Time

In psychology, time can be an important aspect. There are many situations where this applies. Conditioning is one of these situations. The time between the presentation of the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus is critical for conditioning. If a person is trying to get a dog to salivate to a ring of a bell, they might ring the bell just before presenting the food. After several times of doing this, the dog might salivate to the ringing of the bell with no food presented. But if the bell is rung too long before the food is presented or after the food is presented, it will not have the same effect on conditioning. Another aspect of conditioning is spontaneous recovery. Using the same example as before, a dog might experience extinction of the stimulus if it is not presented frequently. Spontaneous recovery happens when after extinction has occurred, the dog hears the bell and starts salivating, out of no where. Time plays a part here because only after a long period of time can this happen.

The critical period is a period shortly after birth when certain evens must take place to facilitate proper development. What happens in this period of time is very important. For example, with animals, imprinting occurs. In this period, the first animal (or person) they see they take as their mother. Even in the short period of time it takes to do this, the effects last a lifetime. Fluid intelligence is one’s ability to reason quickly and abstractly when solving something trivial. This decreases as one growing into their late adulthood. Time is important here because it is all about dealing with thinking in a fast manner, and with age (and time), this speed decreases. A young is able to solve a math problem much faster than their eighty year old grandmother.

The refractory period in neural firing is when the neurons pomp the positively charged sodium atoms back outside.