Psychology 3rd Exam Book Notes

What can the majority of logical errors made by children be explained by?

"Executive failures" in which the central executive is not well controlled. Children tend to make the same mistakes that adults with damage to their frontal lobe (where the CE is thought to be located) do.

The use of scripts to organize episodic memories

Children were able to give ordered reports of what typically happens during events like grocery shopping. This shows the problem with infantile amnesia has to do with unusual and novel events, which are forgotten.

What does the development of abstract knowledge depend on?

Linguistic coding

Can memory be isolated from the development of other cognitive processes?

No, because it is embedded in larger social and cognitive activities

Is recognition memory unique to humans?

No. Pigeons can remember 320 pictures for 700 days. It might be not be a measure of cognitive ability, but maybe processing.

Sensorimotor Stage

(ages 0-2): when you start to master your sensory reception and motoring; use of muscles, movement

Underextension

Applying the meaning of a word too narrowly

Can language acquisition be influenced by positive reinforcement?

Definitely.

Differences In Memory Between Hearing and Deaf children

Hearing children tend to remember numbers presented to them in the temporal order (suggesting they use the phonological loop to rehearse information) while Deaf children remember numbers presented to them in the spatial order (suggesting they use the visuospatial sketchpad to encode information).

Facial Recognition

Helpful because there is no verbal recall component. If a child is primed for a face, they are better able to answer questions/recognize them the second time.

Temporal order as an organizing principle in children's episodic memory

Researchers demonstrating bathing a teddy bear. Children were able to give the bear a bath afterwards, in the right order, even after six weeks. In order to see if the familiarity of having a bath affected the results, researchers invented the event "building a rattle." Children showed the same ability to recall and reproduce the events.

Concrete opperational stage

children gain logical thought about volume, numbers, size, categories, etc.

Formal opperational stage

children gain the ability to think about abstract concepts, and can use hypothetical and deductive reasoning.

6 Types of Memory

1) Semantic memory 2) Recognition memory 3) Working memory 4) Implicit memory 5) Episodic memory 6) Procedural memory

"Magical Shrinking Room" Studies (DeLoache)

2 1/2 year olds were told that the experimenters had built a shrinking machine that could shrink a doll and a room. They were then showed where Big Snoopy was hiding in the big room, and asked find the Little Snoopy in the model room. The children found Little Snoopy easily. They also could do this when shown a picture and then asked to see a big room. If they think that the rooms are the same, they are okay, but if they think that they are different room, they don't do so well.

How many pictures did Brown and Scott find that child could recognize?

98% After 7 days, levels only fell to 94% for pictures seen twice, and 70% for pictures seen only once. This difference suggests that having to recognize a picture acts a a retrieval cue later.

Symbolic Sensitivity

A basic readiness to recognize that one object or event can stand for another.

Clever Hans

A horse that was trained to "solve" arithmetic problems but what really just looking for clues in the questioner.

Wug Test

A test to determine if children will apply grammatical rules to novel words. When shown a picture of a "wug" and then shown a picture of two of them, the children say that there are "two wugs"

Mean Length of Utterance (MLU)

A unit of measurement that assess children's level of language maturation

Habituation

An organism's decreasing response to a stimulus with repeated exposure to it; a measure of recognition

Even though it is embedded in other cognitive processes, how does cognitive psychology like to discuss memory?

As a modular system, with emphasis placed on the fractionation of the developed system. Different types of memory are considered independently of one another.

Scripts

As opposed to routines, a framework for encoding memories that adults use (for example, these are the things that happen when we go to a restaurant).

Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis

Benjamin Whorf's hypothesis that one's perception of the world is molded by one's language

Perceptual Learning in Children

Does not develop in age. Deep processing leads to better explicit memory, and implicit memory levels do not depend on processing.

Freud's Explanation of Infantile Amnesia

Early amnesia was caused by the repression of the emotionally traumatic events of early childhood. Does not explain why pleasant events are also later inaccessible.

What does DeLoache argue helps the development of symbolic sensitivity?

Early experience with symbolic relations

What is a possible explanation for infantile amnesia (not Freud's)?

Early memories are coded in terms of physical action or pure sensation, and thus are irretrievable since they are stored in a different format that later memories (which are encoded using linguistics). However, another explanation would be that the formation of conscious memories are late developing, because the brain structures that underlie the systems are not functional at birth.

Suggestibility in Children

For the most part, studies have showed that children are fairly good about not giving inaccurate information. However, younger children tended to be more susceptible to leading questions, BUT THEY STILL DID NOT SHOW TOO MUCH INACCURACY IN THEIR REPORTS.

Memory Span

Gives a measure of working memory capacity, and increases with age

Is eyewitness memory in child better or worse than adults?

It appears to be the same. Those who saw a man steal a handbag were less willing to selected suggested misleading alternative events during a forced-choice test. However, younger children tend to be more suggestible than adults.

What does Fivush and Hammond argue about infantile amnesia?

It might be due to a combination of the absence of distinctive memory cues and the fact that young children yet to learn a framework for recounting and storing events. Instead, they focus on routines, which do not help in the encoding of novel events. Therefore, childhood amnesia is due to a combination of script formation and the forgetting of novel events.

Episodic Memory

Memory for episode or events in one's life, involving conscious recall. Tends to be organized around schemas or scripts for routine events.

Implicit Memory

Memory without awareness, or "unintentional memory" or "perceptual learning"

DeLoache's Work on Young Children's Understanding of Models

Orientation phase: A 2 1/2 or 3 year old is shown a scale model of a room, containing various pieces of furniture. The child is then introduced to two animals who like to hide. Then, the child is told "Look! Both rooms are just the same." Next phase: The child finds one of the animals in a hiding spot, and then is told to find the next one in the real room. They are told that the animals are in the same spot. The 3 year olds go straight to the place where the other animal was hiding, but the 2 1/2 year olds do not. This suggests that the younger children do not understand the correspondence between the model room and the real room.

Why are younger children more susceptible to leading questions?

Over-dependency of younger children on scripted knowledge could mean that suggestions made by the experimenter get included into the children's script for an event. There are also strong correlations between knowledge and memory.

The relationship between scripts and novel events

Recent studies have shows that younger child can also remember novel and unusual events over long periods of time. This is possibly because scripts help children recognize novel events.

Picture Completion Tasks

Show that explicit memory levels vary with age

Fragment Completion Tasks

Showed that implicit memory levels are invariant across age groups, including adults. Suggests that implicit memory does not develop, but explicit memory does.

Recognition Memory

The ability to recognize the something is familiar and has been experienced before. Usually contracted with recall memory.

Representational Stance

The ability to represent the higher-order relation between symbols and referents

Generativity

The characteristic of language marked by the ability to combine words in novel, meaningful ways

Displacement

The characteristic of language marked by the ability to refer to objects and events that are not present

Semanticity

The characteristic of language marked by the use of symbols to convey thoughts in a meaningful way

Ecological Validity

The extent to which a study is realistic or representative of real life.

Pragmatics

The relationship between language and its social context

Recall Memory

The retrieval of a conscious memory of what has been experienced in the past.

Transformational Grammar

The rules by which languages generate surface structures out of deep structures and vice versa.

Grammar

The set of rules that governs the proper use and combination of language symbols

What is a problem with trying to isolate memory from other cognitive processes?

The studies tend to focus on nonsense syllables and the like, instead of things that people actually remember--like life experiences, recipes, etc.

Phonology

The study of the sounds that compose language

What is one speculation about why our brain would not be able to form memories at birth?

The subcortical limbic-diencephalic structures are essential for the formation of conscious memories, and that the brain only begins to function properly around 2-3 years. However, these ideas are based on paralleling infant humans and infant monkeys.

Critical Period

The time after which language acquisition might not occur.

How are speech rate and memory rate related?

They correlate; the faster the speech rate, the higher the memory rate and span. This is a linear relationship.

What can we assume about the mechanisms that result in false memories?

They may be general ones to do with the way that the developing memory system function, rather than specific ones related to false memories of negative events.

Although much data supports the idea that implicit vs. explicit memories are dissociable, what do Shanks and St. John argue?

Two dissociable memory systems would require two dissociable learning systems, an implicit systems that operates independently of awareness and an explicit system that cannot function with a concurrent awareness. This does not support current data, however,

What is the evidence for children relying on visual memory?

Very indirect; mostly depends on showing that younger children are not susceptible to effects that are related to the use of speech sounds for coding material. In a study by Conrad, young children were able to perform the same in matching games when the words sounded the same vs. when they sounded different, unlike adults who tend to confuse similar-sounding words. Children are also more likely to confuse similar-appearing pictures.

What components of working memory do children rely upon?

Visuospatical sketchpad up until the age of five, at which point they switch to the phonological loop. This switch is very important, as it seems to correspond with Piaget's proposed shift in children's logical reasoning abilities.

Causal relations as an organizing principle in children's episodic memories

When researchers included events who temporal ordering was arbitrary, like a train ride, recall for the order of event was significantly lower. Showed that causal information was important for the development and organization of semantic memory.

Is infantile amnesia a real phenomenon?

Yes, according to Howe and Courage. Even when we believe that we remember something from our early years, they tend to be about someone else's experiences.

Can parental interaction influence the development of event memories?

Yes. Parents tend to ask specific questions about past events, and the repeated experience of these question may help young child organize events into the correct temporal and causal order. Children whose parents ask more specific questions tend to have better memories.

Farrar and Goodman Studies on Novel Events

Young children who played the usual animals game each day, except for one day where there was a different game, believed that the novel event had occurred every day. Older children were able to differentiate.

Preopperational Stage

in piagets theory, the stage from about two to 7 years of age during which a child learns to use language but does not yet comprehend the mental operations of concrete logic