Psych 314: Exam 2

what are the factors influencing memory span

(1) word length effect: memory span decreases when word length increases ex. cat vs. mummification -there is more than one way to define word length but it's basically (1) spoken word duration (best def) and (2) # of syllables in a word memory and languages are interconnected (b) speech rate: rate is speed of Speaking Measured in Words Per second -strongly correlated with memory span performance (close to +1.0) -measured in words/second -give us a list of X amount of words and figure out how many words/sec you read out loud ex. 20 words in 5 seconds = 4 words/second *to convert this into memory span average you would use this formula: 2 x SR = MS -> 2 x (4) = 8 -> so your average memory span is 8 words *word length, speech rate, and rehearsal rate are all highly correlated. Rehearsal rate is the amount of words you can rehearse. This is very difficult to measure because people normally practice rehearsal in their head. (c) chunking: a single verbal label. See flashcard below. (d) phonological similarity -how similar 2 or more different words sound alike ex. b, g, t -> high phonological similarity ex. g, x, l ,m, q -> low phonological similarity

Conclusions: Visual Perception and Visual Imagery

-Behrmann argues that visual perception and visual imagery are best understood as two processes that overlap but are not identical -patients who suffer only perceptual losses have damage to the low-level part of this system, and patients who suffer only imagery losses have damage to the high-level part of this system.

image scanning visual imagery

-Brooks (1968) performed an important series of experiments on the scanning of visual images. -the participant was to scan around an imagined block F from a prescribed starting point and in a prescribed direction, categorizing each corner of the block as a point on the top or bottom (assigned a yes response) or as a point in between (assigned a no response) -For a nonvisual contrast task, Brooks also gave participants sentences such as "A bird in the hand is not in the bush." Participants had to scan the sentence while holding it in memory, deciding whether each word was a noun or not. -A second experimental variable was how participants made their responses. Participants responded in one of three ways: (1) said yes or no; (2) tapped with the left hand for yes and with the right hand for no; or (3) pointed to specific Y's or N's on a sheet of paper -participants took much longer to respond to diagrams in the pointing mode than in the other two modes, but this was not the case when responding to sentences. Apparently, scanning a physical visual object conflicted with scanning a mental image -This result strongly reinforces the conclusion that when people are scanning a mental image, they are scanning a representation that is analogous to a physical picture. Baddeley and Lieberman performed an experiment that further supports the view that the nature of the interference in the Brooks task is spatial rather than visual. -The spatial auditory tracking task produced far greater impairment in the image-scanning task than did the brightness judgment task. This result also indicates that the nature of the impairment in the Brooks task was spatial, not visual.

Semantic Networks

-Hierarchical network structures for representing categorical information and the properties associated with each category. -Properties that are true of higher-level categories are also true of lower-level categories. 1. If a fact about a concept is encountered frequently, it will be associated with that concept even if it could be inferred from a higher-order concept. 2. The more frequently a fact about a concept is encountered, the more strongly that fact will be associated with the concept. The more strongly facts are associated with concepts, the more rapidly they are verified. 3. Inferring facts that are not directly associated with a concept takes a relatively long time.

memory span test verbal short term memory (STM)

-Jacobs (1887) wanted to test how well his students could remember info -almost as old as psychology itself -single items -1 item per second (5... 7... 3... etc) -serial recall: recall the items in order such as phone numbers, serial numbers, instructions in order, etc -7 +_ items/chunks (adults speaking english) -average is less than 7 in other languages because the words for those digits have multiple syllables so the word is longer -digit span task: a memory span test in which people have to memorize digits in order -letter span task: a memory span test in which letters are recalled in serial order -word span task: a memory span test in which words are recalled in serial order -in western countries (English speaking countries), the digit span task have been the norm for measuring verbal short term memory (STM) -people are actually memorizing words when memorizing digits -ex. 864 -> eight six four -memory length is influenced by word length ex. apple, grape, sky vs mummification, constitution, etc -memory and languages are interconnected -word length effect: digit span decreases as the amount of syllables per word increases. This is test across different language and they determined that languages with digits that have one syllable (english german, and Chinese) have a higher average than other languages -Dr. Rajan omitted "zero" and "seven" to control for word length because they have two syllables -there is more than one way to define word length but it's basically (1) spoken word duration (best def) and (2) # of syllables in a word -before administering a digit span task, you must determine the participants native language. If they cannot speak english then we cannot use digits to asses verbal STM. We would need to select a random list of one syllable words from their language. -a bilingual person can score a certain average in one language and another score in english

Context and Pattern Recognition

-Objects occur in context, and we can use context to help us recognize objects top-down processing: When context or general knowledge of the world guides perception -ex. understanding difficult handwriting is easier when reading complete sentences than when reading single and isolated words -because high-level general knowledge contributes to the interpretation of the low-level perceptual units bottom-up processing: Perceptual processing of a physical stimulus in which information from the stimulus, rather than from the general context, is used to help recognize the stimulus ex. if you see an image of an individual letter on your screen, your eyes transmit the information to your brain, and your brain puts all of this information together. word superiority effect: The superior recognition of letters when the letters are presented in a word context than when they are presented alone

Knowledge and Regions of the Brain

-Some prefrontal regions are associated with extracting meaningful information from verbal and visual material, with the left prefrontal region more involved in processing verbal material and the right prefrontal region more involved in processing visual material -categorical (conceptual) information is represented in posterior regions, particularly the temporal cortex -greater activation throughout the left hemisphere when categorical information is presented verbally

Face Recognition

-Special cells that respond preferentially to the faces of other monkeys have been found in the temporal lobes of monkeys Damage to the temporal lobe in humans can result in a deficit called prosopagnosia, in which people have selective difficulties in recognizing faces -a particular region of the temporal lobe, called the fusiform gyrus, responds when faces are present in the visual field (fMRI). The response is much stronger in the right fusiform gyrus. -fusiform gyrus is also involved in making fine-grained distinctions (ex. bird experts have high attention in the fusiform gyrus when they make judgements about birds) -because of our great familiarity with faces, we are good at making such fine-grained judgments in recognizing them, but similar effects can be found with other stimuli with which we have had a lot of experience. orientation of faces -people are much better at recognizing faces presented in their upright orientation than they are at recognizing other categories of objects, such as houses, presented in their upright orientation. -people are much better at recognizing faces presented in their upright orientation than they are at recognizing other categories of objects, such as houses, presented in their upright orientation. -somewhat reduced fMRI response in the fusiform gyrus when upside-down faces are presented -we are much better at recognizing parts of a face (a nose, say) when it is presented in context, whereas recognizing parts of a house (for example, a window) is not as context dependent -we are specifically predisposed to identify whole faces, and it is sometimes argued that this special capability was acquired through evolution.

Imagery Involves Both Spatial and Visual Components

-We can encode the position of objects in space by seeing where they are, by feeling where they are, or by hearing where they are. Such encodings use a common spatial representation that integrates information that comes in from any sensory modality. -In contrast, certain aspects of visual experience, such as color, are unique to the visual modality and seem separate from spatial information. -a "where" pathway for processing spatial information and a "what" pathway for processing object-recognition information -parietal regions support the spatial component of visual imagery, whereas temporal regions support the visual aspects. -mental rotation, a spatial task, tends to produce activation in the parietal cortex. -Similarly, temporal structures are activated when people imagine visual properties of objects -patients with bilateral parietal-occipital damage could not describe the locations of familiar objects or landmarks from memory, but he could describe the appearance of objects. -patients with bilateral inferior temporal damage had an impaired ability to describe the appearance of objects but could describe their locations.

reticular activating system (RAS)

-a lower brain stem system -deals with basic arousal and consciousness -important for all varieties of attention

What is a chunk

-a single verbal label -specific pattern -a certain group of properties ex. 1776 -this is identified as Independence Day. This year reminds you of this one thing/element/label. You cannot mix up the numbers because then you wouldn't identify it with independence day. ex. [insert a picture of a square] this (square) is a chunk because it has a single verbal label given to four lines in this pattern chunks can be words too basically it's a pattern of something that has a specifc meaning

Amodal vs Perceptual Symbol Systems

-amodal symbol system: An inherently nonperceptual system for representing information—i.e., a system in which the symbols are not associated with any particular perceptual modality. -the elements within the system are inherently nonperceptual -perceptual symbol system: A system for representing information in which the terms are tied to particular perceptual modalities. -an extension of the dual-code theory (Paivio) dual-code theory: we represent information in combined verbal and visual codes. -Paivio suggested that when we hear a sentence, we also develop a visual image of what it describes. According to the dual-code theory, memory for wording versus memory for meaning depends on the relative attention that people give to the verbal versus the visual representation. -when people understand a sentence, they often actually come up with a perceptual representation of that sentence. ex. when participants read a sentence about a nail being pounded into a wall or the floor. then, they viewed a picture of a nail horizontally or vertically and were asked whether the object in the picture was mentioned in the sentence that they just read. If they had read a sentence about a nail being pounded into the wall, they recognized a horizontally oriented nail more quickly. When they had read a sentence about a nail being pounded into the floor, they recognized a vertically oriented nail more quickly. -their representation of the sentence seemed to contain this perceptual detail. -concepts are represented in brain areas similar to those that process perceptions.

automatic processing vs conscious processing

-automatic: the process occurs without intention, without a conscious decision -conscious: the process occurs only with intention and deliberate decisions -automatic: the mental process is not open to conscious awareness or introspection -conscious: the process is open to awareness and introspection -automatic: the process consumes few if any conscious resources; that is, it consumes little if any conscious attention -conscious: the processes uses conscious resources; that is, it drains the pool on conscious attentional capacity -automatic: the process operates very rapidly, usually within 1 sec -conscious: the process is slow, taking more than a second or two for completion

Cognitive Maps

-cognitive maps: Mental representations of the locations of objects and places in the environment -route map: a path that indicates specific places but contains no spatial information ex. Straight until the light, then turn left; two blocks later at the intersection... survey map: a spatial image of the environment ex. gps -Hartley used fMRIs to look at differences in brain activity when people used route maps versus survey maps -route-following (involving a route map) or way-finding (involving a survey map) -the route-following condition, participants learned to follow a fixed path through the town, -the way-finding condition, participants first freely explored the town and then had to find their way between locations. -In the way-finding task, participants showed greater activation in a number of regions that have also been found to show greater activation in other studies of visual imagery, including the parietal cortex and hippocampus -route-following task participants showed greater activation in more anterior regions and motor regions. The survey map is more like a visual image and the route map is more like an action plan.

Auditory Attention

-dichotic listening tasks: A task in which participants in an experiment are presented with two messages simultaneously, one to each ear, and are instructed to repeat back the words from only one of the messages. -very little information about the unattended message is processed in a dichotic listening task. -All that participants can report about the unattended message is whether it was a human voice or a noise; whether the human voice was male or female; and whether the sex of the speaker changed during the test. -They cannot tell what language was spoken or remember any of the words, even if the same word was repeated over and over again. -goal-oriented processing: the listener selects the message to be processed -the theory proposed that the message to each ear was registered but that at some later point the participant selected one message to listen to on the basis of the specified ear, thus filtering out the message in the other ear. The Filter Theory: -Broadbent -filter theory: Broadbent's early selection theory of attention, which assumes that, when sensory information has to pass through a serial bottleneck, only some of the info is selected for further processing, on the basis of physical characteristics, such as pitch of the speaker's voice. -chooses which message to process on the basis of some physical characteristic -made neurophysiological sense people can also select messages to process on the basis of their semantic content. -demonstrated that participants can use meaningfulness to follow a message that jumps back and forth between the ears -ex. In one ear they might be hearing the words dogs six fleas, while at the same time hearing the words eight scratch two in the other ear. Instructed to shadow the meaningful message, participants would report dogs scratch fleas. Thus, participants can shadow a message on the basis of meaning rather than on the basis of what each ear physically hears. Treisman (1960) looked at a situation in which participants were instructed to shadow a particular ear. -the message in the ear was meaningful up to a certain point and then it turned to a random sequence of words. The meaningful message switched to the other ear. -results: Some participants switched ears, against instructions, and continued to follow the meaningful message. Others continued to follow the shadowed ear. Thus, it seems that sometimes people use a physical characteristic (e.g., a particular ear) to select which message to follow and that sometimes they use semantic content. The Attenuation Theory and a Late-Selection Theory: early-selection theory: -Treisman (1964) proposed an early-selection theory that is a modification of the Broadbent model and has come to be known as the attenuation theory -attenuation theory: some incoming sensory signals are attenuated (weakened) on the basis of their physical characteristics -Semantic selection criteria could apply to all messages, whether they were attenuated or not whereas in dichotic listening task, participants would minimize processing of the signal from the unattended ear but not eliminate it. -dichotic listening task, participants would minimize processing of the signal from the unattended ear but not eliminate it. -participants found it easier to follow the message that was not being attenuated than to apply semantic criteria to switch attention to the attenuated message. -assumes that a perceptual filter selects which message to attend to (message #1) and that the unselected message (message #2) is therefore attenuated (dashed arrows); thus, only message #1 is fully analyzed for verbal content. -there is not only attenuation of the signal from the unattended ear, but also enhancement of the signal coming from the attended ear late-selection theory -J. A. Deutsch and D. Deutsch (1963) in their late-selection theory, which proposed that all the information is processed completely without attenuation. -their claim was that people can perceive multiple messages but that they can say only one message at a time so if they use meaning as the criterion (either according to or in contradiction to instructions), they will switch ears to follow the message. If they use the ear of origin in deciding what to attend to, they will shadow the chosen ear. -Deutsch and Deutsch's late-selection theory assumes that a response filter operates after both messages have been fully analyzed. late-selection and early-selection theory assume that there is some filter, or bottleneck, in processing. -Treisman and Geffen tested the difference between early and late selection theory using a dichotic listening task in which participants had to shadow one message while also processing both messages for a target word. If they heard the target word, they were to signal by tapping. -According to the Deutsch and Deutsch late-selection theory, messages from both ears would be analyzed for verbal content, so participants should have been able to detect the target word equally well in either ear. -According to the attenuation theory, they predicted much less detection of the target word in the message in the unshadowed ear because the unshadowed message would be attenuated. -The primary auditory cortex (part of the auditory cortex) shows an enhanced response to auditory signals coming from the ear the listener is attending to and a decreased response to signals coming from the other ear. -The enhanced responses occur much sooner in auditory processing than the point at which the meaning of the message can be identified. -evidence for enhancement of the message in the primary auditory cortex on the basis of features other than location. -people attend to a message on the basis of pitch, the primary auditory cortex shows enhancement (PET scan) -increased activation in the parietal areas direct attention. -the primary auditory cortex is the earliest area to be influenced by attention to auditory stimuli. -the effects at the primary auditory cortex are a matter of attenuation and enhancement.

divided attention

-dual task situation: more than 1 thing happening and you have to attend to both -rapidly switch attention back and forth -multitasking -inattentional blindness ex. talking on the phone and driving -talking on the phone and driving is most dangerous when both the conversation and road conditions need your attention -a person over 40 is more likely to get into an accident than someone who is 20

Egocentric and Allocentric Representations of Space

-egocentric representation: A representation of the environment as it appears to the perception of an observer -allocentric representation: A representation of the environment according to a fixed coordinate system, as on a map -When it is not possible to rotate a map physically, people show an effect of the degree of misorientation that is much like the effect we see for mental rotation -the processes and representations involved in such navigational tasks are similar to the processes and representations involved in mental imagery. -Physical maps seem to differ from cognitive maps in one important way: Physical maps show the effects of orientation, and cognitive maps do not. -the hippocampus plays an important role in maintaining an allocentric representation of the world. -high hippocampal activation when humans are navigating their environment -The amount of activation in hippocampal structures has also been shown to correlate with age-related differences in navigation skills and may relate to gender differences in navigational ability -the parietal cortex seems particularly important in supporting egocentric representations -There was greater hippocampal activation when participants were answering questions in the allocentric condition than in the egocentric condition. Although there was considerable parietal activation in both conditions, it was greater in the egocentric condition.

Verbal Imagery vs Visual Imagery page 106

-in the Roland experiment, when participants engaged in the verbal jingle task, there was activation in the prefrontal cortex near Broca's area and in the parietal-temporal region of the posterior cortex near Wernicke's area, patients with damage to these regions show deficits in language processing -When participants engaged in the visual task, there was activation in the parietal cortex, occipital cortex, and temporal cortex. -when people process verbal imagery or visual imagery, some of the same brain areas are active as when they process actual speech or visual information. -in the Santa experiment, the participants' task was to indicate whether the test array contained the same elements as the study array, even if not in the same spatial configuration. -results: participants were faster in judgements when the test array had the same configuration as the study array -participants had encoded the words into a linearly ordered verbal image, they would be faster when the test array was linear

what is the macworth clock

-it has a pointer in, in a large circular background -the pointer moves in short steps (jumps) approximately every second like the second hand of an analog clock -at infrequent and irregular intervals, the pointer makes a double jump -reaction time is the behavioral response -cognitive

what are the characteristics of hemineglect performance

-left half of a picture is omitted -their attention is focused on the right visual field -disorder of attention -there is damage to the right parietal cortex (no damage to the left parietal cortex) -a common cause of this happening is in patients with a stroke to the right hemisphere -neglect of the left visual field -people can see things on the left side but it takes a lot of conscious thought and training ex. they could only shave or comb the right side of their face/hair -can affect memory too -can remember things on the right side of a setting ex. imagine you're walking down the street and report what you see. They repeat only what's on the right side of the street. this study was done in Milan, Italy

how are memory and attention similar

-memory and attention are not a unitary concept because there are different varieties of both of those processes -there are many brain regions associated to memory and attention

Memory for Visual Information

-memory for verbal information was quite good, but memory for visual information was virtually perfect Nickerson did the penny experiment (page 137) -Participants examined a novel coin for a minute and then, a week later, were asked to remember the details. participants were more sensitive to significant changes in a picture than to changes in minor details.

what is verbal short term memory (STM)

-memory that includes 7 +_ 2 items/chunks (adults) -measured in memory span test -95% of the population has a STM of 5 - 9 items -there are gaps the the tails of the bell curve because we will never be able to measure everyone's memory so someone could have a STM of 500 items -left hemisphere -heavily influenced by language -this is what most people are referring to when talking about STM

what is visuospatial short term memory (STM)

-memory that includes remembering an average of 5 items -right hemisphere -remembering spatial locations -test called Corsi Test or The Corsi Block Tapping Test -considered a much fairer test on memory than memory span test -doesn't involve properties of language which is why it's fairer

Mental Rotation visual imagery

-mental rotation: The process of continuously transforming the orientation of a mental image. -Participants were presented with pairs of 2-D representations of 3-D objects -Their task was to determine whether the objects were identical except for orientation. -Participants reported that to determine whether the two shapes matched, they mentally rotated one of the objects in each pair to see if it could be made congruent with the other object. -the relationship in both functions is linear — for every increment in angular disparity, there is an equal increment in reaction time. -Processing an object in depth (in three dimensions) does not appear to have taken longer than processing an object in the picture plane. Hence, participants must have been operating on 3-D mental images of the objects in both the picture-plane and depth conditions. -The greater the angle of disparity between the two objects, the longer participants took to complete the mental rotation. -the parietal region is important in spatial attention. -imagining the rotation of one's hand produced activation in the motor cortex. -mental rotation involves gradual shifts of firing from cells that encode the initial stimulus (the handle at its initial angle) to cells that encode the response (the handle at its final angle).

Object Recognition by Deep Convolutional Networks page 53

-one of the major challenges in artificial intelligence has been object recognition up until recently where computer vision programs have been able to match and now outperform humans -deep convolutional networks: computerized systematically typically applied to object recognition tasks (including face recognition) based on layers of successively more complex pattern recognizers -Its image processing starts from the stimulus — a pixel representation of the image — followed by five layers of pattern recognizers. -Elements in small regions of pixels converge on elements in Layer 1, which detect patterns in these small regions. Layer 1 elements converge on Layer 2 elements that detect patterns of these patterns in small regions of Layer 1, and so on until Layer 5, after which there are three fully connected layers, leading to a response label. -These networks learn to recognize objects by being trained on millions of images and their associated labels. -In Layer 1, there are elements that behave much like the bar and edge detectors in the primary visual cortex, By the time we get to Layer 5, we find elements that respond to complex patterns like faces, similar to cells in the inferior temporal lobe. -objects that produce similar fMRI patterns of activity in the human inferior temporal lobe are represented similarly in Layer 5 of the deep network. Earlier occipital regions of the visual system responded similarly to earlier layers of the network, while later cells in the inferior temporal lobe responded similarly to later layers -deep convolutional networks do support the conjecture that human object recognition works by starting with the detection of simple features in the input and gradually combining them to form more complex features. -deep convolutional networks and the human visual system are very different because (1) the network elements are not in detail like real neurons, and (2) the method by which these networks learn (called back programming) is not considered a realistic model of human learning

what is orienting reflex

-operates involuntarily -occurs rapidly (less than 1 sec) -found in all species -reflexive redirection of attention toward an unexpected stimulus -(1) stimuli that are significant: loud noises, people or objects that are important to you ex. more likely to notice a loved one in an airport than a stranger ex. looking for an object in a store and it stands out to you -(2) stimuli that are novel -(2a): social cues such as yawning and noticing them in a crowd full of people -(2b): language: you have a cue word flash on the screen then either an X (top of the screen) or an O (bottom of the screen) that will appear and you measure the reaction time. They also used eye tracking movement, but the word indicated direction such as boot or hat. If the word "boot" appeared then participants had a faster reaction time when O popped on the screen because we normally see boots lower to the ground.

Individual Difference in Visual Imagery

-participants who score high on vividness of visual imagery actually do worse at this task than those who report less vivid imagery -there does not seem to be a positive relationship between performance on such tests of spatial ability and vividness of visual imagery. -participants with less vivid imagery tend to activate a wider range of brain areas than people with more vivid imagery -vivid imagers find it easier to create the images and have to engage these regions less. -there are two distinct kinds of imagery ability, one spatial and one object oriented -these two kinds of imagery are negatively related -people who score high on one tend to score low on the other -students specializing in the visual arts tend to score high on object visualization and low on spatial visualization, whereas the reverse is true for students specializing in science.

Importance of a Meaningful Interpretation to Memory

-people's good memory for pictures is tied to their ability to make sense of those pictures -Participants who had been given an explanation when studying the pictures showed better recall (70% correctly reconstructed) than those who were not given an explanation (51% correctly reconstructed). -memory for the drawings depended critically on participants' ability to give them a meaningful interpretation.

Sign language and the Advantage of the Corsi Span

-sign languages are full-fledged languages -they contain all the properties of spoken and written language -encoding (learning) is heavily visuospatial rather

can we have attention without awareness

-some amount of attention is possible under general anesthesia -take in info in the brain because people remember about 10% of the words -you can test this out using the Cued Recall Task

Object-Based Attention page 89

-space-based attention: allocating attention to a region of space -object-based attention: focusing your attention on a particular object inhibition of return: the decreased ability to return our attention to a location or an object that we have already attended to -if we have looked at a particular region of space, we find it a little harder to return our attention to that region. ex. If we move our eyes to location A and then to location B, we are slower to return our eyes to location A than to some new location C. -People are slower to shift their attention to a previously attended location than to a new location. -the left parietal regions seem to be more involved in object-based attention and the right parietal regions in location-based attention. Patients with left parietal damage appear to have deficits in focusing attention on objects. -there is greater activation in the left parietal regions when people attend to objects than when they attend to locations -the right parietal region is responsible for attention to global features and the left for attention to local features.

Are Visual Images Like Visual Perception?

-the Finke experiment asked participants to create mental images and then engage in a series of transformations of those images. ex. Imagine a capital letter N. Connect a diagonal line from the top right corner to the bottom left corner. Now rotate the figure 90° to the right. What do you see? in the chamber's experiment, they reported a study that seemed to indicate differences between a mental image and visual perception of the real object -mental images differ from pictures in that one can interpret visual images, even images of ambiguous figures, only in one way. -This result indicates that although it may be more difficult to reverse an image than a picture, both can be reversed.

Visual Attention

-the retina varies in acuity, with the greatest acuity in a very small area, the fovea -Although the human eye registers a large part of the visual field, the fovea registers only a small fraction of that field. Thus, in choosing where to focus our vision, we also choose to devote our most powerful visual processing resources to a particular part of the visual field, and we limit the resources allocated to processing other parts of the field. -in the Posner experiment, participants were faster when the stimulus appeared in the expected location and slower when it appeared in the unexpected location. Thus, they were able to shift their attention from where their eyes were fixated. -people can attend to regions of the visual field as far as 24 degrees from the fovea. -visual attention can be moved without accompanying eye movements, people usually do move their eyes, so that the fovea processes the portion of the visual field to which they are attending -successful control of eye movements actually requires us to attend to places outside the fovea. -we must attend to and identify an interesting nonfoveal region so that we can guide our eyes to fixate on that region to achieve the greatest acuity in processing it -To process a complex visual scene, we must move our attention around in the visual field to track the visual information in the Neisser experiment, participants moved their eyes and focused their attention in such a way that the critical aspects of the monitored event fell on their fovea and the center of their attentive spotlight. -When participants were looking for repetition of faces, the fusiform face area became more active; when they were looking for repetition of places, the parahippocampal place area became more active. -a region of the temporal cortex in the fusiform gyrus (a region known as the fusiform face area), which becomes more active when people are observing faces. (chapter 2) -There is another area within the temporal cortex, known as the parahippocampal place area, that becomes more active when people are observing places. (chapter 2)

Psychological Reality of Schemas

-their participants' recall would be strongly influenced by their schema of what an office contains. we see that a person's memory for the properties of a location is strongly influenced by that person's default assumptions about what is typically found in the location.

what is selective (controlled) attention

-this is voluntary -it prepares us to respond in a deliberate way to a stimulus -operates in a serial fashion (first A, then B, etc) -can do one thing at a time -the earliest research on attention was selective attention in the 1950 at cambridge university because the phone switch board operators would receive multiple calls at the same time so they had to choose who receives their attention first (first A, then B, then C, etc)

ASL and BSL

-unlike spoken languages, these two are not dialects -differences: (1) one hand (ASL) and two (BSL) (2) a lot fewer classifiers

how limited is attention

-very limited -generally speaking, we can only attend to ONE event at a time -multitasking is just switching from one attentive event to another

Conceptual Knowledge

-we see the world in terms of categories (i.e., concepts), such as teacher, student, instruction, and geography. -people tend to remember categorical information and not specific details -What does your cognitive system gain by categorizing the object as a dog? Basically, it gains the ability to predict. -Because they give us this ability to predict, categories also give us great economy in representation and communication. -ex. telling someone, "I was licked by a dog," also communicates the number of legs on the creature that licked you, its approximate size, and so on.

mental comparison of magnitudes visual imagery

-when participants try to discriminate between two objects based on their relative size, the time it takes them to do so decreases continuously as the difference in size between the two objects increases. -Moyer (1973) was interested in the speed with which participants could judge the relative size of two animals from memory -"Which is larger, wolf or lion?" -Many people report that in making these kinds of judgments, particularly for items that are similar in size, they generate mental images of the two objects and compare the sizes of the objects in their images. -judgment time decreases linearly with increases in the difference between the estimated sizes of the two animals -increasing the difference in estimated size has a diminishing effect on reaction time. -very similar results are obtained when people visually compare the size of actual physical objects. -It is reasonable to expect that the more similar the lengths being compared, the longer will be the time for perceptual judgments, because the difficulty of the task increases as the difference in lengths decreases. -similar functions are obtained when mental images are compared and when physical objects are compared indicates that making mental comparisons involves the same processes as those involved in perceptual comparisons.

what is a common confusion with multitasking

-you may be able to do 2 things at once but it doesn't mean you're attending to 2 things ex. walking and talking (walking doesn't require attention because it is an automatic process)

what are the two concepts that need to be present for "multitasking"

1. one or both activities should be automatic ex. walking, talking, and chewing gum 2. different systems ex. you can walk and talk or walk and chew gum but you cannot talk and chew gum at the same time because it requires a similar system (mouth muscles)

how long can you be vigilant for

30 minutes at a time

how long does short term memory (STM) last

30 seconds and then you forget it or it gets moved into long term memory (LTM)

at what age does vigilance decrease

40 vigilance goes down so you can't act as promplty

Implications 5.1 Mnemonic Techniques for Remembering Vocabulary Words

One domain where we have to learn arbitrary associations is foreign language vocabulary. For instance, consider trying to learn that the Italian word formaggio (pronounced "for-MAH-jo") means cheese. There is a memorization technique, called the keyword method, for learning vocabulary items, which some students are taught and others discover on their own. The first step is to think of some word or phrase in one's native language that sounds like the foreign word. For example, we might associate formaggio with for much dough. The second step is to create a meaningful connection between the sound-alike term and the meaning. For example, we might imagine expensive cheese being sold for much money or for much dough. As another example, consider the Italian word carciofi (pronounced "car-CHOH-fee"), which means artichokes. We might associate carciofi with "car trophy" and then imagine a winning car at an auto show with a trophy shaped like an artichoke. The intermediate sound-alike term (e.g., for much dough or car trophy) is called the keyword, although in both of these examples they are really key phrases. There has been extensive research on this technique (for a review, see Kroll & De Groot, 2005), showing that, as with many things, one needs to take a nuanced approach in evaluating its effectiveness. There is no doubt that it results in more rapid vocabulary learning in many situations, but there are potential costs. One might imagine that having to go through the intermediate keyword slows down the speed of translation when listening to or producing speech, and the keyword method has been shown to result in slower retrieval compared to retrieval of items that are directly associated without an intermediate. Moreover, going through an intermediate has been shown to result in poorer long-term retention. Finally, evidence suggests that although the method may help in passing an immediate vocabulary test in a class and hurt in a delayed test that we have not studied for, its ultimate impact on achieving real language mastery is minimal. (For discussion of the issues involved in foreign language mastery, see Chapter 12.)

Implications 2.2 New Developments in Face-Recognition Software

Recent years have seen rapid improvements in face-recognition software. The classic approach to face recognition is to identify key features like eyes and nose and to recognize faces on the basis of features around these landmarks. A number of recent systems, including Facebook's Deep-Face (Taigman, Yang, Ranzato, & Wolf, 2014) and Google's FaceNet (Schroff, Kalenichenko, & Philbin, 2015), take a different approach using deep convolutional networks like those that have enjoyed recent success in object recognition (e.g., the deep convolutional network depicted in Figure 2.19). These systems achieve better than human accuracy in recognizing faces. The tests can be quite demanding. Figure 2.22 shows pairs of faces that these systems were asked to recognize as belonging to the same individual. Google's FaceNet achieved 99% accuracy in making such identifications. Such systems are used for many purposes beyond identifying faces in social media. For example, they are used by Apple's Face ID to identify authorized users, by police to identify individuals in a crowd, and by some countries (e.g., Australia) to verify that visitors match their passport photos. Most Americans have their photos on record (e.g., for driver's licenses), and the FBI can use its face-recognition system to match persons of interest to these photos. Not surprisingly, such advances in face recognition have raised privacy concerns. With the ubiquity of video cameras (an estimated 60 million surveillance cameras in the United States) and the frequency with which faces appear in social media, there is fear that the way is open for government agencies or large technology companies to track our every move. As an example, in the Chinese city of Xiangyang surveillance cameras identify jaywalkers; then, to shame the jaywalkers, their photos, names, and government IDs are displayed on a big outdoor screen (Mozur, 2018). Use of face recognition for criminal identification is also controversial because it can be prone to errors, particularly in the case of minorities like African Americans and Latinos. There have been lawsuits filed against private organizations such as Facebook and government organizations such as the U.S. Department of Justice concerning their use of large databases of faces in conjunction with their face-recognition software.

Implications 4.1 Using Brain Activation to read People's Minds

Scientists are learning how to decode the brain activity of people to determine what they are thinking. For instance, Nishimoto et al. (2011) reconstructed movie clips from the brain activity of participants watching the clips (view the original and reconstructed clips at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo). While blurry, the reconstructed clips capture some of the content from the originals. Researchers have since gone beyond this and asked whether they can identify participants' thoughts. For instance, is it possible to identify the visual images a person is experiencing? There has been some success at this, and, interestingly, the brain areas involved seem to be the same areas as those involved in actual viewing of the objects corresponding to the visual images (Cichy, Heinzle, & Haynes, 2012; Stokes, Thompson, Cusack, & Duncan, 2009). Other research has reported success in identifying the concepts participants are thinking about (Mitchell et al., 2008) and what participants are thinking while solving an equation (Anderson, Betts, Ferris, & Fincham, 2010). Could these methods be used in interrogations to determine what people are really thinking and whether they are lying? This question has been the subject of debate, but the consensus is that the methodology is a long way from being reliable, and it has not been allowed in court (read the August 26, 2012, Washington Post article "Debate on Brain Scans as Lie Detectors Highlighted in Maryland Murder Trial," by Michael Laris). Not surprisingly, such research has received a lot of press — for instance, see the 60 Minutes report "Reading Your Mind" and the PBS NewsHour report "It's Not Mind-Reading, but Scientists Exploring How Brains Perceive the World," both of which you can find on YouTube.

Schemas

Semantic networks, which just associate properties with concepts, cannot represent our general knowledge about properties — for instance, our knowledge about the typical size or shape of a house. schemas represent categorical knowledge according to a slot structure structure default values: The typical values for a slot in a schema representation Schemas are abstractions that can be used to make inferences about instances of the concepts they represent. the inferential processes for schemas must also be able to deal with exceptions: We can understand that a building without windows may still be a house. Finally, it is necessary to understand the constraints between the slots of a schema.

Implications 3.1 Cell Phones and Distractions

Since their introduction in the 1980s, mobile phones have become an increasingly prevalent part of everyday life, with ever greater functionality. In 2016 it was estimated that the average user touched their cell phone 2,617 times a day and used it for 145 minutes (dscout, 2016). Much of this use is in conjunction with other activities, requiring types of multitasking that research suggests should often be difficult to carry out effectively. The impact of cell phone use on driving has been heavily studied. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that distracted driving resulted in 3,450 deaths in the United States in 2016. Strayer and Drews (2007) review the evidence that people are more likely to miss traffic lights and other critical information while talking on a cell phone. Strayer and Drews suggest that participating in a cell phone conversation places more demands on a driver's central cognition than does participating in a conversation with a passenger. A person who says something to a driver on a cell phone expects an answer and is unaware of the current driving conditions. Strayer and Drews note that conversing with a passenger in the car is not as distracting because the passenger can adjust the conversation to the driving demands and even point out potential dangers to the driver. However, the effects of cell phone distraction go well beyond driving. Recently, the National Safety Council has added distracted walking as a category for causes of accidents, noting the increase in fatalities among pedestrians as they walk along looking at their cell phones. Teachers are increasingly concerned about the impact of cell phone use among students. Multiple studies have found poorer learning by students who use their cell phones in class for activities such as keeping in touch with friends and using social media like Facebook and Twitter (for a review see Womack & McNamara, 2017). Yet only 8% of students feel that their cell phone usage in class hinders their academic performance (Berry & Westfall, 2015). Cell phone use also has a negative impact on the effectiveness of out-of-classroom study. Many teachers have instituted policies such as requiring students not to use electronic devices during class, but some experiments have failed to find a benefit of such restrictions (Lancaster, 2018). Interestingly, research has suggested that merely having a cell phone within reach can lead to cognitive impairment, even if it is not used (Ward, Duke, Gneezy, & Bos, 2017), because one is still thinking about it.

Implications 4.2 Spatial Skills and STEM Education

There is a relationship between spatial ability (measured by tests like the paper folding problems illustrated in Figure 4.13) and success in learning science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM disciplines). In studies following students over many years, performance on spatial ability tests predicts both course grades and whether students will go on to work in STEM fields (Wai, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2009). Approximately half of all people who earn PhDs in STEM fields perform in the top 5% of individuals on tests of spatial ability. There are very few PhDs in STEM fields who perform below average on such tests. The correlation between high spatial ability and success in STEM fields holds even in studies that control for mathematical and verbal ability. However, in a study of 40,000 high-school students, Wai et al. (2009) found that males and students of higher socioeconomic status tend to score higher in spatial abilities. Such results are worrisome because they suggest that differences in spatial ability might be limiting diversity in STEM fields. In a review of the literature, Uttal et al. (2013) found that spatial training programs — for example, training on drawing engineering designs — can have a large impact on measures of spatial skills. Uttal et al. suggest that systematic training might increase success and broaden participation in STEM fields. However, they note the possibility that training-related improvements in spatial skills would not be accompanied by improvements in STEM performance. Nevertheless, a recent study (Sorby, Veurink, & Streiner, 2018) did find that training in spatial skills did correlate with improved grades of first-year engineering students with weak spatial skills (the improvement averaged about half a grade point on a 4.0 GPA scale).

Memory for Verbal Information

Wanner experiment: illustrates circumstances in which people do and do not remember the exact wording of verbal information. -warned group (told them what they were supposed to remember) vs unwarnd group (no warning so they had no idea what they were supposed to remember) The implications of Wanner's experiment: -memory is better for the meaning of the sentence in the instructions than for the style of the sentence. The superiority of memory for meaning indicates that people normally extract the meaning from a linguistic message and do not necessarily remember its exact wording. Moreover, memory for meaning was unaffected by whether participants were warned or not. -people are capable of remembering exact wording if that is their goal -Wanner was able to measure their ability to remember the meaning versus the style of the sentence and to determine how this ability was affected by whether or not they were warned. -Wanner found that participants were much more sensitive to significant (i.e., meaningful) changes in a sentence than to changes in style;

what is the Cued Recall Task

a test where you are put under general anesthesia and a scientist reads aloud simple words ex. banana, apple, etc the next day the scientist will ask you to complete the words he said the day before ex. ban_______ this told us that we need to be awake and alert for attention to work really well

what are the costs to automatic processing (automaticity)

action slips and the stroop effect

what are the three factors influencing vigilance

amphetamines -can make you temporarily more vigilant practice -detection rate increases and false alarm rate decreases -2 fundamental principles of expert performance (in any activity and not just rewarding vigilance) is that it... (1) improves with training on a particular activity/task (2) it is specific to that task -training on one task does not transfer to other tasks ex. with practice at playing an instrument, you become more skilled with that instrument but that skill is unlikely to transfer to other musical instruments age the ability to detect vigilance declines after 40

define inattentional blindness

being so focused on event A that you don't notice event B it was in your visual field but you didn't notice it ex. failed to notice a stop sign ex. you are so focused on talking to your friend on the phone that you don't notice the light is now green

what is the difference between change blindness and inattentional blindness

change blindness is the failure to notice when the visual stimulus changes ex. red light to a green light inattentional blindness is the failure to notice a visual stimulus ex. run through a red light

what are the four types of blindness

change blindness, inattentional blindness, repetition blindness, hemineglect our attentional abilities are very limited

what is the key idea to attention

conscious mental focus mental spotlight to direct attention

how does the cortex play a role in memory

declarative memory

how does the mammillary body play a role in memory

declarative memory

what are the advantages of automatic activities

difficult to reverse the effects of practice

who pioneered attention research

donald broadbent

Embodied Cognition

embodied cognition: emphasizes the contribution of motor action and how it connects us to the environment. -Glenberg (2007) argues that our understanding of language often depends on an inner acting out of what the language describes -each type of verb produced greater activation in the part of the motor cortex associated with the corresponding action. (ex. lick, kick, etc) mirror neurons: Neurons that fire both when an animal is performing an action and when the animal observes another animal performing the action. -brain-imaging studies have found increased activity in the motor region when people observe actions, particularly with the intention to mimic the action -conceptual deficits in patients with sensory-motor impairments, when present, tend to be subtle -information is represented in both concrete (perceptual, motor) and abstract (amodal) ways -multimodal hypothesis: The theory that knowledge is represented in multiple perceptual and motor modalities -amodal hypothesis: The proposal that meaning is not represented in a particular modality. -The amodal hypothesis holds that this information is retained in a central system for representing meanings. The multimodal hypothesis holds that the information is retained in one or another perceptual or motor modality

how does the amygdala play a role in memory

emotional memory

define repetition blindness

failure to perceive a pattern, word, or a stimulus that is quickly repeated ex. Hope you are able to go to the party tomorrow THEN Hope you are able to go to the the party tomorrow.

when did vigilance research start and why

in world war 2 because of the problems faced by fighter pilots

what is the relationship between short term memory (STM) and long term memory (LTM)

information must go through STM before it arrives at LTM

how does your knowledge of situation affect your vigilance

it can influence you to be more or less vigilant depending on your environment or knowledge of that situation ex. a police officer patrolling a safe neighborhood vs dangerous neighborhood (sometimes you have to be more alert) ex. border patrol doesn't need to be very vigilant if they know that they there is nothing wrong or suspicious

why does repetition blindness happen

it happens when we don't have much time so we do not form a second, separate representation of the same repeating object which means we are unaware of the repetition

what is the origin of research in short term memory (STM)

it started in the audiology and speech field because kids with auditory impairments fell behind in school so they researched how they could help them keep up in school 60 years ago

how is mental focus voluntary and involuntary

it's voluntary because you can choose what you want to have your focus on ex. 4 students ask the teacher a question at the same time and the teacher chooses one person at a time to ask their question it's involuntary or reflexive at an evolutionary/adaptive standpoint ex. when you hear a strange noise and turn around to see what it is

how does the thalamus play a role in memory

language memory

what is LTM

long term memory

how does the hippocampus play a role in memory

memory acquisition

Implications of Good Memory for Meaning

mnemonic technique: A method for improving memory

who is a pioneer in vigilance research

norman macworth -psychologist in cambridge university in england -did laboratory studies in WW2 and those studies played an important role in allies winning -came up with the macworth clock

what are the four varieties of attention

orienting reflex, selective attention, divided attention, and vigilance

how does the cerebellum play a role in memory

procedural memory

how does the striatum play a role in memory

procedural memory

Propositional Representations

proposition: the smallest unit that one can meaningfully judge as true or false. a propositional representation is a representation of the meaning of something as a set of propositions. Consider the following sentence: Lincoln, who was president of the United States during a bitter war, freed the slaves. The information conveyed in this sentence can be communicated by the following simpler sentences: 1. Lincoln was president of the United States during a war. 2. The war was bitter. 3. Lincoln freed the slaves. -the theory of propositional representation does not claim that a person remembers simple sentences like these when encoding the meaning of a complex sentence. Rather, the claim is that the material is encoded in a more abstract way. -the propositional representation proposed by Kintsch (1974) represents the meaning of each sentence as a list containing a relation followed by an ordered list of arguments. -The relations organize the arguments and typically correspond to the verbs (in this case, free), adjectives (bitter), and other relational terms (president of). The arguments refer to particular times, places, people, or things, typically corresponding to the nouns (Lincoln, United States, war, slaves).

what is STM

short term memory

what is safe to assume if someone has brain damage

that they have a problem with attention, memory, or both

what research is used to study repetition blindness

the RSVP: Rapid Visual Stimulus Presentation

what started the research for inattentional blindness

the colorado plane crash the pilot was so focused on landing the plane that he notice the beeping signal on his dashboard. That beeping signal was telling him that there was another plane in the vicinity. He crashed into the other plane. this lead to the Haine's flight simulator study where they were able to show that a pilot can miss things in plain view

define vigilance

the maintenance of attention over long periods to detect an expected but infrequent event

define short term memory (STM) AKA "immediate memory"

the memory system that contains our moment to moment conscious thoughts and perceptions -concurrent reports are an example of STM -the focus is on input and storage of new info

define change blindness

the surprising failure to detect a visual change in a stimulus field ex. if you're at a red light so you decide to call you're boyfriend and fail to see that the light turned green

stroop effect

the tendency to read the words instead of saying the color of ink in the book

how are attention, STM, WM, and LTM similar

they all have subcategories attention is very important to getting into short term memory (STM)

action slips

unintended actions that are no longer appropriate ex. a woman calling her new boyfriend by her old boyfriend's name ex. putting in your old password instead of your current password

what is the similarity between change blindness and inattentional blindness

we fail to notice something that is clearly visible once we know to look for it

Memory for the Detail of Everyday Experiences

we judge how long a period is by jumping from thing to thing that we can remember — the more jumps, the longer the estimated length of time. Overall, our memory for what we experience tends to have large gaps, particularly for unimportant experiences.

what is one reason of change blindness

we tend to remember the gist of something instead of something rather than the fine details evolved to be this way

what is the neuroscience explanation to repetition blindness

when there is a visual or auditory input, there will be some activity in the brain. It takes some time for the activity to die down but before it dies down, the same stimulus can repeat the same activity. It's considered a single occurrence

what is auditory attention

when you hear a loud noise and turns toward it

what is visual attention

when you see a bright light and turn towards it

how does the prefrontal cortex play a role in memory

working memory

what is WM

working memory

what is the left parietal cortex is damaged but the right parietal cortex is fine

you can still see both visual fields