Psych 120A Midterm Study Guide

what is anatomical direction the *top* of brain known as?

superior/dorsal

**Deutsch-Norman Selection Model**

■ *Information passes through a sensory register -> perceptual processes -> selective filter -> short term memory* ■ *Selection is based on the semantic content of the message* ■ "Attention provides the key that unlocks the gate dividing unconscious perception... from conscious processing"

**Broadbent's Filter Model**

■ *Information passes through a sensory register -> selective filter -> perceptual processes -> short-term memory* ■ *Selected information is allowed to pass to later stages*; unselected information is blocked completely ■ Evidence: ● Within the first 100 milliseconds, your brain does less information processing on unattended stimulus (from EEG and fMRI studies) ● Same effect shown on visual studies in LGN

How does the generation effect relate to learning?

- shows that when given a cued recall test, people do much better with generation of words (ie rapid-f___, lamp-l____) than merely reading them

What is the Modal model?

- there are 3 stores of memory: sensory registers, working (or short-term) memory, and long-term memory - *Information enters the sensory registers. If attention is present to this information --> it is stored in the temporary working memory*. Information from the working memory is *transferred --> long-term memory if it is rehearsed and encoded*. If not rehearsed, this information is quickly forgotten.

TMS (pros and cons and what it is)

- transcranial magnetic stimulation *Pros*: - *Safe, non-invasive, temporary* - *Experimentally controlled* - Test necessity of specific brain regions (casual evidence) ● *Cons*: - *Relatively brief effects* - *Greater impact on surface cortical areas* - Potential spread of activations - *Not effective on deeper brain regions*

what is a BOLD signal?

-*BOLD Signal = Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent Signal* - *An indirect way of measuring brain activity, via measuring levels of blood flow in areas shortly after neurons fire* (a lagged signal that occurs seconds after the stimulus) - *The idea that increased neural activity in a brain area of interest causes increased blood oxygenation to that area, which in turn increases the fMRI signal* ■ Blocked vs. event-related designs - *Block design = many trials of task 1 /// break /// many trials of task 2* - *Event-related design = task 1/task 2/task 1/task 2 ... looking at individual events* ○ Too slow to do with PET scans ○ Advantages: You can characterize individual trials and compare correct vs. incorrect trials while the subject is in the scanner

Identify some of the functions of the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the corpus callosum

-*Corpus Callosum*- *major white matter pathway that connects the two hemispheres of brain* ■ The two hemispheres in your brain are connected by a thick bundle of nerve fibres called the corpus callosum that *ensures both sides of the brain can communicate and send signals to each other*. ■ Patient trials, Stimulus: letter M made up of little z's -right hemisphere damage uses little z's but is unable to put it in form of a letter (does not understand big picture) -left hemisphere damage: made the letter M with regular lines (misses fine details) ● *Amygdala*- located close to the hippocampus, in the frontal portion of the temporal lobe. Your amygdalae are *essential to your ability to feel certain emotions and to perceive them in other people*. This includes fear and the many changes that it causes in the body. ○ Associated with activating the flight or fight response, fear center ● *Hippocampus*- It sits on the top of all of the parietal, visual, etc areas. The *positioning at the top shows that it is a region that is used to receive a lot of information from all inputs* ○ Hippocampus will *receive all parts of this encoding, thoughts, smells, perceptions*, etc. ○ Hippocampus nodes and cortical modules are communicating. When sleep happens, *a transfer happens from the hippocampus to neocortex* so the hippocampus could carry more information while the cortical modules consolidate the memory so it could be independent from the hippocampus. ○ Essential for creating memories ■ The hippocampus plays a *critical role in the formation of new declarative memories (both episodic and semantic)* ■ Facilitates binding of many different types of event details into a coherent episodic memory

What are the major brain structures and their functions?

-*Corpus Callosum*: major white matter pathway that connects the two hemispheres of the brain -*Frontal lobes*: controls important cognitive skills like problem solving, memory, and judgement -*Parietal lobe*: processes sensory information (mainly touch and taste) -*Temporal lobe*: understanding language -*Occipital Lobe*: visual processing center -*Thalamus*: relay center for sensory information -*Hypothalamus*: controls motivated behaviors like eating, drinking, and sex -*Amygdala*: involved with the experiencing of emotions - *Hippocampus*: long-term memory - *Prefrontal cortex*: for the planning of complex or novel behaviors and is often considered one of the main contributors to executive functions.

How does constancy work?

-Relationships within the retinal image remain constant even when our distance from the image changes

Describe the various imaging and recording techniques that can be used to study brain activity

*PET Imaging*: - Involves injecting radioactive isotope into one's bloodstream; as isotope decays, positrons are emitted and they collide with free electrons, creating gamma rays ■ Scanning detects gamma rays and the locations where two rays match up pinpoint activity origin in the brain - *More neural activity = increased metabolic demand = local increase in blood flow to active region (area where there is more blood with have more positrons and more gamma rays* MRI: studies *brain anatomy* - useful in clinical diagnosis and can measure structural development *fMRI*: studies *brain function* - uses BOLD signaling which is an indirect measure of neural activity - ● Increased neural activity -> increase in blood oxygenation -> increase fMRI signal *EEG*: *can record electrical activity from large populations of simultaneously active neurons at the scalp with millisecond resolution* - *direct measure of neural activity* - *Looks at event-related potentials*: looks at when the brain is responding to a specific input or a particular stimulus

explain serial position effects and how they relate to memory tasks and long-term and working memory

*Recency effect*: If a series of words are read, *the LAST few words read before asking participants to recall will have higher accuracy in the recall portion*. - Working memory (WM) has limited capacity - can only hold 5 to 6 words at a time. *As the list goes on, the older words get bumped out of the WM*. - When the list stops, the last words you hear are still in WM. ○ No further input displaces them. - The last few words read are still fresh and stored in the participant's working memory. Therefore they are more easily recalled. ○ Because materials in WM are readily available. ■ *Primacy effect: If a series of words are read, the FIRST few words read before asking participants to recall will have higher accuracy in the recall portion* ● This is because the first few words read *gave participants a chance to practice and rehearse/repeat these words over and over, moving them to long term memory*. However, eventually there were too many words to practice and that's why the primacy effect only includes the first few words.

Name the four different visual illusions discussed in lecture and describe them

*ambiguities*: *images/objects that may be perceived as more than one thing* eg: the necker cube, old lady/ young woman, rabbit/ duck, skeleton/ woman in mirror Bistable perceptions - meaning, you perceive one or the other depending on which way you look at it, (stable when you perceive it but can change, perceive both at the same time) *distortions*: *geometrical illusions based on contextual assumptions based on size, length, height* e.g. turning the tables illusion, Muller-Lyer illusion (two identical lines that look like different sizes because of the arrows), thatcher effect, thedress *fictions*: *illusory perceptions of lines/ objects despite it not existing* e.g. Kanizsa triangle (triangle overlapping 3 circles and another triange) *paradoxes:* *make the incorrect assumption that adjacent edges must join* eg: Penrose triangle (impossible triangle) Assume its a triangle, even though it is not Features make sense locally, but not globally Example of inverse optics

problems in the "executive" system

*blurts out answers: anterior cinculate *interrupts or intrudes*: left lateral frontal *cannot wait*: basal ganglia

What is bottom-up processing and top-down processing?

*bottom-up processing*: data driven; *processing based on incoming stimuli from the environment* (e.g. salience/distinctiveness) *top-down processing*: processing based on the perceiver's previous knowledge, conceptually driven (e.g. priming)

problems in the "alerting" system

*has difficulty sustaining attention*: right frontal cortex *fails to finish*: right posterior parietal *avoids sustained efforts*: locus ceruleus

problems in the "orienting" system

*is distracted by stimuli*: bilateral parietal *does not appear to listen*: superior colliculus *fails to pay close attention*: thalamus

What is the difference between long term and short term memory?

*short term memory*: -*active contents of consciousness* - active nodes in LTM - *fast access to contents* - *limited capacity* - fast forgetting - transiently increased neural firing relative to baseline - 7+-2 *Long term memory:* - *not currently in consciousness* - inactive until cued - *slower access* - *unlimited capacity* - slower forgetting - *plastic changes in synaptic connection strength*

What is Recognition by Component Theory (RBC)?

- *36 geons (3-D geometric shapes) compose everything we see* - *Geons are view-invariant (look identical from most viewpoints)* - *Geons are robust to noise* (can be identified even with parts of an image missing) - Support for RBC: we can recognize partially occluded objects easily if the occlusions do not obscure the set of geons that constitute the object

What are the effects of the DRM paradigm? *(Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm)*

- *A False Memory: The DRM paradigm states that if you are given a list of words surrounding a theme (but without the theme word), you're going to have a false memory of the word* ■ EX: Having the critical lure (theme word) of Sleep and showing the participant words like bed, warm, pillows, cozy, night... etc would cue a false memory to occur with a high confidence

Be able to identify different types of attentional neglect

- *Attentional deficits are NOT sensory; impairments manifest in mental imagery* - Impairments are also apparent at multiple frames of reference ■ *Space-based/environmental coordinates* ■ *Object-based coordinates (neglecting half the object)* - *Object-centered neglect* ■ Patients can neglect the left side of the object instead of the left side of space ■ Example: (the red line is where patients actually neglected while the black line is the predicted neglected area - it's based more on the left side of the object here)

fMRI (pros and cons and what it is)

- *Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent (BOLD) signal = INDIRECT measure of neural activity* - *↑ neural activity —> ↑ oxygenated blood —> ↑ fMRI signal* ■ Changes in hemoglobin's magnetic field: as ratio of oxygenated to deoxygenated hemoglobin increases, BOLD signal increases ● *Pros*: ○ *Good spatial resolution* ○ *Non-invasive* ○ *Widely available* ● *Cons*: ○ *So-so temporal resolution; better than PET but worse than EEG* ○ *Expensive* ○ *Very loud*

What is a projection area in the brain? What's the role of the motor projection area? The sensory projection area?

- *Brain regions where information arrives at brain/leaves brain* - *Sensory projection area: where sensory signals arrive from body at brain* (allows us to "sense") ■ Somatosensory cortex in *parietal lobe* ○ *Motor projection area: where motor signals leave brain out to body* (initiates motor skills) ■ Motor cortex in *frontal lobe*

PET and fMRI

- *Cognitive Subtraction* - Based on the idea that we can find two cognitive tasks that are very similar, but that differ on one cognitive component that we're interested in - Cognitive subtraction is *comparing brain activity between the two conditions and making inference about a specified brain region (as a result of isolating a cognitive process)* - The *places where the brain "lights up" are a result of finding the difference between experimental and baseline conditions*

Instances of hemispatial Neglect

- *Copying: in which the patient doesn't realize they didn't finish the other side of the drawing (left side); their vision is fine but they just don't notice the big blank space* ■ With spontaneous drawing, the other (left) side will sometimes be ignored while other times patients can make it to the other side ■ Other activities where hemispatial neglect is visible ● *Line Bisection Tasks - Putting a tick through line (can only do right side)* ● *Reading a text passage - patients can typically only read the right parts of passages* ● Patient P.S. → A patient sees the two houses as the exact same. They avoid the house with the fire but it is not a conscious decision - *Patients often times can recover* (it could be due to neural plasticity or other parts of the brain reorganizing to pick up slack)

EEG (pros and cons and what it is)

- *DIRECT measure of neural activity* *Pros*: ■ *Excellent temporal resolution* ■ *Non-invasive* ■ *Relatively inexpensive* -*Cons*: ■ *Limited spatial resolution* ■ *Skull & brain distort electrical fields* ■ *Largely blind to subcortical activity* ■ *Records large populations of neurons*

What is Kant's transcendental method and its role in the development of cog psych?

- *First begin with the observable facts, and THEN work backwards* - *Ask HOW these observations may have appeared* - This method is sometimes called "inference to best explanation" - "What qualities of the mind make experience possible?" - *Cognitive psychologists have applied the Transcendental Method to explain how humans make decisions, form memories, and solve problems.* - Introspection is the only direct way to study the mental world

How do researchers use single-cell recording to reveal a cell's receptive field?

- *Flash patterns on the screen for animals to see, and see what is the receptive field - size and shape of the area in the visual world to which that cell responds to of a neuron* - Measure activity of a single neuron with electrode probe. ■ *Map out cells receptive field* ■ Neurons in visual cortex usually have small receptive field ■ *You move the stimulus around to figure out where you put the light to get the specific neuron's action potential you want to fire.* - *When the light hits the receptive field action potential happens and we see the "spike" on the graph* -*some neurons are coded for specific commands. So instead of light, there is for example a neuron that checks for a vertical line*. So when line is horizontal=nothing, slightly upright=little firing, vertical=fires rapidly. (orientation detecting neuron)

Be able to explain how geons are processed. What are the basic properties of geons?

- *Geons are basic 3D shapes that make up an object* - *Idea is that geons serve as the basic building blocks which allow us to recognize all objects.* - We only need 36 geons to describe every object in the world (Biederman) - *Geons are viewpoint-invariant*= they can potentially be distinguished from one another from almost any perspective - One exception is from an end-on view " a cylinder can look like a sphere" - Recognition is often robust

What are the distinct functions of the hindbrain, midbrain, and forebrain regions?

- *Hindbrain*: located at the very top of the spinal cord and includes structures critical to controlling *key life functions like regulating rhythm of heartbeat and breathing*. Also helps maintain body's overall tone (posture and balance) and helps control brain's level of alertness - *Midbrain*: important part in *coordinating movements including precise movement of the eyes*. Also *circuits the relay auditory information from the ears to the areas in the forebrain* (where the info is processed and interpreted). - Other structures in the midbrain help regulate the experience of pain. - *Forebrain*: the largest region of the brain. *Controls body temperature, reproductive functions, eating, sleeping, and the display of emotions*

How do bottom up and top down processing relate to neural processing of illusory contours?

- *Illusory lines "detected" by V1 neurons* - Because an actual line is not present in stimulus, it must be due to top-down feedback signals from higher cortical areas - *Neural response to illusory line is weaker and delayed relative to regular visible line* - *Top-down effects of context* - You still assume that the R is an "R" ... you are filling in the covered spots

What are the differences between inattentional and change blindness? Give an example of each.

- *Inattentional blindness is a pattern in which perceivers seem literally not to see stimuli right in front of their eyes*; this pattern is *caused by the participants focusing their attention on some other stimulus and not expecting the target to appear* - e.g. 24 radiologists were asked to look at an x-ray scan and only 4 of them saw the gorilla that was placed in the scan. Eye-tracking data showed that radiologists spent 5.8 seconds looking at the scan with the gorilla. Out of 20 radiologists who did not see the gorilla, 12 had looked directly at it. *Change blindness is a pattern in which perceivers either do not see or take a long time to see large-scale changes in a visual stimulus* -This pattern reveals *how little people perceive, even from stimuli in plain view, if they are not specifically attending to the target information* e.g.observers often fail to notice major differences introduced to an image while it flickers off and on again. When motion detection is disrupted, it is very difficult to observe changes to unattended image locations

What are the different functions of the sensory areas of the cortex?

- *Information arriving from the skin senses (your sense of touch or your sense of temperature) is projected to a region in the parietal lobe*, just behind the motor projection area. This is somatosensory ● *Each part of the body's surface has its own region in the cortex* ● *Assignment of cortical space is governed by function, not anatomical proportions* ■ Region in temporal lobes is auditory area ■ Area in occipital lobes is primary projection area for vision ■ Parallel to attributes of motor projection area ■ Contralateral connections is present - *Somatosensory area in left hemisphere receives input from right side of the body and vice versa*

What do dichotic listening tasks tell us about attention?

- *It has shown us that even when not actively paying attention, we are still able to take note of very surface level features of sound such as the language English and the tone/gender of the voice*. - Also brings up the concept of cocktail party effect, where participants have different thresholds of attention for things they are interested in and their own names (i.e. it's easier for someone to hear a word about a topic they like versus a topic they don't like, when not paying attention)

Why is the the cognitive subtraction method used in brain imaging studies and how does it work?

- *It is used to understand what areas are active when performing certain actions*, *subtracting baseline conditions from experimental ones.* - For example, reading the word cake in your mind (baseline) versus saying the word cake (experimental) that's on the screen out loud. -You'd be able to differentiate which area is active by subtracting reading area from speaking area (cancelling process). - *Used in tasks that are very similar but use different processes and different areas in the brain*

Explain what is meant by the terms "lateralization" and "localization of function."

- *Lateralization*: *different parts of the brain have different functions, and the left and right hemispheres have their own specializations* ■ In general, the *left hemisphere of the brain is dominant for language, and the right hemisphere is dominant for global spatial information* ■ Every part of the brain comes in pairs (right-side structure and left-side structure) - they differ in function depending on the hemisphere they are located in - *Localization of Function*: figuring out what part of the brain is responsible for what processes - *figure out what is happening where in the brain*

Identify examples of misinformation effects that were discussed in lecture

- *Leading questions* ■ E.g. Loftus and Palmer (1974): subjects were asked to watch a film on traffic safety that contained an accident → subjects were then asked how fast the cars were going when they either "contacted," "hit," "bumped," "collided," or "smashed" into one another -*Results: subjects who were asked how fast the cars were going when they "hit" each other reported an average speed of 34 mph versus the subjects who were asked how fast the cars were going when they "smashed" into each other gave estimates about 20% higher* - additionally, one week later later when participants were asked whether they saw broken glass in the scene, those participants who has been the "smashed" questions were much more likely to say "yes" (32%) than subjects in the "hit" condition (14%) even though there was no broken glass -*Misleading information leading to false memories*: Loftus e.g - Some subjects viewed series of slides about a red car stopping at stop sign and going around the corner and then hitting a pedestrian while other subjects saw the red car heading towards a yield sign - After seeing the slideshow, participants given a questionnaire of 20 Qs and for half of subjects, question #17 was "Did another car pass the red Datsun while it was stopped at the stop sign?" and *for the other half of subjects, they were asked the same question except rather than stop sign it was "yield sign" - → later participants shown 15 pairs of slides and asked to judge which image in each pair was the one they had originally seen *Results: when originally shown a stop sign and then asked a question about a stop sign, 75% of subjects identified correct slide BUT when originally shown a stop sign and then asked a question about a yield sign → 41% of subjects identified the correct slide and the other 59% had a false memory of a yield sign and the results were the same when subjects originally saw a yield sign and were given a misleading question about a stop sign* - *subjects given misleading information after encoding had false memories for the details of the visual scene* - *Story is coming from a person of authority or with credibility* - *Story is plausible/realistic*(e.g. Spilled punch at a party/wedding VS going to the moon) - *Bias of past information* the subject may already/may have been exposed to

How does severing the corpus callosum affect split-brain patients and what this tells of about the specialized function of the brain's two hemispheres?

- *Left eye information is processed by right hemisphere and right eye information is processed by left hemisphere (information from both visual fields cross over at the optic chiasm)* - *Motor function is under contralateral control while speech is lateralized to the left* For example: If shown something in the left visual field, this information will be processed in the right hemisphere. They won't be able to verbalize what they saw (speech function performed by left side) but they can draw or pick up what they saw (motor function performed by right side). Opposite true for the right visual field.

What is the difference between elaborative and maintenance rehearsal?

- *Maintenance rehearsal (item specific): simply saying the to-be remembered items from a list*; simply focus on the to-be-remembered items themselves ■ Want to learn something, and we constantly rehearse the info in our mind again and again - *Elaborative rehearsal: thinking about what the to-be-remembered items mean and/or how they're related to each other and to other things you know*; you are trying to make connections so this is way deeper and embedded in you ■ *When we elaborate, we make more associations between things* ■ This is important in order to cue the info we are trying to remember

Describe the events that occur at the synapse, and describe the differences between within-cell and between-cell neural communication

- *Occurring at the synapse*: *When a neuron has been sufficiently stimulated, it releases a minute quantity of neurotransmitter* ■ When neurotransmitter arrive at the postsynaptic membrane's receptors, they *cause changes in this membrane that enable certain ions to flow into and out of the postsynaptic cell* --> *If the ionic flows are large enough, they trigger a response in the postsynaptic cell* ● *Reaching postsynaptic cell's threshold > cell fires, producing an action potential* ○ *Within-cell communication*: communication from one end of the neuron to the other (from dendrites down to axon) is made possible by an *electrical signal*, created by the flow of ions in and out of the cell. ○ *Between-cell communication*: communication from one neuron to the next mediated by a *chemical signal*

How are memories consolidated?

- *Over time, memory becomes less dependant on the hippocampus and more dependant on the neocortex, they develop linkages with each other and depends heavily on sleep* - Sleep is super important for memory consolidation, occurs during Slow-Wave-Sleep and a hippocampal replay occurs. - I.e: Sleep-dependant- Consolidation - *You can also have targeted memory consolidation where you, for ex, smell an odor that you smelled while studying then also smell it while you sleep which is like targeting the memory to consolidate it*

What are the advantages of parallel processing in the visual system? What are the disadvantages?

- *Parallel processing is a system in which many different steps / analysis are going on simultaneously*. -opposite of serial processing. - Rods + cones - P cells (LGN parvocellular cells for spatial analysis) + M cells (LGN magnocellular cells for motion and depth) - What system + where system - *Advantage → speed, mutual influence among multiple systems& - *Disadvantage → how to coordinate multiple brain functions?*

What is the word superiority effect?

- *People are more accurate in recognizing a letter in the context of a word than when the letter is presented in isolation* or context of a non-word

How do schemas relate to memory?

- *People often rely on schemas when constructing memories* ■ *schema: mental template of what you expect to see in a place, things that seem likely are usually not there, you expect books in an office; Can trigger a false memory* ■ &Basically, the way that you believe something will be can trigger a false memory of what you actually saw*. Ex: If someone asked you if you saw an astronaut in the baseball stadium, you might say no since that's not your schema of who is present at a baseball stadium (even if the astronaut was there) = false memory

What does the Biederman experiment tell us about object recognition?

- *Rotation has a very small effect on priming* - *Object recognition is mostly viewpoint independent* (does not depend on what view an object is observed from)

What is the problem of inverse optics?

- *The world is 3-dimensional* - *The retina is 2-dimensional* - How can the brain reconstruct the 3D world based on a 2D retinal image? ■ It can't! (at least not perfectly) ■ A two-dimensional retina is not capable of telling us with certainty what is out there in the world. ■ We can only make the best guess. ● *The problem is fundamentally ill-posed* - *There are an infinite number of 3D worlds that could produce the same 2D image* - Ill-posed = means you can't solve it. - It's not invertible and we can't take the recordings from neurons on this two-dimensional retina and perfectly invert that to figure out what's happening in a three-dimensional world. - *The brain must reconstruct the 3D world based on a 2D retinal image*

What is Template Theory?

- *We match the things we see to templates already stored in LTM; the template that matches most* - Problems: there are too many views (size, orientation, etc) possible; it *would require an implausibly large database of templates stored in LTM* - *Transformation approach: matching process involves an initial transformation step* (rotation, translation, scaling, etc.) then compute correlation

What is introspection and its role in the development of cog psych?

- *Wilhelm Wundt--Introspection-- "looking within"* - *To observe and record the content of our own mental lives* - "trained simply to report on their experiences, with a minimum of interpretation." - *some thoughts are unconscious, which meant that introspection was limited as a research tool.* - We won't rely on introspective data as a means of evaluating our hypotheses - We need to study the mental world, how?----Kant

What are some of the consequences of hemispatial neglect syndrome?

- *disorder of attention where stimuli/parts of stimuli presented to the contralesional side are undetected and not responded to* ■ Patients with hemispatial neglect exhibit an attentional disorder in which *legions in the right parietal lobe impact their ability to attend to objects in the left visual field*

What are the differences between early and late selection theories of attention?

- *early selection theories: Broadbent's Filter Model*: information is selected on the basis of physical characteristics (ex. Which ear's input to attend to). The selected information is allowed to pass to later stages where it goes through further processing. *Unselected information is completely blocked* ~Early selection theory predicts *no semantic processing of information from the unattended ear* but experiments have shown that some unattended words do get processed at the semantic level - *Attenuation Model:unattended message is not blocked completely but attenuated or weakened*. The likelihood of info getting through is *determined by its threshold or the minimum amount of activation required to produce conscious awareness*(Important words: name, fire, help have lower thresholds) - *Late Selection Model:the Deutsch-Norman Selection Model* proposed a second stage of selection that occurs later in the processing sequence. This later *stage selection is based on the semantic content of the message*.

What is the difference between expectation-based and stimulus-based (repetition) priming? Provide evidence in support of each type of priming

- *expectation-based priming*: *Created only when the participant believes the prime allows a prediction of what's to come. * - Misleading the participants actually hurt their performance (if you give them the wrong expectation you slow their reaction time down). Priming the "wrong" detector takes something away from the other detectors.It's limited. - *Stimulus-based (repetition) priming*: the implicit impact that prior exposure to a stimulus has on later test performance. *If participants view a word and then, a little later, view it again, they will recognize the word more readily the second time around* The first exposure primes the participant for the second exposure. Produced merely by presentation of the priming stimulus, with no role for expectations. *Appears to be "free" so you can prime one detector without taking anything away from other detectors* or hurting the other detectors.

What is the difference between intentional and incidental learning?

- *incidental learning: learning without necessarily trying to put effort into*; Deep processing leads to learning even in ABSENCE of an intention to learn - *Intentional learning: it is when you have the motivation and intention to learn something*; usually ensures that deep processing will happen - KEYNOTE TO MAKE BETWEEN THESE TWO TYPES: *one is not necessarily better than the other*.

PET( Positron emission tomography) (Pros and Cons and what it is)

- *radioactive substance injected into bloodstream; areas of brain where's there's more blood will have more of these positrons/annihilation events (detected in PET scan)* (studies brain activity ○ *Pros*: ■ *Decent spatial resolution* ■ *Can measure NT metabolism* ● METH abuser after periods of abstinence; age differences ■ *Aids in diagnosis of disorders* ● E.g. Alzheimer's: binds to amyloid plaques to find buildup ● E.g. CTE: find high deposition of Tau proteins ○ *Cons*: ■ *Invasive* ■ *Expensive* ■ *Poor temporal resolution*; can't detect neural response to discrete cognitive events

How do spacing effects relate to learning?

- *shows that spaced practice/study sessions is better than massed practice when it comes to long-term retention*. -*Every time you re-engage you strengthen the long-term memorability* -In massed practice, the context at encoding is similar for all repetitions while context differs on each repetition for spaced practice

How does the context effect relate to learning?

- *shows that the context (other words on a list, environmental sensory cues, and internal mental state) with which you learn can have an effect on your retrieval of the information*. ○ The more similar the retrieval situation is to encoding, the better retrieval e.g. scuba divers asked to learn something on land and then be tested in the water did much worse than those who learned the material on land and were tested on land *reasoning*: -the information the person is seeking in memory is likely tied to the retrieval cue the person is given ("what was on the list?"), but the person might not have enough activation from the source → ■ however; *the info the person is seeking may be tied in memory to thoughts that had been triggered by the learning context* (e.g. thoughts about being underwater) ● *If the person is back in that context at the time of recall, the target nodes can receive a double input* (activation from two different sources → will help activate the target nodes

What is perceptual constancy?

- *the tendency of humans to see familiar objects as having standard shape, size, colour, or location regardless of changes in the angle of perspective, distance, or lighting* ■ Size constancy - We perceive an object as the same size even when its distance from us changes. ■ Shape constancy - tendency to see an object as the same shape no matter what angle it is viewed from ■ Brightness constancy - the tendency to perceive the apparent brightness of an object as the same even when light conditions change

What do double dissociations tell us about neuropsychology?

- A minimum of 2 people is needed - *Lesion in brain structure 1 impairs function A but not function B, and a lesion to brain structure 2 impairs function B but spares function A* - Region 1: deficit in process A and no deficit in process B - region 2: no deficit in process A, but a deficit in process B

What is the cerebral cortex?

- Cerebral cortex *includes: frontal lobe, parietal lobe, temporal lobe, and occipital lobe* - *Responsible for voluntary activities* (attention, perception, awareness, thought, memory, language, cognition, and consciousness)

What are the different functions of the motor areas of the cortex?

- Certain regions of the cerebral cortex serve as the *"departure points" for signals leaving the cortex and controlling muscle movement*. *Other areas are the "arrival points" for information coming from the eyes, ears, and other sense organs*. In both cases, these areas are called "*primary projection areas*" with the departure points known as the "primary motor projection areas and the arrival points contained in regions known as the primary sensory projection areas. ● *Particular positions on the cortex correspond to particular parts of the body or particular locations in space* ● Areas of the body we can move with great precision have a lot of cortical area devoted to them ● Strip of tissue towards rear of frontal lobe

What types of tasks require serial search?

- Conjunctive feature search (aka combined feature search) ■ This type of search requires a combination of features to find the target

What is the difference between conjunctive and disjunctive feature search?

- Conjunctive feature search: *requires attention, done in serial, requires a combination of features to find the target* - Response time (time it takes you to find answer) is proportional to how many distractions there are - *More stimuli/distractors the longer it will take* -*Disjunctive feature search*: not attention demanding, done in parallel, a single feature is enough to find the target ■ *The features of the target are not shared with distractors* ■ Aka isolated feature search ■ Response time not really affected by the number of distractors (Allie Wyatt)

How is memory context dependent?

- Context helps retrieval ■ Environmental cues ● *It is better to be tested in the location you studied than elsewhere* ● Above water and below water testing experiment ■ Mental State ● If you're drunk while studying, it's better to test drunk ● If you're sad while studying, it's better to test feeling the same mood ■ *Massed practice is less context dependent than spaced*.

EEG and ERPs

- Event-related potentials (ERPs) - *A measured brain response that is the direct result of a cognitive event* - *An electrophysiological response (measuring electrical fields)* - After a stimulus occurs, you save the electrophysiological response and average the responses over time, and compare one condition to another - Questions to ask: Are the ERPs different? At what time are they different?

What does the operation span task tell us about working memory and capacity and general intelligence?

- Evidence shows that working memory capacity is closely related to general fluid intelligence (IQ). - *Individual differences in intelligence are strongly correlated with performance on WM tasks that require maintenance and processing.* Simple maintenance does not correlate with intelligence. - The Operation Span Task: A complex working memory task that requires maintenance and intervening processing.* Math problems that you have to verify and then hold on to a word*. Then recall the words at the end. Looking at how well participants can hold the words in their mind while they do intervening math task. ■ *Key that you are doing maintenance and processing and your ability to go back and forth is related to other cognitive processing and intelligence(.

Identify and explain examples of memory errors.

- Example: Remembering objects from a graduate student office ■ Shows limitations of human memory ■ *30% of subjects falsely remembered books in the office* ■ *This occurred because people often rely on schemas when trying to reconstruct a memory* ● *A schema is a mental template people have for the type of things they would find in a given place* - Based on our experiences - *We fill in the gaps from what we are familiar with* - Example: DRM Experiment ■ A word that is thematically linked to other words, but is left off the list - E.g. words associated to things that are cold - The word "cold" would be left off this list, but participants would mistakenly recall the word

What are the four major lobes of the forebrain?

- Frontal lobe, Parietal lobe, Temporal lobe, and the Occipital lobe - The *frontal lobe is separated from the parietal lobe by the central fissure* - *The lateral fissure separates the frontal lobe from the temporal lobe*

What are some limitations of the Recognition by Components theory?

- Humans recognize objects by recognizing both their parts and the spatial relations btwn those parts - Geons: are sufficiently different from one another so they can be easily discriminated, view invariant, robust to noise - Limitations: ■ *Geons cannot constitute every shape in real life, sometimes can be ambiguous depending on perspectives* ■ *The theory does not provide a mechanism for how context influence object recognition*

Be able to explain the levels of processing view of memory

- Introduced by Craik and Lockhart in 1972 - *So as there are levels of processing, the deeper you go, it leads to stronger memories*. - And there is a hierarchy of levels of processing: *from shallow (which is more superficial and physical attributes) to deep (semantic like its meaning)* - Here is the picture of levels of processing and its examples: physical: ex: word is table and is the word in capital letters acoustic ex: word is cat and does it rhyme with mat? semantic ex: daffodil. does it fit in sentence-like meaning? -So as you can see, when there is deeper processing, it leads to more activity in the exposure so better performance to remembering things.

How does a double dissociation suggest about working memory?

- It suggests that working memory can *not be a unitary function* like Atkinson & Shiffrin's model suggests. It is not an all-purpose store. *We have different storage systems for dealing with visual-spatial info and auditory/phonological info*. ○ There is evidence of for this in the brain: Verbal and spatial rehearsal in WM ■ *With verbal memory, you see activation in left frontal lobe and premotor areas involved in covert articulation Spatial memory tasks activate different areas, like parietal lobe and other areas involved in spatial rehearsal*

What is the self-reference effect?

- Made by Rogers, Kuiper, and Kirker - *Encoding information with respect to oneself increases memory* - Another form of deep processing - The act of thinking "does that word fit me" really boost memory

What is maintenance rehearsal?

- Maintenance rehearsal *focuses on the to-be-remembered items with little thought on what they mean or how they relate to one another*. - Has little/no long-term benefit. E.g., repeating something over and over again.

How does the feature net system explain how our visual system recognizes words?

- One possibility for how the visual system recognizes words is through a system called a feature net ■ *We have different detectors for words: word, bigram (2 letters), letter, and feature* - The initial layer (bottom) is made of feature detectors - Subsequent layers detect more complex patterns like letters, and then words - If specific feature detectors are present, then the letter detectors will present a letter. These letters put together create a bigram and then a word. - *When we are looking at letters, it is easier for us to recall and perceive letters that make sense to us* For example, CQ doesn't make much sense as CO or CU does - *Words that we're used to seeing (as a result of priming) could be perceived incorrectly. E.g. clock vs cluck* - We can think of this as bottom-up. If we're reading the word, this is top-down.

What is lateral inhibition? How does it contribute to edge perception?

- Rod / cone signals from the optic nerve go to the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) then to the occipital lobe. - *Lateral inhibition: stimulated cells inhibit neighboring cells*. ■ *The net result is that edge cells are less inhibited, allowing edge enhancement (lateral inhibition enhance contrast at the edge)*

What are illusory conjunction errors?

- Sometimes we don't have opportunity to spatially attend to each location and do binding - *Lack of attention can lead to incorrect illusory conjunctions* - *Error of binding together two features that weren't together in the display* - Patients with *damage to parietal lobe* and attention problems show these type of errors more

How does the testing effect relate to learning?

- The Testing Effect: *the deep processing needed to take a test helps create longer-lasting memories of the material* ■ Testing effect shows that being tested for information helps boost memory (retrieval of memory is a form of learning) ■ *You also learn effective mental routes to recover the information, strengthening the memory trace, and weave new contextual details into memory* - E.g.: Rohrer and Paschler study: testing as learning - Findings: restudying only better than testing when final assessment is immediate, but if retention assessed several days or a week later → testing had huge advantage over restudying

Gestalt vs. Structuralism

- gestalt explains the ball phenomenon better since it says it is a bouncing ball whereas structuralism says it is two balls - *structuralism*: the theory that perceptions *result from the summation of many elementary sensations that act as building blocks* - *Gestalt*: stresses the importance of the s*ubjective way an object appears in people's minds (the "whole" rather than the objective physical attributes (parts) of the object*

What are the different types of memory (taxonomy of memory) and what are examples of each type?

- There is declarative memory and nondeclarative memory ■ *Declarative Memory* ● *Episodic memory: memory for events or "episodes" that you lived through: discrete events, specific time/place*. Example-what you ate yesterday for breakfast; what you wore a week ago; who was at your sister's wedding ● *Semantic memory: memory for facts/generqal knowledge*. Example-The capital of France is Paris ■ *Nondeclarative Memory* ● *Procedural Memory: memory for skills*. tying your shoe; riding a bike; playing the piano ● *Priming: It involves using pictures, words or other stimuli to help someone recognize another word or phrase in the future*. Examples include using green to remember grass and red to remember apples. *conditioning*

How do the Gestalt principles influence visual perception?

- These principles help guide us to make decisions about which elements belong to the same object or different objects

What do illusions teach us about perception?

- They teach us that: - *illusions are just an erroneous perception of reality* - the eye is not a passive camera - *Perception is an active process that takes place in the brain and is not directly predictable from simple knowledge of physical relationships* - Perceptions are indirectly related to the objective world - *Perceptions are guesses that are often wrong *(predictive hypotheses)

What does it mean to say that the brain relies on "contralateral" connections?

- This means that stimulation to the left hemisphere leads to movements on the right side of the brain and vice versa. - So *left hemisphere is receiving input from the right side of the body and right hemisphere is receiving input from the left side of the body*

Some influences on the development of cog psych?

- Tolman: Change behavior required new information, as seen with the rat maze study (incidental learning of maze even without reward) - Chomsky: rebutted Skinner's argument about language use and learning since language is too complex for hearing to be enough; need innate mechanism - Barlet: people make schemas that help them understand /interpret explanations/experiences as they happen and help encode memory - Skinner: language use can be understood in terms of rewards and behaviors - Gestalt: need to gauge the nature of whole versus part by part

What is behaviorism and its role in the development of cog psych?

- organism's behaviors are observable in the right way - Behaviorism dominated psychology in America for the *first half of the 20th century(John B. Watson)* - *a behaviorist perspective demands we not talk about mental entities such as beliefs, wishes, goals, preferences,hopes, and expectations because these things cannot be studied directly and so cannot be studied scientifically* - we must think about them, as they play a role in guiding behavior - Behaviorist perspective *cannot explain all behavior* - "Little Albert" experiment---conditioning - *Edward Tolman argued that learning was more than a change in behavior, but that a new knowledge*

What are some consequences of divided attention?

-Definition: *The skill of performing multiple tasks simultaneously*. -When two tasks, combined, require more resources than you've got, then divided attention will fail. -Consequences: Cell phone use and driving ■ *Use of cell-phone (including hands-free) lead to miss of red light* ■ *Slower when responding to red light* ■ Disruption is *NOT observed if driver is conversing with passenger* (passenger will adjust conversation to accommodate for changes in driving)

What is optic ataxia?

-Impairment of visually guided reaching despite normal object recognition -*an inability to guide the hand toward an object using visual information*

What is the function of the somatosensory cortex and which parts of the body take up more space on the cortex compared to others? (refer to the sensory "Homunculus" depiction in the lecture slides and textbook)

-Information about somatosensory cortex ■ *Receives signals from the spinal cord about pain and pressure* ■ *where all of the touch information from your skin and your body temperature, pain textures on your body pressure is processed* ■ Information goes to sort of association cortices ○ Parts of body that take up more space on the cortex(weighed by importance) ■ *Lips, face, fingers, and thumb have a lot of cortex devoted to them* ■ Shoulders, hips, and trunks has a lot less cortex devoted to them

What different areas of psychology in history contributed to modern cognitive psychology?

-Introspection --> (Wundt) -Behaviorism -->(Watson) - Kant's Transcendental Method

what is the anatomical direction the *front* of brain known as?

-anterior/rostral e.g.: the frontal lobe is anterior to the occipital lobe

Name and describe main parts of a neuron

1. *Cell body*: contains nucleus & cellular machinery (DNA of cell) *Responsible for decision making* 2. *Dendrites: receive/ detect incoming signals (input) from the axons of neighboring neurons* (Tree-like shapes that surround the cell body (top of neuron) 3. *Axons*: *send signals (output) to the dendrites of neighboring neurons*( The fiber that travels down the neuron, connects to axon terminals) *Axon terminals*: *small vesicles @ the bottom of axons/ the neuron*

What are the symptoms of Capgras Syndrome? What does this disorder tell us about facial recognition?

Capgras syndrome: *can recognize faces but is paranoid that they are replacements and actual people have been kidnapped* ○ Emotional processing is disrupted so we physically recognize them but they dont FEEL familiar so we assume its someone else ● *Syndrome is associated with damage to right temporal lobe in amygdala* ○ Amygdala is the "emotional evaluator" ■ Detects stimuli related to threats/danger and safety/available rewards ■ *so if it is damaged we dont get that family happy feeling from seeing people so we get paranoid* ● Also associated with *damage to the prefrontal cortex* ○ Prefrontal cortex is very active when one is doing something that need planning and careful analysis, and not active when we are dreaming ○ *Damage to prefrontal cortex makes it hard to distinguish was is real and what is in your mind* (kind of like a dream) ■ Same for schizophrenia

What are the Gestalt principles?

The Gestalt principles are: ■ *Figure-Ground*: elements are perceived as either figures or ground ■ *Proximity*: things that are close to one another are perceived to be more related than things spaced further apart ■ *Similarity*: things that are similar are perceived to be more related ■ *Good continuation*: elements arranged on a line or curve are perceived to be more related ■ *Closure*: incomplete objects will tend to be perceived as wholes *Law of Simplicity/ Law of Pragnanz*: we tend to perceive any given visual array in a way that most simply organizes the different elements

Review the *Baddeley and Hitch Model of working memory*

This model reframes how we think of short term memory. They replace the concept of a unitary "short term store" that handled all things to a multicomponent "working memory" system. So there are three subdivisions: - *Storage (maintanance) components*: these two are dissociable, they are separate systems according to data from patients ■ *Phonological Loop (aka articulatory rehearsal loop): mantains linguistic info in a phonological (sound structure) form* ● E.g. rehearsing a phone number by articulating it to yourself covertly - Data from patients: Stroke Patient P.V. with damage to the left hemisphere ( temporal and frontal lobe regions)- Kept normal intelligence but was unable to repeat back even short sequences of spoken digits and unable to perform mental math. ○ Single Consonant memory task: ■ If the letter was shown visually, performance was 100% accurate ■ If the letter was presented auditory, performance declined in 3 seconds. *Phonological loop is damaged but not the visual miantianance.* - *Visuo-Spatial Buffer (aka visio-spatial sketchpad): temporary maintenance of visual and/or spatial information* ● E.g. keeping a map representation in your mind as you look at the fork in the road. You can't look at both at the same time. *Or look at a chess board and decide what move to make*. ● Data from patients: Patient E.L.D (Hanley et. al) suffered a stroke to the right hemisphere (frontal/temporal regions). Had difficulties with navigation and memory problems. Had severe deficits in visuospatial memory (e.g. Corsi Block Task) ○ Subject is to tap back the experimenter's sequence. Could not do this but their auditory was fine ■ *Episodic buffer: (added as an amendment to the theory) limited capacity storage system that holds and integrates diverse information (multi-modal binding). An intermediary between phonological and visual/spatial. It can also be an auxiliary store when the primary ones are overloaded and disrupted. (backup) Controlled by the central executive.* ● *Allows info retrieved from LTM to be accessible to conscious awareness*.(handels the info that is retrieved from LTM) ● Why add this store?: ○ This addition was in response to the original model, having components that were too separate in their functioning. Unlike what the original theory suggested, visual and phonological material must often combine in some way (e.g. remember letters and their spatial info) ○ Additionally, the original model did not explain how LTM could influence immediate recall (e.g. in tasks of prose recall, people can remember 16+ words in a sentence. BUt this is beyond the capacity of phonological loop.) ○ Processing (manipulation) component: work with information stored in the above components. ■ *Central executive (controlled processes): has access to info and can prioritize processing that is most important. Regulates the information*. ● E.g of central executive processes: ○ *Goal management- keeping track of goals at different levels* (big picture and details) ○ *Selection- choosing which aspect of a particular piece of information to work with* ○ *Scheduling- deciding the order in which to perform a set of operations* - The executive control functions heavily depend on the prefrontal cortex. But the central executive is not in just one place. Different processes are implemented by different systems and different parts of the lateral frontal cortex and parietal regions

What is the major difference between inattentional and change blindness?

Unlike change blindness, inattentional blindness occurs while attention is engaged in some demanding task. *Where change blindness reflects an inability to identify how the visual world changes over time, inattentional blindness refers to the failure to notice that a fully visible item exists at all*

what is anatomical direction of the *bottom* of brain known as?

inferior/ventral

what is anatomical direction the *back* of brain known as?

posterior/caudal

Feature Integration Theory (*Treisman*)

■ During the *preattentive stage*, features pop out effortlessly (attention isn't required) ■ During the *focused attention stage*, features are combined together to create object recognitions (serial search; attention required) ■ Predicts that lack of attention will lead to illusory conjunction errors

**Attenuation Model (Treisman)**

■* Information passes through a sensory register -> attenuation control -> perceptual processes -> short term memory* ■ *Unattended information is weakened, but not blocked completely* ■ Likelihood of getting through is dependent on threshold ● *Important words (your name, "fire," "help," etc.) pass through more easily*

Which aspects of H.M.'s life were disrupted by his amnesia?

○ Report of pervasive and profound *anterograde amnesia* ○ "*Stuck in the present*" ○ Little trouble remembering events prior to surgery. ○ *H.M. was completely unable to recall any event that occurred after his operation* - If asked about recent events: will report facts and events that were current at the time of surgery. - Will not remember about last week, or events that happened one hour ago ○ *Mirror Tracing Task: - Can learn new skills → evidence that even with anterograde amnesia, procedural memory was unaffected* (i.e. Drawing star task "mastered" by Day 3) - Had no memory of the previous day, but still improved the following day.

What can happen when there is a dissociation between the phonological loop and visuospatial buffer?

● Patients similar to P.V. show impairments when the task is auditory but not when it is visual-spatial, whereas Patients like E.L.D. show the opposite impairment.

What are the effects of google on memory? What does this suggest about the ability of human memory to adapt to new ways of computing and communicating information?

➢ *Google inhibits our ability to remember information long term* because the information is all at our fingertips, instead of in a book in a library that is less accessible to us. - *Studies show that we know more about where information can be found rather than knowing the information itself*. ○ "These results suggest that *processes of human memory are adapting to the advent of new computing* and communication technology... We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found." ➢ *This shows that our brains are plastic and can change based off of external stimuli* (ex., information, technology)

Explain what we can learn about the relationship between the mind and the brain by studying the effects of brain disorders and trauma

➢ *We can discover which parts of the brain are responsible for what function*. - For example, a lesion/stroke in the right parietal lobe causes hemispatial neglect of the left side of the visual field. Thus, the right parietal lobe is responsible for brain processing of information from the left visual field.