Memory and Cognition Final

Memory

The mental processes of acquiring and retaining information for later retrieval, and the mental storage system that enables these processes

Cognition

Cognitive psychology refers to all the processes by which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used

Rationalism

Descartes: our senses lie to us. “I think, therefore I am”

Empiricism

Locke: everything comes from experience. Born as a tabula rosa (blank slate)

Precursors to Psychology

Helmholtz: speed of neural transmission, theory of color vision

Weber: psychophysics

Wundt

Founder of psych, structuralism (looking inward to analyze mental experiences)

Ebbinghaus

Studied associations as they occurred, created nonsense syllables, forgetting curve

Donders

Mental chronometry (time and duration of mental processes)

Behaviorism

Predict and control behavior, Watson

What led to the Cognitive Revolution?

Weaknesses in the behavioral approach, developments in the related fields, development of the digital computer

Weaknesses in the behavioral approach

Nobody reinforces sentence structure to kids, yet they still acquire the skill. Could not explain why mistakes were being made by those who are trained.

Development of the digital computer

Allowed more sophisticated techniques, provided a metaphor for the mind (the human mind and digital computer are both systems for processing symbolic information)

Computational level of analysis

The problem faced by the system

Algorithmic level of analysis

The strategy used to solve the problem

Implementational level of analysis

How the algorithm is implemented

Limitations

Parallel processing, context effects, doesn’t predict accuracy well, slower

Cerebral cortex

Outer surface of the brain, wrinkly, 2 hemispheres

CNS

Brain and spinal cord

PNS

Everything but the brain and spinal cord

Hindbrain

Medulla (automated processes), pons (brain activity during sleep), cerebellum (processing memory)

Midbrain

Reticular formation (sleep wake cycle), substantia nigra (dopamine, movement), ventral tegmental (dopamine, mood)

Limbic system

Amygdala, cingulate gyrus, hippocampus

Major parts of the brain

Cortex, thalamus, white & grey matter, corpus callosum

Long term memory

Episodic and semantic

Sensation

Stimulation of the sense organs

Perception

When you become aware of the sensation

Sperling

Partial report

Bottom-up processing

Data-driven

Top-down processing

Conceptually-driven

Feature analysis

Assumes that a pattern consists of a set of features

Problems w/ pure bottom-up

Perceptual learning, context effects

Input attention

Alertness or arousal

Controlled attention

Selective attention

Proactive interference

Forgetting is caused by other material learned before the material to be remembered

Retroactive interference

Forgetting is caused by material learned after material to be remembered

Peterson & Peterson

First evidence of STM, demonstrated another way of forgetting (decay)

Duration of STM

About 18 seconds

The first cognitive psychology textbook was written by…

Neisser

Cognition does NOT involve…

reflexes

Who believed that observable, quantifiable behavior is the proper topic of psychology?

Watson

Who is the first experimental psychologist?

Wundt

When did the cognitive revolution occur?

Late 1950s

Which part of the working memory system is responsible for regulating the flow of information?

Central executive

What component of WM is involved in binding information from different modalities and from LTM?

Episodic buffer

The processes by which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used are all part of…

Cognition

When did the cognitive revolution occur?

The late 1950s

Titchener is most strongly associated with…

Structuralism

Which of the following is NOT part of the modal model?

A. Long-term memory

B. Sensory memory

C. STM/working memory

D. Explicit memory

D. Explicit memory

What is the name for the larger discipline that cognitive psychology is a part of, and that also includes disciplines like computer science, anthropology, and philosophy?

Cognitive science

Which is true of Ebbinghaus?

A. He was interested in memory

B. He was interested in perception

C. He was interested in reasoning

D. He was interested in studying introspection

A. He was interested in memory

Which of the following is NOT true of information theory?

A. It showed how information could go viral

B. It suggested that thinking could be automated

C. It provided a way to measure information

D. It showed that electronic circuits can carry out Boolean operations of thought

A. It showed how information could go viral

Which of the following was NOT a challenge to the behaviorist approach?

A. Language

B. Personnel selection

C. Vigilance

D. S-R learning

D. S-R learning

____ wrote a review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. This review clearly illustrated the shortcomings of the behaviorist account of language.

Chomsky

What was the major thing that the computer contributed to cognitive psychology?

The computer became a metaphor for the mind; humans and computers were both seen as processors of symbolic information.

The region where neurotransmitters cross from one neuron to another is called the…

Synapse

The top layer of the brain, responsible for higher-level mental processes, is the…

Cerebral cortex

Unmyelinated neurons correspond to…

Gray matter

When there is a disruption of one mental process (but not others) due to brain damage, this is called a…

Dissociation

What is it called when a neuron fires?

An action potential

Cerebral lateralization is the idea that…

Different functions depend more on one hemisphere than the other in the brain

The subcortical structure important for emotion is the…

Amygdala

What do event-related potentials (ERPs) measure?

Electrical activity

The ____ is the part of the brain responsible for processing voluntary movement information for throughout the body.

Motor cortex

The hippocampus is important for…

Memory

Consider the partial report condition as reported by Sperling (1960) in his iconic memory experiments. Which of the following is NOT true?

A. Accuracy decreased with cue delay

B. Only one row of letters had to be reported

C. Context dependence was clearly illustrated

D. A tone was used as a cue

C. Context dependence was clearly illustrated

The region of the retina responsible for precise focused vision is the…

Fovea

Which of the following is a model of visual processing using the elements of feature detection?

A. Prototype theory

B. Pandemonium

C. Recognition by components (geon) theory

D. Template theory

B. Pandemonium

Backward masking is…

A later visual stimulus affecting the perception of an earlier one

Sensation is…

The detection of external energy from the environment

Which of the following is NOT a Gestalt principle?

A. Closure

B. Good continuation

C. Proximity

D. Recency

D. Recency

Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of iconic memory?

A. Has a capacity of 12-16 items

B. Lasts approximately 2-4 seconds

C. The information has not been categorized

D. The information is in visual form

B. Lasts approximately 2-4 seconds

A prototype is…

An abstract representation of the basic or critical elements of a set of stimuli

According to Biederman (1987), recognition of objects is a two-step process that involves…

Simple geometric components called geons

Which of the following is NOT an assumption of McClelland and Rumelhart’s (1981) model of word recognition?

A. There are 3 levels of analysis

B. There are connections between the units in the model

C. There are multi-unit templates on the third and final level

D. Each unit has a level of activation

C. There are multi-unit templates on the third and final level

Which of the following is NOT a criterion for a process to be called automatic?
A. It occurs very slowly

B. It consumes few cognitive resources

C. It occurs without intention

D. It is unconscious

A. It occurs very slowly

The cocktail party effect refers to…

Selection

Stroop effects reflect the operation of…

Attentional control

The finding that people will not remember a word repeated 35 times in an unattended ear during a shadowing task, but will notice their name, is consistent with _____ theories of attention.

Late selection

For the metaphor of attention as a mental resource, _______

Attention is finite

General alertness/basic arousal is controlled by the…

Reticular activating system

Which is NOT true of Posner, Nissen, and Ogden’s (1978) spatial cueing task?

A. Participants were to maintain fixation at the center of the screen throughout each trial

B. Useful advance information led to facilitation

C. Misleading cues leads to costs

D. Neutral cues facilitated the movement of the spotlight of attention

D. Neutral cues facilitated the movement of the spotlight of attention

Practice at a task makes it more ____ and less ____

Automatic; controlled

Recency effects are most associated with…

Short-term memory storage

Traditionally, according to Miller (1956), the capacity of short-term memory is thought to be…

Seven plus or minus two units of information

According to Sternberg, short-term memory is searched using what kind of process?

A serial exhaustive search

Speeding up the rate of presentation in a list learning task will most likely…

Decrease primacy effects

The cost to memory because of previously encountered information is called…

Proactive interference

Processing in the visuospatial sketchpad is least likely to be disrupted by…

Articulatory suppression

Serial recall is…

A recall task in which people must recall the list items in their original order of presentation

Which of the following is NOT a component of Baddeley’s working memory model?

A. LTM

B. Episodic buffer

C. Central executive

D. Visuospatial sketchpad

A. LTM

Working memory differs from STM in that…

WM involves actively manipulating information

A chunk is…

A richer, more complex, unit of information

Maintenance vs. elaborative rehearsal is primarily associated with…

Depth of processing

Which of the following is NOT a kind of test of implicit memory?

A. Word stem completion

B. Repetition priming

C. Word fragment completion

D. Free recall

D. Free recall

In general, memory is better after ____ practice than _____ practice

Distributed; massed

The knowledge that you acquire in class is more likely to be stored in ____ memory

Declarative

Damage to what part of the brain led to H.M.’s severe anterograde amnesia

Hippocampus

Episodic memories generally convey…

Personally experienced events

The weekly quizzes in this class are intended to make use of…

The testing effect

Maintenance rehearsal is…

A low-level, repetitive kind of rehearsal