Cognitive Psychology Test #2

Explicit Memory

(Declarative) Conscious access to information from the past

Implicit Memory

(Non-declarative) past experiences influence perceptions, thoughts and actions without awareness that any info from past is accessed

Short term memory

*Multimodal (general for senses) *Small capacity, 7 +/- 2 "chunks" (more recently revised down to 4) *Quick decay, less than a minute and over writing

Phonological Loop Evidence - Articulatory Suppression Studies

1. Articulatory Suppression Studies Baddeley, Lewis, and Vallar (1984) They found that while people are reviewing words that need to be remembered and "blah blah blah" is playing they couldn't remember the words because they couldn't encode acoustically. Their articulatory control process was busy. Don't see acoustic confusion effect (worse recall performance when words sound similar) Do see acoustic confusion with simultaneous finger tapping

Evidence for Categories are structured in levels

1. Basic level names are used to describe categories and are likely to produce semantic priming effects 2. Different levels of categorization activate different brain areas

The inferential Power of Category Knowledge

1. Category knowledge captures and integrates diverse pieces of information about a category. 2. A new category member activates knowledge related to that general category, yielding information to deal with that new item. Thus, when you encounter something associated with the category, other knowledge becomes active.

What are the four general characteristics of the PDP approach?

1. Cognitive processes are based on parallel operations, rather than serial operations. Many patters of activation may be proceeding simultaneously. 2. A network contains basic neuron-like units or nodes, which are connected together so that a specific node has many links to other nodes. 3. The process of spreading information from one node to other nodes is called spreading activation. 4. Consistent with the concept of situated cognition, the current context often activates only certain components of a concept's meaning.

Factors that aid encoding

1. Create connections 2. Active generation and recall 3. Organization

Four Function of Central Executive

1. Determines what information goes into storage. 2. Determines which buffer is used - phonological loop or visuospatial sketch pad 3. Integrates and coordinates information between buffers 4. Allows for held information to be inspected, transformed, cognitively manipulated

Research that shows the difference between STM and LTM

1. Ebbinghaus: no effort to recall 1-5 syllables, considerable effort to recall more than 5 syllables 2. Neurological: neurological patients can show specific deficits in STM, LTM or in transition from STM to LTM

How category knowledge develops

1. From establishing representations of a category's individual members. For example, getting to know who your roommate is. We start a mental category for that person. 2. From integrating those representations. Integrating what a specific cat is like, and what a cat is like. All category members are linked by common characteristics. These characteristics make up the representation of a category.

2 Criteria necessary to form a representation

1. Intentionality criterion. A representation must be formed intentionally to stand for something else. Intentionality comes from a. Conscious planning b. following an unconscious goal. Automatic goal activation by the brain. 2. Information-carrying Criterion: Memory includes detail that distinguishes it from other memories - some distinctiveness.

Limitations of Levels-of-Processing Theory

1. Logic of LOP is circular 2. Encoding specificity principle

3 component parts of Working Memory

1. Phonological loop (inner voice) 2. Sketchpad (inner eye) 3. Central Executive (attention)

5 Important Aspects of Working Memory

1. Phonological loop needed for acquiring new vocabulary 2. Reading comprehension 3. Relationship to efficiently focusing attention and filtering out irrelevant information 4. Aging and Working Memory: working memory capacity is a better predictor of reasoning performance than age 5. More active measures of working memory correlate, but not more static measures (simple span)

What are the three theories of how categorization occurs

1. Prototype theory 2. Exemplar Theory 3. Network theories

What are the three characteristics of prototypes?

1. Prototypes are supplied as examples of a category. 2. Prototypes are judged more quickly than non prototypes, after semantic priming 3. Prototypes share attributes in a family resemblance category.

Prototype Theory Evidence

1. Rosch work on prototype ratings. They studied how typical something is. They found that there were faster reactions times. The researchers present the name of an object, followed by two pictures. The participant must decide if these two pictures are the same as one another. The priming is effective because the presentation of this word allows you to create a mental representation of this word. The participants made faster judgments when they heard a basic-level word.

The three levels of categorization

1. Superordinate-level categories: they are a more higher-level or more general categories like "furniture," "animal" or "tool." 2. Basic-level categories are moderately specific. Like "chair", "dog," and "screwdriver." 3. Subordinate-level categories refer to lower level or more specific categories. Like "desk chair," "collie," and "Phillips screwdriver."

Four theoretical features important to PDP approach

1. The connections between these neuron-like units are weighted, and these connection weights determine how much activation one unit can pass on to another unit. (CONNECTION WEIGHTS) 2. When a unit reaches a critical level of activation, it may affect another unit, either by exciting it (if connection weight is positive) or by inhibiting it (if the connection weight is negative). 3. Experience changes connection weights. Each new experience with a particular item will change the strength of connections among relevant units by adjusting the connection weights. 4. Sometimes we only have partial memory for some information, rather than complete, perfect memory. The brain's ability to provide partial memory is called graceful degradation. (Tip of the tongue)

Category

A category is a set of objects that belong together. Your cognitive system considers these objects to be at least partly equivalent. Fruit represents a category of food items.

Concept

A concept refers to your mental representations of a category. In other words, the physical category called "fruit" is stored as a mental representation distributed throughout your cerebral cortex.

Episodic Buffer

A limited capacity store that binds together information to form integrated episodes (drawing together visual and auditory and perhaps other modality info.)

Network Models

A net-like organization of memory with lots of interconnections. Works like a neural collection. Multiple nodes connected to each other.

Prototype

A prototype is the item that is the best, most typical example of a category; a prototype therefore is the ideal representative of this category.

Situated Cognition Approach

According to the situated cognition approach, we make use of information in the immediate environment or situation. As a result, our knowledge often depends on the context that surrounds us. With respect to our general knowledge, we tend to code a concept in terms of the context in which we learned this information.

Prototype Approach

According to this prototype approach, you decide whether a particular item belongs to a category by comparing this item with a prototype. If the item is similar to the prototype, you include that item within this category.

Who proposed that STM be reconceived as working memory?

Baddeley

Visuospatial Sketchpad evidence

Baddeley & Lieberman (1980) Monkey Experiment

Typicality Effect

Categorization is faster for typical items than non-typical

1. Prototype Theory

Decide whether a new item belongs to a category by comparing it to the prototype. A.Category members based on their prototypicality. For example a robin is a "better" bird than a penguin. B. Categories are structured in levels Superordinate - higher order, general Basic-level - moderately specific Subordinate - more specific

Evidence supporting the idea that people use basic-level names to identify objects.

Eleanor Rosch (1976) found that people typically preferred to use basic-level names when identifying objects. Also, people produce the basic-level names faster than either the subordinate or the superordinate. And people remember the basic-level names of things when they are asked to recall them later.

Episodic Memory

Episodic Memory contains information about events that happen to us.

Exemplar Theory

First learn about specific examples of a concept; then classify each new item based on deciding how closely it resembles all of the specific examples.

Heit and Barsalou (1996)

Heit and Barsalou wanted to determine whether the exemplar approach could explain the structure of several superordinate categories. They asked a group of undergraduate students to supply the first example that came to mind for each of seven basic-level categories. A second group of students rated how typical each of the answers were to the category, "animal." The information about the exemplar frequency and the exemplar typicality did accurately predict which of the seven categories were most typical for the superordinate category of "animal." This supports the Exemplar approach (in contrast to the prototypical approach).

Word Length Effect

Less capacity to memorize lists of multi-syllable words compared to single-syllable words.

Adaptive Constructive Processes

Processes that play a functional role in memory and cognition but produce distortions, errors, or illusions as a consequence of doing so. Flexibility requires a fallible system.

Semantic Memory

Semantic memory refers to our organized knowledge about the world. For example, our knowledge of words or what a cat is.

Phonological loop

Stores about 2 seconds of auditory information

Evidence for Exemplar Theory

Studies do show that people make judgments based on examples.

Exemplar Approach

The exemplar approach argues that we first learn information about some specific examples of a concept; then we classify each new stimulus by deciding how closely it resembles all of those specific examples. Each of those specific examples is called an exemplar.

Levels of Processing Theory

There are various aspects of any given stimulus that can be attended and processed. Any incoming stimulus can be processed in many different ways.

Parallel Distributed Processing Approach

This approach proposes that cognitive processes can be represented by a model in which activation flows through networks that link together a large number of simple, neuron-like units. Emphasizes that we should represent concepts in terms of networks, rather than specific locations in the brain. Distributed: these activations occur in several different locations. Parallel: these activations take place simultaneously, rather than one after another.

Typicality effect

This occurs when people judge typical items (prototypes) faster than non-typical items.

Spontaneous Generalization

This occurs when people make a generalization by using individual cases to draw inferences about general information. This process leads to stereotypes.

Encoding

Various processes by which information is transformed into a memory representation

Default Assignment

We fill in missing information about a particular person or a particular object by making a best guess, we make a default assignment based on information from other similar or objects.

Priming

When you encounter something associated with the category, other knowledge becomes active. A fundamentally significant phenomena for interaction as well as cognition.

Spreading activation

When you see or hear the name of a concept, the node representing that concept is activated. The activation expands or spreads from that node to other connected nodes, a process called spreading activation.

Phonological Loop Evidence - Articulatory Processes

Word-length effect is gone when articulatory suppression is instated. Not able to "repeat" words in working memory. Word -length effect: recall is worse when items maintained are long words (the time it takes to say the words)

Working Memory

Working memory is a workspace for the mind. It collects sensory input, activates relevant LTMs, and transforms information to suit current needs.

Duration of Echoic Memory

about 2000-4000ms

Duration of Iconic Memory

about 250-500ms

Embodied Cognition

cognition arises through the dynamic interplay of brain controlling bodily action controlling perception, which changes the brain. Thinking is not separate from the body.

Chunking

combination of small units into larger meaningful units that are weakly associated with other chunks

Elaboration

interpreting information, connecting it with other information, and thinking it over.

Transfer Appropriate processing

processing at encoding is most effective to the extent that processing overlaps with the processing to be performed at retrieval.

Scripts

simple, well-structured sequences of events in a specified order

Family Resemblance

this means that no single attribute is shared by all examples in a category, however, each example has at least one attribute in common with some other example in it's "family"

Schema

well-integrated knowledge about a situation, event, or person

Semantic Priming Effect

when people respond faster to an item if it was preceded by an item with similar meaning (helps us understand how people retrieve information)