Test 3 notes

For example, my nephew sometimes drove to his mother's home for dinner, and she typically told him about some items in the refrigerator that he must remember to take home when he left. After several prospective-memory lapses, he thought of an ideal external memory aid: When he arrives for dinner, he places his car keys in a conspicuous location in the refrigerator (White, 2003). Notice his strategic application of this memory aid. He is highly unlikely to drive home without the refrigerated items.

. Notice his strategic application of this memory aid. He is highly unlikely to drive home without the refrigerated items. you put food items on top of island so you make take them next door

Characteristics of prototypes

1. Prototypes are supplied as examples of a category 2. Prototypes are judged more quickly than nonprototypes, after semantic priming 3. Prototypes share attributes in a family resemblance category

A category is a set of objects that belong together. Your cognitive system considers these objects to be at least partly equivalent

A category tells us something useful about their members. For example, suppose that you hear someone say, "Rambutan is a fruit." You conclude that you should probably eat it in a salad or a dessert, instead of frying it with onions and freshly ground pepper

narrative technique

A fourth organizational method, called the narrative technique, instructs people to make up stories that link a series of words together. In a classic study, Bower and Clark (1969) told a group of people to make up narrative stories that incorporated a set of English words. People in a control group received no special instructions. In all, each group learned twelve lists of words. The results showed that participants in the narrative-technique group recalled about six times as many words as those in the control group. The narrative technique is clearly an effective strategy for enhancing memory, and it has also been used successfully with people who have impaired memory (Wilson, 1995). However, techniques such as this are effective only if you can generate the narrative easily and reliably, during both learning and recall.

Prospective-memory errors are more likely in highly familiar surroundings when you are performing a task automatically. For instance, consider people who want to stop smoking. They typically acknowledge that they automatically light up a cigarette in the kitchen, right after breakfast. They will probably need to move directly to a different room, in order to break the smoking habit

Absentminded behavior is also more likely if you are preoccupied or distracted, you are feeling time pressure, or i nd yourself otherwise under a lot of stress. In most cases, absentmindedness is simply irritating. However, sometimes these slips can produce airplane collisions, industrial accidents, and other disasters that inl uence the lives of hundreds of individuals

One problem is that the typical prospective-memory task represents a divided attention situation. You must focus on your ongoing activity, as well as on the task you need to remember in the future

Absentminded behavior is especially likely when the prospective-memory task requires you to disrupt a customary activity. Suppose that this customary activity is driving from your college to your home. Now suppose that you have a prospective-memory task that you must perform today, for example, buying milk at the grocery store on your way home. In cases like this, your long-standing habit dominates the more fragile prospective memory, and you fall victim to absentminded behavior

When people are skilled at metacomprehension, they typically receive high scores on tests of reading comprehension

According to research by Maki and her coauthors (1994), for example, readers who were accurate at assessing which sections of a text they had understood were also likely to receive higher scores on a reading-comprehension test. In fact, metacomprehension accuracy and reading-comprehension scores were signii cantly correlated (r = +.43).

In general, college students are not very accurate in their metacomprehension skills. For example, they may not notice that a paragraph contains inconsistencies or missing information. Instead, they think they understand it

Additionally, students often believe that they have understood something they have read because they are familiar with its general topic. However, they often fail to retain specii c information, and they may overestimate how they will perform when they are tested on the material

Divided attention

Although people may think that they are great at multitasking, people typically perform better when focusing all of their mental efforts on one task at a time. This guideline is important when you listen to lectures and read your textbooks

Apparently, when you take a test, this testing provides practice in retrieving the relevant material. Furthermore, that test produces desirable difi culties. When you try to recall the material you had read, you'll see that the task is somewhat challenging, and you will not be overconi dent.

Amazingly, the increased memory benei ts associated with testing are substantially long-lasting, stretching from just a few weeks up until at least 9 months. In addition, when students complete a second test, their recall shows greater organization, compared to students who only received additional study time

The prototype approach can account for our ability to form concepts about groups that are loosely structured. For example, we can create a concept for stimuli that merely share a family resemblance, when the members of a category have no single characteristic in common. An ideal model of semantic memory must, however, acknowledge that concepts can be unstable and variable. For example, our notions about the ideal prototype can shift as time passes and the context changes.

Another problem with the prototype approach is that we often do store specii c information about individual examples of a category. An ideal model of semantic memory would therefore need to include a mechanism for storing this specii c information, as well as prototypes

The tip-of-the-tongue experience is generally an involuntary effect. In contrast, the feeling of knowing is more conscious. You carefully assess whether you could recognize the answer if you were given several options, as in a multiple-choice question

Both of these effects activate the frontal lobe of the brain, which is also important in other metacognitive tasks (Maril et al., 2005). Both of these effects are clearly related to metacognition because you make judgments about whether you know some information.

Metacomprehension refers to your thoughts about language comprehension. Most research on metacomprehension focuses on reading comprehension, rather than on the comprehension of spoken speech (Maki & McGuire, 2002). In this sense, the concept of metacomprehension refers to whether or not an individual can assess the degree to which that individual understands information to which they have been exposed

Consider a situation in which you are in the process of starting to study for an upcoming exam. You decide to re-read the assigned reading. Having the ability to precisely identify which information you understand in the reading and which information you i nd confusing should provide you with the information you need in order to regulate your studying behavior. Naturally, if you have this sensitivity, you can focus your efforts more strongly on the information you don't understand. And hopefully, those focused

Metacognition is also important because a general goal in college should be to learn how to think and how to become a rel ective person. As a rel ective person, you can consider what you have done and what you plan to do in the future

Consistent with Theme 1, metacognition is an extremely active process. As you'll see, metacognition requires focused thinking and self-assessment. The topic of metacognition belongs to a larger issue in psychology, called self knowledge, or what people believe about themselves

It's possible that you have already developed your metamemory well enough that you can easily identify which memory strategies work best for you. But, even if that's the case, your exam performance may still be poor unless you effectively regulate your study strategies. One key way to do so is by spending more time studying the difi cult topics. Indeed, memory tasks require a substantial amount of decision making as you plan how to master the material

Consistent with Theme 4, you must often coordinate at least two cognitive processes—in this case, memory and decision making.

deep processing also increases distinctiveness, which means that one memory trace should be different from all other memory traces. People tend to forget information if it is not distinctly different from the other memory traces in their long-term memory.

Distinctiveness is an especially important factor when we try to learn names. For example, I often need to recall someone's name. Let's say that I have just met a young woman named Kate. I've often made the mistake of telling myself, "That's easy. I'll just remember that she looks like the student in my Cognitive Psychology class named Kate." Later on, I'll realize that I actually have three students in that class named Kate. My encoding had not been sufficiently distinctive. As a result, the face I was trying to recall was extremely vulnerable to interference from other students' faces. With interference from other items, we easily forget the target name

The exemplar approach argues that we i rst learn information about some specii c examples of a concept; then we classify each new stimulus by deciding how closely it resembles all of those specii c examples

Each of those examples stored in memory is called an exemplar. The exemplar approach emphasizes that your concept of "dog" would include information about numerous examples of dogs you have known. In contrast, the prototype approach would argue that your prototype of a dog would be an idealized representation of a dog, with average size for a dog and average other features—but not necessarily like any particular dog you've ever seen.

1. Basic-level names are used to identify objects. Try naming some of the objects that you can see around you. You are likely to use basic-level names for these objects. You will mention pen, for example, rather than the superordinate term writing instrument or the subordinate term Paper Mate Flair pen.

Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues (1976) asked people to look at a series of pictures and identify each object. They found that people typically preferred to use basic level names. Apparently, the basic-level name gives enough information without being overly detailed. In addition, people produce the basic-level names faster than either the superordinate or the subordinate names. Furthermore, when people see superordinate or subordinate terms, they frequently remember the basic-level version of these terms when they are later tested for recall. In other words, the basic level does have special, privileged status.

The benei cial effects of testing stretch far beyond increased memory for the same information in the same testing format

For example, Carpenter, Pashler, and Vul (2006) originally tested memory for learned information in a short essay format, and then tested participants again using a multiple-choice format. Participants whose last activity had been taking a test out-performed participants in a study-only control group, even when the format of the second test was different from the format of the i rst. Thus, testing increases memory at a later point in time that is transferable across different types of tests and test questions. When a textbook for your course comes with on-line supplementary material, go on-line and look at the material. Many times, you'll i nd that the supplementary material contains mock quizzes. Research on the testing effect indicates that completing those will not only increase your memory for that material in the future, but will also help you identify the material on which you need to spend more time studying. Indeed, this research is a primary reason that practice quiz questions were added to the end of each section in this edition of the textbook.

One possibility for this relationship is that skilled readers had more accurate assessments of their own reading ability, and thus were better able to regulate their reading when comprehension decreased. Indeed, metacomprehension requires you to regulate your reading, so that you know how to read more effectively

For example, good and poor readers differ in their awareness that certain reading strategies are useful. Good readers are more likely to report that they try to make connections among the ideas they have read. They also try to create visual images, based on descriptions in the text. Additionally, good readers outline and summarize material in their own words when they are reading textbooks (McDaniel et al., 1996). Students also become somewhat more accurate in assessing their performance after they gain experience in reading the text and after they receive feedback.

Suggestions for Improving Prospective Memory. Earlier in the chapter, we discussed numerous suggestions that you could use to aid your retrospective memory. You can use some of these internal strategies to aid your prospective memory as well.

For example, if you create a vivid, interactive mental image of a quart of milk, you might avoid driving past the grocery store in an absentminded fashion

The research demonstrates that imagery is especially effective when the items that must be recalled are shown interacting with each other

For example, if you want to remember the pair piano-toast, try to visualize a piano chewing a large piece of toast. In general, an interacting visual image is especially helpful if the image is bizarre. One reason that visualization mnemonics are effective is that they are motivating and interesting

one especially deep level of processing takes advantage of the self-reference effect, in which you enhance long-term memory by relating the material to your own experiences

For example, one of the reasons that I include demonstrations in this textbook is to provide you with personal experiences that focus on some of the important principles of cognitive psychology. If you read your textbook in a rel ective fashion, you'll try to think about how to apply major concepts to your own life. I'm hopeful, for instance, that this chapter will encourage you to see how memory strategies and metacognition can be helpful in many other college courses.

Giles Einstein and Mark McDaniel (2004) propose that you can learn and remember complex material more easily if you create and answer "why questions." To answer these questions, you must use deep processing to think about the meaning of the material and connect this new material with the information you already know.

For example, suppose that your American History professor requires you to learn the Ten Amendments in the U.S. Bill of Rights. Many people have trouble remembering the Third Amendment. According to this Amendment, when citizens are asked to provide housing and food for soldiers, these citizens must be paid appropriately. Think about why this amendment is difi cult to remember. It is more or less meaningless to most U.S. residents in the 21st century. We need to consider why this issue was important enough in American history to deserve one of the Ten Amendments. Einstein and McDaniel (2004) suggest that we should think about the citizens of that era. They had little money, and yet they had been forced to house and feed soldiers during the Revolutionary War. Now we can understand why this amendment was so necessary! When material seems difi cult to remember, asking "why" questions—or identifying even more generally why it is difi cult to remember—promotes deep processing, and thus promotes better memory.

One of the best ways to avoid prospective memory errors is to provide yourself with reminders to complete a task at a certain point of time in the future. These reminders, however, must be distinctive if you want to perform a prospective-memory task

For example, suppose you want to remember to give Tonya a message tomorrow. It won't be helpful just to rehearse her name or just to remind yourself that you have to convey a message. Instead, you must form a strong connection between these two components, linking both Tonya's name and the fact that you must give her a message.

Self-knowledge includes the topics in this chapter, as well as your knowledge about your social behavior and your personality. Furthermore, social psychologists are beginning to study people's metacognition about their attitudes (Rucker et al., 2011).

For example, you might wonder to yourself, "Maybe I like Pat and Devon because they look attractive, rather than because they are nice people."

Another problem here is that the participants are studying those word pairs while the correct responses are visible, so their prediction will probably be overly optimistic. Similarly, students who are reading a chapter in a textbook are often overconi dent that they can remember a concept when they are looking directly at a description of the concept

For example, you might write the English word on one side and the French word on the other side. Similarly, suppose that you have a psychology exam that will be based on a textbook. A good plan would be to read the material on a page, close the book, and summarize the information on that page. You may have a general idea about the material. However, when your book is closed, you may discover that you cannot provide specii c information. In any case, check to see if your answer is correct.

the encoding-specificity principle, which states that recall is often better if the context at the time of encoding matches the context at the time when your retrieval will be tested.

For example, you probably will not improve your grade if you decide to study for an upcoming exam by reviewing the material in the specii c classroom where you'll be taking this exam. However, the research on encoding specii city does provide some other more general strategies. For instance, when you are trying to devise study strategies, consider how you will be tested on your next examination Let's suppose that your exam will contain essays. This format requires you to recall information—not simply to recognize it. When you are learning the material, make an effort to quiz yourself periodically by closing your notebook and trying to recall the material on the pages you've just read

According to a theory proposed by Eleanor Rosch, we organize each category on the basis of a prototype. A prototype is the item that is the best, most typical example of a category; a prototype therefore is the ideal representative of this category. According to this prototype approach, you decide whether a particular item belongs to a category by comparing this item with a prototype. If the item is similar to the prototype, you include that item within this category

For example, you would conclude that a robin is a bird because it matches your ideal prototype for a bird. Suppose, however, that the item you are judging is quite different from the prototype, for example, a bee. In this case, you place the item in another category (the category "insect"), where it more closely resembles that category's prototype

For example, semantic memory includes general knowledge (e.g., "Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia"). It also includes lexical or language knowledge (e.g., "The word justice is related to the word equality"). In addition, semantic memory includes conceptual knowledge (e.g., "A square has four sides"). Semantic memory inl uences most of our cognitive activities

For instance, semantic memory helps us determine locations, read sentences, solve problems, and make decisions. Categories and concepts are essential components of semantic memory. In fact, you need to divide up the world into categories in order to make sense of your knowledge

Psychologists use the term concept to refer to your mental representations of a category. In other words, the physical category called "fruit" is stored as a mental representation distributed throughout your cerebral cortex.

For instance, you have a concept of "fruit," which refers to your mental representation of the objects in that category. Incidentally, I will follow the tradition in cognitive psychology of using italics for the actual word names (e.g., justice) and quotation marks for categories and concepts (e.g., "fruit").

The results of this study demonstrated that students spent the majority of their study time on the biographies that they considered easy, rather than those they considered difi cult. Notice that this strategy is wise, because they can master more material within the limited time frame. The take-home message from this and other studies is that when students are facing time pressure, they choose to study material that seems relatively easy to master

Furthermore, Metcalfe (2002) tested students who had expertise in a given area. Compared to novices, these "expert" students chose to concentrate their time on more challenging material.

Comparing Prospective and Retrospective Memory. Prospective memory is typically focused on action. In contrast, retrospective memory is most likely to focus on remembering information and ideas

Furthermore, the research on prospective memory is more likely to emphasize ecological validity. As discussed in Chapters 1 and 5, a study has ecological validity if the conditions in which the research is conducted are similar to the natural setting to which the results will be applied. In other words, researchers try to design tasks that resemble the kind of prospective-memory tasks we face in our daily lives.

metamemory, a topic that refers to people's knowledge, monitoring, and control of their memory. Metamemory is extremely important when you want to improve your memory

Have you ever completed an exam, handed it in, and felt pretty good about your performance on the exam, only to i nd out a week later that you scored a low C? If this sounds familiar, you already know that your metamemory is not always accurate in predicting your memory performance.

Tests don't only serve, however, as a means by which to evaluate the amount of knowledge that a student has acquired. It turns out that being tested on material also increases memory for the material. This phenomenon is referred to as the testing effect.

Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke (2006b) asked students to read short essays on a science-related topic. Then half of the students studied the same essays again. The other half took a test on the contents of the essay. They received a blank sheet of paper and wrote down as much as they could recall from the essay. They did not, however, receive feedback about the accuracy of their recall. During the last step of the study, everyone received a i nal test in which they wrote down their recall from the essay. Some students received this i nal test just 5 minutes after the last activity (either studying or taking the first test)

In their research, Brown and McNeill produced the tip-of-the-tongue state by giving people the dei nition for an uncommon English word—such as sampan, ambergris, or nepotism—and asking them to identify the word. Sometimes people supplied the appropriate word immediately, and other times they were coni dent that they did not know the word.

However, in still other cases, the dei nition produced a tip-of-the-tongue state. In these cases, the researchers asked people to provide words that resembled the target word in terms of sound, but not meaning. For example, when the target word was sampan, people provided these similar-sounding responses: Saipan, Siam, Cheyenne, sarong, sanching, and symphoon.

In other studies, students estimate their total scores after i nishing an exam. For example, Dunning and his coauthors (2003) asked students in a sophomorelevel psychology course to estimate the total score that they thought they had earned on an examination they had just completed. Then these researchers graded the test and divided the students into four groups, based on their actual test score.

However, the less competent students clearly overestimated their performance. Notice, for instance, that the students in the bottom quarter of the class overestimated their performance by about eight items. Ironically, less competent students are often not aware of their limitations (Dunlosky & Metcalfe, 2009). In other words, they do not know that they do not know the material!

elaboration

If you want to emphasize elaboration, you will concentrate on the specii c meaning of a particular concept; you'll also try to relate this concept to your prior knowledge and to interconnected concepts that you have already mastered. You should emphasize rich, elaborate encoding, for instance, by explaining a concept to yourself

despite their differences, prospective memory and retrospective memory are governed by some of the same variables. For example, your memory is more accurate for both kinds of memory tasks if you use both distinctive encoding and effective retrieval cues.

In addition, both kinds of memory are more accurate when you have only a short delay prior to retrieval. Also, prospective memory and retrospective memory show similar rates of forgetting, with the passage of time (Tobias, 2009). Finally, prospective memory relies on regions of the frontal lobe that also play a role in retrospective memory

rehearsal

In contrast, if you use simple rehearsal, or repeating the information you want to learn, you aren't likely to benei t much in terms of accurate recall at some later point in time

3. Different levels of categorization activate different regions of the brain. Neuroscience research using PET scans has examined whether different regions of the brain tend to process different category levels. On a typical trial, a participant might be asked to judge whether a word (e.g., toy, doll, or rag doll) matched a particular picture. This research showed that a superordinate term (e.g., toy) is more likely than a basic-level term (e.g., doll) to activate part of the prefrontal cortex. This i nding makes sense, because this part of the cortex processes language and associative memory. If you need to decide whether the picture of the doll qualii es as a toy, you must consult your memory about category membership.

In contrast, the research showed that subordinate terms (e.g., rag doll) are more likely than basic-level terms (e.g., doll) to activate part of the parietal region of the brain. The parietal lobe is active when you perform a visual search. Again, this i nding makes sense. To answer the question about a rag doll, you must shift your attention away from the general shape of the object. For example, you need to conduct a visual search, so that you can determine if the fabric and the style of the doll indeed permit it to be categorized as a "rag doll

So far, we have seen that people tend to be overconi dent when they estimate the total number of correct items. However, the situation is more hopeful when we measure metamemory in a different fashion

In fact, the research shows that people's metamemory can be highly accurate when they predict which individual items they'll remember and which ones they'll forget

Metamemory: Estimating the Accuracy for Total Score Versus the Accuracy for Individual Items. In general, people tend to be overconi dent if you ask them to predict their total score on a memory test. In contrast, people tend to be accurate if you ask them to predict which individual items they will remember and which ones they will forget.

In some of the metamemory studies, students begin by studying a list of paired associates, such as coat-sandwich. That is, when they see the word coat, they know that they must respond sandwich. Then the students are asked to predict the total number of correct responses they will supply on a later test. In this situation, they are likely to commit the foresight bias; they overestimate the number of answers they will correctly supply on a future test

Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues, as well as other researchers, have conducted numerous studies about the characteristics of prototypes. Their research demonstrates that all members of a category are not really equal.

Instead, a category tends to have a graded structure. A graded structure begins with the most representative or prototypical members, and it continues on through the category's nonprototypical members.

One particularly interesting i nding on metacomprehension is that an individual's perception of her or his reading skill is a strong predictor of metacomprehension accuracy during reading-related tasks

Kwon & Linderholm (2014) found that individuals who believed that they were skilled readers were more accurate assessors of whether or not they understood text passages. The authors also found that this data pattern remained true even after controlling for an individual's actual reading ability

Incidentally, you should notice that this task focuses on metacomprehension. The test would have assessed metamemory, rather than metacomprehension, if (1) There had been a delay between the reading task and the presentation of the multiple-choice questions and (2) If the essay was no longer present

Let's examine the results. When a student had answered a reading comprehension question correctly, he or she supplied an average certainty rating of 73%. In other words, the students were fairly coni dent about these items, which is appropriate. However, when a student answered a question incorrectly, he or she supplied an average certainty rating of about 64%. Unfortunately, this is about the same level of coni dence that the students showed for the items they answered correctly! Furthermore, these data suggest that students are often highly overconi dent. In general, the research shows that readers are not very accurate in estimating whether they have understood the material that they have just read

Charactersitic 1 In this procedure, participants are asked whether an item belongs to a particular category. The typicality effect occurs when people judge typical items (prototypes) faster than items that are not typical (nonprototypes). For instance, when judging whether items belong to the category "bird," people judge robin more quickly than penguin

Mervis and her colleagues (1976) examined some norms. These norms are based on examples that people had provided for categories such as "birds," "fruit," and "sports." Mervis and her colleagues then asked a different group of people to supply prototype ratings for each of these examples. According to a statistical analysis, the items that were rated most prototypical were the same items that people had supplied most frequently in the category norms. For instance, for the category "bird," people judged a robin to be very prototypical, and robin was very frequently listed as an example of the category "bird." In contrast, people rated a penguin as low on the prototype scale, and penguin was only rarely listed as an example of the category "bird." In other words, if someone asks you to name a member of a category, you will probably name a prototype.

Above, we reviewed evidence that students' estimates about their memory are generally more accurate under the following conditions: (1) when they predict their accuracy on individual test items, rather than total scores; (2) when they predict their accuracy after a delay, rather than immediately after seeing the items

Moreover, students who earn low scores on exams are likely to use no specii c memory strategies in learning material for an exam. In addition, students' awareness of their memory should help them identify which memory strategies work best for them and which ones are ineffective. However, students tend to believe that "all memory strategies are created equal" (Suzuki-Slakter, 1988). For example, students typically believe that simple repetition is just as effective as the keyword method

When you use a memory strategy, you perform mental activities that can help to improve your encoding and retrieval.

Most memory strategies help you remember something that you learned in the past.

Pressley and Ghatala (1988) tested introductory psychology students by assessing their metacomprehension, as well as their performance on tests of reading ability. Specii cally, these researchers selected reading-comprehension tests from the Scholastic Aptitude Test, an earlier form of the current SAT. If you took the SAT, you'll recall that the questions about reading comprehension typically contain between one and three paragraphs, in essay form. The essay remains visible while you answer several multiplechoice questions, so you do not need to rely on your memory. Each question has five possible answers. Therefore, a person who simply guesses on an answer would be correct 20% of the time.

Next, the students in Pressley and Ghatala's study answered the multiple-choice questions, and then they rated how certain they were that they had answered each question correctly. If they were absolutely certain that their answer had been correct, they were told to answer 100%. If they were just guessing, they were told to report 20%. They were also instructed to provide an appropriate intermediate percentage for intermediate levels of coni dence. These certainty rating served as the measure of metacomprehension.

Tasks involving prospective-memory actually include two components. First, you must establish that you intend to accomplish a particular task at some future time. Second, at that future time, you must fuli ll your original intention

Occasionally, the primary challenge is to remember the actual content of the action. You've probably experienced the feeling that you know you are supposed to do something, but you cannot remember what it is. However, most of the time, the primary challenge is simply to remember to perform an action in the future

levels of processing

One of the most useful general principles for memory improvement comes from the discussion about levels of processing. Specii cally, the research on levels of processing shows that you will generally recall information more accurately if you process it at a deep level, rather than a shallow level We noted that deep levels of processing facilitate learning because they require elaboration and distinctiveness. We i rst examine elaboration, followed by a focus on distinctiveness.

Serra and Dunlosky (2010) asked students to read a description about lightning storms. Some students read the passage with a photo of lightning accompanying each of six paragraphs. Other students read the same passage without any photos. Students in the six-photos group judged that their comprehension was higher, compared to students in the no-photos group. However, the two groups actually earned similar scores on a short-answer quiz.

Other research shows that irrelevant features may lead students to overestimate their understanding of a textbook passage.

A hierarchy is a system in which items are arranged in a series of classes, from the most general classes to the most specii c.

Others saw the same words, but the words were randomly scattered throughout the different positions in each tree. The group who had learned the organized structure recalled more than three times as many words as the group who learned the random structure. Structure and organization clearly enhance your recall on an exam

The feeling of knowing is the subjective experience that you know some information, but you cannot recall it right now. So, you contemplate the question, and you judge that you could recognize the answer, for example, if you saw this item on a multiple-choice exam

People typically have a strong feeling of knowing if they can retrieve a large amount of partial information. For example, I was recently thinking about how people can become captivated by reading i ction, and I recalled a wonderful essay that I had read in the New Yorker magazine. The author was an Indian woman, and she wrote that she didn't have many books during her early childhood in the United States. This essay described how she became enchanted with books once she started school. I knew that I had read one of this author's novels and some of her short stories. But what was her name? This name was not on the tip of my tongue, but I dei nitely had a "feeling of knowing"; I knew that I could recognize her name, if I had several choices. Fortunately, Google came to the rescue: I entered "Indian American women authors," and a website provided a list of 10 possible candidates. Aha! The seventh person on that list was Jhumpa Lahiri!

In the decades following the publication of Brown and McNeill's study, researchers have identii ed more information about the tip-of-the-tongue effect. The studies show, for instance, that young adults report having approximately one tip-of-the-tongue experience each week (Schwartz & Metcalfe, 2011). However, bilingual individuals experience the tip-of-the-tongue effect more frequently than monolinguals. One reason for this difference is that bilinguals have a greater total number of separate words in their semantic memory, compared to monolinguals

Researchers have also documented the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon in nonEnglish languages such as Polish, Japanese, and Italian. Research in these other languages demonstrates that people can retrieve other characteristics of the target word, in addition to its i rst letter and number of syllables. For example, Italian speakers can often retrieve the grammatical gender of the target word that they are seeking. Interestingly, the deaf community has a similar term, the tip-of-the-i nger effect, which refers to the subjective experience of knowing the target sign, but that sign is temporarily inaccessible

characteristic 3 Family resemblance means that no single attribute is shared by all examples of a concept; however, each example has at least one attribute in common with some other example of the concept

Rosch and Mervis (1975) examined the role of prototypes in family resemblance categories. They asked a group of students to make prototypicality judgments about members of several categories. As you can see in Table 8.1, for example, the students rated a car as being the most prototypical vehicle and a wheelchair as being the least prototypical vehicle on this list. Then, Rosch and Mervis asked a different group of people to list the attributes possessed by each item. The results showed that the most prototypical item also had the largest number of attributes in common with the other items in the category. For example, a car (the most prototypical vehicle) has wheels, moves horizontally, and uses fuel. In contrast, an elevator has relatively few attributes in common with other items.

2. Basic-level names are more likely to produce the semantic priming effect. Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues (1976) used a variant of the semantic priming task. In this version, the researchers present the name of an object, followed by two pictures. The participant must decide whether these two pictures are the same as one another. For example, you might hear the word apple and see pictures of two identical apples. The priming is effective because the presentation of this word allows you to create a mental representation of this word. This mental representation helps when you make the decision quickly

Rosch and her colleagues showed that priming with basic-level names was indeed helpful. The participants made faster judgments if they saw a basic-level term like apple before judging the apples. However, priming with superordinate names (such as fruit) was not helpful. Apparently, when you hear the word fruit, you create a general representation of fruit, rather than a specii c representation that helps you make a judgment about apples.

semantic memory refers to our organized knowledge about the world

Semantic memory is often contrasted with episodic memory, which contains information about events that happen to us. The distinction between semantic and episodic memory is not clear-cut.

Which of the following student provides the most accurate summary about the relationship between divided attention and memory

Shawn: "Divided attention can reduce your ability to process stimuli.

An external memory aid is dei ned as any device, external to yourself, that facilitates your memory in some way; helpful with prospective memory

Some examples of external memory aids include a shopping list, a rubber band around your wrist, and the ringing of an alarm clock, to remind you to make an important phone call at a specii ed time. Even using the calendar function on your cell phone to list things to be done and the times at which they are to be done constitutes an example of an external memory aid. The placement of your external memory aid is also important

In psychology courses, for instance, your exams require you to remember conceptual information about psychology, rather than a simple list of paired words. In addition, students in real-life settings have only a limited time to study for their exams

Son and Metcalfe (2000) addressed this discrepancy by designing a situation that more closely resembles the challenging learning situation that college students often face. Their test material was a series of eight encyclopedia-style biographies. A good reader would need about 60 minutes to read them all completely. However, the researchers increased the time pressure for this task by allowing the students only 30 minutes to read all the material. The students began the study by reading a single paragraph from each biography; they ranked these paragraphs in terms of their perceived difi culty. Then the researchers informed them that they would have 30 minutes to read the material, and they could choose how to spend their time.

One reason that distributed practice is helpful for long-term recall is that it introduces desirable difficulties, in other words, a learning situation that is somewhat challenging, but not too difi cult

Suppose that you need to learn some key concepts for a biology class. If you test yourself on one concept several times in a row, the concept will seem easy by your third or fourth repetition. In contrast, if you allow several minutes to pass before the second repetition, you'll pay more attention to that concept. In addition, the task will be slightly more difi cult because you will have begun to forget the concept

In reality, the tip-of-the-tongue effect and the feeling-of-knowing effect are fairly similar, though your tip-of-the-tongue experiences may be more extreme and more irritating

The current neuroimaging data suggest that these two effects are associated with somewhat different brain patterns. For example, the right prefrontal region of the cortex is more likely to be associated with the tip-of-the-tongue effect. In contrast, the left prefrontal region is more likely to be associated with the feelingof-knowing effect

In the keyword method, you identify an English word (the keyword) that sounds similar to the new word you want to learn. Then, you create an image that links the keyword with the meaning of this new word.

The research on the keyword method shows that it can help students who are trying to learn new English vocabulary words, vocabulary in another language, or people's names

characteristic 2 Prototypes are judged more quickly than nonprototypes, after semantic priming. The semantic priming effect means that people respond faster to an item if it was preceded by an item with similar meaning. The semantic priming effect helps cognitive psychologists understand important information about how we retrieve information from memory

The research shows that semantic priming facilitates people's responses to prototypes signii cantly more than it facilitates their responses to nonprototypes. Imagine, for example, that you are participating in a study on priming. Your task is to judge pairs of similar colors and to answer whether they are the same. On some occasions, you see the name of the color before you must judge the pair of colors; these are the primed trials. On other occasions, you do not see a color name as a "warning"; these are the unprimed trials. Rosch (1975) tried this priming setup for both prototype colors (e.g., a true, bright red) and nonprototype colors (e.g., a muddy red). Rosch's results showed that priming was very helpful when people made judgments about prototypical colors. Specii cally, they responded more quickly after primed trials than after nonprimed trials. However, priming actually inhibited the judgments for nonprototypical colors. In other words, if you see the word red, you expect to see a true, bright red color. However, if the color is a dark, muddy red, the priming offers no advantage. Instead, you actually need extra time in order to reconcile your image of a bright, vivid color with the muddy color you actually see on the screen.

Bahrick and Phelps (1987) had participants learn Spanish- English word pairs e.g. smile—sorinsa

The total amount of study time was held constant for all participants, although study episodes were spaced. Some participants studied again 1 day later whereas others had a second study session 30 days later. After even 8 years, participants in the 30 day condition retained signii cantly more English-Spanish word pairs than did the other participants. The spacing of practice or study sessions clearly confers advantages for memory retention relative to un-spaced (or crammed) study sessions.

Another imagery technique is based on establishing a series of familiar locations, such as the driveway, garage, and front door in a family home. Next you create a mental image of each item that you want to remember

Then you place a mental image of each item in one of those locations. This method is especially useful if you want to remember the items in a specified order

working memory

These limits would be relevant when professors speak too quickly or display their detailed PowerPoint slides too briel y. In such cases, components of the working memory system, such as the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketchpad, may become overly taxed as a result of too much input arriving via the auditory or visual input modalities. The result is likely to be that less information has a chance of making it into long-term memory. If you encounter these situations during lecture, i gure out how to respond strategically. You may want to complete the reading assignments before class in order to familiarize yourself with the concepts. If the professor makes the slides available before class, study them in advance. As an aside, I note here that research on the effects of having access to lecture slides before and during a lecture on exam performance is quite mixed. Some evidence suggests that no signii cant differences in exam performance are observed when students have access to the slides before lecture versus when they don't

The other main class of mnemonic strategies involves the key principles of organization. When people use mnemonics that involve organization, they try to bring systematic order to the material they want to learn.

This class of mnemonics necessitates the use deep processing to sort items into categories. Indeed, research suggests that when you have constructed a well-organized framework, retrieval efi ciency increases

One effective method for improving metacomprehension is to read a passage, wait a few minutes, and then try to explain the passage to yourself, without looking at the written passage

This procedure not only improves your judgment about how well you know the passage, but it should also increase your score on a test about this material Furthermore, when you use this kind of active reading, you are less likely to "zone out" and fail to notice that you are no longer paying attention to your reading

Nelson and Leonesio (1988) examined how students distribute their study time when they can study at their own pace. In their study, students were allowed a reasonable amount of time to study the material. The results were clear. Students allocated somewhat more study time for the items that they believed would be difi cult to master. The correlations here averaged about +.30. (A correlation of .00 would indicate no relationship, and a correlation of +1.00 would be a perfect correlation between each item's judged difi culty and its study time.

This research on metamemory reveals that people often take an active, strategic approach to this cognitive task, a i nding that is consistent with Theme 1 about active processing

Mnemonics are mental strategies designed to improve your memory

Visual imagery can be a powerful strategy for enhancing memory The results showed that people in the imagery condition recalled more than twice as many items when compared to the people in the repetition condition.

The memory-related concepts we have focused on up until this point involve retrospective memory, or remembering information that you acquired in the past. In contrast, we will now focus on prospective memory, or remembering that you need to do something in the future. Some typical prospective memory tasks include remembering to bring your research-methods book to class today, to pick up a friend at work this afternoon, and to submit your cognitive psychology homework assignment by noon next Wednesday.

What was mentioned above are for retrospective strategies for trying to remember studying material. These will be prospective and trying to remember the future. Can be applied when gaining knowledge. These errors are ranked among the most common types of memory lapses

Furthermore, Metcalfe (2002) tested students who had expertise in a given area. Compared to novices, these "expert" students chose to concentrate their time on more challenging material. The feeling-of-knowing effect describes the subjective experience of knowing some information, but you cannot recall it right now

What's similar about both of these effects? They both involve situations in which situations in which you know that you know something. Having knowledge that you know something is another example of metamemory

People do not tend to provide accurate memory estimates for individual items if they make these estimates immediately after learning the items. In contrast—if they delay their judgments—they are reasonably accurate in predicting which items they will recall

When you actually take the test, you will need to draw the answers from your long-term memory. In contrast, the immediate judgments would assess your working memory, which is less relevant for predicting your actual recall on an examination. These particular i ndings suggest an important practical application. Suppose that you are studying your notes for an exam, and you are trying to determine which of the topics need more work. Be sure to wait a few minutes before assessing your memory, because your metamemory is more likely to be accurate

According to the situated cognition approach, we make use of information in the immediate environment or situation. As a result, our knowledge often depends on the context that surrounds us

With respect to our general knowledge, we tend to code a concept in terms of the context in which we learned this information. Without these rich resources, it's often difi cult to transfer a concept from the classroom to the context of a real-life situation, as you may discover when you enter an art museum or when you try to use your Spanish if you travel to Latin America

According to the distributed-practice effect, you will remember more material if you spread your learning trials over time (spaced learning).

You'll remember less if you try "cramming," by learning the material all at once (massed learning).

Metacognition refers to your knowledge and control of your cognitive processes. One important function of metacognition is to supervise the way you select and use your memory strategies

Your knowledge about your cognitive processes can guide you in selecting strategies to improve your future cognitive performance. That is, because you understand the different types of memory (what they are, how they work, factors that inl uence encoding and retrieval, and so forth), you have the knowledge necessary to make conscious decisions about how to control or regulate your study strategies.

Levels of categorization As you continue to read the rest of this description of prototype theory, keep in mind that a prototype is not the same as a basic-level category. A prototype is the best example of a category. In contrast, a basic-level category refers to a category that is neither too general nor too specii c. Basic-level categories seem to have special status. In general, they are more useful than either superordinate-level categories or subordinate-level categories.

an object can be categorized at several different levels. Some category levels are called superordinate-level categories, which means that they are higher-level or more general categories. "Furniture," "animal," and "tool" are all examples of superordinate-level categories. Basic-level categories are moderately specii c. "Chair," "dog," and "screwdriver" are examples of basic-level categories. Finally, subordinate-level categories refer to lower-level or more specii c categories. "Desk chair," "collie," and "Phillips screwdriver" are examples of subordinate categories.

Metamemory, such as your knowledge of your knowledge of psychology while you are studying for a test is:

better after a few minutes delay

Studies of the accuracy of metacomprehension, such as involving college students as participants, reveal that

college students are not very accurate in their metacomprehension skills.

Which of the following research topics has implications concerning the use of memory improvement strategies? divided attention, levels of processing, encoding specificity

divided attention, levels of processing, encoding specificity all of the above

Suppose that you are studying for a biopsychology examination, and you decide to try asking yourself questions about why various structures in the central nervous system operate the way they do. According to the discussion of memory strategies, your technique would

encourage a deep level of processing.

The term metacognition is used to refer in a general way to a person's:

knowledge and control of cognitive processes

The general term referring to the use of mental strategies to improve a person's memory is:

mnemonics

When students are allowed to study various items at their own pace, they tend to spend

more time than necessary studying items they already know, and not enough time studying items they have not yet mastered.

Rosch (1973) also emphasizes that members of a category differ in their prototypicality, or the degree to which they are representative of their category. A robin and a sparrow are very prototypical birds, whereas an ostrich and a penguin are typically nonprototypes. However, the situated cognition approach emphasizes the importance of context and specii c situations. In the context of a zoo, for example, you might consider an ostrich and a penguin to be prototypical

ome classic earlier theories had proposed that an item could belong to a category as long as it possessed the appropriate necessary and sufi cient features (Markman, 1999; Minda & Smith, 2011). In those theories, category membership is very clear-cut. For example, for the category "bachelor," two dei ning features would be male and unmarried. However, don't you think that your 32-year-old unmarried male cousin would be a much better example of a bachelor than either your 2-year-old nephew or an elderly Catholic priest? All three individuals are indeed male and unmarried. Therefore, a "necessary and sufi cient" model would need to conclude that all three deserve to be categorized as "bachelors." That conclusion doesn't seem reasonable. In contrast, the prototype approach would argue that not all members of the category "bachelor" are created equal. Instead, your cousin is a more prototypical bachelor than your nephew or the priest

In an early experiment (Bower & Winzenz, 1970), people were asked to learn pairs of words (e.g., soap-mermaid). Some people were told to repeat the pairs silently to themselves (repetition condition), whereas other people were told to construct an image of the two words in vivid interaction with each other (imagery condition). A major finding was that:

people in the imagery condition subsequently recalled more of the items than did people in the repetition condition.

The use of an external memory aid (such as a shopping list, an alarm clock, a Post-it note, or a personal data assistant) is especially helpful in a situation that involves:

prospective memory

In one recent study, researchers found that when students are studying material under conditions of time pressure, they tend to study:

relatively easy material, which they are especially likely to master, instead of relatively difficult material.

According to the total time hypothesis, the amount of information that you learn depends on the total time you devote to learning. This hypothesis is generally true, although the relationship between study time and later recall ability isn't completely straightforward.

researchers have found that measuring "the number of hours spent studying" is not a predictor of a student's grade-point average. Instead, study time predicts grade-point average only when the researchers also assess the quality of study strategies (Plant et al., 2005). For instance, 1 hour spent actively learning the material—using deep levels of processing—will usually be more helpful than 2 hours spent reading information that you do not exert a great deal of effort to process. In sum, although overall time spent studying does not signii cantly correlate with overall GPA, research indicates that college students' study habits, study skills, and study attitudes are strong predictors of their grades in college

My students report that they often use informal external mnemonics to aid their prospective memory. When they want to remember to bring a book to class, they place it in a location where they will confront the book on the way to class. They also write reminders on the back of their hands

students describe the sea of colored sticky notes that decorate their dormitory rooms. These external memory aids are only helpful, however, if you can use them easily and if they successfully remind you of what you are supposed to remember

In one recent study (Dunning and his coauthors, 2003), students took a sophomorelevel psychology test, and then they estimated the score that they thought they had obtained. The results showed that

students with above-average scores estimated their scores fairly accurately, but students with below-average scores were overconfident in estimating how well they had done.

The testing effect refers to the finding that:

taking a test is an excellent way to enhance a person's long-term recall of academic material

As another example of memory benei ts experienced through deep processing of material, students learned more in a psychology course on personality theories if they had maintained a journal in which they applied various theories to personal friends, political i gures, and characters from television programs.

this case, students elaborated on the material and analyzed it in a complex, meaningful fashion, rather than simply rehearsing it.

Suppose that you need to learn some new vocabulary words in your French class and you plan to apply some of the memory strategies. If you decide to use deep levels of processing on this memory task, you would most likely

try to think of some way to connect each French word with its English translation

Chunking, in which

we combine several small units into larger units, is a basic organizational principle that eases the processing demands on working memory.

Another popular mnemonic that makes use of organization is the first-letter technique;

you take the first letter of each word you want to remember, and then you compose a word or a sentence from those letters. Maybe you learned the order of the colors of the rainbow by using the letters ROY G. BIV to recall Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. As you may have learned in a statistics class, the nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio scales conveniently spell noir, the French word for "black." Students frequently use i rst-letter mnemonics. Unfortunately, however, the laboratory research does not consistently show that this technique is effective For instance, suppose that you are experiencing a memory block for a certain term. If you know the i rst letter of that term, you'll be more likely to retrieve the item