PSYC 1 Exam 1

What do psychologists study (briefly)?

Cognition, mental and emotional processes and behaviors.

THEME: Active processing

Processing the information given, what motivates us is outside of our awareness.

THEME: Inevitability of tradeoffs

What mental process that serves us good in one situation may not serve us good in another.

THEME: The mind and body are connected

Parts of the mind can have an impact on what our body can do such as forming memories.

THEME: Complex outcomes have multiple causes

Not all outcomes are not specifically because of one thing and can have multiple reasons why.

THEME: Psychological studies are not about you

Psychological studies should not be tied about you and you can’t make conclusions from studies.

what is depth of processing in experiments

how we process information on a deeper level which allows us to have better memory.

What is an independent variable?

The variable that the researchers manipulate.

What is an operational definition?

How researchers specifically measure a concept

What is a dependent variable?

The variable that a researcher measures.

What is a correlational study?

Passively observing phenomena, can identify patterns but not what causes them.

What is an experimental study? How does it differ from a correlational study?

Assigning participants to receive different conditions, correlational studies are not done with experiments and don’t manipulate conditions.

What is a quasi-experimental study?

Does not require random assignments and might be preexisting differences in the group.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of correlational studies? Experimental studies?

The advantages of a correlational study is that you can identify patterns but you won’t be able to identify the cause. With experimental studies you can identify causes but there could be a placebo effect or other causes.

What is the benefit of random assignment?

The benefit of random assignment is to help ensure no pre-existing differences between groups.

How can we tell whether we have a causal relationship?

Random assignment to groups and assures no pre-existing differences

Describe research on age-related priming. What did the original study find? What did the replication attempt find?

The research on age-related priming was to give a group of participants age related words and found that people with age related words walked slower to the elevator.

The replication failed and the first experiment had no difference while the second did (they were told they were priming)

What are some reasons a study might not replicate?

Fake data

Chance

P-Hacking (Analyzing the data the way you want)

Poor experimental design

Study doesn’t go from one group to another.

What is attention? Why is it important?

Wide range of psychological and neural phenomena where an identical stimulus is processed in different ways.

Describe the invisible gorilla experiment? What did researchers do? What were the (general) results?

Shown a video and told the participants to find how many times a ball was passed, most did not see the gorilla within the video since they were focused on the ball.

What is inattentional blindness?

We attend to one thing but miss others if they’re unexpected.

Why is selective attention and inattentional blindness important?

We can’t trust our intuition, marks importance of empirical data

Allows us to find or track an object or conversation in the midst of distraction

Describe research about participants running by a simulated fight. What was the task? What were the results? What were the conclusions?

The task was to run 30 ft behind a research assistant and count the number of times they touched their hat.

The more tasks the participants had to do, the less they noticed that the fight was happening.

Distinguish between overt and covert attention. Give examples of each.

Directing attention without physically directing attention

Passing a ball to the direction you’re not looking at

vs

Physically directing your attention to something

Looking over at a noise.

Describe the Posner cueing paradigm

Participants shifted attention without moving eyes

Distinguish between voluntary and involuntary attention

Voluntary: Focusing on something in a controlled manner without moving eyes

Involuntary: Features might grab our eyes.

How does attention relate to the themes of the inevitability of tradeoffs? Active processing?

Inevitability of tradeoffs: We are aware of very little and we might miss important events before our eyes.

Active processing: We’re actively processing the information in our attention and being able to have a deeper understanding of what is happening.

Sensory Memory

A brief store of sensory information and holds info long enough that basic sensory processing can take placebefore it is either forgotten or passed to short-term memory.

Working memory

Temporary store holding of information currently in our awareness, lasting a few seconds unless rehearsed through maintenance rehearsal.

Long-term memory

Includes everything you know or have learned.

Why is sensory memory important?

it holds information enough for a sensory process to take place.

How does auditory sensory memory differ from visual sensory memory?

Auditory sensory vision has a longer duration than vision.

What is chunking? How does it affect working memory capacity?

binding individual items to create a meaningful whole item to increase working memory capacity.

Explain what predicts successful encoding 

by being able to retrieve the information.

Explain what predicts successful retrieval

Being able to retrieve information that has been encoded.

Describe the baker/baker paradox

Deeper levels of processing lead to better memory

More people were able to recall Baker’s name because she was a baker.

Define encoding specificity

Memory is improved when information available at encoding is also available at retrieval.

What did the months of the year challenge tell us about encoding specificity and memory?

Knowing them in chronological order vs. ABC order; the list of months in the year was encoded to our brains in chronological order, not ABC order– this means that we will only be able to recite it in chronological order, NOT ABC order.

What did a study involving on-land and underwater memorization tell us about encoding specificity and memory?

Those who were in water were able to recall more underwater words and vise versa

Memory is improved when information available at encoding is also available

Describe the role of the hippocampus in memory

creating episodic memories

Forming and temporarily storing episodic memories.

What is anterograde amnesia? What kinds of memories are impaired, and what kinds of memories are NOT impaired?

The inability to create new episodic memories, but still remember semantic memories.

Describe how schematic knowledge affects our memory.

DEFINITION: mental structure to understand how things work

Active processing

Our brain can encode/retrieve memories incorrectly because it ‘corrects’ them to what we’re used to seeing.

EX: your always with your friend when your out socializing. When recalling a party, your memory tells you she was there and you spoke— in reality, she had called off sick and wasn’t here. Your brain just ‘corrected’ it to what you usually see!

In a study, participants falsely reported seeing books in an office. Explain these results using schematic memory

Using the experience and schemas we have our schematic knowledge forced the books into our minds because we were used to seeing it in an office setting,

Describe the results of Loftus & Palmer (1974) involving participants watching a video of a car accident. What does it tell us about memory?

Memories can be influenced by leading questions, participants who were asked how fast cars were going when they smashed together were twice as likely to falsely report seeing broken gas.

Describe how memory researchers’ perceptions of memory differs from the public’s perception of memory

Psychologists: General process by which our behavior changed as a result of an experiment

Lay person: Learning in class by a book.

Describe classical conditioning

Learned association between a neutral stimulus and a stimulus that elicits an automatic response.

Describe the results of Pavlov’s experiments with dogs

Ringing a bell while giving food conditioned the dogs to associate the bell with food, making them drool when the bell was rang.

Unconditioned Stimulus

Stimulus that produces an unconditioned response without training

Unconditioned Response

At automatic response to a stimulus

Conditioned Stimulus

A neutral stimulus that is used in classical conditioning.

Conditioned response

An automatic response to a stimulus .

Describe latent inhibition

familiar stimuli are harder to turn into a conditioned stimulus

Describe conditioned taste aversions

Associating food with nausea or vomiting if those two occurred at the same time.

What is the benefit of scapegoat treatments in conditioned taste aversions?

The benefit of scapegoat treatments is that it helps avoid forming taste aversions to familiar foods that patients eat.

Describe the pinprick experiment

Despite not being able to remember things that happened recently the doctor kept putting a pin in his hand every time he shook her hand.

The patient encoded new implicit memory despite anterograde amnesia.

Describe operant conditioning

Involves behaviors that are not automatically conditioned

Behaviors with pleasant effects become more likely.

How is operant conditioning different from classical conditioning?

Classical Conditioning

Associating stimulus with an event

Operant conditioning

Associating behavior with an event

Define reinforcement and punishment

Reinforcement is pleasant feedback which increases the likelihood of the behavior

Punishment is unpleasant feedback and decreases the likelihood of the behavior.

How does the timing of reinforcement affect operant conditioning?

Shorter delays between behavior and feedback allow for more effective conditioning.

Describe the relationship between operant conditioning and superstitions

Behaviors from operant conditioning may correlate with outcomes even they they didn’t cause it. (thinking that leaving the football game caused them to win)

System 1

Fast and automatic with no sense of voluntary control

System 2

Attentive and methodological, slow

Explain why we use System 1 thinking

We use system 1 thinking so that we aren’t sitting there thinking about a small decision for a long time, allowing us to make quick decisions.

Define and give examples of the default heuristic

Choosing the default option or the first one that comes to mind.

Clicking a button or not clicking a button to become an organ donor

Define and give examples of the availability heuristic

Events that are easy to bring to mind are judged to occur more frequently

Used to judge frequency or likelihood.

What are factors that make information “available”?

Hearing about them frequently

Hearing about them recently

Vividness

Define and give examples of the framing heuristic

The way an issue is framed influences judgement

Adding a new size to a menu so that the second most expensive item seems like a good deal.

Define and give examples of the anchoring heuristic

Using a reference point to guide decisions and relying on the first piece of information when making a decision.

How old was Gandhi when he died question

Define and give examples of confirmation bias

Seeking information that fits expectations or beliefs

Seeing the first link of searching something up siding with your side so it becomes more confirmed.

Define and give examples of the representativeness heuristic

Assuming category is represented by an individual category number

Thinking that San Diego is farther west than Reno because California is closer to the coast line.

Describe how attention works in the context of memory

Capacity limits; we can only process so much there’s so much incoming information.

Selection; we have the ability to select what to attend to

We don’t know how much attention we need and default to selective attention

Describe how maintenance rehearsal works in the context of memory

Working memory is temporary with small duration, but with maintenance rehearsal it can be remembered. (studying)

Describe how encoding works in the context of memory

transfer of information from working memory to long term memory

Exposure doesn’t guarantee encoding

Motivation can help encoding but you can’t retrieve what doesn’t get encoded

Describe how retrieval works in the context of memory

Retrieval is remembering long-term memory. You can’t retrieve what doesn’t get encoded nor does encoding guarantee retrieval but can be aided with practice.