Psych 203 Midterm 2
Which of the following systems is responsible for achieving and maintaining an alert state in the brain?
alerting
Laura suffered brain damage and now has difficulty identifying object. Specifically she can see individual features, but has a hard time assembling those features into complex wholes. She is likely suffering from:
apperceptive agnosia
In a traditional digit-span task, the capacity of working memory is estimated to be:
approximately seven chunks
English non-words (e.g., "HICE") are easier to perceive than strings of letters not resembling English words (e.g., "RSFK") because:
bigram detectors for more-common letter combinations fire more readily
If a memory is likely a city you want to travel to, and the retrieval paths you use to find memory are like highways that lead to a city, which is the best strategy for memorizing
build numerous highways that reach the city from many directions, so you have multiple ways to remember the answer later
Participants are shown a pair of similar pictures separated by a blank interval. The pictures are identical except for a single aspect (e.g., a man is wearing a hat in one scene but not in the other). In these kinds of tasks, participants often find it hard to detect the change. This phenomenon is known as
change blindness.
Top down processing
concept driven or knowledge drawn from previous experience influences your processing
Executive system
control voluntary actions
Bottom up processing
data driven or stimulus driven effects
Data indicate that, all things being equal, recall performance will be best if materials are encoded with processing:
deep
effective learning
depends on how the information will later be retrieved - acquisition and retrieval are interconnected
Orienting system
disengage attention from one target -> shift attention to a new target -> engage attention on the new target
In a study of visual selection, participants were shown a video of people throwing and catching a ball. Some of the people in the video were wearing white shirts and some were wearing black shirts. Participants were asked to attend only to the group of people wearing white shirts and count the number of times they threw the ball. In this study, participants
easily completed the task, but in the process failed to notice some other peculiar events that occurred.
Prospagnosia
face blindness, occurs in the fusiform face area (FFA)
Inattentional Blindness
failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere (focusing on one task while ignoring the other) - ie participants asked to stare at the dot in the middle so if you look at the graph if given warning they see changes, but if not given warning they do not notice as much (shows the difference between inattentional blindness and selective attention) - important because it is not that we don't see things, it is that we do not pay attention to things - we choose not to process it
frequency effect
frequent firing results in higher starting activation - an "exercise effect"
Autobiographical memory
general characteristics: - memories about a person's life, emotional, impact? flashbulb memories: - high confidence and vividness, error prone, still susceptible to decay and forgetting
semantic memory
general knowledge
New learning
grounded in previously learned (stored) knowledge. - acquisition and storage are interconnected
As a general rule, the intention to learn:
has no direct effect on learning
Compared to detectors that have not fired recently, a detector that has fired recently is likely to:
have a higher activation level
unattended channel
ignore the other input, the information from this channel is not always gone
One effect of chunking is to
increase the amount of material that can be held in working memory
In a feature net model, knowledge of spelling patterns:
is distributed across the model, and therefore the knowledge is detectable only in the overall functioning of the network
Executive control is likely engaged in all of the following situations EXCEPT when a person
is working on "auto-pilot."
Reading your notes, or the textbook, over and over again is NOT recommended as a study strategy because
it is a passive form of learning
Attended Channel
listen to this input in one ear
Alerting system
maintain alert state in the brain
episodic memory
memory for a specific event
A feature net is a:
network of cognitive "detectors" organized in hierarchical layers
serial position effect
our tendency to recall best the last and first items in a list - the primacy effect is responsible for what we remember at the beginning - the recency effect is responsible for what we remember at the end and it is more influential than the primacy effect
"Super recognizers"
people who are very very good and identifying faces but have no other perceptual or memory based advantages
holistic perception
perception of the overall configuration rather than an assemblage of parts
We could avoid making word-recognition mistakes if we scrutinized each letter on the page. Though, this sort of letter-by-letter reading would be problematic because:
reading would be very slow
shadowing
repeat out loud the information from the attended channel
deep processing
requires thinking about the meaning of the material - ex. does the word DOG fit in the sentence, "he walked his_______."?
The frontal lobe has many functions. Which of the following is LEAST strongly associated with the frontal lobe?
shape processing
Patients with unilateral neglect ignore one side of their visual field. This problem illustrates the importance of
space-based attention
Operational definition
states the procedures by which you will measure the dependent variable, how you will measure it
Different forms of priming can be distinguished in several ways. For example, the effects of ________ priming can be observed almost immediately after the relevant cue is provided; in contrast, the effects of ________ priming require a half-second or so to appear after the relevant cue.
stimulus-based; expectation-based
shallow processing
superficial engagement with the material - ex. is the word DOG in capital or lower-case letters
If two groups of children with anxiety disorder are given either (i) a teddy bear or (ii) a puzzle game, and the heart-rate of children is used as the measure of how well the toys did, then:
teddy bear vs. puzzle game is the independent variable, and heart rate is the dependent variable.
inattentional deafness
the auditory corollary
When asked to recall a list of 25 words, participants are likely to remember only some of them. The words they can recall are likely to include:
the first few words on the list and also the last few words on the list
inattentional numbness
the haptic corollary
The strategy of maintenance rehearsal involves:
the repetition of the items to be remembered, with little attention paid to what the items mean
Maintenance rehearsal:
thinking about the material in a rote, mechanical way; repetition, with little thought about what it means
Imagine you are putting together a puzzle. You have a broad idea of what the finished puzzle will look like, and you're guided by that idea as you work. Your broad idea is acting as a:
top-down influence
Tasks involving dichotic listening are tasks in which
two different auditory messages are presented, one to each ear.
implicit memory
unconscious awareness... - priming, procedural, perceptual learning, classical conditioning
Which of the following is NOT an attribute of working memory?
unlimited storage capacity
Context matters in recognition
"H" in "the" and "A" in "cat" are the same shape but we perceive them differently with the context
Benefit of feature detection
- "increases the load of our object recognition" - this could mean that it allows us to recognize more objects, more at a time ??
Early selection hypothesis
- Only the attended input is analyzed and perceived - unattended information receives little or no analysis (it never perceived)
Working memory capacity correlates strongly with
- Standardized academic tests - Reasoning tests - Reading comprehension tests
Word Recognition
- Words are objects - Feature combination - Frequency matters - Well-formedness matters: - Better memory of letters with a word Ex. "DARK" is briefly presented and the participant is asked whether an "E" or a "K" was present in the display - Participants are more accurate when the letters appear within a word than when they appear by themselves or within a random letter string such as "JESRW"
recency effect
- a "warm up" effect - recent firing results in higher starting activation
Late selection hypothesis
- all inputs are analyzed - selection occurs after analysis - only the attended input reaches consciousness - i.e. unconscious processing plays a factor, background changes affect you even if you don't consciously notice it --looks longer due to the pictures next to it
Feature Networks
- all this is distributed knowledge - knowledge is NOT locally represented - i.e. there is not a single part that we can go to find the perception area for cups - each detector has an action level that increases with input - detectors "fire" when their response threshold is reached
Participants are shown the letter string TPUM for 30 ms and asked to identify what they saw. If they answer incorrectly, which response are they most likely to give?
TRUM
Associative Agnosia
Patients are unable to recognize an object despite intact perception of the object; they can draw a copy of the object but cannot name it (associative deficit) ...language issue
Tests to differentiate between different agnosias
Present them with objects and see if they can identify the properties of the objects - if you cannot draw the object, you cannot process it visually - sign of apperceptive agnosia - if you can draw it and you show them the picture you drew but you cannot name it - sign of associative agnosia
Recognition via multiple views model
Proposes that object recognition depends on viewing perspective
Apperceptive Agnosia
a failure to understand the meaning of objects due to a deficit at the level of object perception...cannot describe the properties or name of the object ...visual issue
The word-superiority effect refers to the fact that it is easier to recognize:
a letter within the context of a word than it is to recognize a letter presented by itself
how divided attention works
- between-task interference increases as a task similarity increases - interference is also evident when concurrent tasks are quite different, however - tasks will interfere with each other if their combined demand for a resource is greater than the amount of the resource that is available
Features of what you're recognizing matter
- building blocks (feature detectors and neural correlates) - commonalities for variable objects - play a role in visual search
unilateral neglect syndrome
- cannot sense one side of the world - ie leaving half the food on their plate, or drawing only half the picture - depends on different factors: age, areas injured, size of stroke, other cognitive skills, certain skills they already had - can do stuff w both hands, but can only do stuff on one side that varies based on person
Executive function and how its related to attention
- control one's thoughts - keep goals in mind - organize mental steps - shift plans and change strategy - inhibit automatic responses - strongly connected with working memory - prefrontal cortex
Selective Attention
- focusing on one task while processing the other on a minimal level - adv: it would be too tiring to pay attention to everything all the time
Concept of speed
- has different effects on primacy and recency - this is worse for primacy because primacy depends on rehearsal and earlier items are rehearsed more. but if rushed, there is less time for rehearsal
Concept of delay
- has different effects on primacy and recency - this is worse for recency because time is the enemy of the working memory since it is in there for a limited amount of time
Dichotic listening
- if messages are given to each ear, by focusing on one message, details of the other message will be missed - significant changes of the audio not paid attention to might be noticed (pitch, speed, repetition)
high validity vs low validity
- in high validity, it was more than 80% accurate so participants trusted this stimulus more - in low validity condition it was less accurate so participants trusted this stimulus less - thus the cost of being misled is lower for the low validity stimulus because you do not "trust" the prime as much
Limit of working memory
- individuals can differ in WM capacity - using the digit-span task, average WM capacity is estimated at 7 plus=or-minus 2 items
short term memory
- largely replaced by working memory - understood as a status or activity rather than a place - more passive, item existing in your head
recency effect
- last few items in the list are still held in working memory - earlier items are displaced by subsequent items
How both models can be correct:
- left occipital cortex: evidence for viewpoint-independence - right occipital cortex: evidence for viewpoint-dependence - the perceiver's task may determine whether viewpoint matters - perceiver's task can determine whether viewpoint matters: 1. independence: is this a cup? 2. dependence: is this the cup I showed you before?
primacy effect
- memory rehearsal - as the list progresses, attention is divided across more items and less is devoted to each individual item - words later in the list are rehearsed less than earlier items - rehearsal increases the chance there will be a transfer of items from working memory to LTM - earlier items rehearsed more, so there is a greater chance of transfer
Time effects on LTM
- once stored in LTM, time should not affect it
Change blindness example
- people carrying the door and exchanging people and during this the guy that was giving instructions did not notice it was someone else - it could be that participants literally do not perceive the stimuli (a limit of perception) - or it could also be that participants perceived the stimuli but immediately forgot it (a limit of memory)
Conclusions on priming and frequency of words
- people recognize high freq words more than low freq - More frequently used words are more easily recognized. Priming significantly increases the recognition of high-frequency words, and has an even more significant effect on recognition of low-frequency words.
sensory memory (iconic or echoic)
- sensory memory plays a role in modern theorizing
chunking
- the ability to condense information i.e. for example H O P T R A S L U (nine items) i.e. HOP TAR SLU (three chunks) - requires effort but reduces WM load
Priming cost
- there is a cost of being misled when you "trust" the prime
Rational or elaborative rehearsal
- thinking about the material in terms of meaning, relating the items to each other and to what one already knows - Relational rehearsal is superior to maintenance rehearsal - Repeated exposure does not guarantee memory - Thinking of what the items mean
3 x 3 Design Experiment
- two independent vars and and 3 levels - freq (3) x priming (2) - freq is high, med, low and priming is unprimed, primed
2 x 2 Design Experiment
- two independent vars with two levels each - freq (2) x priming (2) - freq is high, low and priming is unprimed, primed
Clive Wearing - Amnesia from a viral infection
- unable to form new memories - can remember skill sets (how to play music etc) - remembers his wife - short term memory restricted to anywhere around 7-30 seconds in his immediate past - existing short term memories are promptly forgotten
working memory
- what is currently being worked on in your head, active processing is occurring - what will you do with the item in your hand/what can you do with it
Gorilla in the Passing Video
- what we pay attention to matters because in this study it affects whether or not you see the gorilla walking through - we are not primed to see a gorilla so we do not recognize it when it comes across our vision
Cocktail Party Effect
- when in conversation with a person, you don't notice conversations around you until your name or another important piece of info catches your attention - increased by frequency effect and context - this is evidence that not all the information from the other channel is gone (there is some minimal processing happening)
Why does practice improve performance?
-Practice skills require fewer resources or less frequent use of resources -this leads to a decrease in interference between tasks - automaticity describes tasks that are well practiced and require little or no executive control
Working memory vs long term memory
1. WM stores information currently being thought about; LTM stores all the information that one knows 2. WM is limited in capacity; LTM is great in capacity (contains all your knowledge) 3. WM is easily loaded and accessed; LTM is less easily loaded and accessed 4. WM is fragile and easily displaced by new thoughts/inputs; LTM is more enduring
One way to frame learning and memory
1. acquisition - ex: rice student trying to remember new vocab word, exposed to word 2. storage - ex: repetition of word stores definition of word 3. retrieval - ex: later during test or discussion, the memory of the definition is brought up through association another analogy: creating, storing and opening a computer file - these three things must interact
Expectation-driven priming
1. effortful and deliberate 2. goal oriented
Repetition Priming
1. stimulus-based 2. requires no effort or cognitive resources 3. ex. hearing your name on an unattended channel
Recognition by components (RBC) model
Applies the feature net model to recognition of three-dimensional objects
Participants are shown a visual stimulus for just 30 ms and then are asked, "Was there an E or a K in the stimulus?" We would expect the best performance if the stimulus is:
BARK
Imagine you are shown the word "dog" and asked one of the following questions about that word. Which of these questions is going to lead to the best memory performance ?
Does it fit into the following sentence: "The speeding car swung around the corner, music blaring and screeched to a halt before seeing the____"?
Neural correlates
Orienting System, Alerting System, Executive System --> together form the control system - different regional connections - prefrontal area is very important for executive function
Where is retrieval from LTM vs WM
LTM: activates the hippocampus WM: activates the perirhinal cortex
Distinct word error types
Likely error: DPUM can be misread as DRUM due to top down processing Unlikely error: DRUM misread as DPUM - thus well-formedness matters
Leaking
One proposal is that we block unattended inputs with a filter - shield from (already identified) distractors - but allow processing of desired stimuli
