PerformanceLecture-NR

The lecture on performance was interesting to me. Some of what I learned was surprising. It was interesting to see how for certain things arousal increases behavioral efficiency but for others it actually decreases behavioral efficiency. What was interesting about that to me was that the activities that were decreased and ones that were increased where opposite in my mind. In the slides it told us that you want low arousal to perform the best in difficult tasks and high arousal to perform the best in easy tasks. I would think that for a harder task you want high arousal to be able to perform your best and for easier tasks you need lower arousal, this is because I thought that for something easy you don't need to put in that much energy or work so a low arousal would be good and for a hard task I would want a lot of energy so I thought I'd need high arousal. That is not true and actually opposite so I thought that was interesting because I learned I was wrong.

I also thought the part about tonic immobility in sharks was really cool. I actually learned about it in a marine biology class I had taken, so it was cool to see it being used in a psychology class as well. In the sharks situation it works good for them because they are able to escape a situation but, for humans if we shut down in a scary situation it would be a danger to us. It is intersting to see how the outcomes would be completely different for humans and certain animals.