Ch. 4-7 Study Guide

Williams Syndrome

- Neurological evidence for WM -Have language but impaired visio-spatial abilities -Can explain an elephant in detail but can't draw it

Deep Processing

Deep processing involves close attention, focusing on an item's meaning and relating it to something else. According to levels of processing theory, deep processing results in better memory than shallow processing.

Depth of processing

Depth of processing distinguishes between shallow processing and deep processing

physiological approach to coding

Determining how a stimulus is represented by the firing of neurons

saliency map

Determining how saliency influences the way we scan a scene typically involves analyzing characteristics such as color, orientation, and intensity at each location in the scene and then combining these values to create a saliency map of the scene.

Late Selection Theory

Deutsch & Deutsch / Deutsh-Norman

1950's Attention Research

Developed because of WWII and the issues of having pilots have to pay attention to multiple things going on around them. The advent of the tape recorder helped.

AAA Voice Activated Experiment

AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety titled Measuring Cognitive Distraction in the Automobile found voice-activated activities to be more distracting, and therefore potentially more dangerous, than either hands-on or hands-free cell phones. The study concludes that "just because a new technology does not take the eyes off the road does not make it safe to be used while the vehicle is in motion" (Strayer et al., 2013).

Structural Features

AKA The 3 types of memory in the modal model

Leaky Filter Model (Treisman)

According to Treisman's model, once the attended and unattended messages have been identified, both messages pass through the attenuator, but the attended message emerges at full strength and the unattended messages are attenuated— they are still present, but are weaker than the attended message. Because at least some of the unattended message gets through the attenuator, Treisman's model has been called a "leaky filter" model

Episodic Experience

According to Tulving, the defining property of the experience of episodic memory is that it involves mental time travel —the experience of traveling back in time to reconnect with events that happened in the past. In short, when I remember this incident, I feel as if I am reliving it. Tulving describes this experience of mental time travel/episodic memory as self-knowing or REMEMBERING

Rehearsal

An example of a control process that operates on short-term memory is rehearsal —repeating a stimulus over and over, as you might repeat a telephone number in order to hold it in your mind after looking it up in the phone book or on the Internet.

Introspection & Attention

An example of how introspection might be applied to attention would be to show a person a display consisting of different patches of color and instructing him or her to "pay attention as strongly as you can to the patch in the middle and describe how paying attention affects the clarity of the patch's color."

self-reference effect

Another example of how memory is improved by encoding. Memory is better if you are asked to relate a word to yourself. One possible explanation is that the words become linked to something the subjects know well— themselves. Generally, statements that result in richer, more detailed representations in a person's mind result in better memory.

Semantic Memory

Another type of long-term memory is semantic memory —memories of facts such as an address or a birthday or the names of different objects ("that's a bicycle").

Central Vs Peripheral Vision (Eye Mechanics)

Because of the way the retina is constructed, objects in central vision fall on a small area called the fovea , which has much better detail vision than the peripheral retina, on which the rest of the scene falls. Thus, as you scanned the scene in Figure 4.11, you were aiming your fovea at one face after another. Each time you briefly paused on one face, you were making a fixation . When you moved your eye to observe another face, you were making a

Shifting Attention By Moving Eyes

Bottom-Up and Top-Down

Charan Ranganath and Mark D'Esposito

Brain Imaging Tests show Hippocampus DOES play a role in STM. Especially for novel stimuli. asked whether the hippocampus, which is crucial for forming new long-term memories, might also play a role in holding information for short periods of time. The results indicate that activity in the hippocampus increases as subjects are holding novel faces in memory during the 7-second delay, but activity changes only slightly for the familiar faces. Based on this result, Ranganath and D'Esposito concluded that the hippocampus is involved in maintaining novel information in memory during short delays. Results such as these, plus the results of many other experiments, show that the hippocampus and other medial temporal lobe structures once thought to be involved only in long-term memory also play some role in short-term memory

Early Selection Theories

Broadbent & Treisman

Bottleneck Model

Broadbent's model has been called a bottleneck model because the filter restricts information flow much as the neck of a bottle restricts the flow of liquid, so the liquid escapes only slowly even though there is a large amount in the bottle. However, an important difference between the neck of a bottle and Broadbent's filter is that the filter doesn't just slow down the flow of information. It keeps a large portion of the information from getting through. Also, unlike the neck of a bottle, which lets through the liquid closest to the neck, Broadbent's filter lets information through based on specific physical characteristics of the information, such as the rate of speaking or the pitch of the speaker's voice.

Selective Attention

Filter out distractions Focus on one thing Ignore other things Does not move smoothly across the visual field Cant see when moving eyes You can compare two non contiguous items easily Example was read the words only in italics

Feature Search

Find the horizontal line. This is a feature search because you could find the target by looking for a single feature—"horizontal."

Attention

Focusing on specific features of the environment Usually at the exclusion of others Attention means you selected something for further processing Like a spotlight moving from location to location

Geoffrey Keppel and Benton Underwood

Found that subjects in the Peterson test did well in the early trials and got worse the more trials they did. They said that the drop-off in memory was due not to decay of the memory but to proactive interference

Treisman Feature Integration Theory

Last test... Feature Integration Theory Step 1: Preattentive Treisman's feature integration theory tackles the question of how we perceive individual features as part of the same object by proposing a two-stage process, shown in Figure 4.30. As we will see, attention becomes important in the second stage.

Deutsch & Deutsch (Deutsch-Norman)

Late Selection All Stimuli: -activate representations in long term memory -Are recognized (but quickly forgotten if unimportant) -Important stimuli selected for further processing (more likely to be remembered)

How much INFORMATION can be stored in STM?

Instead of how many items can be stored, researchers look at amount of information Visual Information: When referring to visual objects, information has been defined as visual features or details of the object that are stored in memory Flash Drive Comparison: A flash drive may hole 50 small pictures or 5 large HD pictures

Overt Attention

Intentional attention with eye movements

Interaction

Interaction refers to the fact that the different types of memory can interact and share mechanisms.

Psychological Refractory Period

Is the time where 1st task still going on that overlaps with the 2nd task. It's the "cost" of switching tasks

Memory Definitions

Memory is the process involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer present. Memory is active any time some past experience has an effect on the way you think or behave now or in the future

Visual Scanning

Roger's attempt to identify the people across the room, looking from one person's face to another, is an example of visual scanning —movements of the eyes from one location or object to another.

Overt Attention

Roger's curiosity about what was happening in the library when the book cart tipped over led him to scan the scene by moving his eyes. Shifting attention from one place to another by moving the eyes is called overt attention .

Late Selection Models

Occur later in processing. Don't occur at sensory input. Occurs at representations in long term memory. Selection at higher levels of processing Decisions about access to awareness, encoding into memory, or responses: -Occur internally -NOT based on sensory info

Hippocampus & Cortex :Consolidation

Once it became clear that the hippocampus is essential for forming new memories, researchers began determining exactly how the hippocampus responds to stimuli and how it participates in the process of systems consolidation. Most researchers accept that both the hippocampus and the cortex are involved in consolidation. There is, however, some disagreement regarding whether the hippocampus is important only at the beginning of consolidation, as depicted in Figure 7.15, or whether the hippocampus continues to be important, even for remote memories.

long-term potentiation (LTP)

One of the outcomes of structural changes at the synapse is a strengthening of synaptic transmission. This strengthening results in a phenomenon called long-term potentiation (LTP) —enhanced firing of neurons after repeated stimulation (Bliss & Lomo, 1973; Bliss et al., 2003; Kandel, 2001). Long-term potentiation is illustrated by the firing records in Figure 7.14 . The first time neuron A is stimulated, neuron B fires slowly ( Figure 7.14a). However, after repeated stimulation ( Figure 7.14b ), neuron B fires much more rapidly to the same stimulus ( Figure 7.14c).

standard model of consolidation

One outcome of this research was the proposal of the sequence of steps shown in Figure 7.15 . This picture of the process of consolidation, called the standard model of consolidation , proposes that incoming information activates a number of areas in the cortex ( Figure 7.15a ). Activation is distributed across the cortex because memories typically involve many sensory and cognitive areas. For example, your memory for last New Year's Eve could include sights, sounds, and possibly smells, as well as emotions you were feeling and thoughts you were thinking at the stroke of midnight. To deal with the fact that the activity resulting from this experience is distributed across many cortical areas, the cortex communicates with the hippocampus, as indicated by the colored lines in Figure 7.15a. The hippocampus coordinates the activity of the different cortical areas, which, at this point, are not yet connected in the cortex.

Factors that Aid Encoding

SEE PIC What do these procedures have in common? Practicing retrieval and generating information both involve actively creating and recreating material. accurate to say that each increases the richness of representation in memory by providing connections between the material to be remembered and other material in memory. For example, when material is organized, it becomes easier to form links between items (such as apple, grape , and plum ) in a list. there is a close relationship between encoding and retrieval..

Self Test Method

SELF TEST practicing retrieval of information by making up and answering practice test questions results in better memory than rereading the information (Karpicke, 2012). RESULTS show that there was little difference between the rereading and testing groups after the 5-minute delay but that after 1 week, the testing group's performance was much better than the rereading group's.

Short Term Vs Long Term Coding

See chart for comparison of ST VS LT

Sensory Memory

Sensory memory is an initial stage that holds all incoming information for seconds or fractions of a second. Stores: Iconic and Echoic & Olfactory (odor) Large capacity but brief duration When something is presented briefly, such as a face illuminated by a flash, your perception continues for a fraction of a second in the dark. This brief persistence of the image, which is one of the things that makes it possible to perceive movies, is called sensory memory

Sensory Memory Definition

Sensory memory is the retention, for brief periods of time, of the effects of sensory stimulation. We can demonstrate this brief retention for the effects of visual stimulation with two familiar examples: the trail left by a moving sparkler and the experience of seeing a film.

Shallow Processing

Shallow processing involves little attention to meaning, as when a phone number is repeated over and over or attention is focused on a word's physical features such as whether it is printed in lowercase or capital letters.

STM Definition

Short-term memory (STM) is the system involved in storing small amounts of information for a brief period of time Sensory memory that is attended to will enter STM Decays w/in about 30 seconds w/o rehersal Duration of STM determines transfer to LTM Thus, whatever you are thinking about right now, or remember from what you have just read, is in your short-term memory. Everything we think about or know at a particular moment in time involves STM because short-term memory is our window on the present.

Short Term memory Vs Working memory

Short-term memory is concerned mainly with storing information for a brief period of time (for example, remembering a phone number), whereas working memory is concerned with the manipulation of information that occurs during complex cognition (for example, remembering numbers while reading a paragraph). STM (storage only) is part of WM (storage +Processing) Short-term memory is being used not only for storing information, but also for active processes like understanding conversations or solving simple math in our heads

Math and working memory - Ashcraft and Kirk

Problems like 17 + 25 that involve carrying a number use working memory. investigated how math performance would be affected by having to carry out another task that used some of a person's working memory capacity. Subjects int he dual-task condition had to do math problems while holding a string of 6 letters in their heads. Subjects in the control condition just did the math. They determined that the letter retaining used up working memory that made it difficult to do the math.

Procedural Memory (Skill Memory)

Procedural memory is also called skill memory because it is memory for doing things that usually involve learned skills. Example: tying shoes, riding a bike, playing the piano

Decay

Process by which information is lost from memory due to the passage of time. -Distractions and not rehearsing make it worse

Load Theory of Attention

Proposal that the ability to ignore task-irrelevant stimuli depends on the load of the task the person is carrying out. High-load tasks result in less distraction. if you are carrying out a hard, high-load task, no processing capacity remains, and you are less likely to be distracted (rogers math problems). However, if you are carrying out an easy, low-load task, the processing capacity that remains is available to process task-irrelevant stimuli (roger playing his cell phone games) Lavie explains results such as the ones in Figure 4.7b in terms of her load theory of attention , as diagrammed in Figure 4.8, in which the circle represents the person's processing capacity and the shading represents the portion that is used up by a task. Figure 4.8a shows that with the low-load task, there is still processing capacity left. This means that resources are available to process the task-irrelevant stimulus, and even though the person was told not to pay attention to the task-irrelevant stimulus, it gets processed and slows down responding.

Schneider and Shiffrin Divided Attention RESULTS

RESULTS: What this means, according to Schneider and Shiffrin, is that practice made it possible for subjects to divide their attention to deal with all of the target and test items simultaneously. Furthermore, the many trials of practice resulted in automatic processing , a type of processing that occurs (1) without intention (it happens automatically without the person intending to do it) and (2) at a cost of only some of a person's cognitive resources ALSO determined that if the tasks are harder, it is harder or impossible for them to become automatic At the beginning of the experiment, the subjects' performance was only 55 percent correct; it took 900 trials for performance to reach 90 percent ( Figure 4.21 ). Subjects reported that for the first 600 trials, they had to keep repeating the target items in each memory set in order to remember them. (Although targets were always numbers and distractors letters, remember that the actual targets and distractors changed from trial to trial.) However, subjects reported that after about 600 trials, the task had become automatic:

Recall Vs Recognition

Recall = fill in the blank test Recognition=Multiple choice test

Treisman Illusory Conjunctions

Recalling combinations of features from different stimuli are called illusory conjunctions . Illusory conjunctions can occur even if the stimuli differ greatly in shape and size. For example, a small blue circle and a large green square might be seen as a large blue square and a small green circle. Like seeing letters of the alphabet but not the word they form conjunctions occur because in the preattentive stage, each feature exists independently of the others. That is, features such as "redness," "curvature," or "tilted line" are, at this early stage of processing, not associated with a specific object. They are, in Treisman's (1986) words, "free floating,".

reconsolidation - Nader

Recent research, first on rats and then on humans, has suggested a possible mechanism for updating memories. These experiments support the idea that when a memory is retrieved, it becomes fragile, as it was when it was originally formed, and that when it is in this fragile state, it needs to be consolidated again—a process called reconsolidation This result shows that when a memory is reactivated, it becomes fragile, just as it was immediately after it was first formed, and the drug can prevent reconsolidation. Thus, just as the original memory is fragile until it is consolidated for the first time , a reactivated memory becomes fragile until it is reconsolidated . Looked at in this way, memory becomes susceptible to being changed or disrupted every time it is retrieved. You might think that this is not a good thing. After all, putting your memory at risk of disruption every time you use it doesn't sound particularly useful. PTSD treatment

Shadowing

Repeating what you are hearing - saying the message aloud

Matching Conditions of Encoding and Retrieval

Retrieval can be increased by matching the conditions at retrieval to the conditions that existed at encoding. (Going to location where memory took place) 3 Ways to Achieve Matching (1) encoding specificity—matching the context in which encoding and retrieval occur ; (2) state-dependent learning— matching the internal mood present during encoding and retrieval; (3) transfer-appropriate processing—matching the task involved in encoding and retrieval.

phonological similarity effect (confusability)

Rhyming words remembered less than non-rhyming words. Because they similar we make more errors the confusion of letters or words that sound similar. In an early demonstration of this effect, Visual errors= letters look alike Sound errors=letters sound alike R. Conrad (1964) flashed a series of target letters on a screen and instructed his subjects to write down the letters in the order they were presented. He found that when subjects made errors, they were most likely to misidentify the target letter as another letter that sounded like the target. For example, "F" was most often misidentified as "S" or "X," two letters that sound similar to "F," but was not as likely to be confused with letters like "E," that looked like the target. Thus, even though the subjects saw the letters, the mistakes they made were based on the letters' sounds Conrad's result would be described as a demonstration of the phonological similarity effect, which occurs when words are processed in the phonological store part of the phonological loop.

Modal Model of memory -

Ten years after Broadbent introduced his flow diagram for attention, Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin (1968) introduced the modal model of memory. Defined in terms of :CAPACITY and DURATION Has structural features (called stores) This model proposed three types of memory: 1. Sensory memory is an initial stage that holds all incoming information for seconds or fractions of a second. Then it goes through the attention filters before moving onto... 2. Short-term memory (STM) holds five to seven items for about 15 to 20 (30)seconds unless a control process like rehearsal being used 3. Long-term memory (LTM) can hold a large amount of information for years or even decades.

Cocktail Party Effect

The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli has been called the cocktail party effect , because at noisy parties people are able to focus on what one person is saying even if there are many conversations happening at the same time.

Attenuator

The attenuator analyzes the incoming message in terms of (1) its physical characteristics—whether it is high-pitched or low-pitched, fast or slow; (2) its language—how the message groups into syllables or words; and (3) its meaning—how sequences of words create meaningful phrases.

Recency Effect

The better memory for the stimuli presented at the end of a sequence is called the recency effect. The explanation for the recency effect is that the most recently presented words are still in STM and therefore are easy for subjects to remember.

Central Executive (More Detail)

The central executive is the component that makes working memory "work," because it is the control center of the working memory system. Its mission is not to store information but to coordinate how information is used by the phonological loop and visuospatial sketch pad ATTENTION CONTROLLER : It determines how attention is focused on a specific task, how it is divided between two tasks, and how it is switched between tasks. Driving and Using Cell Phone: the executive would be controlling phonological loop processes (talking on the phone, understanding the conversation) and sketchpad processes (visualizing landmarks and the layout of the streets, navigating the car)

Event Related Potential (ERP)

The event-related potential (ERP) is recorded with small disc electrodes placed on a person's scalp. Each electrode picks up signals from groups of neurons that fire together. The event-related potential is recorded as a person was making a judgment in the experiment. This response had been shown in other experiments to be related to the number of items placed into working memory, so a larger ERP response indicates that more space is used in working memory. We will see later in the book that the ERP has been used to measure the brain's response to other cognitive functions as well. Distractions: the high working memory subjects had little effect from distracting stimuli. some people's central executives are better at allocating attention than others'. The reason this is important is that other experiments have shown that people with more efficient working memories are more likely to perform well on tests of reading and reasoning ability and on tests designed to measure intelligence..

same-object advantage

The faster responding that occurs when enhancement spreads within an object is called the same-object advantage

topographic map

The first experiment is based on a basic finding from perception research, which indicates that there is a spatial map of visual stimuli on the visual cortex. This map is called a topographic map , because each point on a visual stimulus causes activity at a specific location on the visual cortex, and points next to each other on the stimulus cause activity at points next to each other on the visual cortex. We can understand the principle of topographic mapping by considering the observer in Figure 4.35 , who is looking at the center of a patterned disc. Light from location A on the disc creates an image at A on the observer's retina, which causes activity at A on the observer's visual cortex. Similarly, light from locations B and C on the disc creates images at B and C on the retina, which causes activity at B and C on the visual cortex. When this electrical activity is transmitted to higher visual areas in the brain, the observer perceives the patterns at locations A, B, and C on the disc..

automatic processing

a type of processing that occurs (1) without intention (it happens automatically without the person intending to do it) and (2) at a cost of only some of a person's cognitive resources Examples: Locking your doors, arriving somewhere and not remembering driving there, paying attention while typing, playing the piano etc. Sometimes trying to pay attention to automatic things like typing or playing the piano makes the task difficult

double dissociation

The opposite results create a double dissociation between LTM and STM. This evidence supports the idea that STM and LTM are caused by different mechanisms, which can act independently.

Visual Cortex Studies - Stephanie Harrison and Frank Tong

The prefrontal cortex was thought to be the primary area for working memory but some processes never make it past the visual cortex so some working memory must take place there. Harrison and Tong tested to determine whether information about the orientation of the sample grating was being held in the visual cortex during the 11-second delay, Harrison and Tong used a technique called neural mind reading with fMRI They found that during the delay int he experiment the fMRI showed the data was being stored in the visual cortex- so, the visual cortex is involved in working memory

encoding specificity (physical)

The principle of encoding specificity states that we encode information along with its context. For example, Angela encoded many experiences within the context of her grandparents' house. When she reinstated this context by returning to the house many years later, she remembered many of these experiences. D. R. Godden and Alan Baddeley's (1975) "diving experiment." suggest that a good strategy for test taking would be to study in an environment similar to the environment in which you will be tested.

Encoding (Coding)

The process of storing data in long-term memory 1. Auditory or Phonological -Sound based 2. Visual Coding-image based *Better coding if phonological option available* 3. Semantic-Meaning based coding (Wikens) Proactive interference experiments . proven by experiment that released proactive interference

mental approach to coding

asking how a stimulus or an experience is represented in the mind.

Gordon Bower and David Winzenz (1970)

decided to test whether using visual imagery— "images in the head" that connect words visually—can create connections that enhance memory. They used a procedure called paired-associate learning. presented a list of 15 pairs of nouns, such as boat - tree , to subjects for 5 seconds each. One group was told to silently repeat the pairs as they were presented, and another group was told to form a mental picture in which the two items were interacting. When subjects were later given the first word and asked to recall the second one for each pair RESULTS the subjects who had created images remembered more than twice as many words as the subjects who had just repeated the word pairs

Working Memory - Baddeley & Hitch

defined as "a limited-capacity system for temporary storage and "manipulation of information for complex tasks such as comprehension, learning, and reasoning." (The quotes are what makes it different from Modal model of short term memory)

LTM Semantic Coding -Sachs Experiment

demonstrated semantic coding in long-term memory. Sachs had subjects listen to a tape recording of a passage and then measured their recognition memory to determine whether they remembered the exact wording of sentences in the passage or just the general meaning of the passage. found that specific wording is forgotten but the general meaning can be remembered for a long time has been confirmed in many experiments. This description in terms of meaning is an example of semantic coding in LTM. *predominant coding in LTM*

Raluca Petrican and coworkers

determined how people's memory for public events changes over time by presenting descriptions of events that had happened over a 50-year period to older adults (average age = 63 years) and asking them to respond remember if they had a personal experience associated with the event or recollected seeing details about the event on TV or in the newspaper. They were to respond know if they were familiar with the event but couldn't recollect any personal experience or details related to media coverage of the event. If they couldn't remember the event at all, they were to respond don't know As would be expected, complete forgetting increased over time (red bars). But the interesting result is that remember responses decreased much more than know responses, meaning that memories for 40- to 50-year-old events had lost much of their episodic character.

Baddeley New Model - Episodic Buffer

episodic buffer , is shown in Baddeley's new model of working memory in Figure 5.21 . The episodic buffer can store information (thereby providing extra capacity) and is connected to LTM (thereby making interchange between working memory and LTM possible). Notice that this model also shows that the visuospatial sketch pad and phonological loop are linked to long-term memory. "The concept of an episodic buffer is still at a very early stage of development" . The main "take-home message" about the episodic buffer is that it represents a way of increasing storage capacity and communicating with LTM.

Episodic Vs Semantic LTM

episodic memory (memory for experiences) semantic memory (memory for facts) Distinguished by: (1) the type of experience associated with episodic and semantic memories, (2) how brain damage affects each one (3) the fMRI responses to each one.

Ronald Rensink and coworkers (1997) - Change Blindness

experiment in which they presented one picture, followed by a blank field, followed by the same picture but with an item missing, followed by a blank field, and so on. The pictures were alternated in this way until observers were able to determine what was different about the two pictures. Rensink found that the pictures had to be alternated back and forth a number of times before the difference was detected.

processing, Craik and Endel Tulving (1975)

experiment testing memory following different levels of processing. Deeper processing = better memory. presented words to subjects and asked them three different types of questions: 1. (Physical Features=Shallow Processing) A question about the physical features of the word. For example, subjects see the word bird and are asked whether it is printed in capital letters 2. A (rhyming = deeper processing) question about rhyming. For example, subjects see the word train and are asked if it rhymes with the word pain . 3. A fill-in-the-blanks (deepest processing) question. For example, subjects see the word car and are asked if it fits into the sentence "He saw a _______ on the street." After subjects responded to these three types of questions, they were given a memory test to see how well they recalled the words. RESULTS indicate that deeper processing is associated with better memory.

Just In Time Strategy

eye movements occur just before we need the information they will provide

personal semantic memories

facts associated with personal experiences

Collin Cherry Dichotic Listening

found that although his subjects could easily shadow a spoken message presented to the attended ear, and they could report whether the unattended message was spoken by a male or female, they couldn't report what was being said in the unattended ear.

Nationwide Mutual Insurance Experiment

found that even though an overwhelming majority of people who talk on cell phones while driving consider themselves safe drivers, 45 percent of them reported that they had been hit or nearly hit by another driver talking on a cell phone. Thus, people identify talking on cell phones while driving as risky, but they think others are dangerous, not themselves (Nationwide Insurance, 2008).

Graded Amnesia

graded amnesia —the amnesia tends to be most severe for events that happened just before the injury and to become less severe for earlier events. This gradual decrease in amnesia corresponds, according to the standard model, to the changes in connections between the hippocampus and cortical areas shown in Figures 7.15b and 7.15c; as time passes after an event, connections between the cortical areas are formed and strengthened, and the connections between the hippocampus and cortex weaken and eventually vanish.

proactive interference (wickens)

interference that occurs when information that was learned previously interferes with learning new information. Old learning interferes with new learning Example: You have trouble learning french vocabulary words after just having learned Spanish vocabulary words This is what causes STM to be so short. We constantly get new information that interferes with remembering the old information Wickens - proactive interference made subsequent tests decrease performance and change of topic increased performance because they were "released" from P.I.

Feature Analysis Approach

involves mostly bottom-up processing because knowledge is usually not involved. In some situations, however, top-down processing can come into play. For example, , when she told subjects that they were being shown a carrot, a lake, and a tire, illusory conjunctions were less likely to occur, and subjects were more likely to perceive the triangular "carrot" as being orange. In this situation, the subjects' knowledge of the usual colors of objects influenced their ability to correctly combine the features of each object. In our everyday experience, in which we often perceive familiar objects, top-down processing combines with feature analysis to help us perceive things accurately.

Peripheral vision

is everything off to the side. Images are on the RETINA of the eye

Central Vision

is the area you are looking at. Images fall in the FOVEA of the eye.

persistence of vision .

is the continued perception of a visual stimulus even after it is no longer present. This persistence lasts for only a fraction of a second, so it isn't obvious in everyday experience when objects are present for long periods. This retention of the perception of light in your mind. Like the trail of a sparkler. It's actually just a memory of the sparkler. A person viewing the film doesn't see the dark intervals between the images because the persistence of vision fills in the darkness by retaining the image of the previous frame.

Recognition memory

is the identification of a stimulus that was encountered earlier. The procedure for measuring recognition memory is to present a stimulus during a study period and later to present the same stimulus along with others that were not presented.

Long-term memory (LTM)

is the system that is responsible for storing information for long periods of time. One way to describe LTM is as an "archive" of information about past events in our lives and knowledge we have learned. recent memories tend to be more detailed; much of this detail, and often the specific memories themselves, fade with the passage of time and as other experiences accumulate.

Central Executive

is where the major work of working memory occurs. -encoding strategies -attention switching -mental manipulation Episodic Buffer -back-up store -not well-defined The central executive pulls information from long-term memory and coordinates the activity of the phonological loop and visuospatial sketch pad by focusing on specific parts of a task and deciding how to divide attention between different tasks. The central executive is therefore the "traffic cop" of the working memory system.

Lack of Perception sometimes a good thing

it has been argued that the fact that our perceptual system focuses on only a small portion of the environment is one of its most adaptive features, because by focusing on what is important, our perceptual system is making optimal use of our limited processing resources.

Attenuation Model of Attention

language and meaning can also be used to separate the messages

state-dependent learning (emotional / feeling)

learning that is associated with a particular internal state , such as mood or state of awareness. According to the principle of state-dependent learning, memory will be better when a person's internal state (mood or awareness) during retrieval matches his or her internal state during encoding.

Serial Position Curve

listen to words with goal of remembering People tend to remember words on the end and in the beginning. Recency Effect: End words more recent so still in stm. Can be eliminated if interrupted immediately after the list read. (Distractor) Primacy Effect: early words get repeated more during rehearsal. Higher than recency

Donna Rose Addis

look for a physiological link by using fMRI to determine how the brain is activated by remembering the past and imagining the future. When brain activation was measured as neurologically normal subjects silently thought about either events from the past or events that might happen in the future, the results indicated that all the brain regions active during silent description of the past were also active during silent description of the future

semanticization of remote memories

loss of episodic detail for memories of long-ago events.

Shepard and Metzler - Mental Rotation

measured subjects' reaction time to decide whether pairs of objects were the same or different. Based on this finding that reaction times were longer for greater differences in orientation, Shepard and Metzler inferred that subjects were solving the problem by rotating an image of one of the objects in their mind, a phenomenon called mental rotation . This mental rotation is an example of the operation of the visuospatial sketch pad because it involves visual rotation through space.

Implicit Memory

memories we aren't aware of Implicit memory occurs when learning from experience is not accompanied by conscious remembering. For example, we do many things without being able to explain how we do them. These abilities come under the heading of procedural memories

autobiographical memory

memory for specific experiences from our life, which can include both episodic and semantic components. For example, consider the following autobiographical memory: "When I met Gil and Mary at the Le Buzz coffee shop yesterday, we sat at our favorite table, which is located near the window, but which is hard to get in the morning when Le Buzz is busy."

multiple trace model of consolidation

multiple trace model of consolidation , the hippocampus is involved in retrieval of episodic memories, even if they originated long ago (Nadel & Moskovitch, 1997). Evidence for this idea comes from experiments like one by Asaf Gilboa and coworkers (2004), who elicited recent and remote episodic memories by showing subjects photographs of themselves engaging in various activities that were taken at times ranging from very recently to the distant past, when they were 5 years old. The results of this experiment showed that the hippocampus was activated during retrieval of both recent and remote episodic memories.

Memory Fragility

new memories are fragile and can therefore be disrupted.

Retrieval

process of transferring information from LTM to working memory is called retrieval involves accessing some of the information that you've encoded and transferring it from LTM into working memory to become consciously aware of it.

James Nairne (2010) -Survival Value

proposes that we can understand how memory works by considering its function, because, through the process of evolution, memory was shaped to increase the ability to survive. Linking words to survival created memory that was not only better than memory created by counting vowels but was also better than memory achieved by the "elaborative" tasks we have described such as forming visual images, linking words to oneself, and generating information. Whether this advantage is due to evolution is debated among memory researchers, but there is no question that relating words to something meaningful and potentially important like survival does enhance memory

processing capacity (lavie)

refers to the amount of information people can handle and sets a limit on their ability to process incoming information; and

Coding

refers to the form in which stimuli are represented. For example, as we discussed in Chapter 2 , a person's face can be represented by the pattern of firing of a number of neurons

retrieval cue

remembering words in a particular category may serve as a retrieval cue —a word or other stimulus that helps a person remember information stored in memory.

elaborative rehearsal encoding

repeating something over and over WITH consideration of meaning or making connections with other information. Typically, this type of rehearsal results in better memory than maintenance rehearsal.

maintenance rehearsal encoding

repeating something over and over WITHOUT any consideration of meaning or making connections with other information. Typically, this type of rehearsal results in poor memory, so you don't remember the number when you want to call it again later.

Repetition Priming

repetition priming , occurs when the test stimulus is the same as or resembles the priming stimulus. For example, seeing the word BIRD may cause you to respond more quickly to a later presentation of the word BIRD than to a word you had not seen, even though you may not remember seeing bird earlier. Repetition priming is called implicit memory because the priming effect can occur even though subjects may not remember the original presentation of the priming stimuli.

Robyn Westmacott and Morris Moskovitch (2003) Autobiographically Significant Semantic Memories

showed that people's knowledge about public figures, such as actors, singers, and politicians, can include both semantic and episodic components. For example, if you know some facts about Oprah Winfrey and that she had a television program, your knowledge would be mainly semantic. But if you can remember watching some of her television shows, your memory for Oprah Winfrey would have episodic components. call the memories involving personal episodes autobiographically significant semantic memories. you would be more likely to recall the name of a popular singer in a memory test if you had attended one of his or her concerts than if you had just read about the singer in a magazine.

Choking Under Pressure - by Sian Beilock and Thomas Carr

showed that when subjects are tested under high-pressure conditions (for example, being told "you will be videotaped and need to do well to receive a cash payment"), performance decreases for difficult problems. Beilock (2008) proposed that one reason for this decrease in performance is that pressure causes subjects to worry about the testing situation and the consequences of poor performance, and that this worrying uses some of the working memory capacity needed to solve the problems.

Dementia Patients and Future

some patients with semantic dementia—poor semantic memory but intact episodic memory—also have problems in describing the episodic details of what might happen in the future This result suggests that both episodic and semantic memory systems need to be functioning in order for us to think about the personal future

Constructive Episodic Simulation Hypothesis - Schacter and Addis

states that episodic memories are extracted and recombined to construct simulations of future events. They suggest that perhaps the main role of the episodic memory system is not to remember the past, but to enable people to simulate possible future scenarios in order to help anticipate future needs and guide future behavior.

B. B. Murdoch, Jr. (1962) Serial Curve

studied the distinction between STM and LTM using the following method to measure a function called the serial position curve The serial position curve in Figure 6.3 indicates that memory is better for words at the beginning of the list and at the end of the list than for words in the middle

Sophie Forster and Lavie (2008)

studied the role of processing capacity and perceptual load in determining distraction. The subjects' task was to respond as quickly as possible when they identified a target, either X or N. Subjects pressed one key if they saw the X and another key if they saw the N. This task is easy for displays in which the target is surrounded by just one type of letter, like small o's. However, the task becomes harder when the target is surrounded by different letters, as in the display on the right This difference is reflected in the reaction times, with the hard task resulting in longer reaction times than the easy task. However, when a task-irrelevant stimulus —like the unrelated cartoon character is flashed next to the display, responding slows for the easy task more than for the hard task.

Recall Method

subjects are presented with stimuli and then, after a delay, are asked to report back as many of the stimuli as possible. Memory performance can be measured as a percentage of the stimuli that are remembered. Can also be used to recollect life events or facts learned

inattentional blindness (Mack and Rock)

subjects can be unaware of clearly visible stimuli if they aren't directing their attention to them. Specifically, if they are distracted by another task.

whole report method

subjects were asked to report as many letters as possible from the entire 12-letter display. 4.5 of 12 remembered

Test Studying

suggest that a good strategy for test taking would be to study in an environment similar to the environment in which you will be tested (encoding specificity) outside stimulation such as music or television present helps them study. This idea clearly violates the principle of encoding specificity. .

Treisman's Feature Integration Theory

tackles the question of how we perceive individual features as part of the same object by proposing a two-stage process As we will see, attention becomes important in the second stage.

Divided Attention - Hard Vs Easy Tasks

that if task difficulty is increased—by using letters for both targets and distractors and by changing targets and distractors on each trial so a target on one trial can be a distractor on another—then automatic processing is not possible even with practice. Example: Driving and talking is easy until traffic gets bad or a flashing sign appears then it's difficult

divided attention

the distribution of attention among two or more tasks. the ability to divide attention depends on a number of factors, including practice and the difficulty of the task.

Hiroyuki Shinoda and coworkers (2001)

they measured observers' fixations and tested their ability to detect traffic signs as they drove through a computer-generated environment in a driving simulator. They found that the observers were more likely to detect stop signs positioned at intersections than those positioned in the middle of a block, and that 45 percent of the observers' fixations occurred close to intersections. In this example, the observers are using learning about regularities in the environment (stop signs are usually at corners) to determine when and where to look for stop signs.

Top-Down Eye Movement

top-down , based on cognitive factors such as the observer's knowledge about scenes and past experiences with specific stimuli.

Free Recall

two types of recall procedures. a subject is simply asked to recall stimuli. These stimuli could be words previously presented by the experimenter or events experienced earlier in the subject's life.

John Brown (1958) in England and Lloyd Peterson and Margaret Peterson (1959)

used the method of recall to determine the duration of STM.

Types of Coding

visual coding (coding in the mind in the form of a visual image), auditory coding (coding in the mind in the form of a sound) semantic coding (coding in the mind in terms of meaning) in both STM and LTM.

Covert Attention: Directing Attention without Eye Movement

we can also direct our attention while keeping our eyes stationary, a process called covert attention

dichotic listening

where dichotic refers to presenting different stimuli to the left and right ears.

perceptual load (lavie)

which is related to the difficulty of a task.

Synaptic consolidation

which takes place over minutes or hours, involves structural changes at synapses. Relatively fast

Systems consolidation ,

which takes place over months or even years, involves the gradual reorganization of neural circuits within the brain (Nader & Einarsson, 2010). relatively slow

Retrieval Cues (more detail)

words or other stimuli that help us remember information stored in our memory. they can be provided by a number of different sources.

Cognitive Procedural Memories

your ability to have a conversation / grammar

Attention

—the ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations.

J. A. Gray and A. I. Wedderburn (1960) (Disproved Broadbent)

"Dear Aunt Jane" experiment. As in Cherry's dichotic listening experiment, the subjects were told to shadow the message presented to one ear. the attended (shadowed) ear received the message "Dear 7 Jane," and the unattended ear received the message "9 Aunt 6." However, rather than reporting the "Dear 7 Jane" message that was presented to the attended ear, subjects reported hearing "Dear Aunt Jane." Listeners were taking the meaning of the word into account. TOP DOWN PROCESSING

George Miller - Capacity

"The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," Suggested that the average digit span is 5-9

Memory Loss Movies

"The Vow" based on the Carpenter couple. Woman lost memory of ever knowing hubby after car crash. Movie is realistic. THESE BASED LOOSELY ON REAL DISORDERS "Bourne Identity" Based on "psychogenic fugue" Who Am I? (1998), Jackie Chan, a top secret soldier, loses his memory in a helicopter crash, triggering a quest to recover his identity. In Dead Again (1991), a mystery woman played by Emma Thompson can't remember anything about her life. In The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), Geena Davis plays a suburban homemaker who begins remembering events from her previous life as a secret agent after suffering a blow to her head. Memento , where Lenny's problem (Like H.M.) is identified as a loss of short-term memory. This reflects a common belief (at least among those who have not taken a cognitive psychology course) that forgetting things that have happened within the last few minutes or hours is a breakdown in short-term memory. THESE FAKE DISORDERS Total Recall, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 50 First Dates (total fiction)

Covert Attention

"saw out of the corner of my eye" Combined Peripheral vision and mental focus, separate from eye movements,

Early Experiments on Short-Term Memory

(1) What is the duration of STM? (2) What is the capacity of STM? These questions were answered in experiments that used the method of recall to test memory..

Moray (Disproves Broadbent)

(1959) did a dichotic listening experiment in which his subjects were instructed to shadow the message presented to one ear and to ignore the message presented to the other ear, But when Moray presented the listener's name to the unattended ear, about a third of the subjects detected it. Following Moray's lead, other experimenters showed that information presented to the unattended ear is processed enough to provide the listener with some awareness of its meaning.

Scanning A Scene With Eye Movements

-Find Jennifer Hudson -Scanning is necessary because good detail vision occurs only for things you are looking at directly. -Stare at X on right - cant see most letters to the left

Factors that Affect Divided Attention

-Stimulus modality (visual vs auditory) -Memory codes (verbal vs visual spatial) -Response (manual vs verbal)

Peterson and Peterson Recall Test Brown

-Varied the time between when they said the number and when the subject had to start counting backward -After 3 seconds, subjects remembered 80% of letters. After 18 seconds, subjects remember 12% of letters -Lost numbers due to "decay" over the 18 seconds

Divided Attention

-We try to divide our attention (driving and talking) -Attention to one thing at the time -Two tasks CAN be done at same time IF -one is automatic -attention alternates between the two -Similar tasks interfere with each other more than different tasks

Classical Conditioning Real Life

-often linked to emotional reactions -Blue lights causing nervousness (but not implicit because you remember why blue lights make you nervous) -An example of classical conditioning causing implicit memory is provided by a situation in which you meet someone who seems familiar but you can't remember how you know him or her. Have you ever had this experience and also felt positively or negatively about the person, without knowing why? If so, your emotional reaction was an example of implicit memory.

Procedural Memory

. The ability to ride a bicycle, or do any of the other things that involve muscle coordination, is a type of long-term memory called procedural memory

Divided Attention

. When Roger decides to listen in on the conversation while simultaneously playing the game, he is displaying divided attention —paying attention to more than one thing at a time

Ways to study the Brain and Working memory

1. Brain damage patients (human or animal) -how damage to or removal of the prefrontal cortex affects the ability to remember for short periods of time; 2.Single neuron recording in animals -neurons—how neurons in the monkey prefrontal cortex hold onto information during a brief delay 3. Measuring activity in the human brain (imaging) -activity—areas of the brain that are activated by working memory tasks. 4. Recording electrical signals from the brain Experiments focus on "delay" or "waiting" after a stimulus

Atkinson & Shiffrin Problems

1. said stm not directly involved in processing 2. Can't explain people with good LTM but bad STM 3. Can't account for modality specific distractors (brown peterson task) (doesn't decay to zero)

William James

1800's - Everyone knows what attention is. We have an intuitive sense.

Posner's Experiment & Theory

1980 -Discrimination Task Subject told an arrow will appear in one of two boxes. Neutral= If arrow appears in one of the two boxes (middle reaction time) Subject told arrow will appear in box on the left Valid=If arrow appears on the left (fastest reaction time) Subject told arrow in left box Invalid=If arrow shows up in right box (slowest reaction time)

Egly, Driver, and Rafal

1994 If an object is already focused on the location does not matter. Same object quicker than different object even though same distance apart. Indicates when part of an object is cued, it activates the whole object. Had two objects with top and bottom parts. If top part of left object was cued, that's the valid spot. However, if object showed up on bottom of same object it had quicker response than if on top of different object.

Treisman's 1st Stage : Preattentive Stage

1st Stage: Preattentive Stage is the first step in processing an image of an object. Objects are analyzed into separate features. For example, the rolling red ball would be analyzed into features such as color (red), shape (round), and movement (rolling to the right). Because each of these features is processed in a separate area of the brain, they exist independently of one another at this stage of processing. Occurs early, before we become conscious of the object

Endel Tulving

1st proposed episotic and semantic hold different types of information AND that episodic and semantic memory can be distinguished based on the type of experience associated with each

Treisman's 2nd Stage: Focused attention

2nd Stage: "free-floating" features are combined in the second stage, called the focused attention stage. Once the features have been combined in this stage, we perceive the object. During the focused attention stage, the observer's attention plays an important role in combining the features to create the perception of whole objects.

Olfactory Memory (Odor Memory)

30 seconds- high accuracy 2 minutes - decreased performance

Balint's syndrome

A crucial characteristic of Balint's syndrome is an inability to focus attention on individual objects. Caused by Parietal Lobe Damage When R.M. was presented with two different letters of different colors, such as a red T and a blue O, he reported illusory conjunctions such as "blue T" on 23 percent of the trials, even when he was able to view the letters for as long as 10 seconds

Scene Schema

A person's knowledge about what is likely to be contained in a particular scene. This knowledge can help guide attention to different areas of the scene. For example, knowledge of what is usually in an office may cause a person to look toward the desk to see the computer.

Primacy Effect

A possible explanation of the primacy effect is that subjects had time to rehearse the words at the beginning of the sequence and transfer them to LTM.

Toronto Traffic Accident Study

A survey of accidents and cell phone use in Toronto showed that the risk of a collision was four times higher when the driver was using a cell phone than when a cell phone was not being used (Redelmeier & Tibshirani, 1997). Perhaps the most significant result of the Toronto study is that hands-free cell phone units offered no safety advantage.

Delayed Response Task

A task in which information is provided, a delay is imposed, and then memory is tested. This task has been used to study short-term memory by testing monkeys' ability to hold information about the location of a food reward during a delay.

Types of Long Term Memory LTM

A. Explicit (conscious) 1. Episodic (personal events) 2. Semantic (facts and knowledge) B.Implicit (not conscious) 1. Procedural Memory 2.Priming Memory 3. Conditioning Memory

Limit to STM

Agreed that upper limit is 4 items

levels of processing theory

An early idea linking the type of encoding to retrieval. According to levels of processing theory, memory depends on the depth of processing that an item receives.

Model of Attention (Human Info Processing Model)

Input →sensory registers→recognition/selection→working memory

William James definition of attention

Attention is "taking possession by the mind" of an object or thought. Evidence that attention "takes possession" of the brain is provided by experiments showing that covert attention to an object or location enhances brain activity associated with the object or location.

Object Based Attention

Attention on object not dependent on location

Location Based Attention

Attention to the spotlight location, zoom lens etc People move their attention from one place to another Covert attention is shifting attention without making eye movements. Visual attention can be directed to different places in a scene even without eye movements. The effect of covert attention has been demonstrated by precueing experiments, which have shown that covert attention to a location enhances processing at that location. This is called location-based attention.

LTM Auditory Coding

Auditory coding occurs in long-term memory when you "play" a song in your head. Another example of auditory coding sometimes occurs when listening to a CD or playlist that has a short period of silence between tracks. Some people report that for CDs or playlists they have listened to many times, they "hear" the beginning of the next song during the silence, just before it comes on. This happens because an auditory representation from long-term memory is triggered by the end of the previous song. *predominant coding in STM is auditory*

George Sperling

But George Sperling (1960) wondered how much information people can take in from briefly presented stimuli. He determined this in a famous experiment in which he flashed an array of letters, like the one in on the screen for 50 milliseconds ( 50 / 1000 second ) and asked his subjects to report as many of the letters as possible. This part of the experiment used the whole report method ; that is, subjects were asked to report as many letters as possible from the entire 12-letter display. Given this task, they were able to report an average of 4.5 out of the 12 letters. Immediate Que- qued the line of letters to remember Delayed Que - delayed the que

Attention Maps (Datta and Yoe)

By collecting brain activation data for all of the locations on the stimulus, Datta and DeYoe created "attention maps" that show how directing attention to a specific area of space activates a specific area of the brain. What makes this experiment even more interesting is that after attention maps were determined for a particular subject, that subject was told to direct his or her attention to a "secret" place, which was unknown to the experimenters. Based on the location of the resulting yellow "hot spot," the experimenters were able to predict, with 100 percent accuracy, the "secret" place where the subject was attending.

Stroop Effect

Capacity theory explains the stroop effect Reading is "automatic" Naming a color is "controlled"

Change Detection Method - Luck & Vogel

Change detection (noticing changes in a scene) has also been used with simpler stimuli to determine how much information a person can retain from a briefly flashed stimulus. A display (3-9 colored blocks) was flashed for 100 ms, followed by 900 ms of darkness and then the new display was presented. The subject's task was to indicate if the second display was the same as or different from the first. This task is easy if the number of items is within the capacity of STM but becomes harder when the number of items becomes greater than the capacity of STM Luck and Vogel concluded from this result that subjects were able to retain about 4 items in their short-term memory. Other experiments, using verbal materials, have come to the same conclusion

continuity errors

Changes in scenes in films that should've been the same. Usually go unnoticed by viewers.

Broadbent Problems

Cocktail Part Effect = Hears own name across the room Keg Party Effect = COP!

Scanning Based on Cognitive Factors

Cognition does play a role in scanning. The eye movements from scanning the fountain showed very few in areas around the fountain even though some were salient. Such top-down processing is also associated with scene schemas—an observer's knowledge about what is contained in typical scenes People will look longer at an object that does not belong in a scene

Short-Term Memory Duration

Common misconception that it lasts longer than it does. It only lasts 15-20 seconds or less

Dictionary Unit

Common words have LOW threshold Uncommon words have high threshold The final output of the system is determined in the second stage, when the message is analyzed by the dictionary unit . The dictionary unit contains words, stored in memory, each of which has a threshold for being activated ( Figure 4.6). A threshold is the smallest signal strength that can barely be detected. Thus, a word with a low threshold might be detected even when it is presented softly or is obscured by other words.

Automaticity

Controlled Tasks -not practiced -require attention -require cognitive resources -usually occur one at the time Automatic Tasks -well-practiced -Do not require attention -Not always helpful (as in stroop) -Sometimes interferes with controlled processing -Difficult to NOT follow through with controlled tasks -Most of the time it is helpful -can occur simultaneously

Types of Attention

Covert, Overt, Selective, Divided

Treisman

Did dichotic listening tests and disproved Broadbent's theory. Said we do process whats in the other ear. Still early selection but instead of a filter we have attenuation control - like volume control for attention Analyzes incoming information. Can process more than one at the time. Both attended and unattended info go through the attenuator but unattended is weaker Both sensory AND semantic information affect attenuator control Output: Analyzed by dictionary unit Dictionary Unit Threshold determines what gets attended to. Uncommon words=High threshold Common Words=Medium threshold Own Name=Very low threshold

Memory Divisions

Different type of memory based on different mechanisms. We will do this by considering the results of (1) behavioral experiments, (2) neuropsychological studies of the effects of brain damage on memory, and (3) brain imaging experiments.

Moving Attention

Disengage from 1st and move to the 2nd

Donald MacKay (1973) (Late Model)

Donald MacKay (1973), a subject listened to an ambiguous sentence, such as "They were throwing stones at the bank," that could be interpreted in more than one way. (In this example, "bank" can refer to a riverbank or to a financial institution.) These ambiguous sentences were presented to the attended ear while biasing words were presented to the other, unattended ear. For example, as the subject was shadowing "They were throwing stones at the bank," either the word "river" or the word "money" was presented to the unattended ear. After hearing a number of ambiguous sentences, the subjects were presented with pairs of sentences, such as "They threw stones toward the side of the river yesterday" and "They threw stones at the savings and loan association yesterday," and asked to indicate which of these two sentences was closest in meaning to one of the sentences they had heard previously. MacKay found that the meaning of the biasing word affected the subjects' choice.

Switching Attention

Dual task, doing two tasks at once -assume doing both doesn't change how you do either -There is a cost for switching between tasks

Broadbent Theory

Early selection Attention is like an on/off switch Input goes through a filter that removes what you're not focusing on Sensory store/register holds incoming information for a short period of time and transfers into filter Filter attends to physical characteristics (tone, pitch, accent etc) and only this message passes through Short-term memory receives output of filter Unselected stimuli is unavailable to consciousness and completely blocked. It's not processed beyond the sensory level. Filtered BEFORE it is analyzed for meaning.

"early-late" controversy

Early selection can be demonstrated under some conditions and later selection under others, depending on the observer's task and the type of stimuli presented. Thus, researchers began focusing instead on understanding the many different factors that control attention.

Studying

Elaborate Generate and test Organize Take Breaks Avoid Illusion of Learning: re-reading, familiarity effect, highlighting

Types of Long Term Memory

Episodic - personal experience /time travel Semantic - facts Autobiographical - both of the above

Recollection

Example 3 illustrates recollection —remembering specific experiences related to the person Recollection is associated with episodic memory because it includes details about what was happening when the knowledge was acquired and an awareness of the event as it was experienced in the past.

Change Detection Experiments

Experiments show lack of attention can affect perception by first presenting one picture and then presenting another, slightly different picture.

Simultaneous Tasks - Baddeley

Experiments showed that subjects can read while also holding a short series of numbers in their heads. This is contrary to what Atkinson and Shiffrin's modal model says is possible.

Fei Fei Li and coworkers (2002) Unattended Stimuli Experiments

Experiments that considers what information we can take in about unattended stimuli. Li's subjects looked at the + on the fixation screen and then saw the central stimulus —an array of five letters. On some trials, all of the letters were the same; on other trials, one of the letters was different from the other four. The letters were followed immediately by the peripheral stimulus —either a disc that was half green and half red or a picture of a scene—which flashed for 27 ms at a random position on the edge of the screen The subjects' central task was to indicate if all of the letters in the central stimulus were the same, and their peripheral task was to indicate whether the scene contained an animal (for the picture) or whether the colored discs were red-green or green-red (for the discs). RESULTS: 90% saw the peripheral scene info and 50% saw the colored dot. Proved that it is possible to take in information about some objects but not others in scenes even when attention is focused elsewhere.

Walter Schneider and Robert Shiffrin (1977) Divided Attention

Experiments that involve divided attention because they require the subject to carry out two tasks simultaneously: (1) holding information about target stimuli in memory and (2) paying attention to a series of "distractor" stimuli and determining whether one of the target stimuli is present among these distractor stimuli. The subject was shown a memory set consisting of one to four characters called target stimuli . The memory set was followed by rapid presentation of 20 "test frames," each of which contained distractors . On half of the trials, one of the frames contained a target stimulus from the memory set. A new memory set was presented on each trial, so the targets changed from trial to trial, followed by new test frames.

Explicit Memory

Explicit memories are memories we are aware of.

Generation Effect - Norman Slameka and Peter Graf (1978)

Generating material yourself, rather than passively receiving it, enhances learning and retention demonstrated by having subjects study a list of word pairs in two different ways: Read group : Read these pairs of related words. king-crown; horse-saddle; lamp-shade; etc. Generate group : Fill in the blank with a word that is related to the first word. king-cr _______ ; horse-sa _______ ; lamp-sh _______ ; etc. Subjects who had generated the second word in each pair were able to reproduce 28 percent more word pairs than subjects who had just read the word pairs.

Mirror Drawing H.M.

H'M. Got really good at mirror drawing even though he didn't remember practicing it every day. Proves implicit nature of procedural memory. Draw a star like the one in Figure 6.13 on a piece of paper. Place a mirror or some other reflective surface (some cell phone screens work) about an inch or two from the star, so that the reflection of the star is visible. Then, while looking at the reflection, trace the outline of the star on the paper (no fair looking at the actual drawing on the paper!). You will probably find that the task is difficult at first, but becomes easier with practice.

John Bransford and Marcia Johnson (1972) -Prevented organization encoding methods

Had subjects read a paragraph with seemingly unrelated information (no context). Subjects had trouble remembering it. Subjects that saw a visual ahead of time remembered more. Picture provided a mental framework.

George Miller - Chunking

If capacity is so low (as low as 4 units) how do we remember sentences? introduced the concept of chunking to describe the fact that small units (like words) can be combined into larger meaningful units, like phrases, or even larger units, like sentences, paragraphs, or stories.

Working Memory Model -Baddeley

He proposed three components: 1.Storage -the phonological loop (passive)(1 of 3) - visuospatial sketch pad (2 of 3) 2. Processing -Articulatory Control Process (ACP) (active). In charge of rehearsal and translates visual to phonological -Visual scribe 3- central executive (3 of 3) His model takes into account: (1) the dynamic processes involved in cognitions such as understanding language and doing math problems and (2) the fact that people can carry out two tasks simultaneously Concluded that working memory must be dynamic and must also consist of a number of components that can function separately. PROBLEM His original model could not account for the capacity shown in testing. He revised it to add the episodic buffer (wayyy down)

Hebb

Hebb's proposal that synaptic changes provide a record of experiences became the starting point for modern research on the physiology of memory. Researchers who followed Hebb's lead determined that activity at the synapse causes a sequence of chemical reactions, which result in the synthesis of new proteins that cause structural changes at the synapse

H.M. Neuropsychological Studies

Henry Molaison underwent an experimental procedure designed to eliminate seizures. The procedure, which removed the hippocampus on both sides of his brain, succeeded but had the unintended effect of eliminating his ability to form new long-term memories. STM was unaffected but couldn't transfer new info to LTM He "met" his doctor every time he saw her over decades because he never remembered her Studies led to an understanding of the role of the hippocampus in forming new long-term memories. Furthermore, the fact that his short-term memory remained intact suggested that short-term and long-term memories are served by separate brain regions.

K.C. Patient Study Episodic vs Semantic

Hippocampus holds Episodic Memory but not semantic wrecked his motorcycle and suffered severe damage to his hippocampus and surrounding structures. K.C. lost his episodic memory—he can no longer relive any of the events of his past. He does, however, know that certain things happened, which would correspond to semantic memory. He is aware of the fact that his brother died 2 years ago but remembers nothing about personal

Recall Test Example

I will say some letters and then a number. Your task will be to remember the letters. When you hear the number, repeat it and begin counting backwards by 3s from that number. For example, if I say ABC 309, then you say 309, 306, 303, and so on, until I say "Recall." When I say "Recall," stop counting immediately and say the three letters you heard just before the number. Trial 1: F Z L 45 Trial 2: B H M 87 Trial 3: X C G 98

Prefrontal Cortex Damage

If the prefrontal cortex is damaged or removed, the monkey can only remember where the food is 50% of the time. Same as chance. This result supports the idea that the prefrontal (PF) cortex is important for holding information for brief periods of time. In fact, it has been suggested that one reason we can describe the memory behavior of very young infants as "out of sight, out of mind" (when an object that the infant can see is then hidden from view, the infant behaves as if the object no longer exists) is that their frontal and prefrontal cortex does not become adequately developed until about 8 months of age

Gordon Bower - Organizational Tree

If words presented randomly become organized in the mind, what happens when words are presented in an organized way during encoding? Gordon Bower and coworkers (1969) answered this question by presenting material to be learned in an "organizational tree," which organized a number of words according to categories. RESULTS organizing material to be remembered results in substantially better recall.

Stroop Effect

If you found it harder to name the colors of the words than the colors of the shapes, then you were experiencing the Stroop effect , which was first described by J. R. Stroop in 1935. This effect occurs because the names of the words cause a competing response and therefore slow responding to the target—the color of the ink. In the Stroop effect, the taskirrelevant stimuli are extremely powerful, because reading words is highly practiced and has become so automatic that it is difficult not to read them (Stroop, 1935).

David Strayer and William Johnston (2001) Driving Experiments

In a laboratory experiment on the effects of cell phones, David Strayer and William Johnston (2001) gave subjects a simulated driving task that required them to apply the brakes as quickly as possible in response to a red light. Doing this task while talking on a cell phone caused subjects to miss twice as many of the red lights as when they weren't talking on the phone and also increased the time it took them to apply the brakes . As in the Toronto study, the same decrease in performance occurred regardless of whether subjects used a hands-free cell phone device or a handheld model. Strayer and Johnston concluded from this result that talking on the phone uses cognitive resources that would otherwise be used for driving the car This idea that the problem posed by cell phone use during driving is related to the use of cognitive resources is an important one. The problem isn't driving with one hand. It is driving with fewer cognitive resources available to focus attention on driving.

Covert Attention Definition (more in the 50s)

In contrast, shifting attention from one place to another while keeping the eyes stationary is called covert attention.

Cued Recall

In cued recall , the subject is presented with retrieval cues to aid in recall of the previously experienced stimuli. These cues are typically words or phrases.

Interactions between Semantic and Episodic

In real life, episodic and semantic memories are often intertwined. Two examples are (1) how knowledge (semantic) affects experience (episodic) and (2) the makeup of autobiographical memory. Our knowledge (semantic memory) guides our experience, and this, in turn, influences the episodic memories that follow from that experience.

Shadowing Procedure

In the shadowing procedure, a person repeats out loud the words that have just been heard. This ensures that subjects are focusing their attention on the attended message.

Distracted Driving Experiments - 100 Car Naturalistic Driving Study 2006

In this study, video recorders in 100 vehicles created records of both what the drivers were doing and the view out the front and rear windows. These recordings documented 82 crashes and 771 near crashes in more than 2 million miles of driving . In 80 percent of the crashes and 67 percent of the near crashes, the driver was inattentive in some way 3 seconds beforehand . One of the most distracting activities was pushing buttons on a cell phone or similar device. More than 22 percent of near crashes involved that kind of distraction.

Worrying and Performance - Sian Beilock and Thomas Carr

Increasing the load on working memory—whether by introducing a second task or creating worry—impairs performance. Their second test had 2 groups take high pressure pre and post test. Test group wrote thoughts and feeling during the period between the pre and post. They did better than control who sat quietly for 10 minutes Writing about a neutral subject had no effect. Writing about worries and feelings about the test before taking it freed up working memory and improved it.

Dangers of Talking to Passengers While Driving

It's still a risk but s a passenger, you would be aware of the traffic situation and would be able to react by pausing the conversation or perhaps warn the driver of upcoming hazards (sometimes called "backseat driving"!). It is also relevant to consider the social demands of phone conversations. Because it is generally considered poor form to suddenly stop talking or to pause for long periods on the phone, the person talking on the phone while driving might continue talking even when driving is becoming challenging.

Double Disassociation Semantic vs Episodic

Italian woman got encephalitis and lost her semantic memory but her Episodic and could form new episodic memories

Attentional Blink Experiment

JXTVRK Press J for J and K for K If J&K close together the K is missed If spread out the K is seen Cant do the 2nd stimulus until done processing the first

K.F. Neuropsychological Studies

K.F., who had suffered damage to his parietal lobe in a motorbike accident. K.F.'s poor STM was indicated by a reduced digit span—the number of digits he could remember. Whereas the typical span is between five and nine digits, K.F. had a digit span of two; in addition, the recency effect in his serial position curve, which is associated with STM, was reduced. Even though K.F.'s STM was greatly impaired, he had a functioning LTM, as indicated by his ability to form and hold new memories of events in his life.

Capacity Theory

Kahneman

Capacity Theory (Kahneman)

Kahneman -Amount of attention is limited -Attention is allocated (like in a pie chart) Attention=A set of processes -Decide moment by moment how to allocate -Different factors influence allocation policy -No early vs late selection. It depends on how attention is required for certain processes -Explains the dichotic listening tests -Explains Automaticity

Experience Nerve Impulses

Let's assume that a particular experience causes nerve impulses to travel down the axon of neuron A in Figure 7.14a , and when these impulses reach the synapse, neurotransmitter is released onto neuron B. Hebb's idea was that repeated activity can strengthen the synapse by causing structural changes, greater transmitter release, and increased firing Hebb also proposed that changes that occur in the hundreds or thousands of synapses that are activated around the same time by a particular experience provide a neural record of the experience.

Memory Organization

Like folders on your desktop subjects spontaneously organize items as they recall them

Episodic Memory

Long-term memories of experiences from the past, like the picnic, are episodic memories

Della Sala - visual recall and visual chunking

Look a pattern of blocks -shaded and unshaded then indicate which of the squares need to be filled in to duplicate this pattern. Subject could complete up to 9 squares before making mistakes. The fact that it is possible to remember the patterns in Della Sala's matrix illustrates visual imagery. Chunking of squares into patterns explains how they could remember up to 9 without making errors.

Chunk

Meaningful units defined as a collection of elements that are strongly associated with one another but are weakly associated with elements in other chunks We may have capacity to remember 4-8 unrelated words but 20 or more chunked words Example: Recall B C I F C N C A S I B B (letters) VS C I A F B I N B C C B S (4 chunks)

Memory Span Test

Measures capacity. Has subject remember series of info and then increases the data until capacity reached. We remember more Digits than letters and more letters than words

remember/know procedure

Measuring recollection and familiarity are done with this procedure. subjects are presented with a stimulus they have encountered before and are asked to respond (1) remember if the stimulus is familiar and they also remember the circumstances under which they originally encountered it; (2) know if the stimulus seems familiar but they don't remember experiencing it earlier; or (3) don't know if they don't remember the stimulus at all. This procedure is important because it distinguishes between the episodic components of memory (indicated by a remember response) and semantic components (indicated by a know response).

Memory Performance After Sleep

Memory performance after a night's sleep, shown in Figure 7.19b, indicates that the expected group performed significantly better than the unexpected group. Thus, even though both groups had the same training and received the same amount of sleep, memory for the task was stronger if subjects expected they would be tested. Results such as this suggest that when we sleep after learning, memories that are more important are more likely to be strengthened by consolidation (see also Fischer & Born, 2009; Payne et al., 2008, 2012; Rauchs et al., 2011; Saletin et al., 2011; van Dongen et al., 2012). Thus, we sleep, perchance to selectively consolidate memories for things that might be most useful to remember later!

Michael Posner 1978

Michael Posner and coworkers (1978) asked whether paying attention to a location improves a person's ability to respond to stimuli presented there. To answer this question, Posner used the precueing procedure

William Jame's Definition of Attention

Millions of items ... are present to my senses which never properly enter my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. . . . Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. . . . It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.

Steven Luck and Edward Vogel

More recent studies indicate that STM capacity is only 4 items Steven Luck and Edward Vogel (1997), which measured the capacity of STM by using a procedure called change detection

Consolidation

Müller and Pilzecker proposed the term consolidation , which is defined as the process that transforms new memories from a fragile state, in which they can be disrupted, to a more permanent state, in which they are resistant to disruption two types of mechanisms responsible for consolidation based on mechanisms that involve both synapses and neural circuits. Synaptic and Systems occurring together, but at different speeds and at different levels of the nervous system. When something happens, a process is triggered that causes changes at the synapse. Meanwhile, a longer-term process begins that involves reorganization of neural circuits. Thus, synaptic and systems consolidation are processes that occur simultaneously—one that works rapidly, at the level of the synapse, and another that works more slowly, at the level of neural circuits.

Neural Mind Reading

Neural mind reading refers to using a neural response, usually brain activation measured by fMRI, to determine what a person is perceiving or thinking. fMRI measures which voxels in the brain are activated while a subject carries out a task (remember that voxels are small cube-shaped areas of the brain; see Method: Brain Imaging, Chapter 2 , page 41 ). The pattern of voxels activated depends on the task and the nature of the stimulus being perceived or remembered.

Neville Moray Dichotic Experiments

Neville Moray (1959) showed that subjects were unaware of a word that had been repeated 35 times in the unattended ear.

Conjunction Search

Now find the green horizontal line. This is a conjunction search because you had to search for a combination (or conjunction) of two or more features in the same stimulus—"horizontal" and "green." You couldn't focus just on green because there are vertical green lines, and you couldn't focus just on horizontal because there are horizontal red lines. You had to look for the conjunction of horizontal and green.

articulatory suppression

One way that the operation of the phonological loop has been studied is by determining what happens when its operation is disrupted. This occurs when a person is prevented from rehearsing items to be remembered by repeating an irrelevant sound, such as "the, the, the ..." This repetition of an irrelevant sound results in a phenomenon called articulatory suppression , which reduces memory because speaking interferes with rehearsal. Also eliminates the advantage of the word length effect.

Amnesia Patients and Priming - Graf

One way to ensure that a person doesn't remember the presentation of the priming stimulus is to test patients with amnesia. Peter Graf and coworkers (1985) did this by testing three groups of subjects: (1) amnesiac patients with a condition called Korsakoff's syndrome, which is associated with alcohol abuse and eliminates the ability to form new long-term memories; (2) patients without amnesia who were under treatment for alcoholism; and (3) patients without amnesia who had no history of alcoholism. RESULTS of the recall experiment, show that the amnesiac patients recalled fewer words than the two control groups. This poor recall confirms the poor explicit memory associated with their amnesia. PRIMING RESULTS of the word completion test, showing the percentage of primed words that were created ( Figure 6.14b ), indicate that the amnesiac patients performed just as well as the controls. This increase in performance is an example of priming.

Digit Span

One way to measure of the capacity of STM is provided by the digit span —the number of digits a person can remember. How MUCH can a person remember as opposed to how long can they remember it. Typical digit span is 5-9 Digits

Avoiding Explicit Memory In a Priming Test

One way to minimize the chances that a person with normal memory will remember the presentation of the priming stimulus is to present the priming stimulus in a task that does not appear to be a memory task. OR Rapid response tests

Ula Cartwright-Finch and Nilli Lavie (square by cross)

Only 10% of subjects saw the square pop up next to the cross in a series of experiments where subject was focusing on the cross.

Echoic Memory

Other research using auditory stimuli has shown that sounds also persist in the mind. This persistence of sound, called echoic memory , lasts for a few seconds after presentation of the original stimulus (Darwin et al., 1972). 5-9 pieces of info for 2 seconds An example of echoic memory is when you hear someone say something, but you don't understand at first and say "What?" But even before the person can repeat what was said, you "hear" it in your mind. If that has happened to you, you've experienced echoic memory.

Late Selection Model

Other theories were proposed to take into account the results of experiments showing that messages can be selected at a later stage of processing, based primarily on their meaning. MacKay /Deutsch and others proposed that most of the incoming information is processed to the level of meaning before the message to be further processed is selected

Priming

Priming occurs when the presentation of one stimulus (the priming stimulus) changes the way a person responds to another stimulus (the test stimulus).

Perseveration

Patient studies on central executive: A typical behavior of frontal lobe patients is perseveration —repeatedly performing the same action or thought even if it is not achieving the desired goal. Consider, for example, a problem that can be easily solved by following a particular rule ("Pick the red object"). A person with frontal lobe damage might be responding correctly on each trial, as long as the rule stays the same. However, when the rule is switched ("Now pick the blue object"), the person continues following the old rule, even when given feedback that his or her responding is now incorrect. This perseveration represents a breakdown in the central executive's ability to control attention.

Attentional Neglect

Patient studies with damage to right parietal lobe Results in attentional neglect of left side Unilateral Neglect: Failure to attend to things on the left side. NOT vision impairment. Attention is impaired

Fixation

Pausing the eyes on a place of interest while observing a scene

Neuroimaging Evidence fMri

Phonological & Visual Phonological Tasks N-Back Task: read subject list of letters and ask "Is M two letters back?" Causes them to mentally think about the series. -Bloodflow increased in left hemisphere frontal lobe and parietal lobe Viseospacial Tasks Show dots, show a circle and ask if there was a dot where the circle is -Bloodflow to right hemisphere frontal lobe, parietal lobe and occipital lobe More evidence toward lateralization fo the brain. Right vs Left functions. Left=language, interpretation of events and Right=visuospacial processing and face processing Central Executive- bloodflow to the prefrontal cortex -Alzheimer patients have damage to prefrontal lobe -Have trouble performing simultaneous tasks

Scanning Based on Task Demands

Situations in which people are shifting their attention from one place to another as they are doing things, occurs when people are moving through the environment, as in the driving example, and when people are carrying out specific tasks. Some researchers have focused on determining where people look as they are carrying out tasks. Since most tasks require attention to different places as the task unfolds, it isn't surprising that the timing of when people look at specific places is determined by the sequence of actions involved in the task. Research has found that the person's eye movements were determined primarily by the task. The person fixated on few objects or areas that were irrelevant to the task, and eye movements and fixations were closely linked to the action the person was about to take.

STM Vs LTM In The Brain

Some overlap and some separation in the brain. Neuropsychological studies are done to prove separation.

low-load tasks

Some tasks, especially easy, well-practiced ones, have low perceptual loads; these low-load tasks use up only a small amount of the person's processing capacity.

Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart (1972)

Studied levels of processing theory memory retrieval is affected by how items are encoded—is still widely accepted

Serial Position Experiments

Subject begins recall immediately after hearing the list of words= Primacy effect and recency effect. List is presented and subject repeats words out loud in 5-second intervals between words. = Words at the beginning of the list are repeated more, so they are more likely to get into LTM Subject begins recall after counting backwards for 30 seconds.= Recency effect is eliminated because rehearsal is prevented.

Partial Report Tone Immediate

Subjects asked to report from a specific line indicated by a tone played immediately after flashing the letters. 3.3 of 4 remembered Based on this, he concluded that subjects remember 82 percent of all of the letters immediately after but were not able to report all of these letters because they rapidly faded as the initial letters were being reported.

Partial Report Tone Delayed

Subjects asked to report from a specific line indicated by a tone that was delayed for 1 second after flashing the letters. 1 of 4 remembered Based on this he concluded that we remember most of what we perceive in sensory memory for about 1 second then rapidly lose it.

Datta and DeYoe

Subjects in Datta and DeYoe's (2009) experiment directed their attention to different areas of this circular display while keeping their eyes fixed on the center of the display. (b) Activation of the brain that occurred when subject attended to the areas indicated by the letters on the stimulus disc. The center of each circle is the place on the brain that corresponds to the center of the stimulus. The yellow "hot spot" is the area of the brain that is maximally activated by attention. Attention, therefore, enhances activity at the locations on the brain's topographic map that represent where the subject is directing his attention. This is the brain's way of "taking possession" of the location where the subject is directing his attention.

psychogenic fugue

Symptoms of this condition include traveling away from where the person lives and a lack of memory forthe past, especially personal information such as name, relationships, place of residence, and occupation. In the few cases that have been reported, a person vanishes from his or her normal life situation, often travels far away, and takes on a new identity unrelated to the previous one

high-load tasks

Tasks that are difficult and perhaps not as well practiced are high-load tasks and use more of a person's processing capacity.

Precueing Experiments (Posner)

The general principle behind a precueing experiment is to determine whether presenting a cue indicating where a test stimulus will appear enhances the processing of the target stimulus. The subjects in Posner and coworkers' (1978) experiment kept their eyes stationary throughout the experiment, always looking at the + in the display in Figure 4.18 . They first saw an arrow cue (as shown in the left panel) indicating on which side of the display they should focus their attention. In Figure 4.18a , the arrow cue indicates that they should focus their attention to the right. (Remember, they do this without moving their eyes, so this is an example of covert attention.) The subject's task was to press a key as rapidly as possible when a target square was presented off to the side (as shown in the right panel). The trial shown in Figure 4.18a is a valid trial because the target square appears on the side indicated by the cue arrow. On 80 percent of the trials, the cue arrow directed subjects' attention to the side where the target square appeared. However, on 20 percent of the trials, the arrow directed the subject's attention away from where the target was to appear. These were the invalid trials . On both the valid and invalid trials, the subject's task was the same—to press the key as quickly as possible when the target square appeared.

Daniel Simons & Christopher Chabris (Basketball Gorilla)

The idea that attention can affect perception within a dynamic scene was tested in an experiment by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris. They had people focused on counting passes in a basketball game. During the game either a gorilla or a lady with an umbrella would walk by. 46% of participants failed to notice anything odd.

Distributed Representation

The idea that multiple areas of the brain are involved in working memory

Prefrontal Neuron Research

The idea that the PF cortex is important for working memory is also supported by experiments that have looked at how some neurons in the PF cortex are able to hold information after the original stimulus is no longer present, continuing to respond during a brief delay. Shintaro Funahashi recorded neurons of moneys performing delayed response tasks and the neuron was firing during the delay recording the working memory The key result of this experiment was that Funahashi found neurons that responded only when the square was flashed in a particular location and that these neurons continued responding during the delay . For example, some neurons responded only when the square was flashed in the upper right corner and then during the delay; other neurons responded only when the square was presented at other positions on the screen and then during the delay. The firing of these neurons indicates that an object was presented at a particular place, and this information about where the object was remains available for as long as these neurons continue firing

Nilli Lavie

The idea that the ability to selectively attend to a task can depend both on the distracting stimulus and on the nature of the task has been studied by Nilli Lavie, who introduced the concepts of "processing capacity" and "perceptual load" .

Amnesia and Implicit Memory

The implicit nature of procedural memory has been demonstrated in amnesiac patients like the musician Clive Wearing, discussed earlier, who lost his ability to form new long-term memories but who could still play the piano. Amnesiac patients can also master new skills even though they don't remember any of the practice that led to this mastery.

Reactivation

The major mechanism of consolidation is reactivation , a process in which the hippocampus replays the neural activity associated with a memory. During reactivation, activity occurs in the network connecting the hippocampus and the cortex ( Figure 7.15b), and this activity helps form direct connections between the various cortical areas ( Figure 7.15c). This way of thinking about the interaction between the hippocampus and the cortex pictures the hippocampus as acting like a "glue" that binds together the representations of memory from different cortical areas.

iconic memory or the visual icon (Iconic Store)

The memory we have for that one second immediately after visual stimulus. 5-9 items for fraction of a second Icon means "image" Corresponds to Atkinson and Shiffrin's Sensory memory stage

Tulving and Pearlstone's Recall Experiment

The results of Tulving and Pearlstone's experiment demonstrate that retrieval cues aid memory. Subjects in the free recall group recalled 40 percent of the words, whereas subjects in the cued recall group who had been provided with the names of categories recalled 75 percent of the words.

Posner Results

The results of this experiment indicate that subjects reacted to the square more rapidly when their attention was focused on the location where the signal was to appear. Posner interpreted this result as showing that information processing is more effective at the place where attention is directed . This result and others like it gave rise to the idea that attention is like a spotlight or zoom lens that improves processing when directed toward a particular location

Verbal Hints

The retrieval cues in the two experiments we just described were verbal "hints"—category names like "furniture" in the Tulving and Pearlstone experiment and three-word descriptions created by the subjects in the Mantyla experiment.

Visual Imagery

The visuospatial sketch pad handles visual and spatial information and is therefore involved in the process of VISUAL IMAGERY the creation of visual images in the mind in the absence of a physical visual stimulus.

Distraction

The way the conversation in the library interfered with his cell phone game is an example of distraction —one stimulus interfering with the processing of another stimulus

Word Length Effect

The word length effect occurs when memory for lists of words is better for short words than for long words. Baddeley and coworkers (1984) demonstrated the word length effect by testing subjects recall of short and long words. they found that subjects remembered 77 percent of the short words but only 60 percent of the long words. The word length effect occurs because it takes longer to rehearse the long words and to produce them during recall. Also found a person can remember the number of words they can say out loud in 1-2 seconds. # of words should be close to your digit span.

Illusory Conjunction

These combinations of features from different stimuli are called illusory conjunctions . Illusory conjunctions can occur even if the stimuli differ greatly in shape and size. For example, a small blue circle and a large green square might be seen as a large blue square and a small green circle.

Brain Imaging Tests

They're not as straightforward about the separation of the memories.

Broadbent Filter Model

This diagram represents what happens in a person's mind when directing attention to one stimulus in the environment. Applied to Cherry's attention experiment, "input" would be the sounds of both the attended and unattended messages; the "filter" lets through the attended message and filters out the unattended message; and the "detector" records the information that gets through the filter.

Change Blindness

This difficulty in detecting changes in scenes is called change blindness (Rensink, 2002). The importance of attention (or lack of it) in determining change blindness is demonstrated by the fact that when Rensink added a cue indicating which part of a scene had been changed, subjects detected the changes much more quickly

Testing Effect

This enhanced performance due to retrieval practice is called the testing effect . It has been demonstrated in a large number of experiments, both in the laboratory and in classroom settings

retrograde amnesia

This loss of memory for events that occurred before the injury, called retrograde amnesia , can extend back minutes, hours, or even years, depending on the nature of the injury.

Retrieval

This process of remembering information that is stored in long-term memory. When it is retrieved it goes back into STM awareness.

K. Anders Ericsson and coworkers - chunking

Trained a college kid with average capacity of 7 digits to be able to recall up to 79 digits by chunking the numbers into things that made sense to him. (After 230 (1) hour sessions) He used his LTM knowledge to cue his STM

Anne Treisman (1964) (revised Broadbent's Model)

Treisman proposed that selection occurs in two stages, and she replaced Broadbent's filter with an attenuator. Note that the attenuator represents a process and is not identified with a specific brain structure. Treisman's idea that the information in the channel is selected is similar to what Broadbent proposed, but in Treisman's attenuation model of attention , language and meaning can also be used to separate the messages. However, Treisman proposed that the analysis of the message proceeds only as far as is necessary to identify the attended message. For example, if there are two messages, one in a male voice and one in a female voice, then analysis at the physical level (which Broadbent emphasized) is adequate to separate the low-pitched male voice from the higher-pitched female voice. If, however, the voices are similar, then it might be necessary to use meaning to separate the two messages. The final output of the system is determined in the second stage, when the message is analyzed by the dictionary unit . The dictionary unit contains words, stored in memory, each of which has a threshold for being activated ( Figure 4.6). A threshold is the smallest signal strength that can barely be detected. Thus, a word with a low threshold might be detected even when it is presented softly or is obscured by other words. early selection model because it proposes a filter that operates at an early stage in the flow of information.

Phonological loop

Two components: Phonological store: has a limited capacity and holds information for only a few seconds Articulatory rehearsal process : responsible for rehearsal that can keep items in the phonological store from decaying. The phonological loop holds verbal and auditory information. Thus, when you are trying to remember a telephone number or a person's name, or to understand what your cognitive psychology professor is talking about, you are using your phonological loop. Three Phonological Loop Effects: -phonological similarity effect (sounds confused in the ACP) -Word Length Effect(larger words fill up phonological store, require more time in ACP to rehearse so fewer can get rehearsed) -articulatory suppression (saying "the" prevents rehearsal and fills up the ACP)

Dichotic Listening Task (Broadbent)

Two different messages played in separate ears. Told to only listen to one message. He determined attention must be switched from ear to ear.

Egly Experiment (cued object attention)

Two objects were presented. Subjects cued to focus on top of one object. Then stimuli were presented: 1. Exactly where cued, in the same object 2. In the other object 3. In an un-cued location of first object 1=Fastest Reaction time 2=Slowest reaction time 3-Medium reaction time

T. B. Rogers and coworkers -self-reference effect

Used questions like in the Depth of Processing experiment but related the questions to the subject i.e. make answers apply to you RESULTS Subjects were more likely to remember words that they had rated as describing themselves.

Visual Search (Another approach to Binding problem)

Visual search is something we do anytime we look for an object among a number of other objects, such as you did when you looked for Jennifer Hudson in the group of musicians or when you try to find Waldo in a "Where's Waldo?" picture. A type of visual search called a conjunction search has been particularly useful in studying binding.

Attention to Objects

W can also covertly attend to specific objects. (1) attention can enhance our response to objects (2) when attention is directed to one place on an object, the enhancing effect of that attention spreads to other places on the object.

How Time Affects Memory

We are more likely to remember the details of something that happened yesterday than something that happened a year ago. One procedure for determining what happens to memory as time passes is to present stimuli and then, after some time passes, ask a subject to recall the stimuli or to indicate whether they recognize the stimuli. The typical result of these experiments is that subjects forget some of the stimuli, with forgetting increasing at longer time intervals.

Clive Wearing Neuropsychological Study

Wearing was a highly respected musician and choral director in England who, in his 40s, contracted viral encephalitis, which destroyed parts of his medial temporal lobe, which includes the hippocampus, the amygdala, and other structures in the temporal lobe. Because of his brain damage, Wearing lives totally within the most recent 1 or 2 minutes of his life. Because of his inability to form new memories, he constantly feels he has just woken up. As with H.M., Wearing's case demonstrates the separation of short-term and long-term memory

Encoding Procedures That Affect Retrieval

What do these procedures have in common? Practicing retrieval and generating information both involve actively creating and recreating material. accurate to say that each increases the richness of representation in memory by providing connections between the material to be remembered and other material in memory. For example, when material is organized, it becomes easier to form links between items (such as apple, grape , and plum ) in a list. there is a close relationship between encoding and retrieval.

Defining depth of processing

What is needed is a way to define depth of processing that is independent of the memory test, but such a definition does not exist.

In-Valid (Posner)

When arrow appeared in a location not "cued"

attentional capture

When attention due to stimulus salience causes an involuntary shift of attention, as happened when the loud noise in the library caused Roger to shift his attention, this shift is called attentional capture (Anderson et al., 2011). This capturing of attention could be important if it serves as a warning of something dangerous, such as an explosion, a dangerous animal, or an object moving rapidly toward us.

Valid (Posner)

When the arrow appears where it was "cued" to appear

Sign Language

Which structures used with ASL? Phonological loop OR Visuospacial sketchpad? Effects Obtained: -Word length effect (sign-length) -Phonological similarity effect (results inconclusive)

LTM Visual Coding

You use visual coding in long-term memory when you visualize a person or place from the past. For example, if you are remembering your fifth-grade teacher's face, you are using visual coding.

Working Memory Model Example

Your phonological loop is taking in the verbal directions; your sketch pad is helping you visualize a map of the streets leading to the restaurant; and your central executive is coordinating and combining these two kinds of information. In addition, the central executive might be helping you ignore the messages from the radio so you can focus your attention on the directions.

paired-associate learning

a list of word pairs is presented. Later, the first word of each pair is presented, and the subject's task is to remember the word it was paired with.

saccadic eye movement

a rapid, jerky movement from one fixation to the next. We move our eyes about 3x per second.

Selective Attention

attending to one thing while ignoring others.

Early Research on Attention

because early research on attention helped establish the information processing approach to cognition, which became the central focus of the new field of cognitive psychology

Transfer Appropriate Processing (cognitive matching)

better performance when the type of processing matches in encoding and retrieval Donald Morris and coworkers (1977) did an experiment that showed that retrieval is better if the same cognitive tasks are involved during both encoding and retrieval. The question Morris was interested in was how the subjects' ability to retrieve the target words would be affected by the way they processed the words during the retrieval part of the experiment. There were a number of different conditions key result of this experiment was that the subjects' retrieval performance depended on whether the retrieval task matched the encoding task ALSO Morris's experiment shows that deeper processing at encoding does not always result in better retrieval, as prop subjects who had focused on rhyming during encoding remembered more words than subjects who had focused on meaning. Thus, subjects who had focused on the word's sound during the first part of the experiment did better when the test involved focusing on sound. This result—better performance when the type of processing matches in encoding and retrieval—is called transfer-appropriate processing .

Bottom-Up Eye Movement

bottom-up , based primarily on physical characteristics of the stimulus

Long-term memory (LTM)

can hold a large amount of information for years or even decades. Long-term memory is responsible for storing information for long periods of time—which can extend from minutes to a lifetime. Includes: Episodic, Procedural, and Semantic

Driving and talking on Phone

complex mental tasks reduce ability to detect visual targets by 30% higher level mental tasks take attention resources away from the road Talking to passenger not as bad a phone

Edmund Vogel - central executive studies non-brain damaged subjects - Event-Related Potential

considered how well the central executive controlled attention by first separating subjects into two groups based on their performance on a test of working memory. Subjects in the high-capacity group were able to hold a number of items in working memory; subjects in the low-capacity group were able to hold fewer items in working memory. Subjects were tested using the change detection procedure. Their task was to indicate whether the cued red rectangles in the test display had the same or different orientations than the ones in the memory display. While they were making this judgment, a brain response called the EVENT RELATED POTENTIAL was measured, which indicated how much space was used in working memory as they carried out the task.

Broadbent Model of Attention (Early Selection)

created a model of attention designed to explain how it is possible to focus on one message and why information isn't taken in from the other message. This model, which introduced the flow diagram to cognitive psychology, proposed that information passes through the following stages: 1. Sensory memory holds all of the incoming information for a fraction of a second and then transfers all of it to the filter. 2. The filter identifies the message that is being attended to based on its physical characteristics—things like the speaker's tone of voice, pitch, speed of talking, and accent—and lets only this attended message pass through to the detector in the next stage. All of the other messages are filtered out. 3. The detector processes the information from the attended message to determine higher-level characteristics of the message, such as its meaning. Because only the important, attended information has been let through the filter, the detector processes all of the information that enters it. 4. The output of the detector is sent to short-term memory , which holds information for 10-15 seconds and also transfers information into long-term memory , which can hold information indefinitely.

Brian Levine and coworkers fMRI Episodic Vs Semantic

did a brain imaging experiment in which they had subjects keep diaries of events and facts. They read them back to them in an fMRI. The scans showed distinct areas for both types of memory The yellow areas represent brain regions associated with episodic memories; the blue areas are brain regions associated with semantic, factual knowledge (personal and nonpersonal). These results and others indicate that while there can be overlap between activation caused by episodic and semantic memories, there are also major differences

George Alvarez and Patrick Cavanagh

did an experiment using the change detection procedure used by Luck and Vogel but used complex shapes instead of simple shapes They determined that the complexity of the shape affected the capacity of the STM. The more complex, the fewer they could recall.

Lee Brooks - visuospatial interference

did some experiments in which he demonstrated how interference can affect the operation of the visuospatial sketch pad. Letter "F" experiments Most people find that the pointing task is more difficult. The reason is that holding the image of the letter and pointing are both visuospatial tasks, so the visuospatial sketch pad becomes overloaded. In contrast, saying "Out" or "In" is an articulatory task that is handled by the phonological loop, so speaking doesn't interfere with visualizing the F.

Control Processes

dynamic processes associated with the structural features that can be controlled by the person and may differ from one task to another. -Selective attention (focusing on a phone number on screen) - Rehearsal (repeating the phone number to remember) - Strategies you might use to help make a stimulus more memorable, such as relating the digits in a phone number to a familiar date in history - Strategies of attention that help you focus on information that is particularly important or interesting.

Advertising Effects - by T. J. Perfect and C. Askew -Priming

had subjects scan articles in a magazine. Each page of print was faced by an advertisement, but subjects were not told to pay attention to the advertisements. When they were later asked to rate a number of advertisements on various dimensions, such as how appealing, eye-catching, distinctive, and memorable they were, they gave higher ratings to the ones they had been exposed to than to other advertisements that they had never seen. This result qualifies as an effect of implicit memory because when the subjects were asked to indicate which advertisements had been presented at the beginning of the experiment, they recognized only an average of 2.8 of the original 25 advertisements.

Short-term memory (STM)

holds five to seven items for about 15 to 20 seconds Information that stays in our memory for brief periods, about 10 to 15 seconds if we don't repeat it over and over is short-term memory or working memory

Visuospatial sketchpad

holds visual and spatial information. When you form a picture in your mind or do tasks like solving a puzzle or finding your way around campus, you are using your visuospatial sketch pad (passive store). Visual Scribe=active. Refreshes the image Articulatory suppression also affects visual storage Aspects: -visual imagery -mental rotation -visual chunking -visual recall -visual interference

Binding Problem

how an object's individual features become bound together. Explained by Treisman's feature integration theory

Dynamic Aspects of LTM

how it interacts with working memory to create our ongoing experience. Provides an archive that we can can refer to when we want to remember events from the past and a wealth of background information that we are constantly consulting as we use working memory to make contact with what is happening at a particular moment.

Propaganda effect

in which subjects are more likely to rate statements they have read or heard before as being true, simply because they have been exposed to them before. This effect can occur even when the person is told that the statements are false when they first read or hear them (Begg et al., 1992). The propaganda effect involves implicit memory because it can operate even when people are not aware that they have heard or seen a statement before, and may even have thought it was false when they first heard it.

Timo Mantyla (1986) - retrieval cue experiment

o presented his subjects with a list of 504 nouns, such as banana, freedom , and tree . During this study phase, subjects were told to write three words they associated with each noun. For example, three words for banana might be yellow, bunches , and edible . In the test phase of the experiment, these subjects were presented with the three words they had generated (self-generated retrieval cues) for half the nouns, or with three words that someone else had generated (other-person- generated retrieval cues) for the other half of the nouns. Their task was to remember the noun they had seen during the study phase. The results indicated that when the self-generated retrieval cues were presented, subjects remembered 91 percent of the words but when the other-person-generated retrieval cues were presented, subjects remembered only 55 percent of the words The results of this experiment demonstrate that retrieval cues (the three words) provide extremely effective information for retrieving memories, but that retrieval cues are significantly more effective when they are created by the person whose memory is being tested

Occlusion Heuristic

object there even if obstructed

retroactive interference

occurs when new learning interferes with remembering old learning. Example: retroactive interference occurs when learning Spanish makes it more difficult to remember the French words you had learned earlier.

Classical Conditioning Experiments

occurs when the following two stimuli are paired: (1) a neutral stimulus that initially does not result in a response (2) a conditioning stimulus that does result in a response An example of classical conditioning from the laboratory is presenting a tone to a person followed by a puff of air to the eye that causes the person to blink. The tone initially does not cause an eyeblink, but after a number of pairings with the puff of air, the person blinks in response to the tone. This is implicit memory because it can occur even if the person has forgotten about the original pairing of the tone and the air puff.

Working memory in the Brain

prefrontal cortex and visual cortex

The Future

research doesn't ask how well we can predict the future, but asks how well we can create possible scenarios about the future. There is evidence of a connection between the ability to remember the past and the ability to create future scenarios. Evidence for this connection is provided by patients who have lost their episodic memory as a result of brain damage. Patients who've lost their episodic memory and cant tell you their past also can not imagine the future (except for statistical type futures)

Selective Forgetting

selectively forgetting specific events. This occasionally occurs, as when memories for particularly traumatic events are lost (although sometimes the opposite happens, so traumatic events stand out in memory;

of localization of function

separated areas of the brain are specialized for the perception of different qualities.

Semantic Experience

the experience of semantic memory involves accessing knowledge about the world that does not have to be tied to remembering a personal experience. This knowledge can be things like facts, vocabulary, numbers, and concepts. When we experience semantic memory, we are not traveling back to a specific event from our past, but we are accessing things we are familiar with and know about. Tulving describes the experience of semantic memory as KNOWING , with the idea that knowing does not involve mental time travel.

Early Selection Model

the filter eliminates the unattended information right at the beginning of the flow of information. Broadbent and Treisman

Attentional Capture

the interruption of his eavesdropping by the noise of the overturned book cart provides an example of attentional capture —a rapid shifting of attention usually caused by a stimulus such as a loud noise, bright light, or sudden movement.

Familiarity

the person seems familiar and you might remember his name, but you can't remember any details about specific experiences involving that person. Familiarity is associated with semantic memory because it is not associated with the circumstances under which knowledge was acquired.

stimulus salience

the physical properties of the stimulus, such as color, contrast, or movement. Capturing attention by stimulus salience is a bottom-up process because it depends solely on the pattern of light and dark, color and contrast in a stimulus.

Binding

the process by which features such as color, form, motion, and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object. Example: But even though the ball's shape, movement, depth, and color cause firing in different areas of the person's cortex, he doesn't perceive the ball as separated shape, movement, depth, and color perceptions. He experiences an integrated perception of a ball

Coding Vs Encoding

the process of acquiring information and transferring it into LTM Notice that the term encoding is similar to the term coding that we discussed in relation to STM and LTM CODING refers to the form in which information is represented. For example, a word can be CODED visually or by its sound or by its meaning. ENCODING refers to the process used to get information into LTM. For example, a word can be encoded by repeating it over and over, by thinking of other words that rhyme with it, or by using it in a sentence.