Psychology Unit 7: Cognition and Memory

Two cognitive tendencies that lead us astray when solving problems.

Confirmation bias and fixation

One sin of intrusion

Persistence (unwanted memories)

What is the confirmation bias? Example.

We seek evidence verifying our ideas more eagerly than we seek evidence that may refute them -When US launched war against Iraq on assumption that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, when the assumption turned out to be false confimtion bias was one of the flaws in the judgement process.

Does people's working memory capacity differ? Explain.

Yes, those who can juggle the most mental balls tend to exhibit higher intelligence and maintain better focus on tasks

What is implicit memory, procedural memory, and explicit memory?

-(nondeclarative memory) Retention of unconscious capacity for learning -Implicit memories for motor skill tasks like riding a bike or playing an instrument -(declarative memory) Memory of facts and experiences that one can consicously declare

Two tragedies related to adult recollections of child abuse? The average therapist estimated that ________ of the population have repressed memories of child abuse but in another survey ___ out of 10 said they used hypnosis or drugs to help clients recover suspected child abuse. Patients exposed to techniques such as reasoning to uncover memories may do what with further visualization?

-1. Trauma survivors being disbelieved when telling their secret 2. Innocent being falsely accused -11% -7 -Form an image of a threatening person and the image grows more vivid, causing the person to confront or sue the stunned person who will deny the accusation

From his self experiments, what did Ebbinghaus estimate the effort required to learn meaninful material compared to nonsense material? What is the point to remember? What is the self reference effect? Information deemed relevant to oneself is what?

-1/10 -The amount remembered depends both on the time spent learning and onyour making it meaningful -When asked how well adjectives describe someone else we often forget and when asked how they survive us, we often remember, especially from individualistic western cultures -Processed more deeply and remains more accessible

When preschoolers overhead a remark about a missing rabbit, how many recalled actually seeing it? In one study Ceci and Bruck had a child choose a card from a deck of possibilities and the adult read the card, the child trying hard to remember the occurrence. After 10 weekly interviws with the same adult, a new adult asked the same questions, how many preschoolers produced false stories regarding events they had never experienced? When given these detailed stories were psychologists also fooled? explain. Does this mean that children can never be accurate eyewitnesses? How can you make children good eyewitnesses? When are children especially accurate?

-78% -58% -Yes, they could not separate real memories from false ones same as the child could not -No -If questioned about experiences in neutral words they can understand children can accurately recall what occurred, also when less suggesstive more effective techniques are used 4-5 year olds can recall accurately -Have not talked with adults prior to the interview, and when disclosure is made in a first interview with a neutral person who asks nonleading questions

what is memory? Research on what has helped us understand how it works?

-A learning that has persisted over time, information that has been stored and can be retrieved -Memory's extremes

What helps us think about how we form and retrieve memories? What is one example? How do we act like this? What are its limitations? What is one other modern model used?

-A model of how memory works -A computer's information processing system -To remember an event, we must get information in our brain (encoding), retain that information (storage), and later get it back out (retrieval) this is similar to a computer -Our memories are less literal and more fragile, the brain is slower than a computer but does many things at once

What is memory held in storage by? What are retrieval cues? What do the best retrieval cues come from? How can we call up visual cues when trying to remember something? What is priming?

-A web of associations, each piece is interconnected with others -Anchor points you can use to access target information when you want to retrieve it later -Associations we form at the time a memory is encoded, like tastes, smells, and sights evoking recall of associated episodes -Place ourselves in the original context -The activation, often unconsciously, of particular associations in memory

3 types of encoding: define, which yields best memory of verbal information?

-Acoustic- encoding of sounds, mostly sounds of words -Semantic- encoding of meaning, mostly of words -Visual- encoding of picture images -semantic

When do we construct our memories? What have experiments in which people witness and event and then are given or not given misleading information about lead to? Can we discriminate between our memoires of real and suggested events? Explain. Can others vivid retellings of events create memories?

-As we encode them -Misinformation effect: After exposure to a subtle misinformation, many people misremember -No, You can recall recounting an experience and filling in gaps with plausible guesses and assumptions, and after more retellings, we may recall the guessed details as if we actually observed them -Yes

What occurs to babbling at 10 mos? What occurs to babies? What occurs at the first birthday of babies? What do they use to communicate meaning? What occurs at the 18 month mark and what is telegraphic speech? Does it follow the rules of syntax? What occurs to children when they get out of the 2 word stage?

-Babbling reflects household language -Babies become functionally deaf to speech sounds outside their native language -Sounds, usually one barely recognizable symbol but this later grows -Two word stage -Early form of speech containing mostly nouns and verbs -Yes -Quickly begin uttering longer phrases

Do psychologists believe we benefit more from Skinner or Chomsky's view on language? What does skinner's views explain? Chomsky's?

-Both -Infants acquire language as we interact with others -Preschoolers learn language so readily and use grammar so well

What does the cerebellum do? What can people not do with a damaged cerebellum? How does the dual explicit implicit memory system explain infantile amnesia?

-Brain region extending out from rear of the brainstem which plays a key role in forming and storing the implicit memories created by classical conditioning - Develop certain conditioned reflexes like classical conditioning -Implicit reacctions and skills we learn during infancy help us in our future but as an adult we cannot recall anything explicitly. Conscious memory is blank because we index so much of our explicit memory by words that young children have not learned and the hippocampus is not mature yet

Who demonstrated that semantic memory yields best encoding? What are shallower processing things? What else matters with encoding? How was this demonstrated and what is is shown by? What does this research show the benefit of?

-Craik and Tulving -Acoustic but moreso visual -The meaning (semantic) -Students reading a paragraph with and without context of the situation. -Rephrasing what we read and hear into meaningful terms

How do currently depressed people and previously depressed people regard their parents? In a good or bad mood, how do we persist in attributing reality? How does our moods effect on retrieval explain why moods persist?

-Currently depressed people see parents as rejecting, punitive, and guilt promoting, while previously depressed see them as people who have never been depressed see them -To our own changing judgements and memories -When happy we see the world as a happy place which prolongs our good mood, when depressed we recall sad events which darkens our interpretations of present events.

What are the benefits of being able to forget?

-Discards useless or out of date information -Without forgetting, one would have difficulty thinking abstractly and thoughts would dominate one's consciousness -Memory dismays and frustrates us; they are quirky

Concerning language, what occurs by 4 months of age? It marks the beginning of which stage? What do children do at seven months and beyond? What is productive language? What stage do children enter at 4 months of age? How do children with deaf parents babble? How are natural babbling sounds made?

-Discriminating speech sounds -Receptive language (ability to comprehend speech) -Segmenting spoken sounds into individual words -Ability to produce words -Babbling stage -With their hands -Consonant vowel pairs formed by bunching the tongue in front of the mouth or by opening and closing the lips

When pharmacutical companies are competing to develop and test memory boosting drugs, what is one approach do developing drugs? What occurs with repeated neural firing? Explain. What is a second approach? What remains to be seen about this method? What is one effective safe and free memory enhancer?

-Drugs that boost production of CREB, a protein which can switch genes off or on -A nerve's gene cells produce synapse strengthening proteins, enabling LTP Boosting CREB production might lead to increased production of proteins that reshape synapses and consolidate shorterm memory into long term memory -Drugs that boost glutamate, a neurotransmitter enhancing synaptic communication (LTP) -Whether it boosts memory without nasty side effects and cluttering our minds with trivia best forgotten -Study followed by adequate sleep

What occurs in our brains when we are excited or stressed? What part of the brain boosts activity and available proteins in the brain's memory forming areas?What does arousal do for memories and what does it cause to occur over time?

-Emotion triggered stress hormones make more glucose energy available to fuel brain activity, signaling the brain that something important has happened -amygdala, two emotion processing clusters in the limbic system -Sears certain events into the brain disrupting memory for neutral events around the same time -Recollentions of a horrific event may intrude into one's mind again and again

What is another retrieval cue other than associated words, events, and contexts and how is it related to priming? What is state dependent memory? How are memories mood congruent? What occurs to people's memories when in a depressed state? Buoyant mood?

-Emotions! -Events in the past may have aroused a specific emotion that later primes us to recall its associated events -What we learn in one state can be more easily recalled when we are again in that state -Emotions that accompany good or bad events become retrieval cues -Sours memories by priming negative associations, and you remember other bad times -People recall the world through rose colored glasses

What prevents information from disappearing when in the short term store? How did Lloyd Peterson and Margaret Peterson show how quickly a short term memory will dissappear? Two characteristics that short term memory is limited in? What did George Miller demonstrate about one of these phenomena?

-Encoding and rehearsing by the working memory -Asked people to remember 3 consonant groups and had them count backward by 3s from 100 to prevent rehearsal, after 3 seconds people recalled the letters only half of the time and after 12 seldom remembered at all (without active processing short term memories have a limited life) -Duration and capacity -The ability of the short term to only remember 7 bits of information give or take 2 was called the Magical Number Seven, plus or minus two

What does Skinner believe we can explain language development with? How does he think humans (and other animals) learn language?

-Familiar learning principles like association (sights of things with words), imitation, and reinforcements (smiles and hugs) -Children begin to talk in similar ways that animals learn to press bars: through operant conditioning

What did Ebbinghaus do to create material for his experiments? What did he find? What is the simple beginning principle related to this? What increases retention? what is the point to remember?

-Formed a list of nonsense syllables with 2 consonants and 2 vowels, selected certain ones, read them and tested himself using certain repetitions, the day after learning a list he could recall few of the syllables but the more frequently he repeated the list on day 1 the more he remembered on day 2 -The amount remembered depends on the time spent learning -Overlearning, or additional rehearsal -For novel verbal information, practice does make perfect (effortful processing)

What does prolonged stress do to memory? What occurs when sudden stress horomones are flowing?

-It corrodes neural connections and shrinks the brain area (hippocampus) vital for making memories -Older memories may be blocked

What does chomsky argue that language development comes from? What does he believe humans are prewired with? What does this allow us to do? What is universal grammar?

-It is inborn, demonstrated by our skill at acquiring untaught words and grammar and piecing together unique sentences, given nurture, language will naturally occur -Language acquisition device -Switches need to be turned on or off for us to understand language -All human languages have same grammatical building blocks (ex nouns), so we readily learn grammar of any language we experience, starting with nouns

What is a mental set? How does it not allow us to seee things from a new perspective? What is functional fixedness? Give an example? What is a part of creativity?

-It refers our tendency to approach a problem with the mind set of what has worked for us in the past. -It predisposes how we think, and solutions that work in the past often work in the present as well -Our tendency to think of only the familiar functions for objects without imagining alternate alternatives -A person may look for a screwdriver where a coin would have worked instead -Perceiving and relating familiar things in new ways

What occurs once we incorrectly represent a problem? What is fixation? Two examples of fixation:

-Its hard to restructure how we approach it -Inability to see a problem from a fresh perspective -Mental set and functional fixedness

When processing verbal information for storage, what do we usually encode? When asked later about what we read or heard what do we recall?

-Its meaning, associating it with what we already know or imagine -Not the literal text but what we encoded

What are one of the frailest parts of memories? What is this called? Can we be sure a memory is real by how real it feels?What are memories akin to? Can we judge a memory's reality by its persistence?

-Its source -Source Amnesia -No -Perceptions, perceptions of the past, people's initial interpretations influence their perceptual memories -No

Who came up with the linguistic determism hypothesis? What is it? When people speak two different languages what are they said to have? What do english speakers get higher scores on than when speaking spanish? Our words may not __________ the way that we think, but they do ____________ our thinking. We use our language in forming ________________.

-Linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf -Language determines the way that we think -different senses of self, or they may have different personality profiles -Extroversion, agreeable and conscientious selves -determine, influence, categories

What is amnesia? Who is the most famous case? What does testing of those with amnesia reveal? But what is the one limitation they have with this? Who are they similar to? What does this challenge?

-Loss of Memory -H.M. -Although incapable of recalling new facts or anything they have done recently, they can learn -They learn without awareness that they have learned them -People with brain damage who do not consciously recognize faces but have a physiological unconscious recognition -The idea that memory is a single, unified system. Rather it is a double system operating in tandem : implicit memory and explicit

What is implicit memory? Do we think in images? When learning a skill, what effect does watching have, or imagining an activity? What is an outcome simulation? A process simulation? What is the point to remember? What is the relationship between thinking and language?

-Memory in pictures -yes, the greatest minds do -Activates the brain's internal simution of it, same internal activity -Visualizing doing well on something -Visualizing studying hard for and preparing for something -Its better spending fantasy time planning on how to get somewhere than to dwell on imagined destination -Thinking affects our language which in turn affects our thought

What is the second building block of language? What do morphemes include? What is grammar? Semantics? syntax? What occurs when you move from one level to the next of language? How many words do you learn between age 1 and graduation of highschool?

-Morpheme -Words, but others include suffixes and prefixes -A system of rules in a given language that allow us to communicate with and understand others -A set of rules we use to derive meaning from morphemes words and even sentences -Rules we set to order words into sentences -It gets more complex -60,000

What are the most confident and consistent eyewitnesses like? Whether right or wrong, what do eyewitnesses express similarly of? What is one conclusion based on memory construction and falsely remembered events? What have some psychologists trained police to do to avoid creating false memories in suspects? What is this called?

-Most persuasive, but not most accurate -Self assurance -What people feel and know today seems to be how they have always felt or known -Ask less suggestive, more effective questions. They ask witnesses to first visualize the scene, the witness then tells in detail without interruptions every point recalled. Then the detective asks evocative follow up questions -Cognitive interview technique

Three possibilities of why you do not remember something. Which is the most common and who experiences it?

-Not encoded, Stored memories decay, or Unretrieved memories -Unretreived, older adults, who are frustrated by tip of the tongue forgetting

What is belief perseverence and what does it fuel? Showing two opposing groups the same mixed evidence does what to their disagreement? What is the remedy for this phenomenon? What does it take for someone to change our views? When do we more tightly cling to our beliefs?

-Our tendency to cling to our beliefs in the face of contrary evidence -Social conflict -Increases their disagreement -Considering the opposite -Imagining and pondering opposite values rather than just being objective and unbiased -The more we appreciate why our beliefs might be true, once our beliefs are formed and get justified, it takes compelling evidence to change them than it did to create them

What creates overconfidence? People are more confident when asking questions like...? Example of how overconfidence occurs politically and at school? What is the adaptive value of overconfidence? What is the consequence?

-Our use of intuitive heuristics when forming judgements, eagerness to confirm beliefs we already hold, and knack for explaining away failures -Is absinthe a liqueur or precious stone? (liquer) -Overconfident Lyndon Johnson waged war with North Vietnam -Students are overconfident about how long it takes them to do an assignment, but projects noramly take twice the days predicted -Live more happily, find it easier to make tough decisions, seem more credible than those that lack self confidence -Failing to appreciate our tendency for error

What is the hippocampus? What does damage to the hippocampus cause? How is it similar to the cortex? What does left hippocampus damage affect and what does right hippocampus damage affect? What are three different functions of certain parts of the hippocampus?

-Part of the brain that contains explicit memories, a temporal lobe neural center that forms part of the limbic system -Disrupts some types of memory -It is lateralized, there are two of them -Left: trouble remembering verbal information -Right: Trouble recalling visual designs and locations -people associate names with faces, memory that engages in spatial mnemonics, Rear area processes spatial memories

What did Michael Ross and his colleagues demonstrate about people and their memories? Example. What does Sigmund Freud argue about how our memory systems self censor certain memories? What did he think happened to the memory/ did it go away? What was this central to and do many people still believe it? What do modern scientists think?

-People unknowingly revise their own histories, when told about their benefits of brushing, people are likely to say that they brush more frequently than others who didnt hear it -We repress painful memories to protect our self concept and reduce anxiety -The submerged memory will linger and come back later in therapy or at a later cue -Freud's psychology and psychology itself -Repression rarely, if ever, occurs. People can forget neutral material but when material is emotional it is not often forgotten.

What is it called when old information can help us learn new information? When does interference occur?

-Positive Transfer -When old and new information compete with one another

What did Henry Bahrick and 3 of his family members do in a nine year long experiment? What was their persistent finding? What is the testing effect? Point to remember?

-Practiced foreign language word translations for a given number of times, at intervals ranging from 14 to 56 days -The longer space between practice sessions, the better the retention up to 5 years later -Repeated quizzing of previously learned material helps -Spaced study and self assessment beat cramming

Brain activity associated with sudden flashes of insight? Are we the only creatures to display insight? What does this evidence of animal cognition explain? Is insight sudden?

-Preceded by frontal lobe activity involved in focusing attention and accompanied by a burst of activity in the right temporal lobe -No, apes can do it too and exhibit foresight as well -There is more to learning than conditioning -Yes, there is no prior sense that one is warm or getting closer to the answer

What do real memories have and fake memories have that is different? What are imagined memories based on? What does this lead to for children? What do false memories feel like? What do we more easily remember than the memory itself?

-Real memories are more detailed , fake (gist) memories are more durable -The gist of the supposed event (associated meanings and feelings) -False memories outlast true memories, especially as children mature and are able to better process the gist -Feel as real as true memories and may be very persistent -The gist rather than words themselves

How did Duncan Godden and Alan Baddeley discover that putting yourself back into the context where you experienced something can prime your memory retrieval? What is deja vu? For how many people does it occur and who is most common to exxperience it? What is the cause that most attribute to it?

-Scuba divers listened to words underwater or on the beach and recalled them best in the same context -The sense that you've experienced something before -2/3 of us; well-educated imaginative young adults, especially when tired or stressed -Reincarnation or precognition

What is the hippocampus active during? What causes better memory the next day? Are memories permanently stored in the hippocampus? What do researchers suspect occurs while we sleep? Once stored, mental encores of past experiences activate which lobes?

-Slow wave sleep -Greater hippocampus activity during sleep after a training experience -No, it temporarily holds memories then they are stored elsewhere -Hippocampus and brain cortex display simultaneous activity rhythms as if they were having a conversation. Brain is replaying day's experiences as it transfers them to the cortex for long term storage -Frontal and temporal lobes

According to Loftus after implanting false memories and having people believe them, as well as other studies, reasonable normal human beings can do what? How does loftus know firsthand about what she has studied? Does repression ever occur? explain.

-Speak in terror stricken voices about things that didnt actually happen but they remember vividly and clearly -Loftus was convinced that she had found her mother's drowned body by her uncle at age 14, she began to believe it then her uncle denied it later saying it was her Aunt Pearl -She was molested by a male babysitter when she was 6 years old and has not forgotten making her weary of those who think that it is repressed -When a traumatic event is experienced it is not often banished to the unconscious, but they are typically etched in the mind as vivid persistent haunting memories

What is the serial position effect? What does it illustrate? How have experimenters demonstrated the serial position effect? What is the effect called that allows people to remember last items and why? What occurs after a delay/ what recall is best then?

-Tendency to remember best first and last items in a list -Benefits of rehearsal -Showing people a list of items and immediately asking them to recall the items in any order and they normally remember first and last items best -recency effect, last items are still in working memory -Primacy effect, recall is best for first items

What is creativity? What is necessary but not sufficient for creativity? Two kinds of thinking and which concerns intelligence tests and which creativity tests?

-The ability to produce ideas that are both novel and valuable -A certain level of aptitude, or intelligence, but you do not need to be extremely smart -Convergent thinking (intelligence tests requiring one answer) -Divergent thinking (creativity tests requiring more than one answer)

How might the memory system produce deja vu? What does James Lampinen suggest as an alternative theory? What is a third theory concerning processing?

-The current situation could be loaded with cues that unconsciously retrieve an earlier, similar experience. -A situation seems familiar when it is moderately similar to several events. Meeting a new person in a family, when you've already met the rest of the family -Dual processing, Since we assemble our perceptions on information processing that occurs at the same time, one mistake and one part's signal is delayed it can feel like a repeat of the earlier one

How do prototypes shape how we fit things into our concepts? Once we place an item in a category, how does our memory of it shift? When we move away from our prototypes, what occurs? What do concepts, like other mental shortcuts do to our thinking?

-The more closely something matches out prototype, the more readily we recognize it as an example of the concept -Torward the category prototype (a robin is a birdier bird than a penguin) -Category boundaries may blur -Speed and guide our thinking, but dont always make us wise

What is phoneme? Example? How many total? How many in English? Which carries more meaning, consonant phonemes or vowels? Do people that grow up with one set of phonemes have more difficulty with learning those of a different language? What are the phoneme like building blocks of sign language?

-The smallest distinctive sound unit -b, a, t -869 -40 -Consonant phonemes -Yes -hand shapes and movements

What is framing? How can it be used to scare people? Give an example. Example of how it effects political and business decisions?

-The way an issue is posed -Expressing risks as numbers not percentages -People told that something has a 10 in 10 million chance of happening are more scared than those given a .000001 % risk -Ground beef marked 75% lean is more appealing than 25% fat

What do words subtly influence? When hearing the generic he, what are people likely to picture rather than what is intended? What is it difficult to think about without language? What is the bilingual advantage? Children who learn french and english are better than control groups with only english in? What does language allow us to do?

-Thinking -A male -Abstract ideas (freedom commitment) -Bilingual children who learn to inhibit one language while using the other are also better able to inhibit their attention to irrelevant info -fluency, increased aptitude, creativity, and appreciation for culture -Links us to one another and connects us to the past and future

What is the representativeness heuristic? What does it influence? What do we do to judge the likelihood of something? What occurs if they both match?

-To judge the liklihood of things in terms of how well they represent particular prototypes -Influences many of our daily decisions -We intuitively compare it to our mental representation of that category -If the two match, the fact usually overrides other considerations of statistics or logic

How can chunking be used as a mnemonic technique? What are these most commonly called? What are hierarchies and how do they help us with memory? Who presented this and by how many times was recall better?

-To recall unfamiliar material -Acronyms -A few broad concepts divided and subdivided into narrower concepts and facts -They help you retrieve information efficiently -Gordon Bower and Colleagues -Two to three times, when words were organized into groups

Four ways we can solve problems: describe each and give an example

-Trial and Error (trying every solution in an attempt to find one that works, math problems) -Algorithms (step by step procedures that guarentee a solution, they can be laborious and exhausting, trying every combo of letters to make a word) -Heuristics (A simple thinking strategy, more error prone, shortcuts) -Insight (suddenly realizing the solution with out use of a problem solving strategy)

What do the most easily remembered things involve? What do we more easily remember with words? Why? How does this relate to our memory of experiences? What is this called in relation to positive memories?

-Visual imagery -Concrete words rather than abstract -Memory for concrete nouns or sentences is aided by encoding them both semantically and visually -Colored by best or worst moment -Rosy retrospection: recalling the high points while forgetting the lows

What is the availability heuristic? How does this occur with terrorism? How do we typically reason according to Paul Slovic?

-We base our judgements on how mentally available information is; anything that can pop into our mind quickly and with little effort can make it seem more common -Terrorism has decreased since the 1980s, but because the information is more available now and with 9/11, and it was marked as one of the top priorities for Congress while climate change was marked as relatively unimportant -Emotionally and neglect probabilities, we overfeel and underthink

When learning, in what case do items interfere with others commonly? Two types of interference? How is information presented the hour before sleep prevented from retroactive interference? What were some of John Jenkins and Karl Dallenbach's findings concerning this?

-When they are similar -Proactive Interference and Retroactive interference -Opportunity for interfering events is minimized -The hour before a night's sleep is a good time to commit things to memory but not the minutes before sleep or during sleep

Before our first birthday, what were we discerning as well as word breaks? How did Jenny Saffran show this? What does seven month olds abilities to listen longer to syllables in a different sequence (ABB vs. ABA) explain?

-Which syllables go best together -Exposing 8 mos olds to a string of nonsense syllables and after 2 minutes infants were able to recognize three syllable sequences that appeared repeatedly -Babies come with a built in readiness to learn grammatical rules

Can repeatedly imagining nonexistant actions and events create false memories? What is this called? Why does it occur? What does this later seem like, and what conclusion does this lead to? Those who have strange false memories are more likely to have what?

-Yes; imagination inflation -Partly because visualizing something and actually perceiving it activate similar brain areas -More familiar -The more vividly we are able to imagine things, the more likely we are to inflate them into memories -Vivid imaginations

What does childhood seem to represent for language? What occurs to children who have not been exposed to language by age 7? What occurs to natively deaf children who learn sign language after 9? What is the conclusion with this?

-critical period -Gradually lose their ability to learn any language -Never learn it as well as those who become deaf at age 9 after learning english. Never learn english as well as other natively deaf children who learned to sign in english -When a young brain does not learn any language the language learning capacity never develops

What does effortful processing produce? How can we boost our memory for learning novel information? Who was the pioneering researcher of verbal memory? How did he demonstrate this finding?

-durable and accessible memories -Rehearsal or conscious repetition -German philosopher Hermann Ebbinghaus -Became impatient with philosophical speculations about memory, and decided he would scientifically sutdy his own learning and forgetting of novel verbal materials

Those who learn a second language ____________ learn it best. When is it harder to learn a new language when immigrating to a new country? Children wh o are deaf and born to non signing parents dont experience what? What are they like compared to native speakers? What do they show within their brains? What will occur to children who are isolated from language during the critical period for language?

-early -when you're older -Language during their early years -Less fluent, they can master basic words and how to order them but aren't as good at subtle grammar -Show less activity in right hemisphere regions that are active as native signers read sign langauge -Become linguistically stunted

When we need to act quickly, what strategy do we use? What occurs thanks to our mind's automatic information processing? What are the two types of heuristics?

-heuristics -Intuitive judgements are instantaneous but they can be costly -representativeness and availability

What did Sperling's experiment demonstrate that humans have? How long does it last? What occurred when he delayed the tone signal by more than 1/2 second? What is sensory memory for auditory stimuli?How long does it linger? Experiments on these two types of memory have helped what?

-iconic memory (a type of sensory memory; fleeting photographic memory) -A few 10ths of a second -Image faded and participants once again only saw a few letters; Visual screen clears quickly as new memories are superimposed on old ones -Echoic memory -3-4 seconds is how long auditory echoes linger -Understand the initial recording of sensory information in the memory system

What is imagery at the heart of? How were these used in Ancient Greece and in modern day? How do these devices organize material for later retrieval? What is chunking and how does it occur? How does it occur with language? How do we remember information best?

-mnemonics -Greece: Used by scholars and orators to remember lengthy memorized passages and speeches Today: Rely on acoustic and visual codes -When things become meaningful, they turn into a sequence which we can more easily remember -Organizing items into familiar manageable units; Automatically and naturally -When we can organize it into personally meaningful arrangements

What does increased synaptic efficiency make for? In experiments, what has rapidly stimulation certain memory circuit connections increased? What is long term potentiation? What does is provide? What evidence shows that it is a physical basis for memories?

-more efficient neural circuits -Sensitivity for hours or weeks to come, sending neuron now needs less prompting to release its neurotransmitter an d receiving neuron's receptor sites may increase -Increase in synapse's firing potential after brief rapid stimulation. Believed to be neural basis for learning and memory -Drugs blocking LTP interfere with learning; Mice engineered to lack an enzyme needed for LTP can't learn their way out of a maze; Rats given a drug enhancing LTP will learn a maze with half the number of mistakes; injecting rats with a chemical that blocks LTP erases recent learning

What is a memory trace? What has the quest to understand the physical basis of memory sparked interest in? What does experience modify? Explain. How did Kandel and Schwartz demonstrate these changes in sending neurons of Aplysia, the sea slug?

-neural change responsible for retention or storage of knowledge -Synaptic meeting places where neurons communicate with eachother via neurotransmitter messengers -The brain's neural networks; With increased activity in a particular pathway, neural interconnections form or strengthen. - They observed the neural changes before and after classical conditioning took place and displayed that when learning occurs slugs release more serotonin at certain synapses which then become more efficient at transmitting signals

IS our capacity for storing long term memory limited? What is this displayed by? How did Karl Lashley demonstrate that memories do not ly in specific places in our brains?

-no, it is limitless -Those who have performed phenomenal memory feats like Rajan Mahadevan -He trained rats to find their way out of a maze then cut pieces out of their cortexes and retested their memories, no matter what section he removed, the rats still remembered at least partially how to navigate the maze. We do not store information in discrete precise locations

What does intuition also feed? What does intuitive reactions enable us to do? What do learned associations allow us to do? What allows us to make the smartest decisions? What are qualities of intuition and where does it come from? What does intuition do for us?

-our gut fears and prejudices -React quickly and usually adaptively -Spawn intuitions of our two track mind -To take your time and distract yourself so the unconscious mind has the time to process -Adaptive, feeeds our expertise, creativity, love, and spirituality -Experience -Harvests our experience and guides our lives

Those who learn quickly also forget ______________. What is the spacing effect? What is the opposite? What produces better long term recall?

-quickly -Rehearsal that is distributed over time -Massed practice (produces short term learning and confidence) -distributed study time

Short term memory is slightly better for __________ than for ____________. Why? Is it slightly better for what we hear or what we see? Children and adults have short term recall for how many words? Without rehearsal, how much do most of us actually retain in short term memory? What is the basic principle behind this?

-random digits than random letters (which have similar sounds) -What we hear -As many as they can speak in 2 seconds -Four information chunks -At any given moment, we can consicously process only a very limited amount of information

What is one thing that goes from difficult and efforful to process to automatic?

-reading!

3 things that indicate memory. Two qualities of recognition memory. How does the speed of relearning reveal memory? We remember more than we can ______________.

-recall, recognition, relearning -quick and vast -People typically learn things quicker if they are learning them a second time -recall

What processing do computers engage in? What do our brains engage in? That occurs do to this and what is it called?

-serial processing (step by step) -parallel processing (doing many things at once) -Multitasking occurs without your conscious attention (automatic processing)

What is another word for cogntion? What do cognitive scientists study? What is a concept? What are concepts divided up into? What do we form concepts by? (2 things)

-thinking -Cognition activities, including logical and illogical ways in which we create concepts, solve problems, make decisions, and form judgements -Mental groupings of similar objects, events, ideas, and people; give us much information with little cognitive effort -Hierarchies -Definition (ex triangles are 3 sided shapes) or prototypes (mental image or best example that incorporates all features we associate with a category)

What does weaker emotion equal for memories? How was this demonstrated using a drug and a placebo with those who experienced car crashes? What is a flashbulb memory? Example. How can flashbulb memories come to error?

-weaker memories -The group given the drug did not show signs of a stress disorder but half of the placebo group did -A clear memory of an emotionally significant moment or event -People who experienced the 1989 San Francisco Earthquake recalled exactly what they were doing a year and a half later, while others' memories for only having heard about the earthquake were more prone to errors -When relived, rehearsed, and discussed even though they are known for their vividness and the confidence with which we recall them

After long term potentiation has occurred, passing an electric current through the brain does what? For whom is this valid for? What does a blow to the head do?

-wont disrupt old memories, but wipes out very recent memories -Laboratory animals and depressed people given electroconvulsive therapy -Same results: working memory had no time to consolidate info into long term memory before the lights went out

Three sins of forgetting

1. Absent mindedness (inattention to details leads to encoding failure) 2. Transience (storage decay over time) 3. Blocking (inaccessibility of stored information)

Robert Sternberg and colleagues' five components of creativity:

1. Expertise (Well developed base of knowledge furnishes ideas, imageas and phrases we use as mental building blocks) 2.Imaginative Thinking Skills (Ability to see things in novel ways, to recognize patterns and make connections) 3. A venturesome personality (Seeks new experiences, tolerates ambiguity and risk and perseveres in overcoming obstacles) 4. Intrinsic motivation 5. Creative environment (Sparks supports an defines creative ideas by people or environments)

Three sins of distortion

1. Misattribution (Confusing the source of info) 2. Suggestibility (the lingering effects of misinformation) 3. Blocking (inaccessibility of stored information)

Framing research in 3 ways shows the definitons of options, which can help people make better decisions. Point to remember?

1. Preferred portion size depends on framing (people are more likely to choose the default even if it is smaller and labeled normal ) 2. Why choosing an organ donor depends on where you live (In countries where default option is yes, almost 100% do it, but where default option is no about 25% do it) 3. How to help employees decide to save for their retirement (when choosing to opt in rather than opt out, more people choose the retirement plan) -Those who understand the power of framing can use it to influence their decisions

There is a "memory war" concerning whether "recovering" memories of child abuse is good or bad. study panels and public statements committed to protecting abused children and those committed to protecting wrongly accused adults agree on the following statements:

1. Sexual abuse happens (there is no survivor syndrome but it is a traumatic betrayal that leaves victims predisposed to problems) 2. Injustice happens (innocent people are charged and guilty evade responsibility) 3. Forgetting happens 4. Recovered memories are common (the mind can recover events given a cue, but the question is whether the unconsicious mind represses painful experiences and if those can be retrieved) 5. Memories of things happening before age 3 are unreliable 6. Memories "recovered" under hypnosis or the influence of drugs are extremely unrelliable 7.Memories, whether real or false can be emotionally upsetting

2 important concepts that the modified version of the 3 stage processing model of memory that this book uses:

1. Some information skips the first 2 stages and goes directly and automatically into long term memory without conscious awareness 2. Worker memory, (new 2nd stage) concentrates on active processing of information in this intermediate stage. Since we cannot focus on all information at once, we focus on certain incoming stimuli into temporary working memory, which associates old and new info and solves problems

Strategies the the SQ3R study technique incorporates for improving memory through concrete suggestions:

1. Study repeatedly (use distributed practice time with breaks as long as possible without losing the information) 2. Make the material meaningful (connect it to your life, form images, organize info, form associations) 3. Activate retrieval cues (put yourself in the place where you learned the info) 4. Use mnemonic devices (peg words, stories, acronyms, rhymes) 5. Minimize interference (study before sleeping) 6. Sleep More 7. Test your own knowledge, both to rehearse it and to help determine what you do not yet know

Four influences on our intuition about risk. Point oto remember:

1. We fear what our ancestral history has prepared us to fear 2. We fear what we cannot control 3. WE fear what is immediate 4. We fear what is most readily available -It is perfectly normal to fear purposeful violence from those who despise us but smart thinkers will remember to check their fears against the facts and resist those who serve their own purposes by cultivating a culture of fear

What is an older but easier to picture model that Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin proposed (3 stages) (3 stage processing model)

1. We first record to be remembered information as a fleeting sensory memory 2. From there we process information into a short term memory bin where we encode it through rehearsal 3. Finally, information moves to long term memory for later retrieval

Four things you automatically process info about:

1. space (you can visualize the places on a page where info appears) 2. time (you note the sequence of your day and can later retrace your steps to find things) 3. frequency (keep track of how many times things occur) 4. Well learned info (words in your native language)

What are the 7 sins of memory divided into? who came up with them?

3 sins of forgetting, 3 sins of distortion, one sin of intrusion -Daniel Schacter