Cognition Final

Failure to retrieve

"Lost the access card", Not "decay", The memory trace itself does not get weaker over time: simply buried under other info

Primary Effect

"firstness", words early in the list that are remembered relatively well and are consilidated quickly;Typically we start repeating the words to try and remember them but you can only do this for a few words at a time,So the first few words are echoing in your head and interfere with repeating/remembering words that come later in the sequence

Roger Shepard

1970's, Interested in the process of object representation, participants 2 shapes, Same or different?, One is misoriented relative to the other, People are mentally rotating one relative to the other, 180° - completely reversed to each other, The more misoriented they are, the longer it takes to answer the question, This was the 1st time people understood that we hold mental representations in our head

Letter Sequence

Able to remember more because we chunk them together (USA, NBC etc.), Able to recognize (from LTM) how the letters fit together and only have to remember 4 items, rather than 12 separate letters, Chunks - links to LTM

Ludwig Wittgenstein

"What does a word actually mean?" (meaning is given by definition),Most mental categories have "fuzzy" boundaries,t's hard to come up with a clear definition, but there is a resemblance,We start with one item and find others which are similar, but eventually we begin to move further away from the original item

There's no evidence that anything that was consolidated is ever really forgotten

BUT it's hard to know what information is consolidated and what isn't

Memory

Brain system that represents information about the outside world, May be inborn information

Hume's Problem: The Puzzle of Induction

Scottish philosopher,Will the sun rise tomorrow?, Hume wanted to know how we have come to that knowledge

Propositional Representations

a propositional representation stores the abstract relationship, Abstracts it away to just one proposition

Recognition

ability to pick out a word that was spoken from the list (much easier than recall), Ex. Multiple choice exam

Working Memory Seems to be defined as

being remembered for only a short time, but it can be held for an infinite amount of time (as long as you're currently thinking about it), Very active process that requires a lot of brainpower

Buffer

computer term for a holding place (now also used in psych)

Effect

empirical tendency researchers have discovered in the lab

Jointly Sufficient

if you take those features together, it is reasonably to conclude that person is a bachelor

Rehearsal

repetition of an item to facilitate consolidation, Not a great method

Rationalist Knowledge

what we have extracted from the experience

Verbal STM

"Phone number" memory

Recognition vs. Recall

Difference is in how you're prompte, Recognition - Ex. "Choose our 7th president from these 5 choices", Recall - Ex. "Who was our 7th president?", Verbal vs. Proposition vs. Visual vs.

What is Knowledge?

You can think of knowledge & memory as somewhat synonymous

Basic level

but when we speak, we use words closer to the middle of the category (bird, fish), Children learn to speak with basic words (sister → sibling),There's not necessarily an end to the these categories

Retrograde Amnesia

forgetting what happened before the accident

Hippocampus is involved in

forming new memories

Empiricism

knowledge comes just from experience

Semantic Memory

meaning related

Procedural Memory

memory for procedures (muscle memory), Remembering the command signals from the brain that are sent to the muscles

Declarative Memory

sentence that says something, a fact (as opposed to a question or a command)

Category membership is determined by

similarity to the prototype (ex. some games are more similar to each other than others--chess is more similar to checkers than it is to Monopoly), How similar is it to that prototype? If it's similar, it's in the category. If it is dissimilar, it is not in the category.

Retrieval

you can go to LTM and bring information back to STM, Just because something is in there, doesn't mean we can easily access it

Free Recall

you can recall items in any order you wish

Access Cue

you need a way to move an item from the short-term memory to long-term memory

Delete the Prototype?

Taught participants with the "F", but only used distorted "F's", In essence, he deleted the prototype, Atypical instances still take longer to classify, even if "typical" category members (the original, unaltered F) have never been observed!

Serial Position

The tendency of a person to recall the first and last items in a series best, and the middle items worst, Words in the middle of the list are somewhat "suppressed", Words at the beginning and the end of the list are much more likely to be remembered

Concepts and Categories

These terms will be used interchangeably

Property Inheritance

We don't store items such as "tuna fish swim",We store "most fish swim",The property tag can beat the inference,If we have a conflict between an inference and a property tag, the property tag wins

Hierarchical Representation of Spatial Information

We make these errors because of our hierarchical representations of spatial information

Primary Effect

early items are recalled better (because of less interference)

Intension

mental representation of the category (tell us what "table" means),Inside your head

Consolidation

movement of information from working memory (STM) LTM

Property Tag

shows what is different from the inference for the category

Concept Learning

the abstraction of categories from examples

Kosslyn

Developed the model of mental imagery we're examining, Representations of mental images are quasi-pictorial analogs of real images, Not very detailed, Ex. Form mental image of a tiger, most people know the colors but wouldn't know the number of stripes on the imagined tiger

Association Networks

Developing Locke's ideas about associations between things, Sky & blue = the sky is blue, All sensory experiences are associated with each other and that's how we learn, Different concepts floating around in your head that are connected by associations/neural connections, Later on, rationalists would make more specific deductions

Remembering the Number Sequence

Everyone is able to remember 4-6 digits, 8 is more difficult, and 10 is almost impossible, You can typically remember 7 ± 2 items, This is why phone numbers are 7 numbers long (prior to us using area codes)

Prototypicality Effects

Everything we see, we connect to groups with similar properties, Classical View - clear-cut definitions of categories, We have a prototype and some way of comparing similarity between items, The more typical the item (less distorted), the faster people were able to recognize it

Massed vs. Spaced Training

Ex. Studying, Spaced - breaking up a large chunk of time into different sessions, Massed - one long session, It is much more effective when you have two 10 minute sessions than one 20 minute session (this way you study some material and consolidated into LTM, rather than just holding it all in STM)

Explicit vs. Implicit Memory

Explicit - being told to remember something, Implicit - what you learn from "accidents" along the way

Hypothesis involving H.M:

H.M. would start back at the same point where he originally began since he could not form LTM, BUT - he performed the same as average (skill level showed improvement over time) though he never remembered performing the task, Conclusion: H.M. was able to consolidate procedural skills, Handled very differently from other forms of consolidation

H.M

Hippocampus removed due to epileptic seizures, Very serious case of epilepsy, almost to the point of being non-functional, Thought seizures were originating in the hippocampus, Removal had profound impact on his memory -- unable to form new memories, His existing LTM was not affected (remembered childhood etc.). But he could not store new items in LTM, STM was unaffected, Consolidation was damaged, The hippocampus handles consolidation, If you can't consolidate, you can't send things to LTM (everything already in LTM is safe and STM is intact), You're almost frozen in time (thought Truman was still president years after his surgery), Had to readjust life, but had trouble remembering things like his nurses names

Property Inheritance

If X is _ a Y, then Y has _ property Z, X has _ property Z, This is usually a valid way of reasoning (it's not a syllogism, doesn't always work), rule allows properties to be "known" without being directly stored

Mental Scanning

Image moving from...to..., Want objective evidence of mental imagery, Had people study a map until they had memorized it, then quizzed and concerned about placement, Argument - you only store what you think is important to the experience, Conclusion - mental distance is an analog of actual distance, Mental imagery does exist

Exemplar Models

In some models, new instances are evaluated by comparing them only to stored instances of the category, called exemplars, there is no generalization or abstraction per se (and no prototype)

Memory Systems

Includes recency Primacy effect

Tape Loop Metaphor

Infinite loop tape - tape is twisted so it is endless, The digits fade the longer they've been on the tape, so it's almost completely erased by the time it comes back to the front BUT it may still be recoverable, shows how quickly the decay process is

Failure to consolidate

Information never made it to LTM

Mirror Drawing

Instincts are backwards but you quickly get better at it (curve goes down very rapidly), Average person picks up roughly where they drop off when they perform the task again

What is Forgetting?

Library metaphor, Think about LTM as a library, Simply having a book in your collection doesn't mean that you actually know the book, Instead of putting the books in with no organization, libraries used a card system (now a computer system) in which the card is coordinated with a particular book, The indexing system is just as important as the books themselves. Because without the cards, the book is effectively gone since you can't find it, LTM is similar, The "books" are still there, but we may not have a "card" for a particular book

Collins & Quillian (1970's) Semantic Network

Network of ideas or concepts, Means something much more specific, Important that they are hierarchical, Link means something very specific

War of the Ghosts Study

Read participants a story and asked them to tell it back to the researcher, (Trying to remember the story as a meaningful narrative), Cultural references are very unfamiliar to the subjects, Making it much more difficult to remember, We attempt to convert it to a "sensible narrative" - a version that makes sense to you, So subjects understand the basics, but it was hardly an accurate reconstruction, What we remember is a combination of what we actually remember and what we make up to make sense of the experience

Phlyshy (Rutgers):

Representations of images are propositional or descriptive, You don't store anything that's like an image itself, Very philosophical argument, Denial of imagery model we're using, We extract propositions from images but only know the propositions later on, Ex. Don't store the position of dog's ears, but have enough other cues that you could reasonably deduce the answer, Scanning time results are due to cognitive expectations of subjects

H.M.Summarized

Take away point: hippocampus handles consolidation, Taught H.M. to do the mirror drawing task, On subsequent sessions, he was able to improve in the same way the average person would but never remembered performing the task previously, Major point: realization that knowledge of procedural skills was different from knowledge of facts

Short-term memory

The capacity for holding a small amount of information in mind in an active, readily available state for a short period of time

Working memory

The part of short-term memory that is concerned with immediate conscious perceptual and linguistic processing

Prototypes

The prototype (aka fuzzy, aka family-resemblance) view of human concepts, Mental concepts exhibit degree of membership, called typicality (degree to which something fits the prototype), ...and are defined by their central tendencies

Verbal encoding

Verbal distraction interferes, visual doesn't, When you are handling one kind of information, it interferes with your processing of other short-term information of the same type (ex. Listening to music with words while reading), Tape-loop Metaphor

Mental Imagery

You can hold visual images in your head, Involves a mental analog of physical rotation, A spatially organized analog of a real picture is progressively transformed, Seems to be somewhat of a homunculus, but your visual system is looking at the image, This is very different from propositional or declarative information, It encodes information that hasn't been verbalized

Abstraction/Generalization

You take knowledge of individual things that have specific properties,You realize there are other things which also have these same properties,various images all have some differences, but we realize they share common properties

Mental image

a representation of a visual scene, Stored in LTM, Retrieved and placed in a short-term visual buffer, Examined by the visual system

Imagistic Representations

an imagistic representation stores the sensory experience, Storing something close to the experience of seeing it in the first place

The Distance Model of Similarity

basic idea is that when we say two items are similar, we saying they are close to each other, Ex. Two animals are similar

Fuzziness

boundary of whether something is or is not a member of the category

Classical View

categories have definitions, Classical categories have clear-cut boundaries,Object are either members of the category or non-members,There is some set of criteria which allows an item to fall into the category or not

Categories

collections of things in the world that the mind represents as a single "kind" (groupings of like classes), We know a lot about the things around us from using categories,There are various things we come into contact with for the first time, yet we have a set knowledge about the item based on the category it falls into (cars, people, animals etc.)

Interference

competition between items, decreasing the likelihood of consolidation

Subordinate

down the hierarchy

Mental Imagery (or Visual Mental Imagery)

essentially visual memory, Creating a mental image of something (imagining the house you grew up in)

Procedural Memory

how to do things; especially motor skills, Ex. Playing the piano, basketball etc.

Reconstructive Memory

idea that when you remember things you're not only loading information from LTM and spitting out items, Essentially trying to reconstruct the information (make sense out of the information), It's a combination of what you remember and hypotheses of what you think happened

The prototype is formed by

internal processes, not observations!, This finding support rationalism over empiricism, This suggests that people store an abstraction -- they are storing an idealized version of what they've seen previously

Once something is consolidated into long-term memory,

it's in there for good, But items become more and more difficult to access as they get buried under other information (ex. You don't remember what you had for breakfast a year ago today) Childhood experiences don't mean much,

Recency Effect

last few items are recalled better (because they are still in working memory), Explanation: short term memory, Even when we haven't consolidated information, we can still remember

Recency Effect

last few words that are remembered relatively well, These words are subject to active processing when we were told to start writing, distractors can really affect this effect

Induction of future beliefs from past experience is

merely a "habit of reasoning", If we see something happen the same way multiple times, we eventually come to believe that is the same every time

Episodic Memory

personal experiences; subjective point of view, Extract some facts which go into declarative memory, Remembering where you were sitting, thinking, wearing etc., Basically an episode of your life

Similarity

plays a central role in both prototype theories and exemplar theories, Similarity is very "subjective" it can mean different things in different situations.

Induction

reasoning that is NOT logically certain,Any time you're guessing, it's induction, On the flip side, induction is not always guessing it's just not logically certain, The conclusion seems plausible or likely given the premises, Categories are also inducted beliefs

Deduction

reasoning that is logically certain,In our everyday language we use it to mean "reasoning",In cognitive psych, we use it to be reasoning that is logically certain,you can't believe the premises and not believe the conclusion

Reconstructive memory

reconstruct information in a way that makes sense to you

Encoding

representation of information in order to facilitate storage -- will be discussed more later, Take experience and extract from it the information which we be stored, Refers to the way in which the material is packaged (different types of information will be stored differently)

Exemplar

stored example or instance that you've seen and is used for comparison purposes

Recency Effect

suggests that items are temporarily held in a small, short-term buffer (STM)

Primacy Effect

suggests that rehearsal is required to consolidate items to long-term memory (LTM)

Depth of Processing

the deeper the processing, the better the memory is

Generally, we consolidate much better when we understand

the information (the more meaningful the information is) and can link concepts together

Extension

the things in the world that are part of the category (the set of tables, the items which meet the criteria to fall into the category)

Recency effect decreases when

there is a distractor task involved, you start to remember less with a distractor

Recall

trying to remember without the benefit of being shown the words

Anterograde Amnesia

unable to form new memories (what H.M. suffered from)

Superordinate

up the hierarchy

Manner of encoding

visual representation of the words, sounds of the words etc., Different memory systems handle different kinds of information, There are many short-term memories for different types of info (auditory, visual)

It's easier to remember things when you understand them because

you've made connections between concepts