Cognition Test 2

Experiment 2 Summary

Looked at experts only (dermatologists and family practitioners) Verbal condition was split: Diagnosis specific- contained only key features of the correct diagnosis Comprehensive descriptions- contained other features consistent wit the correct diagnosis but that may also point to another diagnosis Realistic for everyday diagnoses for these doctors Results: Results using the comprehensive verbal descriptions were the same as experiment 1 No difference between diagnosis specific and visual conditions

Imagery Ability and Mathematics

Mathematical reasoning benefits from visual imagery and an ability to maintain images in memory Many people describe themselves as either a visualizer or a verbalizer Often link their success in mathematics to this preference for certain types of information Some studies have shown that visualizers are not more successful at mathematics problem solving than are verbalizers This is probably because there are really two types of visualizers: Those with *high spatial ability * low spatial ability Of children who are considered visualizers, *the high spatial visualizers were more successful in solving problems

Three principles of skilled memory

Memory experts have normal memory, and yet they are able to build on their areas of special knowledge to acquire staggering amounts of new information Skilled memory theory- the theory that explains how experts can exhibit such astonishing memory in particular areas

Searching for Hidden Figures in a mental image

Mental images have limitations. Students memorized the original figure and then decided whether the other figures were hidden within their mental image of A. They were more accurate on some hidden figures, such as C, when the object was physically present than just a mental image.

Summary

Network Theory * Most well- known is TLC developed by Quillian * Based entirely off links and connections * Has support but cannot account for all aspects of knowledge Feature Comparison Theory * Similar to network theory but more of an overall understanding of knowledge rather than simply network connections * Single connections can have different levels of similarity * More intuitive and subjective Perceptual Theory of Knowledge Connectionist Model of Memory

Theories of Knowledge

Network, Feature-based, Perceptual and Connectionist Theories shed light on how knowledge is structured for maximum usefulness and efficiency

Coding and Imaginal Distance

Observers looked at the left panel for 5 sec, then the middle panel was presented and the observer had to say whether the arrow was pointing to where a circle had been in the first panel. Time to respond correctly was related to the distance between where the arrow pointed in the original circle- showing that the observer was scanning a mental image depicted in the rightmost panel.

Problem Solving

Of course, people are not always helped by their reliance on their imagery ability, as the story about S shows S might have been great at forming a mental photograph That doesn't mean what he remembers is well understood

Schemas fill in missing information

Our ability to understand conversations or text is especially dependent on our ability to make inferences from what we hear or see Speakers and authors rely on the listener or reader to "fill in" unstated information Possessing a relevant schema will speed up your ability to comprehend information during a discussion ex: setting the scene before telling a story a way of saving resources

Remembering

Our images can help us remember The advantage of imagery comes when it provides an association- a link- between the items that people are trying to remember Bower (1970) Word- pairs (3 conditions) 1- continually rehearse the word pairs 2- form a mental picture of each word (pictures were not supposed to interact with each other) 3- form mental pictures that interacted with each other Free recall of word pairs Condition 3 did twice as well as 1 and 2 Some people have extraordinary talent for using imagery to memorize things Solomon V. Shereshevskii Could recall lists of numbers that he had memorized decades earlier Unable to forget what he had memorized Had a remarkable use of visual imagery

Quillian's Network Theory

Our semantic network has two main components: the node-link structure and a question interface.

Rotating a mental image

Parrot rotated to cat, Snail rotated to seahorse, duck rotated to rabbit.

Dual code task stimuli and response time

Participants imagined the outline of the letter F and scanned their mental image clockwise They indicated yes or no if the point of intersecting lines was at the topmost or bottommost level of the letter They either spoke aloud (verbal response) or pointed to the Y-N display (visual response). In another task they scanned a memorized sentence and indicated whether each word as a noun

Example of cueing schemas

Participants read a story about a fictitious character or about Helen Keller and were tested immediately or a week later on their memory for sentences that never appeared in the passage but were true of the real Helen Keller After a week's delay, only those who thought the passage was about Helen Keller falsely recognized sentences consistent with their schema of her

Individual differences in imagery ability

People differ in their ability to form and use images May have an impact in subtle ways on their lives People who were characterized as vivid imagers made more errors than those who were less vivid imagers: Vivid imagers had the most difficulty distinguishing between what they had seen and what they had imagined

Imagery and Mental Maps

People's mental maps are not organized as a true picture Configuration in which states and countries line up as if they were rectangles rather than the way they really are People seem to employ a heuristic of making the irregular geographic boundaries fit a kind of grid This is a way to remember this information without wasting resources on details What direction do you travel if you take the Panama Canal from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean? West What is the first foreign country you come to if you travel directly south from Detroit? Canada

Mnemonics

Plans for retrieval that are well learned and stored in long term memory They are used in order to store and later retrieve information that would otherwise be stored in short term memory They often involve the use of visual imagery

Story schemas

Popular genres also have a common story structure - Romance novels - Science fiction adventures - Westerns

Speed up principle

Practice speeds storage and retrieval First, as specific patterns and experiences are repeatedly presented to us: we begin to create links called retrieval structures between working memory and the relevant areas in long-term memory Second, the expert acquires a vast amount of information about a single topic and in so doing creates a hill of knowledge: schemas in which one fact can activate closely related facts, which in turn can activate still others so long as they are on the same hill

Spatial imagery

Refers to a representation of the spatial relationships between parts of an object or its location in space An example of a spatial imagery task is called the Form Board Test

Visual Imagery

Refers to the visual appearance of an object, such as its shape, color, or brightness A typical visual imagery task might ask someone to state the color of an object that has a characteristic color, like a football

Quillian's Network Theory- The repeated path hypothesis

Repeating a path speeds processing Hypothesis unique to network theories and a source of support for TLC. If first asked: Is a canary an animal? Animal -> Bird -> Canary -> Breath Then asked: Do birds breath? Animal -> Bird -> Canary-> Breath (Faster) Do fish have gills? Animal -> Fish -> Trowt -> Gills (slower)

Schemas and reading comprehension

Research suggests students should be given cues, in advance of reading a new text or story, for how they should organize what they are reading An advance organizer- Info, typically presented prior to the learning experience, that helps learners interpret new information by providing a bridge between new information and what the learner already knows Do not increase overall recall of facts when they give irrelevant or distracting information, sometimes called seductive details However, their primary advantage is in helping the learner transfer or apply the learned information to new situations

Schemas as Organizers

Schemas function as knowledge structures that organize how we learn and behave They help us encode the stories that we read or hear and influence what we will remember about them In everyday lives schemas also control what we expect of the people and objects around us

Schemas

Separate, specialized combinations of knowledge that are organized in different ways depending on how they are to be used.

Examples

Shoe Defining features: goes on foot, protects bottom of foot Characterizing features: has laces, keeps foot dry Airplane Defining features: flies, has wings Characterizing features: has wheels, has pilot

Telling the real from the imagined

Since mental images and perceptions share some common processes and even common pathways in the brain How do we decipher between images from external stimuli and self- created images? Under normal circumstances people can distinguish between events inside themselves and those outside themselves Reality monitoring: the ability to discriminate between genuine memories acquired from perceiving the external world and memories generated by the imagination An explanation for how we assess the reality of our recollections is called source monitoring: people determine the source of a specific memory by comparing its features to the typical features of their entire history of memories derived from perception and those derived from their imagination Sometimes the features from an imagined memory are more similar to the average features of a perceptual memory This results in source errors

Songs and Rhymes

Some mneumonics rely on wordplay which may be a kind of auditory imagery Rhyming or creating jingles is a useful technique to remember a set of facts People of all ages seem to benefit equally from using songs or rhymes

The Neuropsychology of Imagery: Analog codes and the brain

Some people create such vivid images that they feel that they are actually looking at a scene Does imagining an object require the use of the same areas of the brain that are used when someone actually perceives the object? Imagining a letter activates the same brain structures as just looking at the same letter Different activation from even just looking at two of the same letters that are different sizes In the typical person, the right hemisphere performs many functions important to the perception of spatial relations So right hemisphere should also be important to the rotation of mental images This is the case This was also shown in a study of how a person with split brain performs on a mental rotation task

Rethinking Quillian's Theory

Some phenomena not explained by network theories. Within a category, such as bird, not all instances (the different types of birds) take the same amount of time to answer. You are faster at responding when asked: Is a sparrow a bird? than Is an ostrich a bird? The semantic relatedness effect also challenges network theories. Reflects the existence of inequalities across categories People take longer to decide whether a canary is an animal than to decide whether a chicken is an animal. Shows that the relatedness of items is important for the judgments.

The dual code and meaning

Some pictures are not encoded with multiple codes For example, if you are shown a drawing that has no compelling interpretation, such as a work of abstract art Single pictorial code- less likely to remember or a random line drawing, sometimes called a droodle Pictures superiority effect says droodles (pictures with a single code) should not be easily remembered Students were more accurate in recalling pictures that had meaningful labels than ones that did not

Schemas can mislead example

Student office study Students waited in this room for about 35 seconds After they left, they were asked to recall the items in the room verbally, or to recognize items from the room Their memory was good for items that were consistent with their schema of a graduate student office, but not for those items that were inconsistent

Efficient Filing System

TLC assumes that the properties of an object are stored at the highest node in the hierarchy that is appropriate. Rather than noting that canaries have wings, feathers, and lay eggs and that robins have wings, feathers, and lay eggs, the model places these repeated properties with the category bird. If you are asked if a canary has feathers you may say to yourself, canaries are birds and birds have feathers so canaries have feathers. This efficiency minimizes the demands on long-term and working memories

Story maps

Teaches children to understand the structural elements of a story Improves their story comprehension Children are asked questions corresponding to levels in chart

Eidetic Imagery

The ability to maintain a mental image that has the quality of reviving and earlier perceptual event with great clarity Popularly referred to as photographic memory The incidence of eidetic imagery is higher in children than in adults The phenomenon is rare About 1 in a million adults- if that many This is not because the eidetic imagery ability of children is eliminated over time number of people with the highest level of this skill is exceedingly rate One explanation is that as one gets older it becomes more efficient to apply verbal codes to deal with abstract concepts

Environmental spatial ability

The ability to navigate in new places successfully Includes the ability to form accurate mental representations of large-scale environments such as buildings, campuses, or cities People high in this ability are also high in their ability to visualize space and remember visual information Spatial ability may have a real impact on every day activities

Visual Versus Spatial Imagery

The difference among people in the ability to form and use images is related to the type of imagery that is being used. There are two major types of imagery: Primary Visual Primary Spatial

Spontaneous Imagery scanning

The fictional map was used to study the effect of distance on mental scanning time. Students memorized a map; when it was removed they answered questions about how long a dot would take to move from one object on the map to another. Time to scan from one object to another in their mental image of the map was directly related to the distance between objects in their mental image.

First component

The meaning of a concept is composed of all the links associated with it.

Cueing schemas

The memory for a schema can be activated by the mention of key terms in a narrative The title of a narrative may also activate a schema

Equal links

The model assumes that all the links in the hierarchy are consistently of equal length The link between canary and bird nodes is the same length as the connection between the ostrich and bird nodes. Links are important because it takes time for the cognitive system to travel from node to node across a link. Therefore, all questions that require accessing the same number of links will take the same amount of effort and time to answer.

Symbolic distance effect

The more discriminable two real objects are, the more quickly you are able to judge which is bigger or smaller Which is bigger? really small h or H faster or small h closer to big h slower Which is bigger? Elephant or ant? faster Elephant or cow? slower The larger the difference between objects, the faster the judgment. The pattern is called the symbolic distance effect and occurs when we are looking at objects or just reading their names.

Semantic Memory

The portion of LTM that encompasses facts and inferences to be made from those facts Often compared to a vast library of abstract and concrete knowledge Contains schemas

Second component

The question interface, refers to a sort of sensibility Should we pursue answering a question? Prevents you from having to tax your attention Serves as a gatekeeping function for the knowledge network Associated with people giving rapid answers to questions that deserve an immediate no

Long term memory (LTM)

The repository of all that you know It allows you to use facts to deduce and create even more knowledge without having to deliberately memorize a new fact.

*Quillian's Network Theory- Semantic Distance effect

The time to answer the question increases with the distance between categories. The farther apart two nodes are in the hierarchy, the longer it takes to discover they are related. Is there an animal that barks? takes longer to respond than Is there an animal we call a dog?

Expertise, knowledge, and skilled memory

There are many anecdotes of superb feats of memory in specialized areas such as music The key to our ability to remember events and facts is our background knowledge- our level of expertise People's past knowledge helps them learn new things The more you know about something, the easier it is to acquire new related information The more you know, the more you can know. Areas of expertise studied by psychologists: baseball card games chess circuit diagrams by technicians memory for the digits of pi

Why connectionist models are useful

They can be modified based on a person's development of knowledge: They can account for the concept of learning They illustrate how people often confuse related information They offer a systematic explanation for the loss of information resulting from brain damage, which occurs when people suffer from semantic dementia

Defining features

Those that are necessary and jointly sufficient to specify the requirements for a category. For example, the potential to lay eggs is a necessary feature of birds.

Assumptions of TLC

Three key assumptions about the mechanisms governing people's decisions when they are asked sensible questions: *equal link lengths in the hierarchy * an efficient filing system * spreading activation

Peg- word method

To use this method, the person first commits to memory a fixed set of visual images that are able to be called up at a moment's notice These are called pegs because new items to be memorized are connected (or hung) on them One is a bun- ashtray Two is a show- Firewood

Research on Imagery- Dual-task method

Type of task often used when trying to identify how images are coded If people are asked to perform two tasks at once and it affects their ability to perform the tasks, then there is a basis for suggesting that they require the same or overlapping cognitive resources

Hemispheric neglect (hemineglect)

Unable to attend to scenes or words that are shown to their left visual field. They also have difficulty processing the left side of their own mental things (when imagining things)

Brooks (1968)

Verbal task *Heard a sentence and had to mentally repeat it * Had to respond if each word was a noun or not *Verbal response: "yes" or "no" *Visual response: point to a group of "y" or "n" Visual task *Had to respond if the dot was on the top or bottom edge of the letter *Verbal response "yes" or "no" * Visual response: point to a group of "y" or "n"

The Perceptual Theory of Knowledge

Views seemingly abstract knowledge as perceptually based A perceptual symbol system Assumes that our understanding of things is based on the perceptual mode (visual, auditory, etc) in which we experience them. This assumes that: Properties are represented with their perceptual characteristics in LTM In line with network theories and feature comparison theories Important difference is that it is based off of raw experiences and not abstract ideas

Finding your way

Way finding or route learning Navigating and finding your way back to your starting point by recalling Images of your current location Some of the landmarks you have passed along the way The cognitive processes people employ in a spatial environment in order to arrive at a goal

Schema development

We are born into the world with predispositions to react, and the world cooperates by providing the stimuli for those reactions Jean Piaget conducted research showing that much of children's knowledge is derived from their interactions with the world They are biologically prepared to interact with the world through specific action sequences or schemas

Schemas can mislead

We are prone to misinterpret what we have experienced Because schemas are so rich with information, it can be difficult for people to distinguish between their own knowledge- as provided by the schema- and their actual memory for the experience Schemas not only are able to mislead us in what we have read, they can also distort our recollection of things we have personally experienced People are good at detecting when schema-inconsistent events occur in a story These oddities appear to stand out with special clarity in our memory We recall the schema- consistent information and then add these inconsistent events People are very good at discriminating between unexpected events that occurred in a story and unexpected events that did not occur

Imagery, Memory, and Dual codes

We don't experience everything as either an image- or a word-based proposition Sometimes words evoke images Sometimes seeing an object causes us to store and image as well as a verbal description of it Sometimes words lose that related image Semantic satiation If you repeat the word once a second for about five or six times, it loses all meaning

How FCM is different than TLC and other network theories in describing how people answer questions about their knowledge

When people think about categories such as birds or furniture or vehicles, they have an overall sense of the defining and characterizing features that comprise these categories. Similar to prototype. Assumes that in deciding whether one category is part of another category (e.g. whether a dog is a mammal), a person compares the total set of features associated with each category (dog and mammal) to see whether they overlap Finally, in deciding whether two categories overlap sufficiently to consider one category a part of another category, people use their own personal standards.

Retrieval structure principle

When storing the information into a well-learned schema, skilled memorizers are sensitive to what is important Attach specific retrieval cues to the material Can be readily accessed at a later time from LTM by means of those cues

Dual Code Task Results

When the scanning task and the response required the same encoding format (verbal task/verbal response or visual task/visual response) participants required more time to respond than when the task and the response used different representational systems (verbal task/visual response or visual task/verbal response). Process of scanning an image uses some of the same cognitive resources as scanning a picture: the coding of images is more similar to the coding of pictures than it is to the coding of a string of words Evidence that under some conditions, images have an analog code The importance of analog codes for imagery is described in more detail in the following studies

Imagery and Mental Maps

Which city is father west, Reno or San Diego? Reno, Nevada is farther West than San Diego, California This error is not the result of ignorance When they mentally represent the locations of cities w/i states, most people organize the spatial locations hierarchically They might think of Reno as a city in the state of Nevada and San Diego as a city in the state of California Reno > Nevada San Diego > California California is west of NEvada Hence San Diego is west of Reno

Example of Network theories

Wikipedia follow Boston Red Sox link to get to cheese Boston, regional cuisine, dairy product, cheese

Experiment 1 Comparison B (Verbal vs. Visual-after-verbal)

Within subjects analysis of the same question as comparison A Again, if perceptual (visual) information leads to a comparison of the features, then the addition of visual information shouldn't change the diagnosis. Both dermatologists and family practitioners were better with the visual information than the verbal information The visual information did not add to the residents diagnosis accuracy

Sleep

fruit flies will catch up on lost sleep if kept up at night will sleep in the morning active during day, sleep at night afternoon nap the mushroom body- associated with memory and sleep possible connection between sleep and memory Typed faster after good nights sleep- improved by about 20% Sleep enhances memory use tiny electric probes (wires) to pick up electrical signals in the brain map rats' thoughts in the hippocampus rat maze- sleep and location rat's dreams about running the maze- same patterns of brain activity as when running the maze in dreams but faster

Mneumonics method of story

links images that are in a thematic relationship with each other by fitting them into a story

Meaningful encoding principle

memory experts use their prior knowledge to encode new information in their area of expertise this knowledge is often in the form of memory chunks- perceptual units that allow experts to see configurations of events that are invisible to the typical person

Dual code hypothesis

or dual coding theory words can have multiple codes some concepts, especially abstract ones (e.g. idea or liberty) are primarily represented verbally and not with a visual image Other concepts, especially concrete ones can be represented both by imaginal and verbal strategies Imagery value (I) Students asked to rate words from a list of 925 words The higher the imagery value, the more vivid the image Concrete nouns have higher I values than abstract nouns Results: The I rating is the best predictor of how memorable a word will be: The greater the imagery value, the easier it is to remember the word in a memory experiment

Person schema

schemas about people These schemas connect common personality traits (outgoing, shy, aggressive, etc) with the behavior such traits commonly produce Like all schemas, person schemas affect your interpretation of the events that you witness, your memory for those events, and what to expect in the future Often extended to encompass the members of particular groups

Experiment 1

3 medical groups Dermatologists Family physicians Medical residents (in training) 2 groups (3 conditions) Verbal than visual Visual Participants put in one of two groups Verbal task -> Diagnosis -> Visual task -> Diagnosis or Visual task-> Diagnosis

Using imagery to enhance physical and cognitive functioning

90% of Olympic athletes and their coaches employ imagery techniques to improve their performance Imagery can affect athletic performance in a number of ways, including development of skill, but it can also aid in reducing stress and increasing motivation Volleyball study 2 groups Imagers- 30 mins of imagining a volleyball pass, 3 times a week for 2 months Non-imagers- met in a social setting for 30 min, 3 times a week for 2 months Results Imagers were better at the passing tasks Imagers were more physiologically aroused Increased motivation to perform well

The Connectionist Model of Memory

A broad type of model of knowledge that borrows the best aspects of the specific theories covered before. People's ability to respond to a question or identify a picture of a flower depends on the entire pattern of connections in the brain. Sometimes called neural network models. This model asserts that: every node of knowledge is connected directly or indirectly to every other node Perceptual experiences are a key component of the network Some of these connections are strong and some are weak The strength of a connection is determined by past experiences whether they have been used successfully to answer a question Like the perceptual theory of knowledge, connectionist models emphasize how we acquire information through experience Instances and properties are all connected by common units that link the name of an object (e.g. canary) with a general property (e.g. can) and an output property (e.g. fly).

Method of Loci

A mneumonic scheme, is like others because it has four steps: * To commit the basic structural knowledge to memory * To identify each item that is to be remembered and to imagine it as an object * To combine the imagined items with the schema already in long-term memory * Retrieval example: in video hippocampus- start gate reduction- tennis balls tangles- playground plaque- neurons bridge

Stereotype

A person schema applied to an entire group An oversimplified understanding of the qualities of groups of people "The Irish are alcoholics"

The Form Board Test

A way of assessing people's spatial imagery ability Which objects at the bottom can be arranged (and rotated) to form the square at the top?

The Picture Superiority Effect

According to the dual code hypothesis, pictures should be better remembered than words Pictures are represented both imaginally in an analog code and verbally in a propositional code Picture superiority effect For most people, pictures are easier to recognize than a list of words Neurological findings give support Studying nameable pictures strongly activates both hemispheres and meaning circuits, whereas studying words alone strongly activates only one hemisphere

The Feature Comparison Model

An alternative to network theories of knowledge. Human knowledge as a giant semantic space that contains clusters of hills and valleys representing our knowledge. The tighter the cluster of knowledge, the more similar the items are to each other and the easier it is to decide whether a proposed relationship (e.g., robin is a bird) is true. Some instances of a category are more central (prototypical) to the category than are others. The basis for deciding how central an item is depends on the features the item has. Some features are defining features, others are characterizing features.

Kulatunga- Moruzi et al. (2004)

Are medical experts using feature comparison? comparing features of medical symptoms Better at diagnosing through lists of symptoms or perceptually through a photograph of the ailment? Do these lists of symptoms enhance or impair perception of the photograph of the condition

Mental rotation

Are you able to manipulate the mental images of objects that you are visualizing in the same way you manipulate the real objects that they represent? When we rotate an object in the real world we are not merely redrawing it, we are literally turning it. When we manipulate an object mentally, do we do it in a way that is similar to the way we manipulate real objects, or do we act more like a computer program? Students looked at a letter flashed in front of them that was rotated around 360degrees and had to decide if it would be pointing in the correct direction when it was in an upright position. The time taken to make the judgment increased continuously as the letter was rotated from 0 degrees to 180 degrees, and showed that a mental image could be rotated just like a real object. Humans are able to mentally rotate 2-d figures continuously in a manner that is similar- called isomorphic- to the way we physically rotate 2-d objects, such as pictures Example: tetris Students looked at pairs of 3-d objects and decided whether, if the one on the right had been rotated in some way, it would match with the one on the left In A, objects match if they are rotated in the picture plane: in B, objects match if they are rotated in the depth plane and in C, objects will not match The time required to make this judgement is graphed in the next two figures. People need approximately 60 degrees per second to mentally rotate an image of a 3-d object. This is similar to what we would do if we were rotating 3-d objects in front of us.

The benefits and limitations of imagery

Basic questions in Cognitive research: What can we do with an image? People often use images to help answer questions Did I leave my car window open? Research shows that our images can be manipulated to achieve our goals Some of these goals involve survival, including finding our way in the world.

Experiment 1 Comparison C ( Visual vs. Visual-after-verbal)

Both the dermatologists and the family practitioners performed worse if they received verbal information about the diagnosis before the visual information, than if they received only the visual information.

How are images represented?

Broadly speaking there are two ways of describing mental images Analog code * Preserve the relationship among the elements of the image as if a person were experiencing them directly *Map *Thermometer Propositional code *Such a code is like a series of words or a sentence (although more abstract) Propositions are the smallest unit of knowledge that can be either true or false * Written directions *Picture Analog information * people should be able to scan their images in much the same way as they scan a photograph *Common experience, for example, tells us that it takes longer to visually scan across larger distances than smaller ones

Experiment 1 Comparison A (Verbal vs. Visual)

Comparison A (Verbal vs. Visual) Is the diagnostic value of the verbal features a good summary of the perceptual information in the photograph? If perceptual (visual) information leads to a comparison of features, then these two groups shouldn't differ Results: Both dermatologists and family practitioners were better with the visual information than the verbal information The medical residents were better with verbal information that visual information.

Video on skilled memory

Daniel- autistic but high functioning, can explain what his strategies are, what he is doing can describe his own thought process Asperger's syndrome learned Icelandic in 7 days sees numbers as colors/patterns creating semantic network that most people don't

Characterizing features

Describe the commonly occurring characteristics of many (though not necessarily all) members of a category that we are most familiar with. Building a nest in a tree is characteristic of birds, but it is not necessary to do this to be considered a bird.

Quillian

Developed one of the best-known and most thoroughly researched network theories in the late 1960s: the teachable language comprehender (TLC).

Imagery in the Blind

Do blind people experience mental images even if they are not visually based? This would be equivalent to having an analog coding of a perceptual- though not visual- experience Replication of 2 studies Congenitally blind (blind from birth) vs. sighted controls Mental rotation Using the study with the rotated "R" The greater the rotation, the longer it takes to respond Imagery scanning Using the map study of distance between landmarks on the map Overall the greater the distance the longer it takes to scan the mental image Both the congenitally blind and sighted participants showed a similar effect

Spreading Activation

Energy spreads from the nodes activated by the question in all directions at the same time, but one level or node at a time This process activates many unnecessary nodes along the way, which accounts for why irrelevant things come to mind when answering a question. The greater the distance between the subject and predicate terms in the network, the longer it should take to answer a question.

Network theories

Every category in semantic memory is potentially connected to every other category. The things you know are represented in memory as nodes, specific locations in memory- and the connections between the nodes are links. Node-link system Everything ultimately connected to everything else.

Story schema constituents

Every narrative has four primary categories or constituent: - Setting - Theme - Plot with main characters and a causal chain of events - A resolution to the story example: the story of circle island

Conclusions

Experts are better using visual perception in making diagnoses than reading a verbal description of the case. This seems to only be the case when the verbal description is a comprehensive list of diagnoses (much more realistic in the field) rather than ailment- specific diagnoses. Maybe the medical field should consider altering the way doctors read medical history charts?

Semantic Relatedness Effect

Group strongly related concepts close together and weakly related concepts farther apart. The stronger the association between concepts, the more rapidly a person can answer questions about their relationship.

Imagery

Images are seemingly perceptual experiences that we have without the presence of an external source for the perception- the image comes from inside us, from our mind's eye Visual Auditory Motoric ex: mentally rehearsing a dance or imagine making a great play on an athletic field Haptic ex: imagine touching sandpaper

Concrete words

In general evoke both an image and a verbal semantic code ex: clown

Abstract words

In general have only a verbal representation ex: idea

Limits of Visual Memory

In spite of the picture superiority effect most studies show that our visual memory is not perfect Example of picture memory: a smiling man holds a little girl Students saw versions of a picture (simple or complex line drawings, a photograph, or a verbal description) They were no better at recognizing the photographs than the line drawings either immediately or 7 weeks later, even though the photographs had potentially greater detail

Behavior sequences at birth

Infants are born with a set of reflexes; innate mechanisms for interacting with the world Reflexes may be considered to be wired-in action schemas: a package of coordinated sequences triggered by certain environmental conditions

Example of spreading activation

Is there an animal that barks? Animal --> Bird, Horse, Cat, Dog --> Bird tweets, Horse nays, Cat meows, Dog Barks

Schemas

Knowledge in everyday life is structured by schemas Variables are an important characteristic of schemas modified depending on conditions ex: you would address and email differently to somebody you know very well than somebody you have never met