CogLab Assignments
lexical decision
A mental lexicon serves as a "mental dictionary," storing information about a words semantic content, its part of language, and its relationships to other words. Test participants are expected to respond more quickly to words when they share a similar meaning to the words that were presented immediately prior. If you want a test to be difficult then one could organize the test questions so that the questions that are close in proximity to one another on the test come from different main topics. Everything else equal, separating questions that cover the same main topics makes the test more difficult because one question does not prime the following question
encoding specificity
According to the encoding specificity principle (Tulving, 1983) the recollection of an event depends on the interaction between the properties of the encoded event and the properties of the encoded retrieval information. In other words, whether an item will be remembered at a particular time depends on the interaction between the processing that occurred during encoding and the processing that occured at retrieval. Bank and Money and Bank and River
age of acquisition
According to this research, the response time to words should be faster than the response time to nonwords, and those words learned earlier in life will be responded to the fastest One explanation is that words that are learned early are over-represented in the mental lexicon and thus are more easily accessed. Another explanation (similar in nature) is that people have more practice accessing words that were learned early and that is why they can access them faster.
spatial cueing
An endogenous cue must be identified and acted on by the observer. An exogenous cue automatically draws one's attention to the cued location. If the arrow predicted the target location with 50% accuracy you would find that your reaction times for the valid cue condition would be no different than your reaction times for the invalid condition because the arrow would predict the location of the target at no better than chance. If the arrow predicted the target location with 20% accuracy, given enough trials, your reaction time for the invalid condition would be faster than your reaction time for the neutral condition which would, in turn, be faster than your reaction time for the valid condition. This is because most participants would learn to expect the location of the target following the arrow cue to be at the opposite location indicated by the arrow. Therefore, the invalid cue would end up serving as a reliable cue to the upcoming target's location.
attentional blink
Attentional blink shows us that attention has a limited capacity. There is a limit to the amount of information we can attend to at any one point in time.
implicit learning
During implicit learning, there is an absence of awareness in which one passively acquires knowledge
false memory
Even if trained to do so, the average person does not consciously register every detail in the visual field. Extensive research of top-down processing shows that the human mind tends to fill in these gaps in perception with previously learned information, so one's expectations largely bias perception. For example, those who have visited the doctor's office before know that a stethoscope is a common tool for doctors to use during routine checkups. So, one could logically expect to see a doctor wearing one, and may believe that she saw it during the checkup even if she did not.
categorical perception-identification
Even when the physical stimuli change continuously, people perceive it categorically. (What sound is played)
categorical perception-discrimination
Experience can affect one's ability to make perceptual discriminations. Children are born with the ability to distinguish between all phonemes, but as they get older they are only able to distinguish between the phonemes of their native language. Predicted experimental results suggest that subjects should record positive discrimination scores (more "same" responses) for comparisons between the first four stimuli, which sound like "ba," and comparisons between the last four stimuli, which sound like "pa." When stimuli from opposite categories were combined, the score would be negative, showing more "different" responses.
typical reasoning
Heuristics can be advantageous because they allow people to make quick estimates about the probabilities of various day to day activities. However, one disadvantage of the use of heuristics is that this increased speed comes at a cost. Heuristics, which serve as "mental shortcuts," can be inaccurate and lead to false judgments.
statistical learning
If statistical learning has occurred, participants will have gained insight into the patterns of image sequences, and therefore be able to determine when a sequence is disordered or rearranged. Statistical learning provides insight into the implicit pattern recognition that occurs when a person develops language abilities. Statistical learning refers to the acquisition of information through pattern recognition. This type of learning is subtle, and may even be implicit.
change detection
In the no-flicker condition people often use a serial search strategy, they report having to search the scene item by item to identify the change. In the flicker condition people often use a parallel search strategy, they report looking at the scene as a whole and the change in the scene automatically draws their attention.
memory judgment
Judgments about memory ability are not accurate measures of actual memory capabilities. According to the data, test participants tend to overestimate the effects of physical characteristics, such as font size, while underestimating the effects that factors like the number of presentations will have on memory. This potentially creates false beliefs about metacognition and individual memory performance.
risky decisions
More risky decisions made when facing a loss. Gamble vs sure thing.
production effect
One example of this is the production effect (MacLeod et al., 2010): under certain circumstances, memory is better when a person has to produce some response at encoding compared to when no production is required. When assessed by a recognition test, performance was more accurate for the read aloud condition than the read silently condition. However, if all words in the list are read aloud, then performance is not necessarily going to be better than if all the words in the list are read silently.
word length effect
One finding that was instrumental in the development of working memory was the word length effect: people recall lists of short words more accurately than lists of long words.
prototypes
One stores information about all the examples of an item that she has experienced in one conglomerate concept, which serves as a mental construct based on the average of all the members of the concept category. When one sees a new object, she then compares it to the mental construct, and if it matches this prototype well enough, it is then classified and treated as a member of that category. Typicality effect: People are often quicker at identifying more typical members of a category than less typical ones. For instance, people are faster to identify a sparrow as a bird than they are to classify a penguin as a bird. The prototype model says that we have mental representations of each of our categories that include the features that are most typical of category members. When we encounter a typical category member it is much easier to identify than when we encounter an atypical category member because it has features that are more inline with the features of our category prototype.
absolute identification
People are typically good at identifying faces, letters, animals, and types of cars. It is easy to identify items within these categories because the members of these categories vary along many dimensions. For example, cars vary in their many dimensions including their shape, height, width, and color.
Wason selection
Research has shown that people find it very difficult to decide what information is necessary in order to test the truth of an abstract logical-reasoning problem.A typical experiment using the Wason Selection Task will present some rule, and ask participants to see if the rule is being violated. Consider the rule: "If a card has a D on one side, it has a 3 on the other side." Abstract rules are usually evaluated using logic while thematic rules are evaluated using logic and experience. People typically perform better with thematic rules than abstract rules because they have an additional source of information (experience) to help them.
partial report
Sperling's experimentation demonstrated that the time required to report sensory information set a limit on his test subjects' recall accuracy. Experiments using the partial report methodology have shown that the limiting factor in reporting is not one's perceptual capacity but rather the time duration that items can be held in one's sensory store. Since items fade away from one's sensory store in just a few hundred milliseconds, the longer the interval between the offset of the stimulus and the recall of the items from that stimulus the worse one's recall is going to be.
decision making
Studies in cognitive psychology tell us that the way people make decisions is influenced by a variety of factors. In fact, it is fairly easy to create contexts in which people choose certain options. Many of these tendencies are called "framing effects," because the perceived context or way the choices are "framed" make a big difference, even for situations that are otherwise equivalent.
Brown-Peterson
The Brown-Peterson data was attributed to the decay of information from short term memory. If an individual does not actively rehearse information then that information decays from short term memory with in a few seconds.
apparent motion
The amount of information neurons can transmit is limited by their firing rate. Therefore, even real motion is not continuously sent to the higher processing centers of the brain. If two stimuli are briefly flashed in rapid succession, observers will sometimes report seeing motion between the two stimuli. If the time between the offset of the first stimulus and the onset of the second stimulus (called the interstimulus interval or ISI) is very short, observers simply see two dots presented nearly simultaneously. The visual system has motion detectors that pick up on objects in the visual field at various locations. There activation is dependent on the timing of an object being identified at two separated locations. Participants report assigning the shortest ISI to the smallest dot distance and longest ISI to the largest dot distance
brain asymmetry
The left hemisphere is said to specialize in controlling language comprehension while the right hemisphere is believed to specialize in the control of one's spatial capabilities. Having a brain in which some processes are specific to one hemisphere allows one to multitask
memory span
The memory span experiment is one measure of working memory capacity. In this experiment, participants are given a list of items and asked to recall the list. The list length is varied to see at what list length participants will make make few errors. That list length is the memory span for that person on that task. Same order.
neighborhood size effect
The neighborhood size effect suggests that short-term memory is affected by long-term memory factors like linguistics, which require at least some degree of processing. The neighborhood size affect demonstrates that words with a larger neighborhood are recalled in the proper order with greater accuracy than small neighborhood words. This asserts that memory span is a function of higher level processes and encoding.
serial position
The order in which stimuli are presented affects how well they are remembered during future recall tasks. The primacy effect is a cognitive phenomena in which items at the beginning of a list are recalled with more accuracy and ease than items in the middle. The recency effect explains that items at the end of a list are recalled more easily than those items in the middle of a sequence, though not always as easily as the first items.
phonological similarity effect
The purpose of saying numbers aloud on half the trials is to preoccupy the articulatory control process. This distraction prevents the articulatory control process from converting visual perceptions into phonological information. By this method, the phonological similarity effect is removed.
You and your family have just finished Thanksgiving dinner and some of your family members are starting to get sick. Your sister thinks that the jello salad is what made everyone sick. During dinner, you noticed that your brother ate some of the jello salad but your aunt did not. You also know that your grandpa got sick, but your mother did not. Which two people should you talk with to test your sister's hypothesis and what do you need to ask them?
The two people you need to talk to are your brother and your mother. You need to ask your brother if he got sick and you need to ask your mother if she ate the jello salad. If your brother did not get sick and/or your mother ate the jello salad than your sister's hypothesis is incorrect.
Monty hall
Three doors, always best to choose the second one.
metacontrast masking
Time time between when the masked is shown after the stimuli effect recollection of the target. However, when performance is plotted against the stimulus onset asynchrony, the graph is U shaped.
visual search
Typically participants report that the conjunctive search is more difficult than the feature search. In the feature search the target pops out because it has one feature that is unique from all of the distractors while in the conjunctive search the target shares features with its distractors.
remember-know
When participants judge an item to be old, they are asked to make a further distinction. If they are consciously aware of some aspects of the original episode, they should indicate that they remember the item. If they have no conscious awareness of the learning episode, they should respond that they just know that the item was on the list.
irrelevant speech effect
When people are asked to recall a list of items, their performance is usually worse when the presentation of the list is accompanied by irrelevant speech. One reason that this phenomenon, known as the irrelevant speech effect, has attracted a lot of attention is because it seems strange that auditory information (the irrelevant speech) would interfere with visual information (the items you are trying to remember).
levels of processing
Words encoded with the deepest level of processing were remembered with the greatest accuracy
Stroop effect
having automized reading, recognizing a word seems to happen as quickly as recognizing a color does. So, when the written word matches the color of its text, whether the text or the color is recognized first does not matter; the response will be the same, and it will be automatic. In contrast, for incongruent trials, the correct response only corresponds to the color of the text, not the word it spells. So, when the word is recognized first, one makes a conscious decision to hit the correct color key, which takes more time.
Simon effect
result of a conflict between the location of attention and the location of response. In this particular experiment, the location that the colored square flashed served as the fixation point of the participants' attention. Meanwhile, the location of response was the particular button that the subjects pressed. This study typically finds that subjects responses are faster and more accurate when responding to information that appears in the same location as the location of response, even if the location information is not pertinent to the task.
word superiority effect
the proportion of correct judgments is higher for words than for nonwords and the reaction time is shorter for words than for nonwords.