MEMORY, TECHNOLOGY, EMOTION, & COGNITION VOCAB

confirmation bias

is a cognitive bias where people search for, interpret, and remember info in a way that confirms their pre existing beliefs or hypotheses, while ignoring contradictory evidence.

self concept

refers to our view of who we are

Baumeister (1999)

laboratory experiment

aim: to investigate whether applying self control in one task can reduces the ability to use self control in a subsequent task.

procedure: participants were brought into a lab that smelled strongly of freshly baked cookies. they were randomly divided into two groups. 1) the cookie group ate all the cookies. 2) the radish group were only allowed to eat radishes while resisting cookies. afterward, the participants were given an unsolvable puzzle task. researchers measured how long participants persisted before giving up.

IV: cookie vs radish groups

DV: time spent or persistence on the puzzle task

overall, participants in the radish group gave up on the puzzle much faster than the cookie group. ultimately, applying self control in the first task (resisting cookies) depleted mental resources, leaving less willpower for the second task (puzzle persistence). 

self esteem

refers to our emotional response to our self concept

social comparison theory (Festinger 1954) 

suggests that there is a drive within individuals to have accurate self evaluations. when objective standards aren’t avaliable, they compare themselves to others to asesses their standing. 

upwards comparisons - comparisons where we deem the experience, behavior, and characteristics of others to be preferable to or better than our own.

downwards comparisons or negative cognitive bias - comparing yourself to someone worse off. can boost your self esteem but, may reduce motivation to improve. 

Chou and Edge (2014)

correlational study or survey 

aim: to test ihe influence of the avalibility heuristic on how Facebook users evaluate themselves in comparison to other people. 

procedure: participants from U.S univeristy students.  they were surveyed about 1) their facebook usage like how much time spent and how frequently on the app. 2) their perception of others people’s lives likewhether others were “happier” or had “better lives” than themselves. researchers analyzed correlations between facebook use and perceptions of others. ]

IV: facebook use measured

DV: perceptions of others lives  

findings: participants who spent more time on facebook were more likely to believe that 1) others were happier than they were.  2) others had better lives than they did. participants who spent more time with friends in real life were less likely to report these negative comparisons. futher, on social media people usually posts highlights, leading to upward comparisons which makes the viewer feel worse about themselves. 

to conclude, facebook can distort perceptions of reality. it supports the social comparison theory: when lacking objectives measures, people tend to compare themselves to others, upward comparison. this shows how modern technolgy amplfies this bias. 

prefronal cortex

is involved in strategic plannning, decision making, and cognitive control.

hippocampus

is involved in memory formation, with the right hippocampus being particularly involved in spatial navigation.

cerebellum 

is involved in fine motor function 

transactive memory systems

is when people in relationships have a division of labor with specific roles with regard to the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information from different knowledge domains.

Sparrow et al, 2011

lab experiment 

aim: to investigate how the availability of online information influences memory and information recall.

procedure: participants were asked to type 40 triva facts into the computer. 1) half were told the computer would save the information. 2) half were told the information would be deleted. later, the participants were asked to recall the triva facts.

IV: whether participants believed info would be saved vs deleted. (2×2 independent sample design - here were two conditions; in each condition, there were two independent variables that were manipulated).

DV: recall of triva facts vs remembering the source. 

findings: people who thought the information would be saved had worse recall of the trivia itself. instead, they were better at remembering where the information was stored. futher, those who thought the information would be deleted remembered more facts. 

ultimately, people are less likely to remember information itself if they believe it will be accesible later. since memory adapts to remember where to find information aka transactive memory. this exemplifies how technology changes our cognitive processes and we rely on digital devices as an “external memory system”. 

reception context

the social, cultural, and situational environment in which information is recieved, which shapes how information is interpreted, remembered, and responded to.

Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014)

experimental design with an independent sample. 

aim: to investigate whether taking notes by hand leads to better learning theoretcial understanding than taking notes on a laptop.

procedure: college volunteer students watched a series of 4 lectures and took notes on each either by typing or hand. participants were afterwards told they would be tested on the context in about one week and would not be able to take their notes home with them. each participant watched the lectures on a private monitor and headphones to avoid distractions. futhermore, the two conditions were randomly divided into two more conditions. 1) in the “study” condition (note takers), the participants were given 10 minutes to study their notes before being tested. 2) in the “no study” condititon (laptop users), the participants were immediately tested without a chance to review their notes. there were 40 questions - 10 for each lecture the questions were categorized by the researchers into "factual" questions and "conceptual" questions. 

IV: note taking method 

DV: the test performance 

findings: taking notes longhand leads to better conceptual understanding and recall than taking notes on a laptop. this is because longhand note-takers process the information more deeply and are less likely to transcribe notes verbatim, which is a common ineffective strategy for laptop users. laptop users often engage in shallower processing, which results in worse performance on conceptual questions and longer term recall. to conclude, taking notes by hand encourages deeper processing, whuch improves conceptual learning. laptop note takers, while faster, often leads to shallow processing due to verbatim transcription. 

Kramer et al (2014)

field experiment

aim: to investigate the idea that information in an individuals facebook feed could cause emotional contragion - the tranfer of emotional state from one person to another.

procedure: researchers manipulated the news content feed of participants of about 689,000 facebook users for one week. some participants saw reduced positive posts from their friends, others saw reduced negative posts. one control group saw no manipulation. researchers then analyzed the participants own posts to see if their emotional expression has changed.

IV: the type of emotional content being manipulated in the facebook users news feed (positive, negative, or neither).

DV: emotional screen of participants own posts (posiitive vs negative words).

findings: when participants had a postive content of their news feed reduced, they were less likey to use positive language in their own posts. but, when participants had the negative content of their news feed reduced, they were less likely to use negative language in their own posts. to conclude, the emotional content to which they were exposed of through facebook does indeed affect our emotional state; when we see few positive posts we are less likey to post positive events or positive opinions of our own.

the social desirability effect

when people change their responses in either research, surveys, or interviews to present themsleves in a favorable way.