilitates their future processing in the context of a behavioral task. Such exposure increases stimulus sensitivity and information encoded in cell populations, even though animals are unaware of stimulus identity. This phenomenon is consistent with a Hebbian mechanism underlying an increase in functional connectivity specifically for the neurons activated by subthreshold stimuli. This form of unsupervised adaptation may constitute a vestigial pre-attention system using the mere frequency of stimulus occurrence to change stimulus representations even when sensory inputs are perceptually invisible.
Some experts suggest that subliminal messaging must be “goal-relevant” to a person. Showing a subliminal message saying “Drink Coca-Cola” won’t make you thirsty. But if you’re already thirsty and you see the same subliminal message, and you’re already thirsty, you’re more likely to buy the suggested brand. This influence is probably why subliminal messaging in advertising is banned in many countries.
originally posted by: geezlouise
a reply to: GUGLiL
Yeah, I learned about this in Psych101. Poor Albert.
Everybody is vulnerable to these types of conditionings, and the younger one is the more vulnerable. Our brains are not very different from one another, our brains go through the same developmental stages, etc.
This is something that happens naturally, our environments condition us naturally. But we can clearly manipulate the environment enough to create false triggers and create the opportunity for the subject to create further false associations and etc as seen with Albert.
I guess one way to combat it would be to control your environment to the best of your ability so that your environment gives you things which condition you to become your best and healthiest self- and we should be doing that for each other as well (specially children), helping one another build environments in which everybody thrives. Even though other people are largely part of our environment and other people can't be forced to behave exactly as we'd like them to, we can still control who comes into our immediate environments via boundary setting and etc, and we can cut contact with toxic individuals and etc. It's akin to what you mentioned about not watching certain movies so as not to be subliminally conditioned (it's why I don't watch the news I'm pretty sure, but I still watch movies).
I also learned that the brain automatically accepts everything seen in film on television as reality. If I recall correctly... one of the first times an audience watched a film of a train coming towards them, members of the audience moved out of it's way.