PSYS 214: Final Exam Material

Syntax in animals - Campells monkeys

-male Campbells monkeys emit six types of alert calls. -the primates combine these calls into long vocal sequences which allow them to convey messages about social cohesion or various dangers, including predation. -rarely use them in isolation -produce long vocal sequences (avg of 25 successive calls) -combine calls to convey different messages ---change order of calls within sequence changes meaning about nature of danger (type/location/detection of predator) and social events (encounter with another group, gathering before moving, etc.)

Explanations for the spacing effect

-massed repetition leads to deficient processing of the second presentation of the item ---result is only one fully encoded memory representation of the item -massed repetition leads to little variability in the encoded memory representations ---results in representations that will be difficult to locate in a memory search -many distinct memory traces is optimal!

Memory conclusions

-memory can be usefully divided into types (declarative-nondeclarative, explicit-implicit, semantic-episodic, remembering-knowing, etc.) -these types of memory involve different neural networks

Autobiographical memory

-memory for a specific life experience ---episodic memory -personal episodic memories from our experience and used not only to reconstruct our past but also to develop our sense of self -they typically contain specific, often multi-sensory information ---the following happened to me on the first day of psys214 class -also, autobiographical memory retrieval is more time consuming compared to declarative memories which seem either immediately available or inaccessible ---tell me the color of a stop sign vs tell me the first time you were in a rowboat

Memory fallibility: Carmichael, Hogan, and Walters (1932)

-memory is a reconstructive process -this study suggests that memory is a reconstructive process -people's insight into their memory ability and their confidence of their memories are imperfect -when the participants were later tasked with replicating the images, they tended to add features to their own reproduction that more closely resembled the word they were primed with

Biological effects

-menstrual cycle alters face perception ---more masculinized male faces preferred only during fertile phase of cycle (Perrett et al., 1999) ---masculinized faces associated with genetic health and dominance, but feminized factors associated with reliable long-term partner -images of female faces judged as more attractive if taken during fertile phase than luteal phase of menstrual cycle -pole dancers earn more tips when in their fertile phase

Familiarity

-mere exposure effect ---previous or repeated exposure to a face increases the positive affective response to that face (Rhodes et al., 2001) -general familiarity ---preference for images of own face morphed into the opposite sex (Little et al., 2001) ---face images not recognized as their own

Patient contraindications

-metallic implants ---aneurysm clips, stents, metal pins, fragments in eyes, metal jewelry -electrical devices ---pacemakers, neurostimulators -pregnancy (assess risk/benefit)

Visual system

-micro to macro -visual input is sent to opposite hemispheres (right visual field info sent to left hemisphere)

Investigating changes over adolescence

-might one or two cigarettes alter brain development? -regression between grey matter volume and smoking levels (including 427 smokers and 389 non-smokers).

Distribution of receptor cells in the retina

-more color-sensitive cones in the fovea -more light-sensitive rods as one moves to the periphery of the retina (to see the man in the moon, don't look at the moon) -no receptive cells at the "blind spot" where the optic nerve exits the eye

Perception

-more than just sensory stimulation -ex. checkerboard illusion ---colors look different but are actually the same -later organizational and interpretive processes that bring coherence, order, and consciousness to bear on the information

The speech apparatus: morphemes

-morphemes are meaningful units of consonants and vowels. -morphemes are typically words. -an example of a morpheme that is not a word is the "im" in "impossible."

NMR-->MRI: Why the name change?

-most likely explanation: nuclear has bad connotations -less likely but more amusing explanation: subjects got nervous when fast-talking doctors suggested an NMR

Behavioral economics

-neoclassical models assume a rationale agent who attempts to maximize its own well-being -in practice, human behavior is not rational and frequently decisions are made which are not in the long term best interest of the individual -behavioral economics studies the economic decisions individuals actually make and how this deviates from rationally optimal decisions -deviations from rationality are not random; can be described as a set of cognitive biases that guide real decision-making -knowledge about cognitive biases can be used to shape behavior (product sales, public policy, politics)

Development (face recognition)

-new born babies (mean 9 weeks) prefer looking at intact over jumbled faces -infants (2 days old**?) recognize mother from unfamiliar faces

Are tests that are objective and reliable therefore valid?

-no -number of letters in name * 10 -objective, reliable, but not valid!

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

-non-invasive, in vivo, imaging accomplished with magnetic fields and radio signals. -MRI provides very high resolution images (100/200 microns) of brain structure. -by changing the parameters of the image acquisition (pulse sequences) fMRI can measure blood flow changes associated with neuronal activity. -through psychological experimentation, researchers design tasks that engage specific psychological functions, thereby providing maps of brain function.

Semantic, top-down, influence on speech perception

-normally, you perceive speech within a background of other noises (coughs, whispers, music). -Warren & Warren constructed sentences with "silent" spots and replaced these with a coughing noise. -the "cough" spots were perceived as containing speech appropriate to the sentence context demonstrating top-down influence on speech perception.

Defining creativity

-novelty and utility

What makes object recognition difficult?

-objects remain constant despite dramatic changes in the retinal image

Boundedness

-obstacle to creativity -It's difficult to disabuse ourselves of what we already know. -For example, draw an imaginary alien from another planet

Stimulus Error

-occurs when the observer perceives the "meaning" or attributes of a stimulus rather than its elemental parts -the trained observer's task was to report the elemental parts of an experience and from these one could then induce the meaningful perception

Implicit memory

-occurs without consciousness or intention -three types: priming, procedural, conditioning

Visual information is separated into which two pathways?

-older magnocellular pathway -newer parvocellular pathway

Forgetting curve

-once this exponential curve is described one can then move on to study what factors influence retention (sleepiness, meaningfulness), how to improve memory, and so on -one can also try to find a neural basis for this exponential forgetting rate

Neurobiology of intelligence

-one approach to defining and measuring intelligence might be through identifying its biological basis -phrenology: early approach

Importance of H.M.

-one lesson to be learned from HM is that there are apparently different types of memory -with damage to the temporal lobes, some memory functions are completely lost while others remain intact

Connectionist models of mind: learning example

-one might train the network with the following set of trials adjusting weights based on performance on each trial: -by training the system on multiple sets of input-output relationships, it can learn by adjusting weights to correctly identify a specific set of inputs as a bird and other sets of inputs as a fish. -then, once it has learned to correctly identify these inputs, we can present a new input and see how it categorizes it:

Wolfgang Kohler

-one of the founding Gestalt psychologists -December 1913, he reported extraordinary problem solving within a colony of chimpanzees -the chimps connected sticks to reach bananas, piled boxes to climb on, and even showed cooperative helping behavior -these observations suggested that these types of problem-solving behaviors were not uniquely human

The garden-path model: processing ambiguous sentences

-one research approach to understanding how people process ambiguous sentences is through monitoring their eye movements as they read

Family resemblance

-one solution to the intransitivity problem is to propose that "typicality" is the key issue (clocks "typically" are types of furniture). -so the rules of the hierarchy might change from "is a" to "is typically a" -this approach creates "fuzzy categories" where the definition of a category is not clearly delineated. ---furniture is typically indoors; ---clocks are typically considered furniture; ---birds typically fly

Results of Challenger explosion flashbulb memory test

-only 25% of the subjects remembered being asked about the event 2 1/2 years before -only 7% of the subjects gave similar recollections -however, most subjects were very confident about their memories -why? ---often the event is seen repeatedly on TV - the inaccurate memory may be an occasion when they heard about the event, but it wasn't the first time they encoded it

Guskjolen et al (2018)

-optogenetic strategy -permanent expression of channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) in neuronal ensembles that were activated during contextual fear encoding in infant mice -would reactivation of ChR2-tagged ensembles in the dentate gyrus be sufficient for memory recovery in adulthood? -they found that optogenetic stimulation of tagged dentate gyrus neurons recovered "lost" infant memories up to 3 months following training and that memory recovery was associated with broader reactivation of tagged hippocampal and cortical neuronal ensembles

Connectionist models of mind

-otherwise known as Parallel Distributed Processing or Artificial neural networks. -connectionist models are networks of "neuron-like" nodes that can learn from experience. -they attempt to simulate cognitive processes by programming a computer to function like a matrix of neuron-like connections. -note that these models capture interesting properties of cognitive processing - they are not meant to function in the same way that neurons do.

Eyewitness testimony

-our attention to details is not nearly as good as we think it is under normal conditions (what about stress and anxiety??)

Magnetic properties of protons

-outside magnetic field: randomly oriented -inside magnetic field: spins tend to align parallel or anti-parallel to B0 ---net magnetization (M) along B0 ---only 0.0003% of protons/T align with field

Biederman's "Geon" model of object recognition

-parts-based approach -object recognition is based on parsing an object into its component parts -these "visual primitives" or perceptual building blocks are termed geons (geometric ions). In total, there are fewer than 40 geons.

Two general approaches to pattern perception (theories of visual object recognition)

-parts-based approaches -image-based approaches

MRI equipment safety

-patient contraindications -projectiles are #1 danger of MRI

Split brain confabulation

-patients with a split-brain procedure cannot transfer information between hemispheres - each hemisphere, in effect, works in isolation -the information to the right hemisphere can bias the interpretation of the words they see -what's critical is their explanations for why they see one word versus another -in the same way, people try to make sense of their memories and, without trying to deceive, can be quite confident in their interpretations (applies to eyewitness testimony)

Neurobiological enhancement with attention

-paying attention to a tactile stimulus (finger prodding) enhanced brain activation (sterr et al., neuroreport 2006) -can attention reduce the neural processing (and subjective experience) of painful tactile stimuli?

Why is our probability intuition so wrong?

-people very often ignore base rates and ignore alternative explanations -the test is 95% accurate but only for those very few people who have the disease -the false positives are unlikely (5%) but apply to many more people

Research on controlling attention (pre-attentive)

-perception without awareness -Childress et al., 2008 -this study assessed whether stimuli that were not consciously perceived (33 msec duration with backward masking; confirmed through immediate recall and forced-choice recognition) would produce brain activity and whether this activity would be related to subsequent conscious ratings of their appeal -guiding the research is the question whether or not "subliminal" percepts guide our behavior (e.g. drug cravings) in ways that are not consciously available to us. is this related to addiction vulnerability? -saw that corresponding brain regions that are involved in motivated behaviors were activated even without awareness (v. pallidum and striatum)

Performing verbal and visualspatial memory tasks while completing competing tasks

-performing competing tasks reduced performance overall -similar tasks (e.g. verbal-verbal) maximally interfere with one another -this suggests two types of short-term memory stores

Phonemes

-phonemes are those sounds used to differentiate meaning in any particular language -roughly, they are the consonant and vowel sounds of a language -changing a "phoneme" in a word changes the meaning (e.g. /ta/ble/ versus /fa/ble/).

Sensory transduction: from physical energy to internal representation

-physical energy is detected by the sensory apparatus (eye, ear, skin, nose, mouth) -physical energy is transformed to electro-chemical activity of the receptor cell (e.g. photo-sensitive cells in the retina) -the pattern of physical energy results in a pattern of receptor cell activity -as the neuronal activity moves inward the brain/mind abstracts patterns and, ultimately, meaning

Does attractiveness increase with increasing averaging?

-picture A is an average of 18 faces, picture B an average of 27 faces, C an average of 36 faces, and D an average of 45 faces

Most attractive?

-pictures A, C, and D are each averages of two faces -B is an average of 45 faces -in general, ratings are higher for average faces relative to individual faces

Impaired executive functions in cocaine users

-poorer inhibitory control of cocaine users is associated with reduced activation in the anterior cingulate and the right insula/IFG -users showed reduced insula and dorsal anterior cingulate region activation for errors -other studies identify impaired behavior/function in ecstasy users, cannabis users, opiate addicts, and smokers

Evolutionary hypothesis for attractiveness

-preferences for certain face types evolved as an adaptation to the problem of mate choice -attractive traits signal aspects of mate quality ---fertility, youthfulness, or health ---preferences evolved because they enhanced reproductive success

Cathartic method

-preferred by Freud -patient was awake so could be aware of the insights that emerged during therapy

Tanaka and Farah (1993)

-presented faces or houses accompanied by labels "Larry's house" or "Larry's face" -recognition test with two conditions: ---isolated-parts conditions (recognize Larry's nose or Larry's door" ---whole-object condition (recognize Larry's face or Larry's house) Results: -for houses, part and whole ID was the same -for faces, whole ID was better than part ID -supports the notion that faces are processed and remembered holistically

Kanzi (a bonobo)

-presents some of the most impressive evidence of language in non-humans. -language was learned spontaneously -Kanzi learned lexigram symbols by watching researchers use them with his mother -Kanzi's language evolved through his everyday activities -he did not attempt to engage in human-like conversation. -led to a great deal of data—13,000 utterances generated over a 4-month period

Brown-Peterson task

-preventing rehearsal in short term memory "remember these letters but also count backwards in 3's from this number" -proactive interference vs retroactive interference -items are displaced or interfered with by other items -greatly decreased ability to recall trigram-interpreted as the memory traces decay or interference by other items

Why does p(D/S) NOT equal p(S/D)

-probability that you smoked cannabis is you used harder drugs is not the same as the probability that you will use harder drugs if you smoke cannabis -probability that you will be Canadian if you have slept in an igloo is not the same as the probability that you have slept in an igloo if you are Canadian

Inductive reasoning

-proceeds from specific examples, from which you try to arrive at a general conclusion -most of science progresses (or at least starts) in this manner - you obtain empirical data (e.g. observable behavior) and then try to infer the causal mechanism

Retrieval

-processes involved in getting info out of memory

Encoding

-processes involved in the acquisition of material

Noam Chomsky

-proposed that language consists of a small number of "kernel" sentences and a means of transforming these elementary components into a wider range of possible sentences

Evidence that face recognition is distinct

-prosopagnosia -development -face inversion

Semantic priming

-provides a method for mapping out association trees ---which concepts "activate" other concepts and by how much. -associations between concepts are linked in terms of "spreading activation." -priming occurs when the spreading activation of the prime word allows the target to be more readily identified as a word.

Language overview

-psycholinguistics often appears to be an isolated domain within cognitive psychology. -however, the issues raised are often quite fundamental. ---is language uniquely human? ---is language innate? ---how are thought and language related? ---are cognitive abilities distinct modules?

Neuroimaging as a new dependent variable

-psychological measures are limited. In addition to giving insights into the neurobiology of psychological processes, fMRI also provides us with a whole new way to study these processes. -more specifically, it affords insight into processes of which the participant may be unwilling to communicate or may be entirely unaware! ---real-time fMRI ---race perception (Lieberman et al., 2005); ---perception without awareness (Childress et al., 2008); ---free will (Soon et al., 2008).

In vivo views of the human brain in action

-psychologists have been very quick to embrace techniques that offer the possibility of in vivo views of the human brain in action (especially if they are non-invasive). ---X-Rays; ---Cat Scans; ---Electroencephalography (EEG) and Evoked Brain Potentials; ---Implanted electrodes; ---Direct brain stimulation; ---Positron Emission Tomography (PET); ---Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI); ---Others (NIRS; MEG; TMS; SPECT; ...) -the popularity of fMRI is that it is can map brain functions in vivo and non-invasively, and can provide a systems-level insight into brain function (and dysfunction).

G.T. Fechner

-psychophysics -1801-1887 -just noticeable difference

Methods developed in 19th century psych

-psychophysics -introspection -mental chronometry

The famous non-debate between Noam Chomsky and B.F. Skinner: Skinner's argument

-radical behaviorist and arch-empiricist. -Skinner's book, Verbal Behavior (1957) which described how the child learned particular words, categories for words, and even word order as a result of interaction with other language speakers. -Chomsky reviewed Skinner's book and spent several pages, in the harshest language, arguing for rationalism in general and against empiricism.

Priming

-reading the word "butter" makes processing related words such as "bread" faster

Caveats regarding connectionist models

-real neurons are more complex than the simple digital neurons used in these computer models. -real neurons are not identical. The surface of the brain, the cortex, contains highly structured layers of different neurons serving different functions. -and, localization of both neurons, types of neurons, and function occurs in the nervous system. Damage to particular regions disrupts the ability to perceive phonemes, to experience the correct color of objects, to perceive faces, to calculate, and so on. -the learning rule used in these models is not biologically plausible. -the connectionist model is not trying to mimic neurons. Instead, it is trying to capture information processing and information storage capabilities of our minds.

Eyewitness testimony - post-event

-recall can also be affected by events at the time of retrieval

Are childhood memories lost or not retrievable?

-recall optogenetic manipulations whereby specific memories can be observed and manipulated (e.g. suppressed) -Guskjolen et al (2018)

The Vermont Hiker Problem results

-reconfiguring the problem such that there are two hikers makes it apparent that there is a single spot that will be passed at precisely the same moment on the two days

Self-reference effect

-references to ourselves have a rich network of associations -subjects were asked to perform a standard depth of processing task with an added condition in which they determined if an adjective described themselves -the self-reference effect showed the greatest recall

The goal of cognitive neuroscience

-reflect on the insights to be afforded by these brain imaging results

Craik & Watkins (1973)

-rehearsal -a string of words is presented, one at a time -your task is to remember the last word beginning with the letter "g" -rehearsal is controlled by the number of words intervening before the end of the list -after processing 27 lists subjects were asked to recall all of the target words ("g" words in this example) -if mere repetition influenced transfer to long-term memory then words with more repetition should show better retention -however all words were recalled about 25% of the time regardless of the number of repetitions -repetition rehearsal is insufficient!

Summary - rehearsal

-rehearsal maintenance is not the most effective way to make memories (recall the last "g" word experiment) -what is more critical is the depth of processing that the items receive

Electroconvulsive Therapy (ETC)

-repeated administrations cause a deterioration of declarative memory but not non-declarative memory

Conway et al (1997)

-researchers asked students in a number of psychology courses to take multiple-choice exams and to indicate, for each answer, their memory awareness (remember, just know, familiar, or guess)

In the Brains of the Violent, Gray Matter May Matter, results and implications

-researchers found that the latter group had, on average, 11% less gray matter than the other subjects -the results, reported in the latest issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, could eventually lead to screening techniques to ID young people most prone to violence, said study coauthor Adrian Raine of the University of So Cal "the more we learn about the brain bases of violence, and the more we integrate those with social and family causes, the better we will be able to predict violence and know where to target our intervention resources. But which kids do we look for? We need a way to know who will grow up to do the greatest harm to society and to themselves"

Vending machine experiment

-responses tilt the vending machine -earned rewards are signaled by picture of the food reward -day 1: reinforced training -day 2: reinforced training -day 3: reinforced training, devaluation video, test in extinction -what would happen if subjects had only been trained for 1 day?

ABCD study measures....

-reward anticipation -response inhibition -working memory -reward success

Classical model

-rule-based systems -a hierarchy of categories; a robin is a bird, is an animal, is living, etc

19th century cog psych

-saw the emergence of psych as an independent scientific discipline -this century demonstrated that a scientific study of the mind was possible

Second stage of autobiographical memories over the life-span

-second, there is a period of memory from about 10-30 which reflects an increasing memory for autobiographical memories followed by a reduction to age 30-35, forming a shape called the "reminiscence bump"

Alternative methods

-self-report of real-life emotional events played back during imaging. -despite the methodological difficulties, functional neuroimaging may be of particular value for studying emotional processes as these processes tend not to produce unambiguous behavioral measures.

Categorization and meaning will focus on...

-semantic memory -we have a vast knowledge base. -we have lots of different types of knowledge. -the focus is on this knowledge base (our semantic rather than implicit or episodic memories). -imagine a computer programmer was trying to design an information database modeled on human semantic memory. How would you advise them on its design? -put another way, how is our semantic knowledge organized?

Association network/spreading activation

-semantic memory is assumed to be organized as a network consisting of associated representations -when one concept is activated, that activation spreads among related representations -by measuring the speed with which related items are processed, one can infer the association links

Projectiles are #1 danger of MRI

-should be eliminated by procedures/staff training -large objects (e.g. fire extinguisher, oxygen tank, crash-cart) -pens, scissors, needles

Hauk et al (2004)

-show "that action words from different semantic subcategories (referring to movement of parts of the face, arm, or leg) activate the motor cortex in a somatotopic fashion that overlaps in premotor and motor cortex with the activation pattern observed for actual movements of the relevant body parts."

Beaty et al., PNAS (2018)

-show that creativity on an unusual uses test was related to correlated activity across a broad range of brain areas. Some correlations between brain areas were positively related to creative ability ("high-creative network") and others were negatively related with creative ability ("low- creative network")

Jung et al., Human Brain Mapping (2010)

-show that measures of creativity correlate with grey matter thickness in a number of brain areas, concluding: -"The distribution of brain regions, associated with both divergent thinking and creative achievement, suggests that cognitive control of information flow among brain areas may be critical to understanding creative cognition."

McBain, Norton, and Chen (2009)

-showed line drawings of an object embedded within a larger array of lines -stimuli were shown from 13-104 milliseconds -task: indicate if face or tree was on the right or left side of the display -dependent variable: accuracy -results: ---performance was better the longer the display ---women were more accurate than men in both upright and inverted face conditions ---performance or men and women was the same in the tree conditioin -why is there a female superiority in face recognition? what might be the consequences of this superiority?***

19th and 20th century antecedents of cognitive psychology

-showed that a scientific study of the mind was possible and saw the emergence of a number of schools of psychology -a number of methods developed during the earlier periods of the discipline are still practiced today and are core experimental procedures for cog neuro -to understand the origins of the discipline it can be insightful to understand what cognitive psychology is not, that is, what it reacted against (ex. behaviorism, psychoanalysis)

The "grandmother" cell

-single neurons in the FAA in macaque monkey are selectively responsive to faces -if we observe neurons that respond to particular individuals then is there a "grandmother cell"?

Newer parvocellular pathway

-small cells and thinner fibers -high detail and color -ventral stream "what is the object?"

Criticism of the Wason selection task

-some people criticize this task (maybe even the entire field of research) as being too focused on abstract, logical problems -ex. which cards would you select with a more real-world problem: if you mow the lawn, ill give you five dollars -unlike the Wason task many real-life arguments carry with them an implicit understanding that the relationship between the two events is not bi-directional

Attenuation theories

-some words in mental lexicon are permanently more available due to personal relevance or temporarily due to context (top-down processing) -therefore, less "bottom-up" information is needed to trigger conscious recognition

When do infants learn their specific language?

-sometime during the first year, around 10 months, infants show a reduction in perceptual receptiveness to non-native speech sounds. -Maritza-Gaxiola, Pereyra and Kuhl (2005) recorded cortical event-related evoked potentials in 7- and 11-month old infants to native speech (English) and non-native speech (Spanish). -over this period children showed increased responsiveness to native language sounds and decreased responsiveness to non-native sounds. This suggests a critical period for neural consolidation of speech sounds. -some children showed continued responsiveness to non-native sounds, suggesting some individual differences

Color perception

-spectral sensitivity of the three types of cone pigments -the 7 million cones fall into three general categories of light sensitivity: blue-green-red -other colors are created by the firing of a mixture of these three -info from the blue, green, red cones is fed to ganglion cells that respond to (a) differences in firing rate between the red and green cones, and (b) differences in firing rate between blue cones and a combined signal of both red and green cones -the opponency is why you cannot perceive a reddish-green -color perception is an example of more complicated perceptions occurring as one moves up the visual processing system` -if the red and green distributions are much closer together, then you'll likely have trouble distinguishing red and green colors (color blindness)

The speech apparatus

-speech production is the placement and movement of the tongue, the modulation of the amount, pattern, and rate of air flow, and so on. -stopping or continuing a flow of air results in different sounds.

Split-brain task

-split-brain patients can name words presented to their left hemispheres but not words to the right -however, they can draw a picture or point to a picture of what is presented to the right hemisphere

Connectionist models of mind: learning

-stimulation with an input results in a pattern of activation throughout the network. -activation changes the weights of the connections between units. -programming the computer to adjust the system's weights, called "back-propagation," permits the program to "learn." -training consists of numerous learning trials.

Degraded stimuli

-stimuli that are blurry, incomplete, or otherwise less informative -perception will not be impeded even in a degraded stimulus as long as there is sufficient info to activate the mind's geons

Conditioning

-stimulus-response associations

Conditions that favor habit over goal-directed action

-stress -cognitive interference -overtraining -fatigue -goal-directed control is flexible but slower; requires greater cognitive resources -habit-based control is fast, and efficient, but inflexible

Problem solving for Duncker's tumor problem

-students generated many interesting ideas -however, once a student decided on one route to solution it was difficult to shift from that "mental set" to another route

Conway et al (1997) results, conclusions

-students who performed better on the tests reported "remembering" for more of their answers -this suggests that they had a richer degree of knowledge about the problem than those students who merely indicated that they "knew" or were responding to an answer because it seemed "familiar" -however, on a delayed test these results reversed; the higher performing students now reported "knowing" the correct answer more than "remembering" it -thus, some memories may shift over time from episodic (related to time and place) to integration with semantic memory

Maier

-studied the shifting problem - the difficulty in shifting from one "functionally fixed" conceptualization to another with problems similar to those used by the Gestalt psychologists

Cue words

-subjects are presented with word cues and asked to: ---retrieve an autobiographical memory ---describe it ---date it -this yields an autobiographical memory retention function -that is, the distribution of personal episodic memories across the lifespan

Depth of processing as an increasingly stronger "trace"

-subjects determined if each word was "abstract" (liberty) or "concrete" (cup) or if each word was printed in upper case or lower case letters -deeper processing led to better retention -both tasks generated widespread brain activation -the deeper, semantic decision task resulted in relatively greater activation of the left prefrontal and temporal brain regions than did the non-semantic task

The Weather Task

-subjects learn associations between patterns on cards and a hypothetical "weather" outcome without being able to clearly verbalize the rules by which they were learning the judgement -they learn a non-declarative skill based on the probability of success -different visual patterns predicted the correct weather with varying degrees of certainty (either 75%, 57%, 43%, or 25% of the time) -the trials are presented quickly so subjects don't have time to really think about the patterns - BUT they do get better, implicitly learning the "rules" even though they can't describe how they make the judgements -their striatums were able to acquire the predictive value of the patterns

Participant Safety - MRI

-subjects must have no metal in their bodies: ---pacemaker ---aneurysm clips ---metal implants (e.g., cochlear implants) ---interuterine devices (IUDs) ---some dental work (fillings okay) -subjects must remove metal from their bodies ---jewelry, watch, piercings, etc -subjects must be given ear plugs (acoustic noise can reach 120 dB)

Eyewitness testimony - post-event study

-subjects observed a film on an automobile collision -they were then asked "about how fast were the cars going when they hit (or, contacted, bumped, collided, smashed) each other?" -the choice of descriptive verb influenced the estimated vehicle speed in an accident -in later studies other misleading info was provided (e.g. when the car stopped at the "stop" sign versus "yield" sign) -subjects were consistently influenced by the language of the question and also falsely reported their memories days and weeks later

Human NeuroImaging: Morris et al 2014

-subjects performed instrumental responding for two rewards -one reward was devalued with a devaluation video -activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and caudate was greater than baseline an when individuals responded for the still valued reward

Negative semantic priming

-subjects were presented with two overlapping drawings, one in greyscale and one in green; they were told to attend to one and ignore the other. -they were able to read a word related to the attended sketch faster than a word unrelated to that sketch -in these circumstances, "negative priming" is also observed wherein subjects are slower to respond to a probe if it was the ignored item. -this suggests that semantic associates can be suppressed.

Pragmatic style

-succinct -little detail -used more when conversing with sons

Factors influencing attractiveness

-symmetry -familiarity -biological effects

Methods of investigation

-targeted event recall -diaries -cue words

Methods of investigation of AM

-targeted event recall -diaries -cue words

20th century cog neuro

-the 20th century saw different schools emerge within psychology, each of which, to different extents, involved reactions against previous approaches to studying mental processes --Freudian theory --behaviorism --cognitive revolution -both Freudian theory and Behaviorism involved a rejection of the introspective method -whereas Freudian theory went even "deeper" into our minds (i.e. into unconscious processes) -behaviorism rejected the study of mental processes

The Gestalt approach to problem solving

-the Gestalt psychologists approached problem solving with problems and observations of solutions -ex. Wolfgang Kohler and the chimps

Eugenics

-the advancement of society through selective breeding -an application taken to arise from Darwinian theory -was seen as a very rational basis for the development of society -consequently, Galton was strongly opposed to feminism ---"the greatest anti-social act committed by the better type of woman was the avoidance of pregnancy"

Neuroimaging as a new dependent variable: race perception (Lieberman et al., 2005)

-the amygdala is known to respond to threatening, novel or biologically-relevant stimuli. -this study assessed the amygdala response of African-American and Caucasian-American participants to faces of African-Americans and Caucasian-Americans. -the researchers looked at matching faces by race as well as explicitly identifying and labeling the race (the latter was designed to compel attention to the race of the stimulus) -both groups produced greater amygdala activity in response to the African-American faces but in the perceptual encoding condition only. -does this give us a novel insight, "uncontaminated" by social desirability?

Introspection

-the careful, systematic observations of one's own conscious experience (your experience is inaccessible to anyone but you) -if psychology is to be the study of mental processes, and mental processes, by their very nature, are personal and inacessible to anyone else, then it stands to reason that introspection would be the psychological method -however, proper introspection required training, to example to avoid the "stimulus error" and to engage in "inner perception" rather than self-observation. researchers were the first research participants, often alternating between being the observer and the experimenter -ultimately, the introspection technique was determined to be too unreliable

Optogenetics

-the combination of genetics and optics to control cell function -it involves the insertion into cells of genes that confer light responsiveness -this is combined with technologies for delivering light deep into organisms including freely moving mammals -it enables specific engrams (memory traces) to be observed...and experimentally activated

Connectionist models of mind: where is the concept represented when it is distributed like this?

-the concept is distributed throughout the network -it is not in any one node but resides within the overall architecture - that is, in which nodes are active, to what extent they are active and the weights between nodes -this is what is referred to as a distributed representation. -note that the same nodes can contribute to multiple representations! -with a distributed representation the concept can contain multiple features from different modalities and emotional tone. -if a few connections are lost in a connectionist system it continues to work pretty well, though perhaps "fuzzier." -this is called "graceful degradation," and is similar to what occurs with a patient's memory after brain injury -details may be lost, the system may function more "noisily," but it will not fail until a large proportion of the connections are lost.

Stop consonants

-the consonants /b/, /p/, and /t/, for example are produced by stopping the flow of air and are called "stops."

The primacy effect

-the earliest items have been rehearsed the most times and have begun to enter long-term memory -evidence that the primacy effect is due to secondary (long-term) memory: ---recall improves the more you rehearse ---the primacy effect (but not the recency effect) is increased if the memoranda are more familiar or semantically related

Surface structure

-the final sentences are the surface structure.

Fusiform face area

-the fusiform gyrus is part of the medial, or interior, temporal lobe -this area, in both hemis, responds to facial stimuli -greater response in right hemi -response is greater for whole faces than for face parts -seen as early as 9 months

The garden-path model

-the garden path model proposes that readers and listeners process a sentence in a serial order, guessing at each meaning and keeping that meaning as long as possible, proceeding down "the garden-path." -in the first sentence the word "this" disambiguates the meaning while in the second, the reader must backtrack in order to understand the sentence.

Role of hippocampus in retrieval

-the hippocampus, through its widespread cortical connections is thought to retrieve memories by reinstating the pattern of cortical activity that was there during the initial encoding -this is very difficult to visualize

Interference vs decay

-the important role of interference in recall suggests that better performance results from being able to combat interference -that is, what dictates capacity and retention might not be as simple as how many items you can store but might be dictated by how well you can keep those items distinct and prevent them from interfering with one another

Pre-speech "word" perception: study results

-the infants were tested with exposure to both "old" words and "new" words. The old words were three-syllable combinations of consonant vowels that were previously heard during the two minutes of exposure. -new words consisted of three-syllable combinations of consonant-vowels which were not previously paired consistently in the training

Taa (or ǃXóõ)

-the language of the Bush people located in the Kalahari Desert in southwestern Africa and in a region of Tanzania, has over 100 phonemes. -some of these are clicking noises and some are tonal changes.

Connectionist models of mind: connections

-the lines connect each layer. There are weights associated with each connection.

Image-based approach: template model

-the mind has a set of templates for determining the most likely fit for a stimulus -note that this is a difficult task for the mind to accomplish given how many views there can be of an object

Letter recognition with different font

-the network does learn to "recognize" written numbers

fMRI allows us to detect...

-the neurobiology underlying various cognitive processes -how do we make memories?

Generating false memories: Roediger & McDermott (1995) results, conclusions

-the number of falsely recalled words, which were associated with studied words but not presented, was almost equivalent to the number of correctly recalled words -the act of remembering a "false" word increased the probability that the word would be remembered at a later time -demonstrated that the act of remembering can also generate false memories

Connectionist models of mind: outputs

-the output layer might represent the object. -thus a certain set of features (inputs) might map on to a specific object.

Object recognition

-the process by which we match and incoming stimulus with a stored memory representation for the purposes of identification -in this regard, object recognition is an act of memory

Non-automatic (controlled) processes

-the process occurs only with intention, with a deliberate decision -the process is open to awareness and introspection -the process uses conscious resources, that is, it drains the pool of conscious attentional capacity

NETtalk

-the pronunciation of a letter is heavily influenced by the letters surrounding it. -the task was to train a network to produce the proper phoneme (output) for a given string of letters (input). -the inputs were strings of 7 letters with the task being to map the central letter to a specific phoneme (the outputs were fed to a voice synthesizer so we can hear how well the network performs). -we can assess how well the network learns by hearing how well it pronounces the training words and then, critically, by hearing how well it generalizes to new text. ---first recording 38" (new learning) ---second recording 3'20" (after 10,000 learning trials) ---third recording 5' (new words not yet learned)

Biological reductionism

-the purpose of neuroimaging is to reveal the neurobiology of psychological processes. -does understanding its neurobiology give us a full understanding of: ---arm motor movement control ---right-handedness ---long-term memory ---personality ---homosexuality ---intelligence -each of these may exist in the brain but: ---how well do we understand each process? ---in what way will they map onto brain function?

A hierarchy of categories

-the relations 'CAN' and 'HAS' specify actions and parts, whereas 'IS' primarily captures superficial appearance properties. According to this approach, the essence of our knowledge is this rule-based network of information - these rules organize our knowledge-base

Syntax

-the set of rules by which we organize words to make meaningful sentences -the syntax is the system of translation of the deep structure to more complex sentences (i.e., the language's "rules" for how to make a grammatical sentence).

Overcoming functional fixity

-the solution to duncker's candle problem required overcoming the typical function of an object -it required reframing the matchbox as a stand -the solution was often observed to occur with immediate awareness - with "insight"

Basic steps required for a listener to understand speech

-the speech signal must be separated from other noise; -the critical components of the speech signal must be perceived (in English, there may be 20/25 phonemes/second); -the components must relate to the mind's dictionary of words, the lexicon; -the grammatical structure must be extracted in order to understand the relationship of the words to one another; -the determination of meaning must happen, often requiring re-evaluating the grammatical and semantic relationship of the words in a sentence; -this affective content of the message must be integrated with the grammatical and semantic content

The striatum and implicit memory

-the striatum is a part of the brain critical to the control and planning of movements -it is also involved with procedural and habit memories, such as the gradual learning of associations -disorders of the basal ganglia not only cause movement dysfunction but also difficulties in non-declarative memory

Maier's string problem

-the student entered a room containing only two strings hanging from the ceiling and a pair of pliers -their task was to tie the ends of the strings together (without pulling them from the ceiling) but cant reach.....use pliers as a weight to get one string to swing toward you while holding the other! overcome functional fixedness

Temporal discounting

-the subjective value of a positive reinforcer decreases hyperbolically as the delay to delivery increases (farther away, decreased value) -would you rather have $200 now or $200 in 6 months? -would you rather have $200 now or $220 in 6 months? -would you rather have $200 in 6 months or $220 in 6 months + 1 week?

The deep structure

-the underlying kernel sentences (basic, simple sentences with no modifiers or connectives)

Rewiring visual and auditory pathways

-the visual pathways develop late after birth in the ferret -severing the pathways from the retina to the visual cortex shortly after birth results in rewiring of visual information to what is normally the auditory cortex -could this happen in humans?

Problem solving

-the whole is greater than the sum of its parts -we don't perceive objects by their parts -we bind together the parts perceiving the object as a whole (a whole face, a whole dog) -Gestalt psychologists argued that we internalize a problem as an organized whole -if elements of the problem are tied together incorrectly then the solution becomes difficult

Feature detectors

-there are certain neurons in the brain whose purpose is to detect motion -some upper level neurons will only first if a line of neurons have fired - we now have a neuron that detects lines (horizontal neurons, ones that detect vertical lines, then a neuron even further up that detects edges and corners (both lines)

Increasing complexity (light processing)

-there is an organizational principle in the visual system wherein information processing complexity increases as one moves up the system -thus, simple light detectors on the retina converge on neurons that will only respond if there are lines of a specific orientation which converge on neurons that will only respond if there are two lines at a certain angle and so on... -ultimately you can find neurons that show a selective response to faces and, indeed, to specific faces, corners, motion, etc. (as you move up in the system)

Short and long-term memory

-there is something intuitively appealing about postulating differences between short-term and long-term memory -many of us have had the experience of trying to memorize a name or phone number only to lose it once distracted

Gestault psychologists: insight

-they thought that problem solving often occurred with sudden insight -they proposed that the mind suddenly reorganized the problem reaching a new "form" of the problem - a gestalten

Depue and colleagues (Depue et al. 2007, Science) procedure

-they used a think/no-think paradigm for emotional memories and tested to see if memory suppression would push activation below baseline

Targeted event recall

-this is the recall of specific historical events -corroborating information is typically required (public record or family members) -information recalled is distinctive

Automatic processes

-this process occurs without intention, without a conscious decision -the mental process is not open to conscious awareness or introspection -the process consumes few it a ny conscious resources, that is, it consumes little if any conscious attention

Brain imaging for mental chronometry

-this research strategy is very common in functional brain imaging ---ex. isolating brain activity during working memory (N-Back Task) -evidence from human lesion studies and non-human primates suggests fronto-parietal cortex retains info over short periods ---ex. monkey stares at a point, then for half a second the cue presents, then the animal has to stare at the point for 2.5 secs then the fixation thing goes away and you move your eyes to where the cue was - info stored in STM during the delay! ---records from electrodes, bundle of neurons show enhanced activity during delay period then makes response the action potentials go quiet ---how well it can fire during delay indicates how well will do on the task (neuron will fire when remembering a specific direction - direction that cue is in from fixation pt)

Neuroimaging as a new dependent variable: perception without awareness (Childress et al., 2008)

-this study assessed whether stimuli that were not consciously perceived (33 msec duration with backward masking; confirmed through immediate recall and forced-choice recognition) would produce brain activity and whether this activity would be related to subsequent conscious ratings of their appeal. -guiding the research is the question whether or not "subliminal" percepts guide our behaviour (e.g., drug cravings) in ways that are not consciously available to us

Executive functions

-those cognitive processes involved in controlling behavior, maintaining goals, and monitoring behavior -but beware of the homunculus argument

H.M. mirror drawing task

-though H.M. retained no memory of performing the task his performance improved over time suggesting that the temporal lobes were not essential to learning visual-motor tasks

Implicit memory preservation in amnesic patients

-though amnesic patients have poor explicit memory for words and images they still respond effectively to cues in the form of fragments of stimuli, suggesting that their implicit memory is relatively preserved

Atkinson and Shiffrin's modal model

-three different types of memory: sensory memory, short-term memory, long-term memory ---items entering sensory memory decay over time and are displaced by new incoming info ---items entering short-term memory decay, are displaced and interfered with by other items ---items entering long-term memory are interfered with by other items and the process of reorganization of memory -according to this model, short-term memory serves as a temporary buffer for items to be rehearsed -what if someone with severely impaired short-term memory for verbal info performed normally on non-verbal info?

Infer the inaccessible

-through careful experimentation -inferring the cognitive processes that underlie performance on tasks such as the sternberg paradigm task -hypothesized constructs: make sense of the observable behavior by postulating cognitive entities such as working memory, serial scanning, and decision making -cog psych measures behavior but only for the insights it yields in to the hypothesized mental processes -aims to break thinking down into its subprocesses

Behaviorism

-to enable comparative psychology (animal-human comparisons) and to provide a solid scientific basis for psychology, behaviorists proposed that the only reasonable subject matter for psychological investigation was behavior itself -all hypothetical mental processes were deemed inherently vague and not subject to proper rigorous investigation -at an extreme, mental processes were denied to even exist

Method of loci (imagery)

-to explore the method of loci identify a physical location with which you are very familiar -it could be a house or an apartment -imagine a layout of the place you've chosen -now imagine each to-be-remembered item by placing one in each room as you walk through your house or apartment -the method works by creating a more elaborated memory trace (one that has both verbal and visual attributes)

Intransivity

-transitivity refers to a pattern of consistent relationships between elements. For example: A < B; B < C; then A < C. -but meaning and concepts do not hold this property which they should in a hierarchical structure. -for example: ---are clocks a type of furniture? ---is Big Ben a clock? ---is Big Ben a type of furniture?

Double dissociation

-two groups of subjects with primary damage in different neural systems who show the opposite pattern on deficits -shown in Parkinson's vs temporal lobe amnesics and the weather task

Number generating task results

-typically, people generate possible rules (hypotheses) -next, they generate tests of these rules -typically, these tests seek to confirm the rule -this can lead to errors: ---if your rule was "even ascending numbers" but the true rule is just "ascending numbers" then only testing positive examples of your hypothesis will lead you to fail to correct it -rarely do people try to disconfirm their rules -a "positive test strategy" is often effective but it can lead to a confirmation bias that can lead to errors!

Undergraduate drinking and executive functions

-undergrad drinkers (n=84; 45 male; age 21+/-3 yrs) 1. Go/NoGo task measuring response inhibition (presented Y then X hen Y then X, told not to respond it two X's in a row) 2. drug interference task measuring attentional biases (shoe, vodka, etc.) 3. delayed discounting task measuring delaying gratification ($10 now or $20 next week) -AUDIT (Saunders et al., Addiction, 1993): lots of questions about frequency and amount of drinks -the three measures accounted for 48% of the variance in AUDIT scores -delay discounting was the best discriminator between "problem" (AUDIT > 11) and "non-problem" (AUDIT < 11) drinkers -cognitive control/executive functions can explain a considerable proportion of the variance in undergraduate drinking

Generating false memories: Roediger & McDermott (1995) procedure

-undergraduates heard lists of related words such as: bed, awake, rest,... -the words in each study list were highly related to one word not in the list - in this case, sleep -recalling "sleep" would be a false memory -they also asked subjects to determine if they "remembered" or just subjectively "knew" that the words were on the list

Tanaka and colleagues (Neuron 2014)

-used novel methods to visualize hippocampal-cortical connections during learning and retrieval and were then able to silence these connections using optical methods -"these proteins allowed us to identify encoding neurons several days after learning and inactivate them with laser stimulation. when tagged CA1 neurons were silenced, we found that memory retrieval was impaired and representations in the cortex (entorhinal, retrospenial, and perirhinal) and amygdala (central nucleus) could not be reactivated"

Wang (2006) procedure

-used the cue word technique to provide earliest memory associated with the cue words ---self ---mother ---family ---friend ---surroundings

Symmetry

-using computer manipulations of faces, symmetrical faces found to be more attractive (Perrett et al., 1999)

Top-down processing

-using expectations, knowledge, and/or surrounding context to aid in recognition

Brown, Deffenbacher, and Sturgill (1977) procedure

-viewed two groups of 5 individuals labeled "criminals" for 25 seconds each -told they might need to ID them later -shown 15 mug shot pictures containing the "criminals" and unseen individuals "non-criminals" -one week later, shown pictures containing: mugshot of a criminal, mugshot of a non-criminal, mugshot of a new person not previously seen

McGurk Illusion

-visual information affects the sound that you hear ---(more an example of cross-modal interaction than top-down influence)

Flashbulb memories

-vivid, highly detailed memories that endure, apparently unchanged for many years -the memory for the event seems to be "burned" into our memories and integrated with our autobiographical memories -is this due to repeated rehearsal of the memory? -is it a special kind of memory?

Top-down information processing: the stroboscope

-von Ehrenfels (1859-1932) noted that a melody retains its organizational structure whatever key it is played in. he suggested that its "form-quality" was perceived independently of its component parts -Max Wetheimer's research was stimulated by the apparent motion produced by a stroboscope -objects and events occurring close in time are perceived as a whole, as a single perception. this is an example of top-down organization.

The Thatcher Illusion

-we appear to perceive faces in a holistic manner and consequently don't notice if parts are inverted

Connectionist models of mind: hidden units

-we can think of these as intermediary stages in information processing (feature extraction).

The Kanizsa triangle: principle of good continuance

-we group stimuli into meaningful shapes

Gestalt principles of perceptual organization

-we group stimuli into meaningful shapes -similarity -proximity -closure -good continuation

Object-based attention

-we pay attention to items (objects) in the environment and our attention is guided by what something is (rather than being guided to a specific space in the environment -Egly, Driver, and Rafal (1994) assessed both space-based and object-based attention -the task was to press a key as soon as a target was detected in one of four possible locations

The Phi Phenomenon

-we perceive motion even though there is none (slide switches to dots in different position, it looks like the dots are moving)

Rubin's face-vase illustration of figure-ground

-we segregate stimulation into a figure at the fore and a background -determining the figure and the background in an ambiguous figure creates a phenomenon of continual conflict as the mind attempts to organize the image -note that you can perceive either the faces or the vase but not both simultanously -the gestalt approach identified the principles by which we organize or construct what we perceive

Global vs local features

-what is the first letter you see? -overall, global letters were reported more quickly -big letters were not affected by identity of small letters (same as if they were neutral squares), but small letters were affected by identity of a big letter -global precedence effect - global perceived before local

Limits of spotlight metaphor (and space-based attention)

-when the spotlight moves (attentions shifts), the "space" along the way should be temporarily illuminated. data do not support this. -it takes time to shift attention and that time should depend on how far the spotlight must move. data do not support this. -attention can be space-based, but its precise nature remains a matter of empirical data

Proactive interference (Brown-Peterson task)

-while counting backwards by 3's the subjects were presented with a new consonant trigram on trial 1, trial 2, and trial 3 -though the time-span was short, subjects showed rapid forgetting when required to learn new material -when given additional trigrams to remember the initial trigram interferes with learning of the others -performance did not appear to show decay on trial 1 -intelligence based on how well you can keep items distinct and prevent from interfering with each other

Image-based approaches

-whole image is compared to representations in memory until a match is found -objects are recognized by comparing the sensory input with a stored replica (i.e. an "image") -thus, object recognition is a process of template matching ---an exact match must be found

Top-down influences on the speech signal

-why do we need top-down processing of the speech signal? -the speech signal is a complex pattern of sounds and brief periods of relative silence enmeshed within a background of noise. -there is no single place in the speech stream that one can separate segments that would correspond to a part of a syllable, a syllable, or a word. -if you "cut" out apparent units and present them on their own, they often simply sound like noise.

Distinction between declarative and non-declarative memory loss over time

-with the reduction in neural tissue in aging there is a loss of declarative memory but not non-declarative memory

Tanenhaus results

-with ≥500 msec delay only related words that fit appropriately in the sentence were facilitated. -related but contextually inappropriate words were read slower than control words. -this suggests that reading in context involves initially activating all the meanings of words followed by a second stage when contextually appropriate meanings are facilitated and inappropriate meanings are suppressed

Individual differences in face recognition

-women are better than men in recognizing facial emotions, but are they better at face recognition in general? -McBain, Norton, and Chen (2009)

Retention of implicit priming over time

-words were presented on a computer screen for 5 seconds each -subjects were asked to remember as many as possible -after 1 hour and again after 7 days, they were asked either to recognize studied words or to complete a fragmented word (e.g. "A_ _ A _ _ IN") -after 7 days, though explicit recall was diminished, implicit recall was still strong

Beuchel et al., Brain (1998)

-you get a lot of visual activity in the back of the cortex when reading text but if you are doing braille you get the same amount of activity in the visual cortex -people born blind - when they read braille it activates visual cortex (chunk of cortex that is good for doing fine tune processing) -if it doesn't get visual output from birth it will use it and take it to process whatever sensory info that person receives -a lot of plasticity in the system

Connectionist models of mind: inputs

-you specify what the inputs are. For example, you might let each input unit represent a specific feature that is either present or not in the stimulus. -thus one stimulus might be a certain set of features.

Assessing grammar with the "wug test"

-young children (<4) are typically unable to answer correctly ("two wug") -preschoolers, between the age of 4 and 5, often add the correct sound ("two wugs") -ninety-seven percent of children entering the first grade produced the correct answer.

Research demonstrating embodied perception

"...perception doesn't involve "thinking" as much as it involves the body "reacting". and this "reaction" is influenced by a variety of nonvisual factors such as bodily state, emotional state, and a person's goals" -for example, would fatigue influence the perception of the slant of a hill? -Proffitt, Bhalla, Gossweiler, Midgett (1995) asked subjects to estimate the slant of two hills (both 5 percent) --2 conditions: before rigorous run, and after rigorous run --responses were given verbally, visually, and haptically (touching) **Note that this effect demonstrates, once again, that perception is more just a veridical (real) representation of the world

Eyewitness testimony and repressed memories

"Eyewitness misidentification testimony was a factor in 72% of post-conviction DNA exoneration cases in the US, making it the leading cause of these wrongful convictions" - The Innocence Project

Computer gamers and Foldit solve AIDS protein folding problem

"In 2011, Foldit players helped decipher the crystal structure of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (M-PMV) retroviral protease, a monkey virus which causes human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS), a scientific problem that had been unsolved for 15 years. While the puzzle was available for three weeks, players produced an accurate 3D model of the enzyme in only ten days."

The Stop Task

"as fast as you can, respond left or right based on which way the arrow is pointing. sometimes a red X will be presented after the arrow, indicating to withhold your response to the arrow" -the stop signal reaction time (SSRT) is the main outcome variable of the task and can be used as an index of inhibitory ability -short SSRT = strong inhibitory ability -stop signal delay is the time between when the signal is put up and the stop signal is put up -longer stop signal delay trial is hard to inhibit that response bc you are further along in the process of executing that motor action (gives an idea of how long it takes to inhibit an ongoing task-inhibition of already initiated motor responses)

Gorilla video

"count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball" -gorilla walks right through but if you're focusing on the white shirted players enough you won't see the gorilla -task difficulty was manipulated by counting the number of passes or by requiring separate counts for direct vs bounced passes -similarity refers to the gorilla suit being the same color as the teams to which the subject was attending

Dual-task procedure examples

"count silently, in repeated loops, from 1 to 5/ remember these letters: J D C E G/ write down the letters" "remember the following display (then shown different pics) then draw the original display" Both hard to do

Duncker's tumor problem

"given a human being with an inoperable stomach tumor, and rays which destroy organic tissue at sufficient intensity, by what procedure can one free him of the tumor by these rays and at the same time avoid destroying the healthy tissue which surrounds it?

Sensory memory

"nine letters will be presented quickly - write down as many as you can" -George Sperling -we have access to visual information even after it is no longer available -in condition 1, at the top, subjects are able to recall, on average, about 4 items -however, if cued (low, medium, or high tone) immediately after the display is gone to recall either row 1, 2, or 3, subjects are able to recall the cued items -this demonstrates continued access to a "sensory" storage of the information

The Go/NoGo Task

"push a button as fast as you can for every letter presented except the number 3" -on tasks like this errors of commission (responding when you shouldn't) are common and provide a measure of impulse control

Is face perception special?

"remember these faces" then "which of the following was not in the previous list?" "remember these chess configurations" then "which of the following was not in the previous list?" Easier to answer the first one

STROOP task

"what is the font color?" -suppressing automatic attention task -list of words, say font color (ex. "blue" written in green font, say "green") -the central executive is required to maintain the font reading goal, direct our attention to the appropriate information, and suppress the prepotent reading response

Craik and Lockhart depth of processing model

"write down all the words you can remember from the first lists we went through" -the depth of processing of a word is manipulated by asking about its spelling, its sound and its meaning -as questions require increasing depth of processing people take more time to answer the questions -the deeper the processing the more successful was the recognition memory for previously studied words

Are there systematic biases in how people search for empirical data?

**

A schema

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Meaning/perception

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Diamond et al. (Science 2007; 2011): Significance

-"EFs are more strongly associated with school readiness than are intelli- gence quotient (IQ) or entry-level reading or math skills. -"Kindergarten teachers rank skills like self-discipline and attentional control as more critical for school readiness than content knowledge. -"EFs are important for academic achievement throughout the school years. Working memory and inhibition independently predict math and reading scores in preschool through high school." -EF-training curriculum: ---The Tools curriculum ... core is 40 EF-promoting activities, including telling oneself out loud what one should do ("self-regulatory private speech"), dramatic play, and aids to facilitate memory and attention ---Tools teachers spent ~80% of each day promoting EF skills

Neuroimaging as a new dependent variable: Free will (Soon et al., 2008)

-"The impression that we are able to freely choose between different possible courses of action is fundamental to our mental life. However, it has been suggested that this subjective experience of freedom is no more than an illusion and that our actions are initiated by unconscious mental processes long before we become aware of our intention to act." -awareness of the intention to respond typically preceded the response by 1 second. -prefrontal-parietal areas appeared to code which response would be made up to 10 seconds before the response while motor areas closer in time to the response coded the particular timing of the response.

Heuristics

-"mental shortcuts" -cognitive biases that individuals rely on to produce decisions, ex: ---loss aversion ---temporal discounting ---framing ---confirmation bias

What's the big magnet for?

-1 Tesla (T) = 10,000 Gauss -Earth's magnetic field = 0.5 Gauss -3 Tesla = 3 x 10,000 x 0.5 = 60,000 x Earth's magnetic field

Adolescent brain cognitive development (ABCD)

-11,874 children (including 1,720 twins) aged 9-10. -Annual assessments (biennial MRI) for ten years. -Extensive neuroimaging, genotyping, psychometrics, hormone analysis, geocoding ... -Data publicly available

Descartes

-1596-1650 -believed that the mind contains innate ideas (like Plato) -the mind (coming from God and being immaterial) is of a different nature to the body with which it interacts (through the pineal gland) -the body was seen as a machine -mind-body dualism continues to present major conceptual difficulties for psychologists -most reject dualism but concede that we don't know how brains give rise to minds -dualism is well ingrained in popular understanding of the mind

Charles Darwin

-1809-1882 -for centuries the world was viewed as arranged in a hierarchy with God at the apex and people as the most God-like creatures -Darwin's evolutionary theory (variation and natural selection) challenged this conceptualization -demonstrating that humans, and consequently their minds, were part of the natural world suggested that a scientific psychology was a possibility -evolutionary theory is of particular relevance to comparative psychology (use of animal analogues), individual differences, instincts, and sexuality

Francis Galton

-1822-1911 -hereditary genius -eugenics -he was important in the development of statistical applications to psychology (ex. correlation, the normal distribution, etc.)

Hermann Ebbinghaus

-1850-1909 -conducted indepth investigations into his own memory in an effort to discover fundamental laws of human learning -plotted forgetting curves and savings curves for lists of nonsense syllables and was able to describe mathematically features of human memory -important point to note: he was demonstrating that it was possible to conduct quantitative, experimental studies of human cognition

Freud

-1856-1939 -do you understand the motivations for your behavior? -your insights into the reasons for your behavior (introspection) may not be valid as much of the dynamic of mental processes happens without conscious awarenenss -Conversion Hysteria/catharsis -Freud preferred the cathartic method with an awake patient

John B. Watson

-1878-1958 -conditioning is everything! -through conditioning, one can learn emotional habits, manual habits, and verbal habits (thoughts are considered internal speech) -"give me a dozen healthy infants and my own specific world to bring them up in and ill take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select....regardless of his talents...etc."

Is the neural representation of a stimulus affected by verbal descriptions?

-19 subjects were trained to discriminate six odors [Fournel et al., Human Brain Mapping, 2017]. -Some pairings of odors were accompanied by semantic descriptors and some were not. -Training in both conditions increased intensity, familiarity and pleasantness ratings.

Noam Chomsky

-1928 -Skinner had argued that language was learned through a process of reinforced utterances by children -Chomsky pointed out how inadequate this was to describe: --the creative generativity of language. the child can create novel sentences never before heard (therefore they must have access to a deeper, structural organization from which to build sentences) --everyone's understanding of a language's syntax --the seemingly innate character to language; poverty of the stimulus: language is acquired too rapidly in childhood, without enough experience (stimulus) -Chomsky proposed that humans have an "innate language acquisition device" -Chomsky argued that language was controlled by an internally generated system of rules and not by external stimuli - this is a profound alternative to the behaviorist school

Tolman and Honzik

-1930 -rats tested in a complex maze -3 groups --1. reinforced every time they reached the goal box --2. never reinforced --3. not reinforced until day 11 -rats can learn a maze even without reinforcement -the rats that got reinforced after day 11 learned the map even though they weren't reinforced until later (their curve is steeper)

McNamara, Long, and Wike

-1956 -rats tested in T-maze -phase 1: some rats ran the maze, some rats were pushed by experimenters in little carts -phase 2: then all rats ran the maze on their own behaviorism would predict differences in learning as the second group had no motor behavior to be reinforced

In utero brain development

-250,000 neurons per day. -100,000,000 neurons at birth.

Can cognitive training reduce delayed discounting?

-27 adults in treatment for stimulant use were randomly assigned to receive either working memory training or control training according to a yoked experimental design. -Training consisted of verbal working memory tasks (e.g., Digit-span forward; Digit-span backward) -Control Training: program identified the correct answers to the participants, so that they did not need to engage working memory

Patient P.V.

-30 year old woman -suffered a stroke damaging her left parietal and temporal lobes -her verbal short-term memory was limited to a single word or number -but she could remember to tap a sequence of blocks, showing a memory span of about 6-7 items -cases like this suggest that visual-spatial short-term memory can be preserved when verbal short-term memory is lost (and vice-versa)

Aristotle

-384-323 BC -people have the power of "self-nutrition" (like other living things) -people have the power of sensation (like other animals) -people have the power to think and reason which is particular to humans -research that uses animal models to give insights into human cognition rejects this assertion

Plato

-427-347 BC -people have innate knowledge -the soul, being immortal and having lived many times, has already accumulated all knowledge -understanding the relationship between innate and learned knowledge, between nature and nurture, is still current

Hirst et al (2009): results, conclusions

-43% loss in flashbulb memories in the interval between the 1st and 3rd survey -most of the loss occurred between 1st and 2nd survey -memory loss for event memory paralleled the loss found in flashbulb memories -63% loss in memory for their emotional reaction in the interval between the 1st and 3rd survey -confidence in the accuracy of these memories did not change in the interval between the 1st and 3rd survey

Pythagoras

-570-495 BC -studied the relationship between mathematics and music -investigations into geometry led to the belief that number was a property of everything -studying phenomena leads us to discover their inherent mathematical nature -still a current issue: are all phenomena, including minds, ordered mathematically? ---qualitative vs quantitative methodologies ---in trying to measure complex phenomena such as love ---in asking if there is a function that relates brain activity to mental processes

The Wason selection task results

-65% of subjects pick the 3 card: which does not solve the problem correctly - the rule does not speak to what is on the other side of a 3 card -turning over the D will solve part of the problem. if there is any number except a 3 on the other side then the rule is violated -but the 7 card must also be turned over. since all Ds have a 3 on the other side, the 7 card should have some other letter; otherwise some Ds would have 7s on the opposite side

Nativist (top-down) vs empiricist (bottom-up) worldviews

-A number of important issues are raised here: ---Is language uniquely human? ---How do infants learn language?

Variety of snow-names

-As it turns out Whorf provided no evidence for the variety of snow-names: in fact there is no evidence that people living in Vermont or the Himalayas have more or fewer snow-names. -Moreover, anthropologists who have studied the Hopi report that they have a highly accurate concept of time. -Nevertheless, Whorf's theory continues to generate research and both proponents and opponents.

Brain pruning and sculpting

-At age 2-3 the brain has twice as many connections between neurons as it will have in adulthood. -These extra connections are gradually removed during childhood and adolescence. -What might be the consequence of especially high connectivity?

Willingness-to-pay task

-Becker-Degroot-Marschak auction -subjects bid on opportunity to consume (positive bids) or avoid consuming (negative bids) series of snack foods -one trial realized at end experiment -subject bid competes with randomly generated number -optimal strategy is to bid as much but not more than what subject would be willing to pay to eat or avoid eating snacks

Intelligence tests - Binet

-Binet introduced the first test of general intelligence in 1905. -It's purpose was to appropriately target education interventions to children.

Are the feature detectors of the visual system wired from birth?

-Blakemore & Cooper, 1970 raised kittens in a vertical or horizontal world for about 5 hours each day from age 2-weeks to about 5-months -later kittens were disoriented in a normal world -cells in their visual cortex were sensitive to the orientation of their early visual world and they had difficulty perceiving the orientations to which they had less exposure

Broadbent's model: the attention bottleneck

-Broadbent proposed that all sensory information is held in a buffer, we pick what to attend to and the rest is discarded -thus, Broadbent proposed an attentional filter which operated at an early stage of information processing ---attended messages passed through the filter and unattended messages were blocked from further processing ---sensory attributes (e.g. loudness, pitch) were the primary means of separating incoming messages from one another

Localizing intelligence

-Choi et al., J Neuroscience (2008) fractionated g into crystallised intelligence (WAIS) and fluid intelligence (Raven's Progressive Matrices). -they report that gC is related to cortical thickness (especially in the left temporal lobe) and gF to brain structure (lateral and medial prefrontal cortex) and brain function. -brain function and brain structure measures made separable contributions to predicting intelligence, explaining 50% of the variance!

Cognitive training

-Clearly, people can improve their skills through practice. (And, as discussed in previous classes, this practice can change brain function and structure). -The more interesting question is whether this improvement is task-specific - that is, does it generalize to other tasks? -For example, would practicing a prefrontally demanding task (e.g., working memory) have effects on cognitive control (e.g., the ability to delay gratification)?

Neurobiology of creativity

-Cognitive studies show that the extent of spreading activation to distant associates is correlated with creativity. -There are parallels to this in the neuroimaging literature: more creative people have been shown not to turn off brain regions that are typically deactivated as people perform cognitive tasks

Early selection theories

-Corteen and Wood (1972) -Treisman (1960) -Cocktail party phenomenon -only selected information receives meaningful processing and is consciously recognized

ABCD study objectives

-Develop national standards for normal brain development in youth. -Measure individual developmental trajectories (e.g., of brain, cognitive, and emotional development, academic progress), and identify the factors that can influence them (protectively or adversely). -Examine the roles of genetic vs. environmental factors on development, as well as interactions. -Study effects of health, physical activity, sleep, extracurricular activities, sports injuries ... on brain development and other outcomes. -Study onset and progression of mental disorders, factors that influence course or severity; and the relationship between mental disorders and substance use. -Determine how exposure to various levels and patterns of alcohol, nicotine, cannabis, caffeine, and other substances affect developmental outcomes and vice versa.

Dog experts and the Greeble family

-Diamond and Carey, 1986 showed an inverted face effect for dogs (but only in dog experts) -do we learn "expertise" for visual configuration? -Isabel Gauthier and her research colleagues created the Greeble family -with learned expertise at IDing Greebles the FAA in the right hemi showed increased activation to the Greebles

Explicit memory (vs implicit)

-Difference in experience: intentional, effortful, conscious -Difference in method: direct tests (e.g. recall) -Difference in effect: short-lasting, effect strong for different simuli -Labels: explicit, controlled, conceptual, semantic -Neuropsychological differences: amnesic patients show a loss of explicit memory -Brain systems involved: temporal lobes (cingulate memory system), frontal lobe activity associated with effort and intention

Implicit memory (vs explicit)

-Difference in experience: without intention, effortless, without awareness -Difference in method: indirect tests (e.g. fragment completion, stem completion) -Difference in effect: long-lasting, effect reduced by physical changes to the priming stimuli -Labels: implicit, automatic, perceptual, presemantic -Neuropsychological differences: amnesic patients show preserved implicit memory -Brain systems involved: striatum, limbic diencephalic

Brain system developmental rates

-Different brain regions develop at different ages and at different rates. -The discrepancy between prefrontal control regions and subcortical reward regions may underlie many adolescent characteristics

Non universal grammar - Evans and Levison (2009) review

-Diversity of the world's languages makes it improbable that a set of features describes all of them. -Estimated that current languages only constitute 2% of all languages ever spoken. -Current linguists and psycholinguists only study 10% of that 2%! -Making universal language claims based on studies of this limited range of languages seems invalid.

Broadbent's dichotic listening procedure

-Donald Broadbent systemically studied the conditions under which we selected one message (a channel) from among many other messages -in the dichotic listening task different messages arrive simultaneously at each ear and the listener is generally asked to recall what they heard after a series of messages are received -most people show a right ear advantage, recalling more items from the right ear (presumably because the left temporal lobe contains regions that are critical to receptive speech)

Mind as a biological information processor

-Donald Broadbent's Model -boxology -the information processing approach to understanding cognition likens the mind to a computer -the mind has a finite number of components, or processing systems (such as attention, perception, short-term memory) which can be understood by analyzing how information is processed, transferred, and stored (represented) in these components of mind

The serial position curve

-Ebbinghaus -the position of an item in a list of items (the "serial position") predicts the likelihood of recall -early items are later items are better recalled and this is independent of the list length

Size constancy

-Ebbinghaus illusion -figures have same retinal image size but are perceived differently

Mental Chronometry

-F.C. Donders (1818-1889) -partition mental events using reaction time -with well designed experiments, psychologists could isolate and measure hidden cognitive processes ---push a button whenever a shape shows up (no discrimination) then same but push different button for each shape -the response time difference between the two conditions quantifies how long the stimulus discrimination takes -assumption of pure insertion (the assumption that stimulus discrimination has no effect on stimulus detection or response organization) -working memory can be isolated by subtracting the different conditions from one another for N-Back task

People of 19th century psych

-Fechner (psychophysics) -Francis Galton (hereditary intelligence) -Hermann Ebbinghaus (memory abilities)

Dimensions of creativity

-Fluidity (the number of ideas) How many red round objects can you think of? -Flexibility (number of content categories/shifts) What would happen if people no longer slept? -Originality (how many people have the same idea) -Elaboration (the number of ideas per category)

Biological basis to intelligence

-Focusing on a biological basis to intelligence might be stigmatizing (IQ is used to predict educational and employment outcomes).

Probabilistic thinking is difficult

-Forensic psychologists and psychiatrists were asked to judge the likelihood that a mental patient would commit a violent act within six months of being discharged -an expert assessed that 20% of the patients like the patient in question are estimated to commit an act of violence -"20 out of 100" -41% refused to release the patient -"20%" - 21% refused to release the patient fractions judged as more probable than percentages**

The structure of the mind: by Freud

-Freud conceptualized psychodynamics as the interplay between the three parts of the mind: ---Id: operated according to the pleasure principle ---Ego: operated according to the reality principle ---Superego: one's conscience

Howard Gardner

-Gardner focused on different aspects of intelligence and was specifically interested in individual differences and in usual and unusual development of abilities. -By studying individual differences, including extreme differences such as people with exceptional abilities, people with brain damage, child prodigees, or idiot savants he concluded that there are distinct abilities and each can be considerded a separate intelligence in its own right

What makes an "insight problem" so difficult?

-Gestalt psychologists argued that the solution (candle problem) required the reformulation, the reorganization, of internal gestalten, an internal model or representation of the components of the problem space -solution requires reorganization of the components of the problem space often changing the "function" of a component of the problem solution

Short-term memory duration

-Glanzer and Cunitz (1996) -delayed recall cue by: 0 seconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds -results: ---recency effect was: diminished at 10 sec delay, eliminated at 30 sec delay ---primacy effect was unaffected

How to measure creativity

-Guilford (1967) suggested that creativity could be measured by "divergent production," that is, the number of different responses made to an item. -For example: ---Uses of a brick. ---Words that being with L and end with N. ---In one minute write down what would be the consequences if people reached their final height at age 2 (i.e., three feet). ---Combine the following shapes to make: a face; a lamp; a piece of playground equipment; a tree

Intelligence tests - IQ

-IQ (Intelligence Quotient) came after Binet when mental age was divided by chronological age and multiplied by 100.

Brain function and structure changes with practice

-Ilg and colleagues demonstrate that training on a novel mirror-reading task (15 mins daily for two weeks) produces grey matter volume increases in the same visual region that shows substantial brain functional activation when performing a task.

Measuring the functioning of brains in utero

-In utero, correlated activity between brain regions can be measured. -In children born prematurely, altered connectivity can be identified before birth. -This suggests that neurodevelopmental disorders associated with preterm birth may result from neurological insults that begin in utero.

Generalizability: can cognitive training affect fluid intelligence?

-It has been argued that fluid intelligence may be heavily genetically determined and therefore would not be amenable to practice-related change. -One way to test for what might be a subtle effect is to look at changes in cognitive performance following weeks of training in a very large sample. -Owen et al., Nature (2010) conducted a six-week cognitive training study of 11,430 participants

Biological determinism

-It has been argued that when IQ is used to assign people to one track or another then there is an implicit assumption that intelligence is innate and fixed for life. -Today, we will address the biological correlates of intelligence and show that these change across development. -We will also discuss group intelligence

Cocktail party phenomenon

-Joe Smith: --attended ear: "...Mary is watching the people on the street" --unattended ear: "...[Joe Smith] should go to..." *spoken aloud*: "...Mary is watching the....uh....people on the street" Despite it coming to the unattended ear, the subject becomes aware that his name was spoken!

Duncker's classic candle problem

-Karl Duncker asked subjects to think aloud as they solved problems -he asked subjects to somehow attach a candle to the wall so that, when lit, the wax would not drip on the floor -nothing other than these items could be used

Linguistic determinism

-Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about. -Our language shapes the perceptual distinctions we make, the categories we construct, and how we think. Therefore, people who speak different languages think differently (linguistic relativism).

Did Neanderthals have language?

-Lieberman and Crelin (1971) examined human newborn and adult skulls and two casts of skulls of Neanderthals. -the mouth, palate, larynx, and so on, of the Neanderthal were more similar to the newborn human infant than the infant's skull is to the adult human. -they determined that a Neanderthal could not produce the range of sounds necessary for human speech; they could not produce vowels like /a/, /i/, /u/ or consonants like /g/ or /k/. -however, Pinker (1994) pointed out that the restrictions in speech apparatus might not have prevented vocal communication in Neanderthals: ---"e lengeege weth e smell nember ef vewels cen remeen quete expresseve, so we cannot conclude that a hominid with a restricted vowel space had little language."

What are the different types of intelligence that Gardner identified?

-Linguistic intelligence; -Logical-mathematical intelligence; -Personal intelligences: ---Interpersonal intelligence ---Intrapersonal intelligence -Musical intelligence; -Spatial intelligence; -Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence; -More recently: ---naturalist intelligence; ---existential intelligence

The British Empiracists

-Locke, Berkeley, Hume -17th and 18th centuries -in contrast to Plato and Descartes, these guys believed that the contents of the mind were not innate but instead were the products of experience ("tabula rasa") -transition from deity to humanity, from the requirement to invoke deities as explanations to invoking natural mechanisms -this conceptualization anticipated Behaviorism, one of the largest schools of psychological thought

Brain anatomical connectivity

-MRI can be used to detect the diffusion of water. -water will diffuse isotropically if it encounters no impediments but will diffuse anisotropically along the direction of white matter bundles. -this property enables one to determine the presence and direction of such bundles. -connecting the "tensors" (the direction of maximal diffusion) of each voxel enables one to plot white matter tracts. This process is referred to as Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI).

Minsky's Frame Theory

-Marvin Minsky (1975) proposed that we have a "remembered framework:" ---a stereotyped version (like a prototype) of commonly encountered situations, such as going to a children's birthday party (or going to a restaurant, a bookstore, and so on). -when we encounter a "birthday party" we expect it to be like the stereotyped frame; -it can be thought of as a network of nodes and relations. ---the "top levels" are relatively fixed because they represent things that are generally true about the situation; ---the lower levels have many connections to "slots" that are filled with specific instances (details of your first remembered birthday); ---sets of frames can be connected together to form higher level frames systems (a frame for all parties).

Coke vs pepsi experiment

-McClure et al 2004 -true preferences assessed by blind taste tests i.e. repeated choice between two unmarked cups containing pepsi or coke -verbally stated preferences (e.g. "I generally prefer Coke") were not correlate with true preferences -level of neural activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) correlated with the true preference when individuals were allowed to consume the beverages in the scanner -vmPFC activity may reveal more about real preference that individuals are willing (or perhaps able) to express

Intelligence + creativity

-Measurement is difficult! ---Part of what makes studying mental processes so difficult is that the things in which we are often most interested are often very hard to define and therefore measure (e.g., love, happiness, courage, brilliance). ---The challenge: If something exists then it has to exist in a certain quantity so measurement must be possible. -Intelligence is probably the most investigated/measured construct in the history of Psychology! ---And yet there is still great dispute over how to define and measure it. (At one stage, intelligence was defined as the thing that is measured by intelligence tests!).

Short-term memory capacity

-Miller (1956) "the magical number seven plus or minus two" -although the paper is taken as evidence of the limits of short-term memory, a central goal was to demonstrate how we can work around our capacity limits -chunking (grouping items together - recoding into larger chunks) results in us being able to recall 7+/-2 chunks -the 7+/- 2 capacity of STM is a combination of items being retrieved from LTM (primacy effect) and directly from STM (recency effect)

NETtalk results

-NETtalk exhibited strong global regularities (i.e., it detected the consistent patterns whereby sounds were influenced by surrounding letters), but also a large number of more specialized rules and exceptional cases. -note that it did this without those rules ever being explicitly coded?

Contrasting temporal lobe amnesia with striatal implicit learning deficits

-Parkinson's disease is a chronic, degenerative disease that results in the loss of neurons that use the NT dopamine, mostly in the striatum -patients show motor tremors, difficulty in initiating movements and in balance, and attention problems, executive function problems and chronic tip-of-the-tongue experiences

The Weather Task in patients with Parkinson's vs patients with temporal lobe amnesia

-Parkinson's patients, temporal lobe amnesics, and healthy controls performed The Weather Task -amnesic patients predicted the weather as well as non-brain damaged controls but had severely impaired declarative memory for the training episode (they were asked MC questions about the cues, the layout of the computer screen, etc.) -patients with Parkinson's failed to improve their performance on this non-declarative, implicit task despite having intact explicit memory for the training episode

Language networks at birth

-Perani et al., (2011) -tested processing of language in 2 day olds ---infants heard a fairy tale (Goldilocks) while being imaged. -results showed that "the language-related neural substrate is fully active in both hemispheres" -kids showed differences in functional and structural connectivity compared to adults indicating an immature system not yet fully "wired."

Corteen and Wood (1972)

-Phase 1: listened to a series of words that contained 3 city names that were associated with a slight shock -shock produces a slight galvanic skin response (GSR)-slight sweating on the fingertips Phase 2: attended ear "...at the beginning of the week..." vs unattended ear: list containing 12 critical words: -6 words from phase 1: --3 city names associated with shock (lafayette, minneapolis, cincinnati) --3 nouns not associated with shock -6 words not presented in phase 1 --3 new city names --3 new nouns GSR to shock-associated names GSR to 3 new city names results suggest that there is a level of semantic processing in the unattended ear

Alternative approaches to intelligence

-Robert Sternberg (1985) "Beyond IQ" moves away from the traditional measures of intelligence (e.g., vocabulary, problem-solving, memory) and, instead, defines intelligence as goal-directed adaptive behavior and proposed a triarchic theory of intelligence. ---Analytical intelligence ---Creative/Synthetic intelligence ---Practical intelligence -Being able to automatize and free up cognitive resources is considered a key component of intelligent behavior

Pre-speech "word" perception: study methods/questions

-Saffran, Aslin & Newport (1996) presented infants (8 months old) with two minutes of exposure to novel speech sounds. -contained within the string of speech sounds were syllable pairs that differed in the probability that one pair would follow another: "bi" was always followed by "da" "ku" was followed by "pa" only 1/3 of the time

Nim Chimpsky and the limits of chimpanzee language

-Terrace, Petitto, Sanders, & Bever (1979) raised a chimpanzee, Nim, by human surrogate parents who communicated among themselves and with Nim using a sign language. -Nim clearly learned two-word sequences that were effective for communication. (e.g. "play me," "more eat," "me play," "grape eat") -three-sign combinations most often involved two-signs plus reference to himself, such as "tickle me Nim," "give me eat," and "hug me Nim." -the four-sign combinations, however, were often repetitious. For example, "drink Nim drink Nim," "play me Nim play," "tickle me Nim play."

Duncan et al., Science 2000

-The "manifold" effect. -Spearman's g vs. Thomson's multiple factors. -Neuroanatomical hypotheses derived from these cognitive theories. "According to this hypothesis, tasks with high g correlations should be characterized by specific recruitment of prefrontal cortex. The alternative—directly implied by the Thomson hypothesis—is that increasing g correlations should be associated with an increasingly diverse pattern of neural activation, reflecting increasingly broad sampling of all major cognitive functions." "In contrast to the common view that g reflects a broad sample of major cognitive functions, high-g tasks do not show diffuse recruitment of multiple brain regions. Instead they are associated with selective recruitment of lateral frontal cortex in one or both hemispheres. Despite very different task content in the three high-g - low-g contrasts, lateral frontal recruitment is markedly similar in each case. . . The results suggest that "general intelligence" derives from a specific frontal system important in the control of diverse forms of behavior."

Diamond et al. (Science 2007; 2011): Results

-Those with the initially poorest EFs gaining the most; -EFs must be continually challenged to see improvements.

Human Neuroimaging after vending machine experiment

-Tricomi et al 2009 -the longer subjects trained, the more neural activity was observed to increase in the posterior putamen relative to baseline

Three arguments for innateness in language acquisition:

-Universality of grammar: the underlying "deep" grammar is the same across languages; For example: nouns vs verbs. -Creativity of language: we can create an infinite variation of sentences; -Poverty of the stimulus: Children learn language too quickly for it to have been learned.

Cultural differences in childhood amnesia

-Wang (2006) -compared recall of early childhood memories in: --Tiawanese adults ---emphasis on interconnectedness and group identity --US adults ---emphasis on independence and autonomy

In the Brains of the Violent, Gray Matter May Matter, intro and methods

-Washington Post, 2000 -people with a smaller than average amount of gray matter in a key section of their brains may be predisposed to violent antisocial behavior, according to a provocative and controversial new study -scientists used brain scans to compare the volume of the prefrontal area in a group of normal subjects and in a group whose members had committed crimes such as assault, rape, armed robbery, attempted murder

Does brain training work?

-We object to the claim that brain games offer consumers a scientifically grounded avenue to reduce or reverse cognitive decline when there is no compelling scientific evidence to date that they do -The promise of a magic bullet detracts from the best evidence to date, which is that cognitive health in old age reflects the long-term effects of healthy, engaged lifestyles -In the judgment of the signatories, exaggerated and misleading claims exploit the anxiety of older adults about impending cognitive decline We encourage continued careful research and validation in this field

Intelligence tests - Wechsler

-Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) and the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) are very commonly used. -They assess a range of verbal and non-verbal abilities consistent with Wechsler's 1958 definition of intelligence as: ---"the aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally and to deal effectively with his environment."

Whalen et al., 2008 - Pre-treatment Prediction

-Whalen et al., (2008) -tested whether pretreatment activation in important emotional processing areas (amygdala and rostral ACC) in response to facial expressions could predict treatment outcomes in patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). -the treatment was eight weeks of venlafaxine (an SNRI) and the pretreatment assessment was based on responses to neutral, happy and fearful facial expressions. -the magnitude of treatment response was related to greater pretreatment reactivity to fearful faces in rACC and lesser reactivity in the amygdala.

Research showing that human attention is limited

-Wolf, Horowitz, and Kenner (2005) devised a baggage screening task in which subjects searched for a target item in a series of simulated bag trials as seen by baggage screeners -performance is often poor if the target to be detected is rare -high prevalence condition: 200 trials and target appeared 50% of the time (100 trials) -medium prevalence condition: 200 trails and target appeared 10% of the time (20 trials) -low prevalence condition: 2000 trials and target appeared 1% of the time (20 trials) RESULTS -% of target-present trials on which the target was missed increased from high to low prevalence conditions -proportion of targets missed in low prevalence conditions -one third!

Group intelligence

-Woolley et al., Science (2010) studied the determinants of group intelligence. -First, they established that collective intelligence exists -Many of the factors one might have expected to predict group performance such as group cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction did not. -There was a relationship between higher collective intelligence and the average social sensitivity of group members ("Reading the Mind in the Eyes" test) -Groups where a few people dominated the conversation were less collectively intelligent than those with a more equal distribution of conversational turn-taking. -collective intelligence was positively correlated with the proportion of females in the group (this effect mediated by social sensitivity scores)

K.C. - episodic

-a case of lost episodic memory -he no longer has a memory of himself over time -he knows things about himself, much as another individual with a detailed knowledge of him might know these things -but the facts of his prior experiences are recalled without any subjective sense of participation -he has lost all "episodes" of his life -he has lost all memory of himself - his autobiographical memory

Luchins' mental set

-a constraint on problem solution is the mental "attitude" or mental set -for example, in this problem, you have three differently sized pitchers and must end up with a specified number of quarts -training strategy is: B-A-2C -but more efficient strategy trials 7&8 -problems 7 and 8 have more efficient solutions -however the subjects had acquired a "mental set" and tended to solve these problems in a similar manner to the ones that preceded them -87% of the subjects did so (100% controls with no experience solved them the efficient way)

Reminiscence bump

-a disproportionate greater number of memories for events that occur between the ages of 10 and 30 -this is a time period of firsts which may explain the bump -however, there is also a bump for ---autobiographical facts like personal preferences ---events people think are historically important ---general semantic memories

The Vermont hiker problem

-a hiker decides to climb Camel's Hump on a saturday and camp overnight -on saturday, she leaves at 10 am from the trailhead and arrives at the top at 4 pm -on sunday, she leaves the top at 10 am and returns to the trailhead at 4pm -what is the likelihood that the hiker will have been at the exact same point at the exact same time of day on the ascent and descent?

Pirahã

-a language spoken by an indigenous people near the Amazon River in Brazil, has only 10 phonemes. -there are fewer than 500 of these people surviving. -they can whistle their language.

Diaries

-a running record of events that occur in daily life --later used to query memory -firmer conclusions about memory accuracy can be made

A script

-a script describes appropriate sequences of events in a particular context. -we accumulate hundreds of scripts: checking the mail, making coffee, driving to work, and so on -ex. a restaurant script

Prosopagnosia

-a selective inability to recognize familiar faces

Development of cognitive self

-a sense of self refers to knowledge that: ---one is a person with unique and recognizable characteristics ---one thinks and knows things about the world, and can serve as a causal agent ---theory of mine: a child's understanding that they have a unique set of beliefs, desires, and knowledge that is inaccessible to others -children don't demonstrate autobiographical memory until they have a sense of themselves as independent entities

Parts of the connectionist models of mind

-a simplified connectionist model consists of three parts, the input units, the hidden units and the output units.

Can we identify early markers for drug use?

-adolescent smokers showed reduced ventral striatum reward-related activity. -in smokers, this reduction was correlated with smoking frequency. -the effect was also observed in very mild smokers (n=14) who had smoked on fewer than 10 occasions.

Post-attentive processing

-after the focus of attention has been brought to a stimulus -slow and effortful -retention time inc as number of items inc

The Wason selection task

-all cards have letters on one side and numbers on the other -here is a rule: every card that has a D on one side has a 3 on the other -your task is to select all those cards, but only those cards, which you would have to turn over in order to discover whether or not the rule has been violated

Late selection theories

-all incoming information receives meaningful processing -only selected information is consciously recognized

Background to brain imaging

-almost all of psychological research is based on just two types of measurement: response types (correct vs incorrect; error type; survey responses etc.) and response speed (reaction time). -experimental cognitive psychology research has historically not had as much interaction with brain-based approaches as you might think. -the exceptions to this include: ---other brain recording technologies (e.g., EEG) ---comparative psychology (animal models) ---human lesion studies.

Working memory tasks

-alpha span: "remember the following words and repeat them back in alphabetical order" --your alpha span is much smaller than your STM -internal attention switching: "you will see a series of circles and squares. keep a running count of each and report the two final counts at the end of the trial" ---switching attention between counts (items stored in working memory) is effortful ---a switching cost is observed in all subjects and persists following thousands of practice trials -operation span test: "indicate if the equations are correct and remember the word" --difficult to do the mental-gymnastics of storing word info while doing the calculation

Word, sentences, and the extraction of meaning

-ambiguity takes more effort -subjects listened to pairs of sentences while remaining vigilant for a particular phoneme sound -in this example the sound was the "k." -detecting the target phoneme (sound of the beginning of "corner," in Sentence A, with the ambiguous "bugs," which could refer to a type of insect or a listening device, took longer than the unambiguous sentence B).

What might a template image look like?

-an enormous artificial neural network (1 billion connections) trained by Google to view YouTube stills (10 million 200 x 200 pixel images) developed elements that seemed to code for cat images and for faces (without the images being labelled as such)

Object agnosia

-an inability to recognize objects -intact knowledge of the object's characteristics are preserved -patient cannot point to named objects -patient is unable to match, copy, or discriminate simple visual forms (geometric shapes) but may draw well from memory -visual acuity is normal ---intact detection of spatial frequency of line gratings ---intact perception of stimuli in both visual fields

Stimulus-response (SR) habits

-animals learn through trial-and-error -reinforcement increases the likelihood that a behavior will be repeated

Social contract theory

-another approach to studying human cognition is to ask how/why did it evolve -derives from an evolutionary theory that supposes that the major portion of human existence was spent hunting and gathering in social groups -hunter-gatherers needed to form cooperative contracts that would, because of the mutual benefits of these arrangements, increase prospects for survival -a social contract is an implicit or explicit understanding between two or more humans that involves the relationship between "perceived benefits" and "perceived costs" -in order for humans to effectively cooperate they must be vigilant for cheating -thus, they argue, humans would have evolved a set of cognitive mechanisms specifically designed to detect cheating; our species has evolved to be distrustful and that distrust is essential to social contracting that has mutual benefits

Children as witnesses: results in "clumsy" suggestion group

-another group of kids were told that Sam Stone was clumsy before he visited the classroom and provided the other suggesting interview questions (ripped book, spill on teddy bear) ---72% of the younger children reported the fictitious incedents and 44% reported that they saw him do these things ---when challenged by the experimenter many of the children admitted they really didnt know but 10-20% continued to believe the incidents occurred

Context influencing word meaning - Tanenhaus

-another research approach to understanding how people process ambiguous sentences is to assess what meanings are activated as they read -Tanenhaus contrasted the speed with which subjects could read related words that were consistent or inconsistent with the context of a text. -after reading the sentence subjects were asked to read, as quickly as possible, a target word that was flashed on a screen -immediately after reading the sentence subjects read related words faster than unrelated words if they were related to the ambiguous word, whether they were or were not appropriate in the context of the sentence

Neurotic anxiety

-anxiety with no particular target -Freud said it resulted from unrealistic fear of releasing repressed id desires

The irrelevant speech effect

-any spoken stimulus presented during the processing of relevant information has the potential to disrupt memory for that information -ex. when someone talks to you while you are trying to rehearse some verbal info/ when trying to study and there is talking (TV, radio) in the background

Cognitive neuroscience

-area within psychology that has seen the greatest advances over the last 20 years -seeks to explain mental processes in terms of brain function -ex. if a cognitive process truly exists then it should be measurable in the brain (localized to specific brain regions) -individual differences in cog abilities should be related to differences in brain function -clinical symptoms should be related to brain dysfunction -relevant brain info may be used to make judgements on cog theories -asks questions we've had for a long time -today's research approaches will eventually become outdated, too

Max Wertheimer

-argued that reassembling the problem, reorganizing the elements to relate differently to one another results in a solution experienced as insight, as the "AHA" experience -this is similar to what people might call "lateral thinking" today

Tolman

-argued that the rats learn about the experimental setting even when not reinforced (latent learning) and represent information in a cognitive map (i.e. internal representation of the external environment) -novel actions can be formed on the basis of the cognitive map -A = shortest path -B = medium length path -C = longest path -if behaviorists right, rats should choose path B and C equally when path A is blocked -most rats choose path B as alternate route -evidence of cognitive map

The more moderate or "weak" version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

-argues that thought is influenced by language. ---The relationship between thought and language is in both directions - language influences thought and thought influences language. ---An individual from one culture is biased towards construing the world in a particular manner but is capable of understanding alternative world views

Working memory capacity

-as opposed to short-term memory capacity, is often measured with a working memory span which captures the dynamic between storing information, processing information and minimizing interference between information

Sternberg Paradigm

-asked to remember a set of letters presented then decide if subsequent letters are members of that set -response time increases as set size (number of items asked to remember) increases -each additional item added 40ms to the response time (faster than subvocal rehearsal) -time is same for remembering whether item was present or absent in original list -sternberg conclusion: indicates that you do exhaustive serial searches (go through all the letters, one letter at a time)

Bahrick and Hall (1991)

-assessed retention of material learned in high school algebra -analyses accounted for: ---grades, subsequent rehearsal, scores on SAT -results: grades and SAT's were related to overall performance, but unrelated to maintenance over time ---only predictor of maintenance over time was the interval of time over which the information was learned: the longer the interval, the longer the retention!

Cognitive control

-assessing cognitive control with a GO/NOGO task

Social contract theory: underage drinking

-assume the legal age for purchasing and consuming alcohol is 21 -the rule becomes: if you are drinking beer then you are 21 or older -detecting cheating (underage drinking) requires choosing both the D and 7 cards (the logical choices) -framed this way, it is obvious that you dont care if they are not drinking (K) or if they are of legal age (3) -reformulating the problem in terms of a social contract produces "logical" selections

Social effect of facial attractiveness

-attractive faces associated with social competence ---better social skills (Kuhlenschmidt and Conger, 1988) ---more competent at their job (Shapiro et al., 1976) ---possess leadership qualities (Cherulnik, 1989) -attractive faces are treated differently ---they receive higher salaries (Hamermesh and Biddle, 1994) ---elicit more cooperation (West and Brown, 1975) ---rewarded more often (Raza and Carpenter, 1987)

Development of language

-autobiographical memory development parallels language development -narrative style (how families reminisce about past events) ---may be the source of female superiority in autobiographical memory

Automatic processing

-automaticity ---performing an action using little to no attention ---develops after years of experience performing the action

Multiple views model (Tarr and Buithoff, 1995)

-based on experience, we have multiple stored views of objects rather than just a single template representation -thus, an object is represented as an optimized collection of templates or views -not all views of objects are stored -recognition proceeds by matching the input to the nearest stored view -mental rotation might be used to realign object image with stored view in memory

Caveats about animal language

-be careful not to anthropromorphisize (talk about an animal as if it were a human) -note that stimulus-response associations are not language

Pre-attentive processing

-before the focus of attention is brought to a stimulus -occurs quickly (without thinking) -retention times doesn't inc as number of items inc (1,2,3,4 are the same)

Syntax in animals - Japanese tit

-bird -novel "sentences" in which the order of sounds is critical has been shown in the Japanese tit

Resilience - grey matter volume increases

-brain characteristics of children who have experienced adversity but have very good outcomes.

How could you separate verbal and visuospatial short-term memories?

-brain damaged patients provide a valuable existence proof but it is highly desirable to be able to test these observation is normal, health participants -this can be done using a dual-task procedure -the logic is to simulate damage to a cognitive process by occupying it with a second task performed simultaneously

Explanations for childhood amnesia

-brain development -development of language -development of cognitive self

Neuroeconomics

-brain mapping of economic factors such as choice strategy, preference structure, and risk using theoretical accounts of behavior developed in economics and psychology -an important goal is to reveal attitudes/values/emotions that individuals cannot (or prefer not to) express verbally

Cognitive psychology

-branch of psychology that focuses on "thinking" processes -perception, attention, memory, language, problem solving, intelligence -abilities may not be unique to humans but many of these "higher-order" skills are especially characteristic of being human

Children as witnesses: results in suggestion group

-but, 42% of the children in the suggestion group reported that Sam Stone did these things and 19% claimed they saw him do it -older children, at ages 5 and 6 were less suggestive

Duration of sensory memory

-by delaying the time after the end of the stimulus display and the tone cueing which row should be recalled, Sperling was able to estimate the time duration of the sensory store -this was the time before the information was no longer available -providing a second overlapping visual stimulus after the display ended, but within the duration of sensory memory, "erased" the item in the same position in the display -this demonstrates that info in the store can be displaced easily -"backward masking" is commonly used in cognitive experiments -enables cocktail party effect

Indirect priming

-can also be observed -A to B to C

Historical Antecedents

-can we trust our senses? -does what we know come from what we learn through our senses (empiricism)? -or do we have innate knowledge (rationalism)? -modern day conceptualization: study of genetic influences on cognition or the existence of universal grammar

Children as witnesses: procedure

-children are often good witnesses: but they are prey to the same distorting influences as adults -in one study by Steven Ceci a character named "Sam Stone" visited a nursery school for a total of two minutes -afterwards the children were interviewed over a two month period, during which one group was asked neutral questions (what do you remember?) and another group were asked suggestive questions about false events (did sam stone rip a book? did he spill anything on a teddy bear?)

Children as witnesses: results in neutral group

-children in the neutral group were very accurate in their recall -only 10% of the 3 and 4 year olds agreed that the fictitious events occurred and only 5% reported that they saw the events

Drug-task interactions

-cocaine users performed an impulse control task after saline and after cocaine. -with healthy controls, one can determine the pharmacology of a specific neurocognitive process (e.g. working memory) by assessing the change in activation resulting from specific neurotransmitter agonists and antagonists.

Peak functioning account

-cognitive abilities and brain function are at their peak in early adulthood

Explanations for reminiscence bump

-cognitive explanation account -identity explanation account -peak functioning account

Reversal

-combat problem with: ---precommitment ---interim reward (contingency management) ---bridging stimuli

Wu et al., Human Brain Mapping (2015)

-combine results over many neuroimaging studies: "The ALE results indicated that the brain networks of the creative idea generation in DTTs may be composed of the lateral prefrontal cortex, posterior parietal cortex [such as the inferior parietal lobule (BA 40) and precuneus (BA 7)], anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) (BA 32), and several regions in the temporal cortex [such as the left middle temporal gyrus (BA 39), and left fusiform gyrus (BA 37)]."

Implicit priming example

-complete the following word fragment with the name of an old-fashioned job: T H A T _ _ _ _

Ways to test implicit memory

-complete the incomplete words -ex: Apple - Oran _ _ Fix - Bre _ _ Cow - Hor _ _ Car - Pla _ _ Tree - Le _ _ Butter - Bre _ _ -examples of verbal and visual stimuli and their fragmented versions

Grammar can be independent of meaning

-compliance with the kernel allows us to determine that a sentence is grammatical even if we do not understand its meaning. -Chomsky's example: ---"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." -Louis Carroll's, from the Jabberwocky: ---"Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe."

Feature comparison models

-concepts are stored by defining and characteristic semantic features; a robin lays eggs (defining) and some birds eat fish (characteristic)

Freud: personality development

-conceptualized as a series of psychosexual stages where the locus of pleasure changes from oral to anal to phallic to genital

State dependent learning: Gordon Bower

-conducted a classic demonstration of state-dependent learning -suggestible subjects learned lists of words after being asked to remember an event in their life that was either sad or happy -later they were asked to recall the words while again being primed for either sadness or happiness -matching the emotional state resulted in a dramatic increase in recall ---note the clinical implications: depressed patients are more likely to recall depressing episodes from their lives creating a vicious circle

State dependent learning: Godden & Baddeley

-conducted a similar study to Gordon Bower in which subjects learned words while underwater (diving club) or on dry lang -again, the environmental match predicted greater recall

Can we identify early markers for schizophrenia?

-conjunction analysis of Inhibition-related activation and grey matter volumes in 12-year-olds at risk of schizophrenia and chronic schizophrenics

The kernel ideas

-consider these two sentences: ---active sentence: the small boy chased the large dog ---passive sentence: the large dog was chased by the small boy -both sentences convey the same action. -the kernel ideas allow the information to be communicated in a variety of different types of sentences. ---the boy is small ---the boy chased the dog ---the dog is large

Using good and poor prototypes to prime semantic categories

-consistent with this model, good prototypes prime more than poor prototypes -ex. a picture of an APPLE (prime) facilitates deciding that the letter sequence "FRUIT" is a word, more than does the picture of an OLIVE

The central executive

-controls behavior -allocates attention -inhibits inappropriate behavior -more... it is an important concept with clinical relevance but is: -vague and underspecified -represents a homunculus

Analysis revealed Kanzi....

-could generate novel combinations of symbols -could distinguish between different types of symbols (nouns and verbs) -could place symbols in appropriate slots in an utterance -made up his own grammatical rules and consistently used them.

STM: loss of information

-decay: the memory traces are lost due to a lack of rehearsal -interference: items in short-term memory interfere with one another

Declarative, explicit memory

-declarative, or explicit, memory is the conscious recollection of facts and the descriptive details of past events -declarative memory can be divided into semantic memory (informational) and episodic memory (situational contextual) -semantic: what is the color of William's Hall? -episodic: was it raining before you entered this building? ---autobiographical memory which is personally episodic: when were you last in William's Hall?

Types of reasoning

-deductive -inductive

Neurobiology of short-term memory

-delayed match-to-sample tasks assess STM in primates -shown stimulus, memory delay, showed stimulus 2 and had to say if it was the same or not -single-unit recordings from the brains of primates show that brain regions involved in sensory processes and perception are also involved in STM -if you see a hammer the brain regions involved in motor control and swinging the hammer will activate -can we observe similar STM activity in people? ---activation patterns in posterior brain regions appeared to be specific for the memoranda during the delay period

Morgan et al (2004): dependent variable, results

-dependent variable: identify guard and interrogator in each condition from a set of 15 photos -results: identification of guard and interrogator were not statistically different -so even when a witness appears to have controlled their stress and focused on identification, mistakes can occur

Internally generated reactivation of single neurons in human hippocampus during free recall

-depth electrodes in the hippocampus of epilepsy patients -recorded responses to audiovisual stimuli (eg TV clips) -single units that were responsive to specific clips were also responsive when the patients reimagined the clip

Things that make for good recall

-depth of processing/elaborative rehearsal -spacing -similarity between encoding and retrieval -imagery -self-reference effect

Weber's law

-detected changes in stimulus properties are proportional to the original magnitude of the stimulus -true for sound, weight, brightness, etc. (money!)

Disease probability using Bayes Theorem

-disease affects 1/1000 people -very series, almost always fatal -good test: 95% accurate -if you have it: test will ID it 95% of the time -if you don't have it: test will return false positive 5% of the time -you test positive!! -what is likelihood you have the disease?? p(D) = 0.1% p(-D) = 99.9% p(S/D) = 95% p(S/-D) = 5% (.95)(.001)/((.95)(.001)+(.05)(.999)) = 0.0187 = 1.87% -the probability is just under 2%!!! -probabilistic thinking is relatively new and quite difficult

K.C. - semantic

-dissociating semantic and episodic memory -as a result of a motorcycle accident K.C. suffered extensive damage to both the left and right hemispheres of his brain -he is able to carry on conversations, recognize familiar objects and people, read, write, and reason -his short-term, working memory is entirely intact

Distributed representations in the brain

-distributed representations refers to the idea that information about a particular concept is not localized to one specific brain location (grandmother cell) but is instead encoded in a broad manner across multiple brain locations. ---ex. how might the concept "hammer" be represented in your brain?

Mathematics training and the Wason selection task

-do people fail if they are inexperienced or poor at logical meaning? -what if the task were given to undergrad history majors, undergrad math majors, and math faculty? would training in math decrease the logical errors? -other research shows that even courses in logic do not eliminate the errors

Animal language

-does it show: ---semanticity? (ability to convey meaning) ---arbitrariness? (no obvious link between the words and their meaning) ---displacement? (the ability to communicate about the past or future) ---open-endedness? (creative generation of new sentences/ideas) ---prevarication? (lies) ---reflexiveness? (self-reflection)

Repressed memories

-dont think of a white bear!! -a memory task that you will all fail -can memories be suppressed? -Depue and colleagues

Wold War II (cog revolution)

-during WWII groups of psychologists were brought together to assess the skills of new recruits -three factors contributed to the information processing approach to mind: --1. a realization that new methods of assessing cognitive skills were needed --2. brain injured soldiers increased the need for comprehensive psychological assessments, including assessment of cognitive skills and deficits --3. groups of psychologists and other scientists were brought together in Britain and the US to design computers able to simulate human cognitive processing

Conversion Hysteria

-e.g. glove anesthesia -important in the development of Freud's thinking -Breuer reported Anna O (who suffered paralysis without any biological basis) reported a reduction of her symptoms when encouraged to talk about them under hypnosis -led to the concept of catharsis (emotional release) -Freud initially concluded that the hysteria resulted from childhood sexual trauma which had been repressed but eventually doubting that such abuse could be so widespread, concluded instead that they were the result of fantasies (Oedipal and Electra complexes)

E.L. Thorndike

-early 1900s -studied how cats learned to extricate themselves from crates locked using various sticks, clasps and loops of wire -he concluded that they gradually approximated a solution -changes in behavior are due to consequences

Primates and sign language

-early reports of sign-teaching to great apes were enthusiastic, they reported that Washoe's sentence structure and her ability to answer questions was greater than the typical 3-year-old: ---Washoe signed a duck as a "water bird;" ---Koko, a gorilla, signed "cookie rock" for a stale sweet roll and called a stuffed animal a "dumb cow." -however, they often combined the signs into meaningless sequences and it isn't known how rarely these impressive examples occurred

Neisser's challenge

-ecological validity and memory research "if X is an interesting or socially significant aspect of memory, then psychologists have hardly ever studied X" How do we strike a balance between laboratory precision and the uncontrolled factors that might affect everyday memory?

Narrative styles

-elaborative style -pragmatic style

Hereditary Genius

-eminent people (famous, respected) tend to be related to eminent people -eminent fathers were more likely to have eminent sons than eminent grandfathers were to have eminent grandchildren -Galton's law was developed: each parent contributes 50% of a child's heritage, each grandparent 25% and so on

Bottom-up processing

-employs the info in the stimulus itself to aid in its identification

Important concepts in understanding memory

-encoding -storage -retrieval

Wang (2006) prediction, results

-end of childhood amnesia: ---US earlier than Tiawanese -content of memories: ---US would feature personal autonomy ---Tiawanese would focus on group or social relationships results were as predicted

Identity explanation account

-events during this period are defining in terms of our identity -similar to the cognitive self explanation for the end of childhood amnesia

Cognitive explanation account

-events from early adulthood: ---are often rehearsed due to their importance ---subject to less interference due to their distinctiveness

Response inhibition neuroanatomy

-evidence for dominant right hemisphere role in response inhibition comes from a split-brain patient -data show the right hemisphere commits fewer commission errors than the left on both a Go/NoGo task and a STOP task

Delayed discounting

-ex. which would you prefer? $100/ now or $200 tomorrow/next week/month/year -the value of a reward is affected by how long you have to wait for it with the longer the wait, the less its value. This phenomenon is known as delayed discounting. -the steepness of the delayed discounting slope reflects impulsiveness ---A strong preference for (smaller) immediate rewards over (larger) delayed rewards is a risk factor for drug addiction ---Higher rates of discounting are associated with drug dependence, problem gambling, obesity, and HIV risk behaviors.

Roberson, Davies and Davidoff (2000)

-example of culture-specific language differences -compared English speakers and the Berinmo, a people from New Guinea who have five color terms. -they presented their subjects with a large set of one-inch square color chips similar to those found in a paint store. -the experimenter pointed to each color chip and asked (in Berinmo or English), "this here, tell me what it is called."

Eleanor Rosch

-example of culture-specific language differences -studied color naming in the Dani, members of an agricultural society in northern Iran. -They have only two color categories, generally used to label light and dark, or white and black. -But, the Dani are able to remember colors even though they have no names for them. And, they can learn to recognize colors according to eight fundamental colors typical of European and English speaking populations. -This suggests universal color perception ---(not good for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).

Measuring the responses of the brain

-experimental setup: light bar stimulus projected on screen, recording from cat's visual cortex, note stimulus orientation and stimulus presented -see which neurons fire when which line is oriented a certain way

Depue and colleagues (Depue et al. 2007, Science) results, conclusions

-fMRI data showed brain regions (prefrontal) that increased in activity when people were trying to suppress the memories (i.e. "suppressing" areas) and brain areas that decreased in activity (i.e. "suppressed" area) -show that memory suppression engages many of the same brain circuits involved in other inhibitory functions

Reinders et al., 2006

-faces or control stimuli emerged over 80 images -subjects indicated when the "pop-out" occurred. -results indicate an earlier response (532 msec to 765 msec) of the amygdala to fearful faces. -this response is faster/earlier in those with social phobia

Holistic processing

-faces seem to be encoded as whole configurations

Third stage of autobiographical memories over the life-span

-finally, the third period reflects an increasing retrieval of more recent personal memories

First stage of autobiographical memories over the life-span

-first, there is a period of early childhood amnesia extending to about 5 years of age

Evidence that attention is space-based

-focusing attention on a specific spatial location (like shining a spotlight), areas in periphery receive less processing Orienting attn to center space: does the letter in the middle come from the range A to G? FIGHT -these trials were the majority of trials (75%) and served to ensure that attention was paid to the center of the display -on 25% of trials, subjects were shown a different display and asked to indicate if a "7" was presented Is there a 7? 7 + + + + for the "7" trials, what would you expect if you plot RTs as a function of target position? -the result is consistent with a "spotlight" metaphor of visual attention (quicker if 7 was in the middle position)

Encoding specificity principle

-for a given encoding condition, memory is best when the retrieval condition matches the encoding condition

Storage

-formation of a memory representation

What are the data of psychology and neuroscience?

-fundamental issue -subsequently, psychology developed other means of acquiring insights into human behavior and mental processes -for example: a purely behavioral analysis in which one makes no inferences about hidden central processes (behaviorist school) -for example: other experimental techniques to elaborate hypothesized cognitive variables such as mental chronometry (cognitive school)

Autobiographical fact

-general (context-free) knowledge about oneself and one's personal history ---semantic memory

Autobiographical memories over the life-span

-generally, when adults recall as many personal memories as they are able the resulting lifetime retrieval curve reflects three stages

Research on controlling attention (post-attentive)

-given a memory set and asked if each number was in memory set - evocative photos will slow you down -attentional biases of users to cocaine related stimuli may be related to prefrontal deficits -users showed significant interference from the cocaine stimuli -the distracting effect of the cocaine pictures was evident in the left inferior occipital gyrus and right inferior frontal gyrus -users with the greatest increases in right IFG activity showed the lowest levels of behavioral interference -when distracted by ecstasy stimuli, ecstasy users show increased occipital and decreased prefrontal activation

Psychophysics

-goal to determine precise mathematical relationships between stimulus properties and sensations -attempted to determine the relationship between stimulus properties and the mental experiences that they produced -achieved by systematically testing very carefully controlled stimuli -researchers were able to infer features of the nervous system that were later proven

Hideaki Tomoyori

-has beaten the previous record: 40,000 digits of pi ---he constructed mental associations using imagery ---"for example the number sequence three-nine in Japanese is pronounced san-kyu, and that sounds very like the word sa-kyu, which means "sand dune" ---"if I picture a sand dune, i easily remember the numbers three and nine. and if i add in other elements, like my wife standing in front of the sand dune by the bright sea, then those words in Japanese can remind me of a whole string of ten numbers" -when faced with new memory tasks both "memorists" showed normal memory

Dr. Rajan Srinivasan Mahadevan

-has memorized 31,811 digits of pi ---he chunked the numbers into units ---arranged the numbers into a matrix and then in a sequence of 10 numbers until he built a row of 100 numbers and then assigned positions to each number by row and column -when faced with new memory tasks both "memorists" showed normal memory

Letter recognition: hidden units

-hidden units contain an intermediate abstract representation of the numbers.

Brain development

-hippocampus and prefrontal cortex (important for explicit memory formation) are underdeveloped in infants -perhaps children lack the cognitive abilities to consolidate and integrate memories? -but theres the paradox of childhood amnesia - young children can have elaborate memories for previous events in their life -perhaps, with cognitive/neurobiological development, new connections form and integrate and eliminate existing connections (memory clearance) ---higher rates of hippocampal neurogenesis are associated with greater childhood amnesia ---suppressing hippocampal neurogenesis in infant mice shows forgetting

Psychoanalytic approach (Freud)

-historically, more common in clinical practice than in academia -the theory, with its emphasis on catharsis and insight, led naturally to therapeutic intervention but not to empirical testing -cognitive psychology can be seen as a movement away from this type of theorizing

Why are faces hard to ID when inverted and why do we not notice when parts are inverted?

-holistic processing -tanaka and farah (1993)

Evidence that attention is object-based

-horizontal line will give you a hint as to where the target will appear (true 75% of the time) -target will be in different corner 25% of the time -looked at reaction time -if attention is space based, the two invalid trials shown should have equal reaction times -but if it is object based then the trial on the left will have a shorter reaction time bc the target is in the same object, the rectangle -shows we pay attention to objects not just spaces!

Phrase structure order in Yoda language

-how come everyone, even children, can understand Yoda's speech? -Yoda's speech is not random: the kernel, the deep structure, is understood.

Some mind/brain conundrums

-how do simple ON/OFF devices like neurons give rise to complex mental representations? -a single neuron does not store an entire concept so how do neurons work together to hold information? -how do a bunch of neurons that are wired together learn? -how is information stored by neurons over a lifetime if neurons and synapses are replaced? -how come trauma to the brain tends not to create catastrophic impairments but instead leads to "graceful degradation?"

Challenges for building a brain

-how does our brain do pattern detection so well when the inputs can be so different? ---object constancy. -the artificial brain we will describe is excellent at pattern recognition (even with noisy inputs). -applications include ---face recognition, ---climate forecasting, ---economic forecasting, ---checking your credit card purchases, ---SIRI

Eyewitness Memory: Megreya and Burton (2008)

-how good is facial recognition? -methods ---person walked in front of room and stood there for 30 seconds ---participants were instructed to encode the face ---5 second blank period ---presented with 10 photos and instructed to identify the person -results ---66% accuracy

Loss aversion

-humans typically prefer avoiding losses more than winning -the framing of a gamble as a potential loss will alter whether it is preferred

Contextual factors influencing neural representations of value

-hunger/satiety -uncertainty -self-control -social input

Number generating task

-i have a rule for generating sets of three numbers called triples -your task is to figure out what my rule is -here's an example of a triple that follows my rule: 2, 4, 6 -to figure out my rule, write down three triplets of your own and I will tell you if they conform to my rule

Viewpoint-invariant

-identification does not depend on the particular view we have of the object

Localizing the MR signal

-if the magnetic field is different in different locations, then the frequencies of the protons will vary spatially in a known way. -slices can be selected by specifying a certain bandwidth.

The classical rule-based approach

-if the mind organizes things in a hierarchical fashion then items further apart in the hierarchy should take longer to access. -asking if a canary has skin should take longer than asking if a canary is yellow or has wings since the first question requires searching two steps rather than one. -the graph shows the time required to verify an "Is an S a P" question at three levels of a hypothetical semantic hierarchy. -to answer questions like these you complete a search of your rule-based semantic knowledge. -the classical hierarchical model predicts the time it takes subjects to answer categorical questions about concepts.

Clinical applications

-if we can assay emotional and cognitive processes then we can investigate their dysfunction in groups with clinical conditions. -such knowledge may help in diagnosis, differential diagnosis, treatment tailoring and assessing treatment efficacy. For example: ---understanding cognitive-emotion interactions; ---understanding information processing in fear; ---predicting who responds to treatment; ---identifying kids at risk of schizophrenia; ---identifying kids at risk for drug use; ---identifying those who can avoid drug relapse.

Letter recognition

-imagine an input layer that was arranged as a 20 x 20 matrix -imagine if I wrote a number on it -this could be coded as turning some inputs on -different numbers would have different input patterns.

Word length effect

-immediate memory span is limited by the amount of time it takes to encode the items -long words take longer to pronounce than short words and subvocal rehearsal cannot rehearse them fast enough to maintain them in the phonological store -ex. recall for list 1 is better than for list 2 list 1: car; plane; hat; stairs; frog list 2: automobile; aeroplane; fedora; escalator; amphibian

Flashbulb memory: Challenger space shuttle explosion

-in 1986, the morning after the Challenger space shuttle exploded while being watched nationally on television, Neisser and Harsch began gathering memories about how people learned of the disaster -they did so again, from the same people, 2 1/2 years after the explosion

H.M.

-in a series of operations H.M.'s intractable epilepsy was cured by removal of the majority of his temporal lobes in both hemispheres of the brain, including structures such as the hippocampus and amygdalae -afterwards H.M. had access to most of his past memories and to whatever was in his short-term memory -but the info in his verbal short-term memory did not transfer to his long-term memory

How do you assess language in infants?

-in an early study, Eimas, Siqueland, Jusczyk, P.Vigorito, J (1971) reported that 1- and 4- month old infants were able to discriminate /b/ and /p/. -jnterest in speech sounds could be gauged with a baby pacifier that measures the rate of sucking. -when a speech sound was played the infants initially increased their rate of sucking. -babies become easily bored and decreased sucking after repeated presentations - but presentation of a new speech sound generated an increase in sucking. -they were sensitive to the sounds of speech for other languages; they responded to both their own native tongues and non-native speech sounds to which they had never been exposed. -these early studies of speech perception were interpreted as evidence that the human capacity for language was both innate and universal

Fricatives

-in contrast, /f/ and /s/, called fricatives, are produced by forcing the flow of air - /f/, for example, is made by partially preventing the air from leaving the mouth by bringing the lower lip close to the upper teeth, permitting air to create a friction between the articulatory parts as it exits

The famous non-debate between Noam Chomsky and B.F. Skinner: Chomsky's argument

-in the 1950's Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures (1957) and revolutionized linguistics -he moved linguistics away from merely describing language to theorizing about its underlying, universal structure -he argued that a universal grammar, a universal, genetically wired and modular, "language acquisition device," underlay language development in all cultures. -his position was, he argued, essentially the same as Descartes rationalism -language was inherited and unique to humans.

Recovered memories

-in the 1980s and early 1990s a series of reports of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, of satanic and occult rituals associated with sexual victimization of children and even infant sacrifice, and alien abductions created controversy that is still present -the idea that memories can be repressed and then retrieved perfectly accurately is at odds with memory research and led scientists to be quite skeptical -one question is whether or not false memories can be experienced as real

Parts-based approaches

-incoming patterns are parsed into component parts that are matched to information in memory -recognition occurs by integrating those parts -features of the encoded object are compared to a stored representation of the object's structure ---stored representation includes a list of features, as well as the relationship between them ---this is an abstract representation -viewpoint-invariant

Averageness

-indicative of health and genetic fitness -is this an effect of experience? ---average faces perceived as generally familiar since they resemble other faces in memory ---average birds, fish, and cars are also more attractive

The Jennisfer Aniston cell

-individual neuronal responses to faces were measured in 8 patients with microelectrodes placed in their hippocampus, amygdala, entorhinal cortex, and parahippocampal gyrus in order to ID the origin of epileptic seizures prior to corrective neurosurgery -a neuron in this patient's FAA selectively fired to the face of Jennifer Aniston -other patients showed preferences to other faces (e.g. Michael Jordan, Halle Berry, faces of the Simpsons)

ADHD and response inhibition

-individuals with ADHD perform poorly on the tasks, and also show reduced activity in key inhibitory control and self-regulation regions of the brain -better inhibitory ability is associated with a greater capacity for activation during response inhibition -on a simple task (easy to inhibit) a great inhibitor and bad inhibitor will do the same -on a harder task, good inhibitors are able to activate much better (the right inferior frontal gyrus)

Perception of statistical regularity in infants

-infants controlled listening time by staring or not staring at a blinking light. -with only two minutes of the repetitive sound combinations, the artificial "words" lost their novelty but more time was spent on new words -infants are prepared at birth to perceive statistical regularities in the world. ---these regularities become perceptual units which may form the basis for speech perception.

Determining understanding in the pre-language child

-infants, sitting on their mother's laps, faced two projection screens which played different events -for example at level 1: ---child is asked "Where's the cookie?" ---if the infant regularly looked at the correct screen it is assumed that they understood -by age two all children evidenced understanding

Lineup administration recommendations

-inform witness that perpetrator may not be in lineup -administer should be "blind" to ID of the suspect ---important because of eyewitness confidence, witness confidence is a poor predictor of accuracy ---confidence increases if "choice" in a lineup is supported by administrator and this cant happen if administrator is unaware of who the suspect is -see pictures just one at a time so as not to be able to compare the individuals (perhaps - see Albright PNAS 2017)

The phonological loop

-information must be converted into a verbal form for processing by the PL and will be lost if not verbally (subvocally) rehearsed

The cognitive revolution

-inspired by the developments in computer technology and in information theory and with disenchantment that the behaviorist approach had gone so far as to strip psychology of any focus on mental processes, there emerged a new approach to studying cognitive processes -World War II

Working memory as a mental workspace

-internal attention switching: ---what is challenging about these tasks is you have to do more than store the items in a temporary short-term buffer ---you have to actively manipulate them in your mind, keeping them distinctive so as to minimize interference between them -the concept of working memory as a mental workspace is quite different from the short-term memory concept of a temporary verbal storage buffer

Morgan et al (2004) conditions

-interrogator and guard present in both -high stress: physically confronted by guard if not complying with interrogator (30 minutes) -low stress: no physical confrontation, but intellectually challenging the recruit into responding (30 minutes)

Problems for the classical model

-intransivity -family resemblance

Face inversion

-inversion disrupts the recognition of faces much more than objects

Deductive reasoning

-involves beginning with a set of known facts or "premises" and inferring what conclusions follow -often, these deductions argue from a general principle to a specific example: ---all men are mortal (major premise) ---Socrates is a man (minor premise) ---Therefore, Socrates is mortal -if you assume that the premises are true, then what must logically follow?

Precedence of global over local features

-is this hard-wired or cultural? -Himba do not show the Ebbinghaus illusion -Davidoff et al. (2008) tested Himba and UK participants -which comparison stimulus is most like the target: A or B? -UK participants: global precedence (86% chose left) -Himba participants: local precedence (77% chose right)

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

-language leads to different world views -in the 1950's Benjamin Whorf, a student of the anthropological linguist Edward Sapir, reported on the language of a number of cultures, including native American -Whorf reported that the Hopi of the Southwest have no past and future tenses in their language and therefore did not have a linear conception of the passage of time -Whorf reported that the Eskimo had many more "names" for varieties of snow than did other people with the result that their understanding of the varieties of snow was greater

Older magnocellular pathway

-large cells and fat (fast) fibers -low detail, black and white, motion and spatial information -dorsal stream "where is the object?"

Complex pattern recognition

-learning -can result from what is a complex system of very simple binary (neuron-like) units -ex. an artificial neural network can be trained to recognize written letters -ex. an artificial neural network can be trained to generate speech from visual inputs

Procedural memory

-learning to ride a bike

Problems with behaviorism

-learning without responding --rats can learn a T-maze even it they don't move through it themselves -learning without reinforcement --rats can learn a maze even without reinforcement

H.M.

-life without new learning -can't form new memories -in a series of operations, HM's intractable epilepsy was cured by removal of the majority of his temporal lobes in both hemispheres of the brain, including structures such as the hippocampus and amygdalae -afterwards, HM could not form new memories - information that he could hold in mind would not transfer to his long-term memory -that he still had short-term memory shows that there are distinct types of memory and that short-term memory can remain intact even when long-term memory is damaged

Willingness-to-pay task results

-linear relationship between subjective value and neural activity in a network of brain regions including ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) (red circle in pic), ventral striatum and posterior cingulate cortex -green bars are voluntary bids -blue bars are forced bids

Phonological similarity effect

-lists of similar sounding items are more difficult to keep track of in short-term memory than different sounding items -ex. recall for list 2 is better than for list 1 list 1: pin; pan; pen; ten; tan list 2: pin; hat; dog; bump; door

Brain volumetrics

-longitudinal studies show developmental changes in brain maturation. -Gogtay et al., PNAS (2004) show the sequential development of different cortical areas from age 5 to 20

Childhood amnesia

-loss of memory for events between ages 0-5 -children between the ages of 5 and 10 can recall their earlier autobiographical experiences but these memories are subsequently forgotten

Transcranial magnetic stimulation

-magnetic fields on the skull's surface affect cortical neuronal firing (creates a temporary lesion in a brain region) -further support for a critical role for the right IFG comes from TMS studies -TMS at right inferior frontal gyrus impaired STOP task performance -inhibitory performance was not affected by TMS stimulation at the right middle frontal gyrus, the right angular gyrus, or in the corresponding left hemisphere regions

Habit-based vs goal-directed control of instrumental behavior

4 groups of rats P=paired with sickness (injection LiCl) U= unpaired 500= 10 days of training (overtrained) 100= 2 days of training -graph shows ratio between response rate after and response rate before reward devaluation -responding significantly (*=p<0.05) decreased after devaluation in rats with less training but not in overtrained rats -that is, overtrained rats not sensitive to current subjective value of reinforcer, i.e. their behavior is habit-based

How many phonemes are there in the English language?

45

NimStim Face Stimuli Set

646 facial expression stimuli fearful, happy, sad, angry, surprised, calm, neutral, disgusted.

Is IQ stable over time?

66% of the variance in VIQ at time 2 was accounted for by VIQ at time 1, a further 20% was accounted for by the change in grey matter density in the left motor speech region, with the remaining 14% unaccounted for. 35% of the variance in PIQ at time 2 was accounted for by PIQ at time 1, with 13% accounted for by the change in grey matter density in the anterior cerebellum, leaving 52% unaccounted for.

Reliability

A second measurement will give the same result as the first

Generalizability - Owen et al., Nature (2010)

A six-week online study in which 11,430 participants trained several times each week on cognitive tasks designed to improve reasoning, memory, planning, visuospatial skills and attention. Baseline: measures of reasoning, verbal short-term memory, spatial working memory, and paired-associates learning. Participants logged on to the BBC Lab UK website to practice six training tasks for a minimum of 10 min a day, three times a week. At six weeks, the baseline assessment was repeated and the pre- and post-training scores were compared

Military problem

A small country was ruled from a strong fortress by a dictator. The fortress was situated in the middle of the country, surrounded by farms and villages. Many roads led to the fortress through the countryside. A rebel general vowed to capture the fortress. The general knew that an attack by his entire army would capture the fortress. He gathered his army at the head of one of the roads, ready to launch a full-scale direct attack. However, the general then learned that the dictator had planted mines on each of the roads. The mines were set so that small bodies of men could pass over them safely, since the dictator needed to move his troops and workers to and from the fortress. However, any large force would detonate the mines. Not only would this blow up the road, but it would also destroy many neighboring villages. It therefore seemed impossible to capture the fortress.

Attention

Basic characteristics: -limited capacity: ---visual attention limits are described with a spotlight metaphor ---auditory attention limits are described with gateway metaphor -flexibility ---people can easily shift attention based on situational demands -voluntary control ---we can control how we direct our attention

How are the color worlds of the British and the Berinmo experienced?

Berinmo color categories: "Wapa" refers both to a European person, and for white, and for very pale colors. "Kel" refers to charcoal, or black, or anything burnt or dirty. "Mehi" is the term for red and for the red of a particular regional fruit. "Wor" is the term for leaves ready to fall from a tree and for a range of yellow, orange, brown. "Nol" refers to "live" and also "live" plant colors, such as green, yellow-green, blue, and purple. -The color names in Berinmo appear to have evolved to correspond to their pragmatic needs in their physical world. -Both groups reliably discriminated between colors that fell into different color categories but not to color differences within each of their categories. -This suggests that language influences color discriminations (good for Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).

Brain pruning from childhood to adulthood

Brain changes from age 5 to 20

Repetition priming

Buckner et al., PNAS 95, 1998

Loss aversion example

Choose between option A or B: Task 1 A. sure gain of $240 B. -25% chance to gain $1000 -75% chance to gain nothing ---84% choose A; 16% choose B 4x on average, A = +$960, B = $1000 -risk averse prefer smaller safer bet with less expected value Task 2 A. sure loss of $750 B. -75% chance to lose $1000 -25% chance to lose nothing ---13% choose A, 87% choose B 4x on average, A= -$3000, B= -$3000 -risk-taking prefer more risky bet with equal expected value

Types of long-term memory

Declarative (explicit, conscious): semantic (facts, events) vs episodic (autobiographical, ex. flashbulb memories) Non-declarative (implicit, no awareness): priming vs procedural vs simple learning (e.g. classical conditioning)

Brown, Deffenbacher, and Sturgill (1977) dependent variable, results

Dependent variable: accuracy in identifying the criminal Results: 20% of mugshot non-criminals were misidentified, 8% of new faces were misidentified

Early interventions: Education

Diamond et al. (Science 2007; 2011) show that early school training on executive functions can work.

Definitive evidence for right-hemisphere dominance

Dogs wagging their tails! -right hemi is important for inhibitory control -left hemi might be more involved in approach, right withdrawing -measured direction in which a dog tail wags -presented dogs with pics of their owner (eliciting an approach, left-hemisphere dominant response) and measured that as a preferential bias to the right -showed pic of a threatening dog- right hemi-preferential tail to the left

How does the mind organize meaning?

Fuzzy categories are a move away from classical rules to feature models -classical model -feature comparison models

Owen et al., Nature (2010): Groups

Group 1: -the six training tasks emphasized reasoning, planning and problem-solving abilities. Group 2: -The six training tasks included a broader range of cognitive functions including tests of short- term memory, attention, visuospatial processing and mathematics similar to those commonly found in commercially available brain- training devices. -The difficulty of the training tasks increased as the participants improved to continuously challenge their cognitive performance and maximize any benefits of training. Control group: -No formal practice on any specific cognitive tasks during their 'training' sessions, but answered obscure questions from six different categories using any available online resource

Selective attention

How do we explain our ability to filter information (the first example) AND the ability of some information to pass through that filter and be distraction (the second example)?

The spacing effect

Massed repetition: repeated presentations that occur closely together in time Distributed repetition: repeated presentations spread out over time Distributed repetition leads to better retention

Objectivity

Measurement won't be affected by who is giving the test

History of nuclear magnetic resonance

NMR = nuclear magnetic resonance -Felix Block and Edward Purcell ---1946: atomic nuclei absorb and re-emit radio frequency energy ---1952: Nobel prize in physics nuclear: properties of nuclei of atoms magnetic: magnetic field required resonance: interaction between magnetic field and radio frequency

Owen et al., Nature (2010): Results

On average, participants completed 24.5 training sessions (range 1-188)

Sensation and perception overview

Organization of the visual system: -from simple light stimulation to complex visual percepts -we will note the increasing complexity of the perceptions completed by the brain's visual processing system --color perception --feature detenction --what and where systems in the brain Principles of perceptual organization (Gestalt principles) Embodied cognition

Novel clinical applications: detecting awareness in a vegetative state

Owel et al., Science 2008 "In July 2005, a 23-year-old woman sustained a severe traumatic brain injury as a result of a road traffic accident. Five months later, she remained unresponsive with preserved sleep-wake cycles. Clinical assessment by a multidisciplinary team concluded that she fulfilled all of the criteria for a diagnosis of vegetative state according to international guidelines." -in response to verbal instructions, she could activate brain areas associated with motor imagery and spatial navigation. -these results demonstrate her conscious awareness and her ability to behave intentionally.

Shaw et al., (2007)

PNAS (2007) show a developmental delay in children with ADHD

Eyewitness testimony, stress & trauma: Morgan et al (2004)

Participants: recruits to the US Army's survival training program Program consists of two phases: -classroom training -experimental immersion in a mock prisoner of war camp ---prisoner is isolated and exposed to interrogation techniques designed to push recruit to the limit ---physiological measures confirm extreme stress during this phase

What makes a face attractive?

Prototypical faces are most attractive (the most "face-looking" face)

Selective attention task

Read aloud only the words in the specific font

How did you hear about the news of the Challenger disaster?

Recalled immediately after the event: "I was in religion class, some people came in and started talking about it... i went to my room and watched the TV program talking about it and got the details" Recalled 2 1/2 years later by the same person: "i was sitting in my freshman dorm room with my roommate and we were watching TV, it came on a news flash, we were shocked, i was upset and went upstairs to talk to my friend then called my parents"

Wong (2006) results: memory type, Taiwan

Self: relatives would compare me with my girl cousin, i was said to be more sensible, must be because of my mom Mother: mom always smiling, always working and didnt have time for me, she was always busy walking around, never rested Family: grandpa, grandma, dad, mom, little bro, puppy, breakfast, recalls the dish Friend: in kindergarten, good friendship with neighbor, they raised ducks, we would play in the field or hide and seek in the house Surroundings: 4 or 5 different recycle bins in the park, moms and kids taking a walk and chatting, going to preschool, song "Tiger Lady"

Wong (2006) results: memory type, US

Self: tying shoes, learning games, winning gold stars Mother: mom dressing her up as a queen, fake jewelry, makeup, very happy walking to school Family: family trip to Niagara falls, shampoo wasn't out of hair and bubbled walking under the falls Friend: best friend moved on birthday, she called, i cried, mom made me practice piano later, angry Surroundings: 3 years only, comfort blanket, room had a carpet, stuffed animals were in the bed, raining, the light was on, playing with blocks with brother

Early interventions: intelligence

So, although training might improve crystallized intelligence (e.g., education), specific abilities (i.e., performance on the tasks that you practiced) and procedural abilities (e.g., mirror-drawing study discussed previously), is it the case that fluid intelligence cannot be trained?

Speech spectrogram

Speech occurs over time and this speech spectogram shows major patterns of the signal

Transfer

Success at solving problem -solve radiation task without provided military analog 10% -solve radiation with military analog known (no hint to use it) 30% -solve radiation task with military analog comparison understood/applied (hint given to use it) 75% -Gick & Holyoak, 1980, 1983

Real-time fMRI

Synchro-scanning and neurofeedback

Experimental design

Task design Signal time course Brain activity

Central executive and behavioral control tasks

The Go/NoGo Task The Stop Task -assess a very basic form of inhibitory control - the ability to interrupt motor behavior -the circuitry for motor inhibition is well understood - moreover this form of inhibitory control, and a number of the brain regions subserving it, are implicated in other aspects of inhibitory control -the functioning of these regions is thought to relate to clinical conditions characterized by poor inhibitory control

Amygdalar activation

The amygdala appears to play a role in processing both positive and negative stimuli, and the arousal level of the negative stimuli determines if there will be an amygdalar response or not.

Homunculus argument

The homunculus argument is a fallacy arising most commonly in the theory of vision. One may explain (human) vision by noting that light from the outside world forms an image on the retinas in the eyes and something (or someone) in the brain looks at these images as if they are images on a movie screen (this theory of vision is sometimes termed the theory of the Cartesian theater: it is most associated, nowadays, with the psychologist David Marr). The question arises as to the nature of this internal viewer. The assumption here is that there is a "little man" or "homunculus" inside the brain "looking at" the movie.

Hariri et al., 2001

The simple act of labelling the emotions affected the emotional response.

Do non-humans learn language?

The speed at which baby marmosets learn to "talk" is related to the feedback they receive from their parents

Chomsky's psycholinguistic theory

There have been challenges to Chomsky's theory: -what are the language universals? ---how well have we studied language in all its forms? -Perhaps it is possible that language can be learned? ---Children show an early ability to detect and categorize statistical regularities in their environment before the emergence of language. ---Connectionist models provide an empirical alternative to innate mechanisms demonstrating learning with only a little experience

Recall example

Which British politicians have been mentioned in previous lectures?

Has introspection entirely gone away?

Why are you majoring in neuroscience?

Essential features of language

Words and syntax: -being able to apply arbitrary "signs" (words) to concepts and having rules on how to combine signs so as to communicate -semanticity -arbitrariness -displacement -open-endedness -prevarication -reflexiveness

Principles of perceptual organization

a shift in focus away from the neural systems underlying perception to the psychological principles by which people make sense of what they see: -gestalt principles of perception stress how the organism makes sense of the visual input in a "holistic" manner - that is, how the whole perception can be greater than the sum of its parts -as we saw earlier, the perception of a stimulus can often not be explained with sole reference to the bottom-up sensory stimulation

Costs of automaticity

action slips -mistakes made when engaged in automatic processing (i.e. in the absence of attention- autopilot) -actions slips occur because prevention requires conscious monitoring of performance, which is lowered in automatic processing -for example, capture errors are errors in which a well-practiced but unintended action occurs initiated by a potent cue associated with doing an action or by sharing an initial sequence with a more unfamiliar action

Impulse control and behavior monitoring

activity in healthy subjects overlaps with regions though to be critical from lesion data (Aron et al., Nat Neuro 2003)

Treisman (1960)

attended ear: "...psychology is an interesting / walk on the beach..." unattended ear: "...on our vacation we took / major for students..." prediction: "...psychology is an interesting walk on the beach..." results: "...psychology is an interesting...uh...major for students..." unattended information that makes more sense semantically is selected

Subitizing

being able to very quickly and effortlessly (preattentive) count a small number of objects (0-4)

Brain activity

brain regions involved in performing the task are identified statistically (typically by correlating with the task design). Active areas are those that pass a statistical threshold. Active areas are then color-coded (e.g., the greater the correlation coefficient, the hotter the color).

0-back vs fixation brain image

compare to see how brain activity differs-working memory

2-back vs fixation

compare to see how brain activity differs-working memory

Top-down processes

considered to be conceptually driven, that is based on knowledge, expectations and context (we could prime you to perceive a B or a 13)

Bottom-up processes

considered to be data-driven, that is, based on sensory information from the stimulus

Error detection

dorsal anterior cingulate region lights up when you detect an error

Sensation

early physiological processes that translate incoming messages from external energy forms (e.g. light and sound waves) into activity in the nervous system

Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire

for finding early markers of schizophrenia?

BOLD brain pong

graded control: just the right amount of movement and effort is used as appropriate to the task at hand

Morgan et al (2004) experimental question

how does extreme stress affect memory for the interrogator and guard?

The marshmallow test

individuals who were high delayers of the marshmallow had an easy time inhibiting key reward centers in the brain

The recency effect

items at the end of the list are still in short-term memory

The Wason selection tasks shows us...

its an example of people looking for positive rather than disconfirming evidence

p(S/-D)

probability of testing positive given that you don't have the disease

P(S/D)

probability of testing positive given that you have the disease

p(D/S)

probability of the disease given that you test positive

p(D)

probability of you having the disease

p(-D)

probability of you not having the disease

Elaborative rehearsal

processing information for meaning

Hirst et al (2009): participants, methods

recollection of 9/11: -3000 participants filled out a detailed survey about: ---how they found out about the event ---memory for the event itself ---confidence in the accuracy of these memories ---personal feelings and reactions to the event -surveys given three times to the same people: 1 week, 11 months, and 35 months after the attack

Maintenance rehearsal

simple repetition of information

The primacy and recency effects

taken as evidence for the existence of short-term (primary) and long-term (secondary) memories

Signal time course

the MRI records brain activity during the entire experiment (e.g., a whole-brain image every 2 seconds). Different recordings are made for different regions of the brain.

Just noticeable difference

the smallest detectable difference in a changing stimulus

Task design

the task is designed such that trials are presented in a row (e.g., 30 seconds duration) and alternated with a control condition (e.g. rest).

Practical intelligence

this refers to the ability to adapt to everyday life by calling on existing knowledge and skills.

Creative/Synthetic intelligence

this refers to the ability to deal with new and unusual situations by calling on existing knowledge and skills.

Analytical intelligence

this refers to the typical abilities assessed in traditional intelligence tests.

Baddeley and Hitch model of working memory

two slave systems: -the phonological loop -the visuospatial sketchback -central executive that supervises the information in the two subsystems

Working memory and IQ

working memory span is a lot lower than STM. higher IQ correlated with larger working memory span