This Week At CART – Ab Beltran Campos

Hi! I am a senior attending CART this year and am currently enrolled in the Psychology Lab. The class itself is a great way to get a better understanding of how the brain and mind works. This would include optical illusions, memory, or even how someone’s personality is formed.

This week in the Psychology Lab we have explored and gained a deeper understanding of memory and the different forms of it as well as how to improve it. The two simplest forms of memory are Long-Term Memory (LTM) and Short-Term Memory (STM). STM, as the name suggest, is extremely limited and does not last very long. Things like the color of someone’s shirt or their shoes are often stored there due to their irrelevancy in our day to day lives. LTM is where things that are more “important” are stored such as passwords, birthdays, phone numbers. Things like attention, sleep, and overall health play a big part in how well something is stored in our memory.

We have also started covering situational awareness and how many people lack it. Situation awareness is the awareness you have of your surroundings in any given moment. For example, how many people walked into your classroom, or where all exits are in a room. At first things like this may seem unimportant or irrelevant but it’s always important to know things like this in case of a fire or an emergency

I would highly recommend this lab to anyone interested in the mind and how it develops over the course of a person’s life. The teachers are very supportive and always have an answer for any question you might have. Overall CART is a great environment with welcoming teachers and students. It is also a great way to not just explore the field of psychology but anything else you might be interested in.