Cognitive Psychology Exam 2

Describe the methods and results of the two studies by Loftus discussed in class that dealt with eyewitness testimony.

1. Participants were shown a film of a car on a country road. Half of them were asked how fast the car was going, and the other half were asked how fast the car was going when it passed the barn. There was no barn actually present. A week later, the subjects in the second group were much more likely to remember seeing a barn. 2. Participants were shown a film of an auto accident, and asked to estimate how fast the car was going. When questioned, the experimenter used the word "hit" "bumped" or "smashed." When they said smashed, the participants were merely likely to have seen broken glass.

Describe the methods and results of 3 different experiments that support the functional-equivalency hypothesis

1. size and shape: asked S's to picture rabbit next to fly or elephant to manipulate the size of mental image, and then asked questions about the details of the rabbit. size of the image affected response time) 2. image scanning (memorize a picture of an island, it took longer to answer a question the further you had to travel on a map from place to place) 3. mental rotation (it takes longer to mentally rotate an image the further rotated it is)

What were the 3 different hypotheses proposed by Sternberg about how we search STM? What would the graphs of the data look like for each of the 3 hypotheses?

3 hypothesis for how we search STM: Parallel (all at once) - data set a straight line Serially self-terminating (one at a time, stop @ target) - data set for no twice as high as yes Serially exhaustive (one at a time through entire set) - data set for yes and no equally as high

What is the duration of STM?

3 seconds - 80% 18 seconds - 7%

What is the capacity of STM?

7 (plus or minus 2) meaningful chunks of information

Describe the hierarchical semantic network and how information is organized in LTM.

A hierarchical network model categorizes objects from more general to more specific. Facts or properties are stored at the highest appropriate level, and assumed to be true for all lower nodes.

Propositional Theory

Abstract propositions that are units of meaning we don't store exact replica pictures, we store general ideas

ACT models

Adaptive control of thought. Able to distinguish between three types of memory systems: Declarative Procedural Working

encoding specificity principle

At the time of recall, it is a great advantage to have the same context available as when the material was originally learned (or encoded)

Echoic Memory

Auditory memory, lasts about 4-20 seconds (4 for sure) Capacity was larger

Concept vs Category

Concept - a general idea about what something is Category - a list of things

Describe the spreading activation model and how information is organized in LTM.

Concepts are represented by nodes, which are all connected to one another. Only one node can be activated at a time, but once activated, the nodes send activation to the nodes in parallel.

How is sensory memory lost?

Decay

How is Short-Term memory lost?

Displacement

Episodic Memory

Events in which you participated Example: Everyone eating cake in my apartment for my bday

Declarative Memory

Facts, information, ideas Example: semantic memory, episodic memory, things you have learned or thought about

Semantic Memory

General knowledge Example: Abraham Lincoln is the 16th president of the USA

Procedural Memory

How to do things Example: How to make a cup of tea

Define the relational-organizational hypothesis. Give an example that supports this hypothesis

Imagery improves memory because imagery produces more associations between the items to be recalled. (memory better when you can visualize them interacting) Think of the paired-associate task, or the pegwords we memorized in class. Forming an image of the two items interacting is better than just forming two separate mental images of the items (it gives you more to recall).

How are implicit and explicit memories affected in amnesiacs?

Implicit memories are a lot less affected (????)

How is Long-Term memory lost / unable to be accessed?

Interference (during recall) New memories impair retrieval of old memories, and vice versa

.Describe the methods and results of the Loftus and Pickrell discussed in class that dealt with false memories.

Interviewed relatives to learn stories about subject when they were young. Generated 3 true stories and 1 false stories. 68% said they remembered the true stories, 25% said that they remembered the false stories. When questioned a week later, false stories moved up to 29%.

Encoding variability

It is best to encode in a variety of ways, to attach a wider variety of memory cues to material Spacing practice sessions allows for more variability

The spacing effect

It's better to study for several shorter periods than for one longer period

Iconic or Sensory Memory - what is its capacity and duration?

Lasts about 250ms (can hold about 9 items)

Describe how you would run an experiment to test for retroactive interference.

Learn List A-B Learn List A-C List A-B

Describe how you would run an experiment to test for proactive interference.

Learn List A-B / Spanish Learn List A-C / Greek List A-C / Spanish interferes with your Greek

Retrograde amnesia

Loss of memory for information stored before the point of memory loss. Spares "over learned" information and skills

How is STM coded?

Mainly Acoustic (auditorially)

Recency Effect Experiment

Manipulated the delay before S's were asked to recall. If they had to wait several seconds before writing down the letters, they lost the last several items due to decay

Primacy Effect Experiment

Manipulated the speed of the letters - only 1 second per word made it impossible to rehearse the letters and store them in LTM

Implicit Memory

Memories we don't deliberately remember or reflect on consciously, but are shown in other ways

Describe the methods and results of the Craik and Lockhart study on levels of processing.

Method: Participants are exposed to a word and asked a question about whether it is capital letters, whether it rhymes, or a question about the meaning. They are unaware that they are going to be asked to recall the words later. Results: Things processed at a deeper level are more easily recalled. Semantic is deepest, followed by phonemic and graphemic. Semantic - meaning Phonemic - Sound Graphemic - Visual

Describe the methods and results of the Reber (1965) experiment in whichparticipants learned an artificial grammar system.

Method: S's were taught artificial grammar system by being shown strings of letters (fake words). They had better retention for grammatical than ungrammatical strings. The S's couldn't identify any partners, but implicitly knew when strings fit the rules (i.e., when they were exemplars)

Describe the methods and results of the Waugh & Norman (1965) study that was conducted to find out whether forgetting in STM is due to decay or interference.

Method: They presented strings of up to 16 letters, each letter presented once except for a "probe" letter. When the letter was repeated, the participants had to name the letter presented just after the probe. The # of letters between probes varied. They found that the higher number of interfering items, the worse the participants were able to recall. Another variable was the rate at which the letters were presented (1 or 4 letters per second) and found that there was little different between 2 rates. It got worse with the number of items no matter how fast they were presented. Therefore, the forgetting was due to interference, not decay.

Name and give an example of the 3 levels of categorization

Nominal-kind concepts have clear definitions. An example is an odd number. Natural -kind concepts naturally occur in the environment, such as rain or trees or birds. Artifact concepts are constructed to serve some function, such as a hairbrush

Describe the Methods and Results of the Posner Study

Participants had to identify if 2 letters were the same or different letters. The response type was greater when the letters were one capital one lowercase (Aa) than if they were the same (AA). The first thing we process is visual The second we process is verbal/auditory Fser

Describe the experiment in which people had to draw pictures they had seen after they were labelled with one of two different names. Which theory did that experiment support?

Participants were shown a picture with one of two labels. Later, when asked to redraw the picture, the label they had read heavily influenced how they remembered the picture. This supports the propositional theory. We don't take exact snapshot pictures and store them in our memory, we store ideas of what they look like.

Describe 3 phenomena that support the notion that the phonological loop plays a major part in rehearsal of information.

Phonological suppression: When S repeats simple word out loud while learning list of words, retention inhibited Phonological confusion: S's confuse letters if they sound alike but not look alike Word length: S's learn more words if fewer syllables

Give an example of a type of question or experiment that was used to support the notion of the spreading activation model.

Priming

Reconstructive Memory

Retelling of stories leads to distortions in what is remembered. Eyewitness memory is subject to distortion when leading questions are asked.

Give an example of a type of question or experiment that was used to support the notion of the hierarchical network.

S's were given statements that they had to say yes or no to, and experimenters measured response time. It took S's longer to confirm if they had to jump up more levels. For example, "Robin is an animal" took longer than "Robin is a bird." Disclaimer: There were some cases that did not work as well, such as "a dog is an animal" was quicker than "a dog is a mammal", perhaps because the concept of mammals is less familiar to us. Disclaimer: Things that are typical also process faster than things that are atypical "robin is a bird" is faster than "turkey is a bird"

Describe and give an example of a schema and a script.

Schema: a large unit of organized information used for representing concepts, situations, and events Example: A schema for parties Script: a schema for a routine event, such as going to the dentist, or folding your laundry

Describe the methods and results of the experiment run with scuba divers that demonstrated encoding specificity.

Scuba divers studied a list of items either underwater, or on land. Later, when forced to recall the items, they remembered them better in whichever environment they learned them.

Describe the methods of the Sternberg task.

Sternberg presented a memory set, then a single letter. Subjects responded ASAP whether the letter was a part of the memory set. The size of the memory set varied.

Experiment that supports dual-coding (Brooks 1968)

Subjects were assigned to one of two tasks. 1) trace along an F, and at each corner, say whether it was an extreme corner or inside corner (say yes or no). Either they had to say yes or no, or point at a word yes or no on a sheet of paper. Subjects were faster at saying yes or no because it was verbal code that would not interfere with visual task. (only a certain amount of resources available for visual task). 2. Other people had to look at a sentence and say whether each word was a noun (yes or no). S's were faster at pointing to yes or no, because it they were using their verbal resources on the sentence and it was faster to use a visual response.

Three Levels of Classification

Superordinate Basic Level Subordinate Animal, Dog, Chihuahua Fruit, Apple, Granny Smith Clothes, Pants, Black Mom Jeans

The testing effect

Taking tests on material improves learning (enhanced memory after retrieving, rather than simply rereading, information)

Describe the Brown - Peterson Task

The Brown-Peterson Task designed an experiment to measure the duration of STM. They presented a three-consonant trigram to their participants, and then assigned them a task that would take a lot of attention (counting backwards by 3's). After a specific amount of time, they asked the participant to recall their original 3 consonants. "How long can you hold something in your short term memory without being able to rehearse it?"

Describe the dual-coding hypothesis and how it describes the wayinformation is stored in LTM.

The LTM memory contains two distinct coding systems: visual, and verbal. Memory is best when we construct both types of codes for an item. For example, concrete nouns are better recalled than abstract nouns, because they allow for both types of coding.

The classical view of concepts

The classical proposal claims that concepts are a set of (necessary and sufficient) features. Some problems with this theory is that it doesn't explain typicality effects, that people do not always agree with category membership, and have a hard time deciding what features belong to each concept.

Define the exemplar view of concepts.

The exemplar proposal explains that concepts include representations of a specific instance or example, rather than just an idealized prototype. This idea of supported by Reber's 1965 test, where subjects implicitly recognized artificial grammar concepts.

Partial Report vs Full Report Experiment

The first method was a "full report." Participants were shown a 9x9 square of letters for 50ms, and then asked to name as many letters as they could.The results: they could name about 4 or 5 letters. The second method was a partial report. Participants were shown the 9x9 square of letters, and then a tone afterwards indicated a specific row in a 9x9 square that they had to name. Results: participants could usually name all three letters in whichever row was indicated. This led to the discovery that the problem with naming the letters was not the capacity of the STM, but the decay of the information.

Anterograde amnesia

The inability to learn new information after the initial point of memory loss. Old memories in LTM remain intact. General knowledge and skills remain intact.

the prototype view of concepts

The prototype view states that concepts are represented by a mental prototype or an idealized representation.

Which hypothesis was supported by the results of the Sternberg task?

The serially exhaustive hypothesis is supported by the Sternberg task

What are some problems with the hierarchical network model that arebetter explained by the spreading activation model?

The spreading activation model explains typicality and exemplar effects better than the hierarchical model. Typicality: Some category members are better examples of a category than others. For example, most people would agree that a blue jay is a better example of a bird than a penguin. Not because we have a preference for blue jays over penguins, but because of the typicality of each bird. (typicality gets faster response times) Exemplar effects:

Name and define the 4 components of working memory.

Visuospatial sketchpad: visual information Central Executive: controls operations Phonological loop: auditory information The Episodic buffer: Facilitates the transfer of info into and from LTM

Describe the rate of forgetting of information according to the forgetting curve proposed by Ebbinghaus.

We forget the majority of information within the first 8 hours, and then it gradually levels off to about 25%

How do our mental maps differ from reality?

We like to make our mental representations much "neater" and "more perfect" than they really are.

Retroactive interference

When new material interferes with your ability to remember old material

Proactive interference

When old information interferes with your ability to learn new information

functional equivalence hypothesis

belief that although visual imagery is not identical to visual perception, it is functionally equivalent to it. if we had to do some sort of action with our mental image, we would do it equivalently to how we would manipulate an actual object in real life. - there is a functional relationship between objects in our memory, and in the real world

Explicit Memory

memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and "declare"

Serial Position Effect

our tendency to recall best the last and first items in a list

Primacy Effect

tendency to remember words at the beginning of a list especially well. occurs because there is more time for rehearsal and transfer into the LTM, while later items compete for resources.

Recency Effect

tendency to remember words at the end of a list especially well. occurs because the last few words are still present in the STM