PSY603 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Signal Processing, Donald O. Hebb, Ant Colony
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PSY603 Consumer Behavior
LECTURE 4
Memory:
What do we know about the inner workings of the human mind? Surely everything that humans
do from designing skyscrapers to composing symphonies is not the product of simple cellular
interactions and yet it might be because everything that humans do, think, or feel is the result of
these basic units of brain structure. The neurons, the human brain contains more than 100 billion
neurons, just as a single end could never build an anthill. A single neuron cannot think, feel or
remember. The neurons power is a result of its connections to other neurons. Each neuron is
connected to as many as a thousand of its neighbors. These trillions of connections provide the
plane filled upon which the complex activity of the brain takes place. Each neuron can turn its
neighbor on or off. Depending on the signal it sends and the resulting stable patterns of neuron.
Firing represents memories, images, and thoughts. We do not understand the relationship
between neural activity and mental experience. We do not know what the precise pattern of
memory or an image or a thought looks like. We do not yet know how to read the cerebral code
of the neurons but progress is being made. We can now watch exactly how various stimuli and
memories cause the firing of hundreds of neurons. Perhaps these techniques will allow us to work
our way up from the activity of a few neurons to see the structure that emerges from the whole.
Memory Process:
• Memory is a process
• Conscious level-memories as distinct and unconnected mental events
• Biological level-neurons (nerve cells) firing chemical messages at each other and if they
connect several times it becomes a memory. Neurons that fire together, wire together
(Donald Hebb, 2001)
Memories:
• Memories are not stores
• Remembering as a process-encode information as links between active neurons that fire
together and decode neurons that wired in the past
• Memory-probability that certain patterns of brain activity will occur again in the future
• Recreate a memory each time you re-call it
• Effective coding is finding a middle ground
E.g., each time we remember something, the neurons in our brains fire in specific patterns. When
they fire in the same patterns, then the memory is the same.
All memories are not remembered the same each time, is I asked you to remember what you had
for breakfast today; you would most likely create the correct memory. However, 3 months from
now, if I asked what you had for breakfast today (the day you are reading this), you might (but
most likely will not) be able to create the same chain of memory
Memory and Consumer Behavior:
• Cognitive learning-information processing
• Focus on comprehension, memory and elaboration
• Consumers exposed to thousands of stimuli each day, consumers more apt to gain
comprehension/ understanding from marketing communication they can use
• Difficult to encode large amounts of information at a time
find more resources at oneclass.com
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Document Summary
The neurons, the human brain contains more than 100 billion neurons, just as a single end could never build an anthill. A single neuron cannot think, feel or remember. The neurons power is a result of its connections to other neurons. Each neuron is connected to as many as a thousand of its neighbors. These trillions of connections provide the plane filled upon which the complex activity of the brain takes place. Each neuron can turn its neighbor on or off. Depending on the signal it sends and the resulting stable patterns of neuron. We do not understand the relationship between neural activity and mental experience. We do not know what the precise pattern of memory or an image or a thought looks like. We do not yet know how to read the cerebral code of the neurons but progress is being made. We can now watch exactly how various stimuli and memories cause the firing of hundreds of neurons.
