Cognitive psych test two mississippi college

Attention

The ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations in our environment

Selective Attention

attending to one thing while ignoring others; We do not attend to a large fraction of the information in the environment.; We filter out some information and promote other information for further processing.

Divided Attention

paying attention to more than one thing at a time

Dichotic Listening

Colin Cherry; One message is presented to the left ear and another to the right ear; Participant "shadows" one message to ensure he is attending to that message.

Early selection model

Filters message before incoming information is analyzed for meaning

Sensory memory

Holds all incoming information for a fraction of a second; Transfers all information to next stage

Filter

Identifies attended message based on physical characteristics; Only attended message is passed on to the next stage

Detector

Processes all information to determine higher-level characteristics of the message

Short-term memory

Receives output of detector; Holds information for 10-15 seconds and may transfer it to long-term memory

Intermediate selection model

Attended message can be separated from unattended message early in the information-processing system.

Dictionary unit

Contains words, each of which has a threshold for being activated

Late Selection Models

Selection of stimuli for final processing does not occur until after information has been analyzed for meaning

who is associated with late selection models

MacKay

who is associate with early selection models

Broadbent

who is associated with intermediate selection models

Treisman

Processing capacity

how much information a person can handle at any given moment

Perceptual load

the difficulty of a given task

High-load

(difficult) tasks use higher amounts of processing capacity

Low-load

(easy) tasks use lower amounts of processing capacity

Stroop effect

Name of the word interferes with the ability to name the ink color; Cannot avoid paying attention to the meanings of the words

Saccades

rapid movements of the eyes from one place to another

Stimulus salience

areas that stand out and capture attention

Scene schema

knowledge about what is contained in typical scenes; Help guide fixations from one area of a scene to another

Precueing

directing attention without moving the eyes- Participants respond faster to a light at an expected location than at an unexpected location

Divided Attention

(Schneider and Shiffrin) Practice enables people to simultaneously do two things that were difficultat first.

Inattentional blindness

Stimulus that is not attended is not perceived, even though a person might be looking directly at it

Change blindness

If shown two versions of a picture, differences between them are not immediately apparent; Task to identify differences requires concentrated attention and search.

binding

The process by which features such as color, form, motion, and locationare combined to create our perception of a coherent object.

Preattentive stage

- Automatic- No effort or attention- Unaware of process- Object analyzed into features

Focused attention stage

Attention plays key role- Features are combined

Treisman and Schmidt (FIT)

Participants report combination of features from different stimuli.- Illusory conjunctions occur because features are "free floating."

Memory

processes involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer present

sensory memory

initial stage that holds all incoming information for seconds or fractions of a second; retention, for very brief periods of time, of the effects of sensory stimulation

short term memory

holds five to seven items for about 15 to 20 seconds; Includes both new information received from the sensory stores and information recalled from long-term memory

Control processes

active processes that can be controlled by the person; strategies associated with the different types of memory

Persistence of vision

retention of the perception of light

Iconic memory

brief sensory memory of the things that we see

Echoic memory

brief sensory memory of the things that we hear

who performed a short term memory experiment?

Peterson & Peterson

Capacity of short-term memory?

5-8 items

Chunking

small units can be combined into larger meaningful units

who worked in training people in chunking?

Ericsson and coworkers

Baddeley and Hitch difference in stm and wm

STM holds information for a brief period of time- WM is concerned with the storage, processing and manipulation of information, and is active during complex cognition

working memory

Limited-capacity system for temporary storage and manipulation of information for complex tasks such as comprehension, learning, andreasoning

Phonological similarity effect

Letters or words that sound (not look) similar are confused

Word length effect

Memory for lists of words is better for short words than for long words- Takes longer to pronounce and rehearse longer words and to produce them during recall

Articulatory suppression

Speaking prevents one from rehearsing items to be remembered

Visuospatial Sketch Pad

Creation of visual images in the mind in the absence of a physical visual stimulus (Shepard and Metzler)

The Central Executive

Acts as the attention controller• Focus, divide, switch attention• Controls suppression of irrelevant information

The Episodic Buffer

Backup store that communicates with long-term and working memory components• Hold information longer and has greater capacity than phonological loopor visuospatial sketchpad

what part of the brain is associated with working memory?

prefrontal cortex

long term memory

"Archive" of information about past events and knowledge learned• Works closely with working memory• Storage stretches from a few moments ago to as far back as one can remember• More recent memories are more detailed

visual coding

refers to the process of converting visual information into a format that can be stored and retrieved from memory, often in the form of mental images or visual representations.

auditory coding

memory refers to how the brain processes and stores sound information, involving encoding, storage (short-term and long-term), and retrieval, with the echoic memory playing a crucial role in briefly holding auditory stimuli.

semantic coding

memory process where you focus on the meaning of information, rather than its visual or auditory features, leading to deeper and more effective memory formation.

Recognition memory

identification of a previously encountered stimulus

what is responsible for long term memory?

hippocampus

damage to what part of the brain may affect short term memory?

parietal lobe

Episodic memory

memory for experiences- Involves mental time travel

Semantic memory

memory for facts- General knowledge, facts- "Knowing"

Autobiographical memory

People's memories for experiences from their own lives. These memories have both episodic components (relieved specific events) and semantic components (facts related to these events).

How Time Affects Memories

Forgetting increases with longer intervals after encoding; Forgetting is not an "all-or-nothing" process

Familiarity

semantic memory

Recollection

episodic memory

Constructive episodic simulation hypothesis

Episodic memories are extracted and recombined to create simulations of future events- Helps us to anticipate future needs and guide future behaviors- Adaptive function similar to mind wandering

Implicit memory

Occurs when learning from experience is not accompanied by conscious remembering

Procedural Memory

Skill memory: memory for actions• May have no memory of where or when learned• Perform procedures without being consciously aware of how to do them• People who cannot form new LTMs can still learn new skills (e.g., HM)

Priming

Presentation of priming stimulus changes person's response to a test stimulus

Propaganda effect

more likely to rate statements read or heard before as being true- Involves implicit memory because it can occur when people are not aware of previously seeing or hearing statement- Implications for advertisements

Open ended questions

· List four words that would have a low threshold for being activated for the typical MC student, according to the dictionary unit in Treisman’s Attenuation Model.

· Who was Phineas Gage and what did his case study teach us about the brain? Include how his behavior changed.: Accident caused damage to Gage’s frontal lobe.• Accident changed Gage’s personality from an upstanding citizen to aperson with low impulse control, poor ability to plan, and poor social skills.

· Describe one of the following case studies, including the specific part of the brain that was affected and the resulting changes in behavior: HM, KF, KC, or LP: HM - surgery removed hippocampus– Retained short-term memory (STM) but unable to transfer info to long-termmemory (LTM)– Unable to form new LTMs