Exam 2 - Pych 332

Executive Functioning (or Cognitive Control)

A collection of cognitive process which include planning, cognitive flexibility, abstract thinking, understanding rules, initiating appropriate actions, inhibiting inappropriate actions, and selecting relevant sensory information

Being able to hold back automatic response

Miyake and Friedman’s Theory of Executive Functions: Updating

The continuous monitoring and quick addition or deletion of contents within one’s working memory

Miyake and Friedman’s Theory of Executive Functions: Inhibition

one’s capacity to supersede responses that are immediate in a given situation (

Miyake and Friedman’s Theory of Executive Functions: Shifting

one’s cognitive flexibility to switch between different tasks or mental states (multi-tasking)

Freewill Vs. Volition (Benjamin Libet et al. 1983)

Participants asked to sit at a desk with a button to press

EEG electrodes attached to their scalp

Instructed to verbally report that they want to press the button- then have to the do the action at any point after that

On average, after stating wanting to press the button, 200 milliseconds later they pressed the button

Found 300 milliseconds before the conscious awareness, there was brain activity in the motor cortex

Libet argues volition represents executive control over unconscious process

Prefrontal cortex comes in to stop an automatic response

Strength Model of Self Control

Engaging in acts of self-control draws from a limited “reservoir” of self-control when depleted, results in reduced capacity for further self-regulation

Ego Depletion

Self-control gets harder to hold overtime

Has a limited capacity

If exerted overtime, the control gets harder to hold

Explicit Memory

Consciously retrieving memory

You know that you are trying to retrieve information/memory

Implicit Memory

Unconscious memory

Relearning something (memorizing)

Procedural Memories

Memory for performing a task, action, skill

“knowing how”

Form of implicit memory

Hard to verbalize

Just know how to do it

Some could be transformed from declarative memories (driving a car/bilingual)

Declarative Memories

Memory for facts, rules, concepts and events

“knowing what/that”

Form of explicit memory

Your Name/Capital of California/Color of the sky

Some can be transformed into procedural memories (driving a car/bilingual)

Types of Declarative Memory

Semantic Memory

• General knowledge/facts of the world

Episodic Memory

• Autobiographical memories of events experienced by a person and the context of how these events occurred

Sentence Verification Task

Sentences briefly appear on the screen, and participants must quickly judge True/False

Taps at explicit/controlled cognitive processes

Reaction time/error rates measures performance

Semantic Network

An interrelated set of concepts or body of knowledge

Node

A point or location in the network representing a concept, property , or feature

Proposition

The relationship between two concepts

Cognitive economy

Only non-redundant facts are stored in memory

Reusing concepts over and over again

Inheritance

Members of a category possess or inherit the properties of the category itself

Propositional representation of meaning

The meaning of a concept is based on its category membership, properties and features

Some common ground to refer to things to the world

Dictionary definition of a concept

Analogical representation of meaning

How we store semantic memory that is visually based

The meaning of a concept is based on its parallel representations in the real/outside world and the semantic network within the mind

Visual mental imagery is like visual perception

There is a parallel representation

There are implicit representations of relations between concepts

Semantic Relatedness

Distance between two nodes in a network is determined by relation or similarity

Concepts close in meaning or highly related are stored close together in memory, while unrelated concepts are stored far away

Typicality Effects

More typical members of a category are judged faster than are less typical ones

“A dove is a bird” over “A chicken is a bird”

“A whale is a fish” (high similarity but false)

“A penguin is a bird” (low similarity but true)

Exemplar

There is a specific example or instance that serves as the most typical member of a category. Members of a category are compared on how close they are with the exemplar

Prototype

There is a hypothetical concept that is composed on the “averaged” features between various members of a category

Combine all members of a category together, these are the characteristics of that category

Spreading Activation

The mental activity of access and retrieval involving information being activated across a region of the semantic network

Ex. Teh game of Taboo involves spreading activation of distant nodes to activate a target word

Availability

The memory trace exists and was encoded into long term memory

This is dependent on the initial encoding by STM/WM

Accessibility

Degree to which the memory trace can be retrieved from the network. This is dependent on the structure of the semantic network and the amount of spreading activation through the network

Can you get to it? Can you get to that information?

Implicit Memory in Dissociative Fugue (Lyon, 1985)

Jane Doe discovered by police

She was disheveled and wandering

Reported no previous memory or identity

During clinical evaluation, she was shown a phone and asked to randomly call a number

Jane called her mother

Reproductive Memory

A highly accurate, verbatim (word-for-word), exact recording/experience of an event

Reconstructive Memory

Remembering by combining elements of experience with existing knowledge

Schema

An organized, structured set of information about a concept, theme or person

Hospital - nurses - needles

Shopping mall - food court- stores

Scripts (Schank & Abelson, 1977)

Schemas for events in the world

Daily routine

Restaurant script

Grocery shopping script

Inference

The process by which a person draws connections between concepts, determines referents and derives conclusions (assumption, fill-in-the-gaps)

Make assumptions and fill in the gaps from the context given

Source Misattribution

The inability to distinguish whether the original event or some later event was the source of the information

Factors involved in the overconfidence in eyewitness memory (Wells, Olson, & Charman, 2002)

Autobiographical Memory

Teh study of one’s lifetime collection of personal memories

Flashbulb Memories

Extremely vivid recollections of emotional memories of particular events, especially when the events were surprising or highly unusual

Cognitive map theory

Place cells

Configural association theory

The hippocampus organizes and retains the behavioral significance of combinations of stimuli and the context that they are presented in, but not the individual stimuli themselves

Synaptogenesis

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

An anxiety disorder in which a person who has experienced a traumatic or life-threatening event has symptoms such as psychic numbing, reliving of the trauma, and increased physiological arousal (Amygdala and Hippocampus)

Edna Foa’s theory of PTSD

Decay Theory

Memory fades with time if they are not retrieved every now and then

Use it or lose it

Retroactive interference

Proactive interference

Previously learned material interferes with remembering a similar new material

(Old phone number vs. new phone number)

Anterograde Amnesia

The inability to store new long-term memories that occurs after an amnesia inducing event

Retrograde amnesia

Striatum

Caudate nucleus

Putamen

Korsakoff’s Syndrome

Papez Circuit (James Papez, 1937)

Alzheimer’s disease

Symptoms include widespread disturbances in working, semantic, episodic and procedural memory in individuals aged 65 and above

Confusion, irritability, aggression, mood swings, language breakdown, and the general social withdrawal of the patient as his/her senses decline

Predementia stage of Alzheimer’s Disease

Early dementia stage of Alzheimer’s Disease

Moderate dementia stage of Alzheimer’s Disease

Advanced dementia stage of Alzheimer’s Disease

Causes of Alzheimer’s Disease

Cytoskeletal (within the cell structure) Abnormalities

Senile Plaques

Neurotransmitter Changes