psych midterm 3

parigmatic inference

(in memory errors and autobiographical memory) were explored by Brewer et The Branford and Johnson term is out of place, they explored imagery in the organization of information in memory (LTM - Encoding and Retrieval).

referent

A referent is the actual object, action, or event in the world that a word refers to. • A large part of "knowing a word" is knowing the relevant concept. • Therefore, the same complexities of conceptual knowledge that we have previously encountered also apply to words and semantics.

self-reference effect

A tendency to have better memory for information relevant to oneself than for other sorts of material

mental rotation tasks

Also suggests that mental images preserve spatial information in three dimensions in each pair, the objects are identical, despite being viewed from different perspectives

anomia

Another symptom displayed by people with aphasia is anomia, the inability to name objects, caused by a disruption to the mental dictionary.

hierarchical organization

At the basic level, language involves translating thoughts into series of sounds that can be spoken. The listener then converts these series of sounds back into thoughts.. language has a heirarchical organization that allowes these translations between thought and sound - sentences are composed of words, words are composed of morphemes and morphemes are composed of phonemes

source amnesia

Attributing an event to the wrong source that we experienced, heard, read or imagined (misattribution)

hierarchy

Complex information broken down into broad concepts and further subdivided into categories and subcategories.

loftus experiments of memory construction and false autobiographical memories

Construction and false autobiographical memories. Loftus' research shows that if false memories (lost at the mall) are implanted in individuals, they construct (fabricate) their memories

intrusion errors

Errors in which other knowledge intrudes into the remembered event When reading a story, we may believe that propositions we inferred while reading the story were actually presented in the story itself.

wittgenstein's problem: defining 'game'

For any set of definitive features, we can think of exceptions that are still considered games

use of introspection to study imagery

Galton 1883 used the method of introspection to study mental imagery his participants' self reports suggested that they could inspect their images in much the same way as a picture the participants also different widely int he amount of the detail their mental images seemed to contain studies in the last 50 years avoid introspection and ask participants to do something with their images to read information off them or manipulate them in some way

branford & johnson experiment pragmatic inference

Inference that occurs when reading or hearing a statement, leads a person to expect something that is not explicitly stated or necessarily implied by the statement

image scanning

Kosslyn 1978 first asked participants to memorize map they were then asked to mentally scan from one landmark to another on the imagined map the time it took to scan the image correspond to the distance on the map thus, mental images seem to preserve the spatial layout and geometry of the represented scene

Maintenance Rehearsal

Maintains information but does not transfer it to the LTM. Thinking about the material in a rote, mechanical way, repitition

Typicality effects fuzzy boundaries graded membership in sentence-verification task in production tasks in picture identification task in rating tasks

One implication of prototype theory is that categories have fuzzy boundaries, with no clear specification of membership and non-membership graded membership: another implication is graded membership, or the idea that some members (closer to the prototype) are "better" members of the category than others In sentence verification task: a sentence like "robins are birds" can be verified faster than a sentence like "penguins are birds" In production tasks: if we ask people to name as many birds as they can, they typically start with category members that are closest to the prototype in picture identification task: if we ak people "does the next picture show you a bird," response times will be fastest for pictures of category members that are closest to the prototype in rating tasks the more prototypical category members are also privileged in rating tasks high-prototypicality: category member closely resembles category prototype low-prototypicality: category member does not closely resemble category prototype wittgenstein proposed that members of a category have a family resemblance to each other dark hair, glasses a mustache and a big nose are typical for this family but do not define this family

categorical perception (of phonemes)

Our categorization of phonemes shows abrupt boundaries, even when there is no corresponding abrupt change in the stimuli themselves. • This phenomenon is referred to as categorical perception.

dual-code theory

Paivio was the first to formalize the theory that there seems to be two types of representations visual imagery and verbal codes visual representation = analogues usually preserve the main perceptual features of the item verbal representations = symbols do not resemble the perceptual item

reminiscence bump self-image hypothesis cognitive hypothesis cultural life script hypothesis

Reminiscence bump: participants over 40 years old asked to recall events in their lives. memory is high for recent events and for events that occurred in adolescence and early adulthood (10-30 years of age)

mental walk task

Results of Mental-Walk test for patient MGS: before her operation, could mentally "walk" to within 15 feet before the image of the horse overflowed her visual field after removal of right occipital love, the size of the visual field was reduced and he could only mentally approach within 35 feet of the horse before it overflowed her visual field

organization in memory (scripts, Images)

Scripts: the conception of the sequence of actions that describe a particular activity. For Example, the sequence of events that are associated with going to class would be a "going to class" script. Images:

Shallow vs. deep processing

Shallow: engaging the information in a relatively superficial way deep: engaging the information in a more meaningful way

the imagery debate (imageless thought) spatial propositional epiphenomenon propositional representation tacit knowledge explanation

The imagery debate spatial or propositional spatial: Kosslyn - implies that images are not only represented by propositions. he tried to find evidence for a spatial representation system that constructs mental, analogous, 3D models Primary role was to organize spatial information in a general form that can be accessed by either perceptual or linguistic mechanisms. provides coordinate frameworks to describe object locations, this creating a model of a perceived or described environment representations created are models of physical nd functional aspects of the environment propositional - pylyshyn an epiphenomenon which accompanies the process of imagery, bit is not part of it. mental images do not show us how the mind works exactly, just that something is happening. even if CP player display is broken, the CD player still plays music. Epiphenomenon: secondary effect or byproduct that arises from but does not causally influence a process propositional representation: relationships between objects are represented by symbols and not by spatial mental images of the scene for example, a bottle under a table would be represented by a formula made of symbols like UNDER(BOTTLE,TABLE). The term proposition is lend from the domains of Logic and Linguistics and means the smallest possible entity of information. Each proposition can be either true or false. if one proposition is false, so is the whole sentence.

phonemic restoration effect

This can be demonstrated with the phonemic restoration effect - we "hear" phonemes that are not actually present in the stimulus if they are highly likely in the context. Phonemic restoration effect - "Fill in" missing phonemes based on context of sentence and portion of word presented

Elaborative rehersal

Transfers information to LTM. Thinking about the material in terms of meaning, relating the items to each other and to what one already knows

semantic networks

a network which represents semantic relations between concepts. this is often used as a form of knowledge representation. it is a directed or undirected graph consisting of vertices, which represents concepts and edges.

phonological rules (phonology)

a set of rules that indicate how phonemes can be combined to produce speech sounds also concerned with the sequences of phonemes that are acceptable in the language ex. the sequence "tl" is not acceptable in english. the "s" becomes a "z" sound in words like "bags"

scripts

a type of schema; the conception of the sequence of actions that describe a particular activity Schema: a person's knowledge about what is involved in a particular experience

Consolidation

achieved through some aspect of protein synthesis and neural reorganization retrograde amnesia: a blow to the head can interrupt the process of consolidation for events that happened 1-2 hours before the accident occurred memory for events during the time period is lost

false fame effect

after 24 hours, some non-famous names were misidentified as famous because they were familiar

segmentation problem

although words are effortlessly parsed out of the sound stream, the actual sound stimulus is usually continuous ex, listening to an unfamiliar language is even difficult to single out words. production of phonemes is regularly started before the preceding phoneme is even finished

simultaneous multiple contraint satisfaction

an advantage of connectionist, or pdp networks is that they allow simultaneous multiple constraint satisfaction rather than satisfying each constraint of a problem serially, the network deals with all of them at the same time, finding the balance point that provides the best possible solution

examplars

an alternative to prototype theory is exemplar-based reasoning, drawing on knowledge of specific category members rather than on more general prototypical information about the category the exemplar approach: concept is represented by multiple examples (rather than a single prototype) Examples are actual category members (not abstract averages) to categorize, compare the new item to stored examples representing a category is not defining it but representation is not abstract the more similar a specific exemplar is to a known category member, the faster it will be categorized

kosslyn's (1976) study of mental images

asked participants to answer yes/no questions about their mental images if participants imagined a cat, they were faster to confirm that cats have heads, compared to confirming that cats have claws the reverse was true if the participants were asked to think about cats, not to imagine them this suggests that as the mode of representation changes, so does the pattern of information availability

analogical representations

basis of all thinking is knowledge knowledge consists of mental representations of the world and our experienced with the world

parallel distributed processing

because this processing (connectionism) is also parallel (an not serial) connectionist networks are said to involve parallel distributed processing

category hierarchies and networks

categories are discovered, not invented detecting the correlational structure of the world fuzzy boundaries, internatl structure internal structure: better and worse examples of a fruit

family resemblance

categories have family resemblance structure

learning algorithms error signals back propogation

cause a node to decrease its connection to input nodes that lead to back propagation back propagation: error signal transmitted back through the circuit, indicates how weights should be changed to allow the output signal to match the correct signal the process repeats until the error signal is zero

late closure

causes new words or phrases to be attached to the current clause "John said he would leave yesterday" "John said (he would leave yesterday)" NOT "John said (he would leave) yesterday" group phrases are based on late closure

categorizations shared-knowledge object-specific knowledge

concept = musical instruments object-specific knowledge = guitar --> as six strings violin --> has four strings trumpet --> is blown into

concepts vs categories

concept: mental representation used for a variety of cognitive functions categorization: is the process by which things are placed into groups called categories

symbolic representations

concepts - can be literal (dog) or abstract (length) concepts are the building blocks of symbolic knowledge

prototypes

concepts with mental images or typical examples for example, a robin is a prototype of a bird, but a penguin is not

anaphoric inference

connecting object/people

retrieval cues and paths

connections between newly acquired material and representations already in memory serve as retrieval paths when we need to remember the new material a retrieval cue is anything that helps access the right information stored in long-term memory it is easier to recognize than to recall information according to the encoding specificity principle, any stimulus encoded along with an experience can later trigger the memory of the experience

depth processing

deep processing: close attention is paid to meaning (good memory) shallow processing: little attention is paid to meaning (poor memory) there are different levels of processing memory depth of processing promotes recall by facilitating later retrieval. consider learning as a way to establish indexing, a path to the information connections between to-be-remembered items facilitates retrival

defining attribute model (definitional approach)

determine category membership based on whether the object meets the definition of the category does not work well not all members of everyday categories have the same defining features

causal inference

events in one clause caused by events in previous sentence

over-regulation errors

for instance, suggest that children do not learn language based solely on imitating what they hear

lexical-decision task

further evidence for spread of activation and priming within networks comes from the lexical-decision task when items are presented in pairs, the semantic relationship between words affects the speed of lexical decision a word like "butter" will be recognized faster after having seen "break" because its node has already received spreading activation

grammar morphological rules syntactical rules

grammar: a set of rules that specify how the unites of language can be combined to produce meaningful messages morphological rules: a set of rules that indicate how morphemes can be combined to form workds syntactical rules: a set of rules indicate how words can be combined to form phrases and sentences

speaker variability

great deal of variability between people in respect to pitch of voice, accents, rate of speaking sloppy speaking -- fused words, omitted phonemes

syntax

how to combine the word with other words also provides rules that specify the kinds of sequences of words that are acceptable

cryptomnesia

in cryptomnesia, a person thinks he or she has come up with a new idea, but has only retrieved a memory

misinformation effect misleading postevent information

incorporation misleading information into one's memory of an event.

garden path sentences

initially suggests one interpretation, which turns out to be wrong

wernicke's area and fluent aphasia

involved in language comprehension a fluent aphasia wherein patients have little difficulty producing speech but produce nonsensical statements statements are reasonably grammatical wernicke's damage can also produce selective anomias Wernicke's area, associated with fluent aphasia. Wernicke's area (involved in language comprehension) • Wernike's aphasia - A fluent aphasia wherein patients have little difficulty producing speech but produce nonsensical statements • Statements are reasonably grammatical • But like a word salad "I called my mother on the television and did not understand the door. It was not too breakfast, but they came from far to near. My mother is not too old for me to be young" • Can usually neither understand or produce statements vocally or written • Wernike's damage can also produce selective anomias (single case of individual without nouns)

broca's area and nonfluent aphasia

involved in language production Tan left inferior frontal gyrus later patient usually had right sided weakness concluded language was mostly int he left hemisphere, believed to be responsible for planning patterns of motor movements to produce speech sounds Broca's area, associated with nonfluent aphasia Broca's area (involved in language production) • Broca's aphasia - a nonfluent aphasia which primarily involves a difficulty in producing speech • Extreme cases - unable to say or write a word • Moderate cases - speech is labored and fragmented "Here...head...operation...here... speech...none...talking...what... illness" • Believed to be responsible for planning patterns of motor movements to produce speech sounds

self-schema

is a theorized schema that is developed about oneself.

script reproduction

is the experimental paradigm of having participants read a story and then have them try to reproduce the story back as completely as possible. They may be asked one or more times to examine how their memory of the story changes with time. Bartlett's "War of the Ghosts", mentioned in lecture and the text used this paradigm.

universality of language (linguistic universals)

knowing language is a key part of being human; it is a human universal, and no other species has as complex a communicative system language is essential for a huge range of human achievements. without it, cultural transmission of information and the acquisition of knowledge would be much more limited

semantic reversibility

knowledge of semantics also guides us in parsing sentences whether a sentence is semantically reversible provides a cue to the relationships among the words in the sentence

minimal attachment

leads the listener to chose the simplest phrase structure that will accommodate the words heard so far "because he ran the second mile went quickly"

critical period

learning new languages gets harder with age childhood is a critical period for fully developing certain aspects of languages

connection weights

learning occurs through changes in the strength of connections -- the connection weights - between nodes in some models, if two nodes are activated at the same time, the connection between them is strengthened. if they are activated at different times, the connection is weakened

taxonomic structure of categories superordinate (global) basic object level (important) subordinate

maximum similarity between members within the category and minimal similarity between members of contrasting categories. People almost exclusively use basic-level names in free-naming tasks. they are quicker to identify (basic-level category members as a member of a category) children learn basic-level concepts sooner than other levels more common in adult discourse than names for superordinate categories

chronometric studies

measures the amount of time required by a cognitive process of interest

flashbulb memories

memories of extraordinary clarity, typically for highly emotional events. can be inaccurate/lacking in detail

schemas and schematic knowledge

memory can include information not actually experienced but inferred because it is expected and consistent with the schema the constructive nature of memory can lead to errors or "false memories"

conceptual peg hypothesis

memory for words that evoke mental images is better than those that do now

situation model

mental representation of what a text is about represent events as if experiencing the situation point of view of protagonist

source monitoring

misidentifying source of memory - also called misattribution

effects of hints in networks

networks suggest an explanation for why hints help us remember south dakota's capital is easier to remember with the hint that the answer is a man's name with the hint "pierre" receives activation from two nodes and it is more likely to reach threshold

state-dependent learning

new material is most likely to be recalled when the person is in the same mental, emotional, or biological state as when the material was learned.

memory bias

our autobiographical memories are also biased to emphasize consistency and positive traits people's memories change over time to maintain consistency between their past memories, their current knowledge, and their current attitudes.

imagery in neglect patients

patients with unilateral neglect may also neglect the left side of space in their mental images asked to imagine themselves in the piazza and describing the piazza: standing in front of church - neglected left side attentional neglect is not only a perceptual phenomenon but also affects recalled/imagined representations other evidence that long-term visual memory may be propositional comes from studies showing that verbal labels influence later recreations of a studied figure

phase-rule noun phrase verb phrase

phase rule: a constraint that governs the pattern of branching in a phrase-structure tree. one such rule specifies that a sentence must contain: noun phrase and verb phrase One kind of syntactic rule is a phrase-structure rule, a constraint that governs the pattern of branching in a phrase-structure tree. • One such rule specifies that a sentence must contain a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP).

variability problem

phoneme context: the "d" in both stimuli sound the same but are physically dissimilar. caused by coarticulation - phoneme production is influenced by the phonemes that precede ad follow it example = 'bat' and 'boot' -- "b" sounds the same, but lip articulation is very different as well as acoustic signal

phonemes infant discrimination

phoneme: the smallest unit of sound that can distinguish words in a language infant discrimination: very young infants can discriminate between the phonemes in all of the world's languages early babbling is also nearly identical across cultures including all phonemes sometime after the first year, infants can only discriminate the phonemes in their own languages only produce the phonemes of their own language

network account of state-dependent learning context reinstatement priming

priming in prosopagnosia during learning, connections are strenthened between the context and the learned material context reinstatement: if you are in the same context during testing, the learned material will receive pre-activation from these connections

rosch's prototype theory

rather than thinking about definitions that define the boundaries of a category,t he category is characterized by a central member that possesses all of the characteristic features (the prototype)

context reinstatement

recreating the context that was present during learning will improve memory performance

extralinguistic context

refers to factors outside of language itself the sentence "put the apple on the towel into the box" is a garden-path sentence, unless the sentence is uttered with the appropriate visual context

pragmatics

refers to knowledge of how language is ordinarily used "what happened to the roast beef?" "well, the dog sure does look happy."

autobiographical memory

refers to memory of episodes and events in a person's own life

prosody

refers to the patterns of pauses and pitch changes that characterize speech production. it is used to: emphasize elements of a sentence highlight the sentence's intended structure signal the difference between a question and an assertion

encoding specificity

refers to the tendency, when memorizing, to place in memory both the materials to be learned as well as the context of those materials. as a result, materials will be recognized as familiar later on only if they appear again in a similar context

narrative rehersal

repeated viewing/hearing of an event TV, talking with other could introduce errors in own memory

associations

representation of individual ideas are the nodes ("knots") within the network the connections between the individual ideas are associations or associative links think of the nodes as cities on a map, and the associations as the routes between the cities

coherence

representation of the text in one's mind so that information from one part of the text can be related to information in another part of the text

specificity coding (local representation)

requires a different cell for every object we can recognize spontaneous activity would make a single cell error prone and its loss would cause the representation to be lost these concerns have led most researchers to embrace ensemble coding in which a number of feature detectors signal the presence of objects in the networks considered so far, each concept is represented by a local representation

distributed coding (distributed representation)

specific stimuli are represented by the pattern of firing of many neurons a limited number of neurons could represent a nearly unlimited number of specific stimuli connectionist networks use distributed representations, where information is represented by a pattern of activation across a network

associative links (and types of)

spreading activation is the process through which activation travels from one node to another, via these links to confirm that "cats have hearts" one must traverse two associative links may guide the search through the network just as hyperlinks guide search through internet in some proposals, nodes represent a single concept only (ex. "dog") and the nodes are connected by different types of associative links (ex. "isa and hasa") a more complex network is designed around the notion of propositions - the smallest units of knowledge that can be true or false

spreading activation activation levels summation threshold

spreading activation: the process through which activation travels from one node to another, via the associative links as each node becomes activated, it serves as a source of further activation, spreading onward through the network similar to neurons, nodes have activation levels and fire a signal if the input stimulating them summates to reach threshold concepts that receive activation are primed and more easily accessed from memory

Retrieval

storage is not enough; we must be able to access the memory when needed inadequate coding leads to a failure to retrieve with an adequate retrieval cue, sometimes we can realize that encoding wasnt the problem after all

deep vs surface structure

surface: the sound and order of words deep: the meaning being conveyed Deep structure vs. surface structure • deep = meaning • surface = wording

approaches to parsing (p304-308)

syntax-first approach to parsing, syntax determines parsing immediately and semantics is later used to rearrange parsing interactionist parsing: in the interactionist approach to parsing, semantics come into play early as the sentence is being read. parsing is influenced both by the meaning of words and by the environmental setting ** semantics and syntax are used simultaneously to parse the sentence and that they work together in clarifying the meaning for example: "the spy saw the man with the binoculars" 2 interpretations. parsing determines how sentence is read: "the bird saw the man with binoculars" only 1 interpretation usually made because we know that birds do not use binoculars

fan effect (and degree of fan)

the degree of fan is the number of associative links radiating out from a node with a higher degree of fan (more links) each of the associated nodes receives a smaller fraction of the central node's activation. this is sometimes called a fan effect

lexical ambiguity and dominance (p. 305-307)

the lexical ambiguity of a word or phrase pertains to its having more than one meaning int he language to which the word belongs

speech segmentation

the processing of "slicing" the speech stream into words and phonemes

morpheme

the smallest unit of sound that can carry meaning in a language - morpheme into word - ex 's' b/c it imparts pluralization of words"

associative paths (collins & quillian, 1969) and searching associative links

the time to answer these questions depends ont he length of the associative path between the pieces of information

input nodes

these nodes fire the signal if the input stimulating them summates to reach threshold

propositions (Anderson's ACT) type node token node time node location node episodes

type node: a node that represents a general category token node: a node that represents a specific instance time node: a node that represents a specific time location node: a node that represents a specific location Episodes: the ACT network can also distinguish between specific episodes and abstracted knowledge by including time nodes and location nodes

experimental evidence that mental imagery uses perceptual mechanisms farah's visualization exppt. perky's mental image study motion adaptation brain imaging TMS

unbeknownst to the participants, perky was projecting dim images onto the screen - affected the way they imagined images' orientation perky's mental image study - 1910 mistake actual picture for mental image motion adaption: subjects were adapted to motion in one direction, up, down, or from one side to the other. known to make less sensitive to perceiving motion in the adapted direction (neural fatigue) after the dot moves behind the display box, subjects imagine the dot continuing to move down. respond to when they think the dot should reappear at the bottom. was imagined to reappear later when in the adapted direction, reappeared sooner when opposite the adapted direction, and unaffected by lateral adaptation in some critical ways, our mental images are different from pictures recall that although a picture may be ambiguous, our perception of the picture is not neutral perception "goes beyond the information given" to organize and interpret the image, making it unambiguous similarly, mental images correspond to these interpretations, not to the ambiguous images

image scaling

we can control our scale of perception, focusing on perhaps a whole car or just the rear view mirror to provide a particular levl of detail kosslyn asked subjects to imagine four different pairs of animals. when asked about features of the animal ex. rabbit (ex. does it have toes) were slower when when asked to imagine it with a larger animal having to scale out their mental image to encompass the elephant made it difficult to inspect their image of the rabbit

word learning fast mapping

word learning: The average high school graduate is estimated to know about 60,000 (a good student 2x) • With word learning starting around 12 months • 11 new words a day • New word every ninety waking minutes • Six-year-old: 13,000 words Fast mapping: learning a word - assigning its meaning after a single exposure • Heuristics for name learning • Social referencing • Novel object names • Assume common names (not proper)

generativity

• Our morphological knowledge specifies how to create variations of each word by adding appropriate morphemes. • E.g., hack, hacker, hacking, hacked • This is one example of language's generativity - the capacity to create an endless series of new combinations, all built from the same set of basic units.