Psyc 20 UCSC Final exam

Implicit/Procedural memory

Any change in mental processes or behavior as a result of experience

that is not explicit memory

Types of implicit memory

classical conditioning

• operant conditioning?

• perceptual fluency

• motoric skills

• priming

• mental operations? Problem solving strategies?

Anterograde Amnesia

• Inability to form new long term memories

• Implicit memory still intact - can form new procedural memories and

use old procedures

• However, no explicit memory of learning a new procedure

• Damage to the hippocampus (subcortical)

• Surgery

• Korsakoff's Syndrome (alcoholism complications)

• Viral infection

Implicit vs. explicit memory

Explicit Memory

• Variable tasks

• Effortful recollection

• Able to communicate

• Complex consequences and

prediction

• Adapt to changing situations

Implicit Memory

• Stereotyped tasks

• Automatic access

• Unable to communicate

• Simple consequences and

conditioning

• Automatize frequent tasks

recency effect

when asked to recall a list of informations, people with a recency effect are best at recalling the end of the list.

primacy effect

recalling the beginning of the list best

Phonological similarity effect

• Words that "sound similar" are more easily confused in the

phonological loop

• This leads to poor recall

• Similarity determined by overlap of sound

• Acoustic features more confusable than articulatory

• Matters what it sounds like, not how you produce it

• Effect biggest when similarity is at start of words

• Shows relation between working memory and language

Corsi blocks

Task used to assess

visuospatial sketchpad

function

• Lots of variations

• Number blocks

• Color blocks

• Sound blocks (Simon)

Chimpanzee working memory

Claim: Chimpanzees have better spatial working memory than

humans!

• Problem: Humans had no practice. Chimp had two years of practice!

working memory

thinking skill that focuses on memory-in-action: the ability to remember and use relevant information while in the middle of an activity.

Baddeley & Hitch model

Emphasizes role of active maintenance and manipulation

• Temporary work space

• Highly integrated with sensory memory and attention

Central executive

• Delegates information, maintains rehearsal, and controls output

• Directs attention and holds it on the current task

• Failure of central executive - daydreaming

Phonological loop

Responsible for auditory

information, including language

• Information updated through

rehearsal

• Can be overt (actually speaking) or

covert rehearsal

• Capacity limit? Seven items? Four

chunks?

Visuospatial Sketchpad

Responsible for visual and

spatial location information

• Information updated through

rehearsal

• Overt (gesturing, pointing) or

covert rehearsal

• Capacity limit of about 4

chunked items or locations

span task

• Digit span demo

• Other forms of span

• Complex span

Working memory capacity

• Miller - 7 (+/-) 2 items can be held in working memory at one time

• Cowan - 4 (+/-) 1 chunks can be held in working memory at one time

Word length effect

Phonological loop capacity is

related to length of items

• Subsequently found to relate to

articulatory duration - how long

the words take to speak

• Implies that phonological loop

capacity is temporal

• About 2 seconds

Executive function

Executive function is a set of mental skills that help you get things done. These skills are controlled by an area of the brain called the frontal lobe. Executive function helps you: Manage time. Pay attention.

Frontal lobes

Includes

• Willed attention

• Sequence planning/executing

• Inhibition

• Thought, judgment, emotional regulation

• "Theory of Mind" (empathy)

• Damage to frontal lobes can impair all of these

• Phineas Gage

• Lobotomy

inhibition

• Inhibiting impulsive behavior

• "Raw" emotion produced in limbic system

• Frontal lobes regulate emotions (largely for social reasons)

• Emotional regulation develops until adulthood

• Inhibiting one action while performing another

• Responses that lead to desirable outcomes are reinforced

• Requires inhibition to "un-learn" a certain response

• This also develops until adulthood

Wisconsin card sort test

• Cards must be sorted into piles

• Can be sorted by number, color, or shape

• Sorting "rules" change throughout test

• Inhibition necessary to sort according to new rule

Alcohol and EF

Alcohol acts as an neural inhibitor

• Mimics effects of GABA

• Reduces activity in frontal cortex

• Lowers EF abilities

• Explains lowered inhibitions / emotional

regulation

• Specifically affects link between amygdala

and orbitofrontal cortex

• Of course, there is still a very large

"placebo" role due to culture

• People will act dru

Intelligence and working memory

Gardner - There are many kinds of

intelligence

• One factor tends to correlate with

many types of intelligence - factor g

• Factor g highly correlated with IQ

test score

• IQ tests typically test WM capacity

• Is working memory related to

intelligence?

Sensory memory

• Iconic memory - visual

• Lasts for less than a second

• Echoic memory - auditory

• Lasts for a couple seconds

• What did I just say?

• "Unlimited" capacity

• Partial report demo

• Necessary for temporal integration

• Before entering working memory, information must

be attended to

functions of attention

Focusing - limit amount of information processed

• Perceptual enhancement - increase "gain" of item

• Binding - combining perceptual information into

one whole

• Sustaining behavior (concentration) - maintaining

one action while others are options

• Action selection - Choosing an action among many

Attentional bottleneck

Not all information can be attended to at once

• Grand illusion of complete perception

• Attending to something comes at the expense of

other things

Stable world assumption

• Not everything needs to be attended to all the time

• Most things don't change

• Assume that what isn't being attended to isn't changing

Attentional blink

• Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP)

• Monitor for a target item

• Detection of subsequent items (about 2-6 after) inhibited

after capture

Subitizing and enumeration

• Enumeration

• Subitizing - about four max

• Any more requires

counting

resource model

• Attention is the selective allocation of limited

cognitive resources

• Relevant information enhanced, irrelevant information

filtered

• Relevancy can be tuned

• Pools of resources for different tasks, such as visual

processing and language comprehension

• Easy - conversing while looking at a painting

• Harder - conversing while listening to music

• Hardest - conversing while reading

Overt / covert orientation

If you hear a loud noise,

you'll look (overt spatial

orientation)

• Covert spatial orientation

• Orient attention without

orienting eyes

• Throwing a basketball pass

Inattentional blindness

Information irrelevant to current situation is

filtered out

Change blindness

Failure to notice details changing

• Flicker change blindness - don't notice large

change between images

Automaticity

Once tasks have been practiced enough, they no

longer require the same amount of attention

• Learning to drive a car (or ride a bike)

• Such skills are now part of procedural (implicit)

memory

• Thinking about perform

Task switching cost

Decrease on task performance if having to task switch

Multitasking

Doing two (or more) tasks

simultaneously

• This seems possible with

highly automatized tasks

(walking and talking)

• If not automatic

Vigilance

• Sustaining attention the face of distraction or

exhaustion for long time periods

zombies

• Something that appears

conscious - but isn't

Bistable perception

Our perceptual experience continuously alternates when an ambiguous or rivalrous stimulus is observed.

Utilization behavior

• Inability to inhibit acting on

nearby objects

• Seen with damage or

impairment to frontal lobes

Anarchic hand syndrome

Loss of conscious control

of a hand

• "Anarchic" hand will

engage in utilization

Global workspace hypothesis

• Explicit processing demands global workspace

• Conscious perception allows wide access to information

throughout the brain

• Working memory depends on consciousness

• Consciousness allows the novel combination of material

• Consciousness is essential for explicit learning and

episodic memory

• Consciousness allows the monitoring and adjustment of

motor control

Blindsight

• No conscious awareness of vision

• But can still "see" things

• Damage to primary visual cortex

Masked priming

a stimulus (the prime) is presented for a very short presentation duration and is immediately followed by the target, which causes backward masking of the prime.

vision for perception

• Conscious

• Slow (relatively)

• Ventral stream

• Damaged in blindsight and

object agnosia

• Subject to constancy

• Multimodal

vision for action

Not conscious

• Fast

• Dorsal stream

• Damaged in optic ataxia

• More primitive?

Amygdala

• Early processing routed through amygdala and LGN

• Highly responsive to potentially threatening stimuli

• "Early warning" system

Fear response can then either be acknowledged or

suppressed

PTSD

PTSD - post-traumatic stress disorder

• Abnormally high amygdala activation

• Overactive fear response to "neutral" stimuli

• Certain events trigger full-blown attack (due to

sensitivity of amygdala)

Fear-suppression

Something happens in the

song that triggers a fast system

fear response (in the

amygdala)

The slow system suppresses

the fear response produced by

the fast system

• This resolution of fear feels

good, leading to the aesthetic

experience

Communication

- transfer of

a signal

Qualities of language

generative, referential, extendable, combinational, and shared by a community

critical period of language

infancy

Theories of acquisition

Cognitive ability - Other cognitive adaptations in humans

allows for use of language (LTM, WM, EF, ToM)

• Nativism - There are innate and specific mechanisms in the

brain for bootstrapping language acquisition

Broca's area

is located in the left hemisphere

responsible for fine motor skills, like using utensils

and tools

Broca's Aphasia

Comprehension comparatively OK, but lots of trouble

articulating

• With difficulty, can say phrases and short sentences

• While speaking is difficult, what they say makes sense

and is intelligible

Wernicke's area

involved in understanding auditory scene

(like animal noises, machine sounds, etc)

Wernicke's aphasia

• Comprehension is difficult (but not impossible)

• Can speak fluently, but what they say is nonsensical

and often includes made up words

• Most severe case: unable to understand any words

(aka "word deafness"), but can still hear pure tones

Psycholinguistics

Area of cognitive psychology dealing with language

• Linguistics - what is the structure of language?

• Psycholinguistics - how do we mentally represent

and understand language?

Phonetics

Study of the acoustic characteristics of speech

sounds

Phonology

Study of how phonemes are used in a language

• What sounds are allowed in a language?

• Which differences are meaningful and which are not?

Morphology

• Morpheme - basic unit of meaning

• Can be a word, like cat

• Can also be a prefix or suffix

- can be combine to form a bigger word

Syntax

Word order and structure

• Mental decoding of syntax -

parsing

• How words combine into proper

sentences

Semantics

Meaning of words and sentences

• Semantic networks

• Dependent on context and syntax

-Time flies like an arrow

-Fruit flies like a banana

Pragmatics

Beyond syntax and semantics

• Context

• What does the utterance mean, in context?

• Why did the speaker say this? or What am I trying

to communicate?

Discourse

Language use does not occur in a vacuum

• Grounding

• Some information may be mutually understood

• "What did you get on the test?"

Speech spectrogram

Phoneme

basic unit of speech

Place, manner, and voicing

Place - where in the

vocal tract the sound is

produced

• Manner - how the

airflow is altered

• Voicing - vibration of the

vocal folds

Vowel production

Phonotactic regularities

• How phonemes are combined in a language

• Why "marfo" might be an English word but "bko!f" is likely

not

• Varies between languages

• Babies are sensitive to these early on

Phoneme restoration effect

a perceptual phenomenon where under certain conditions, sounds actually missing from a speech signal can be restored by the brain and may appear to be heard.

Segmentation problem

Where does one word end and the next begin?

• Fluid speech is not easily segmented

• Gaps in a sentence do not necessarily mean new words

• Just as many gaps WITHIN words as between them

• Can't segment words until you know the words...and can't

learn the words until you segment them

Matching problem

How do we "match" the

acoustic stimulus with our mental representation?

- People vary greatly in how they pronounce phonemes,

especially vowels

• It's fairly easy to compensate (though consider heavy

accents)

Ordering problem

- How do we keep the order of

phonemes intact in an utterance?

Coarticulation

"Coarticulation" allows us

to produce fluent speech,

linking one segment to the

next.

• But it also changes how we

pronounce any given

sound!

Auditory theory of speech perception

speech is perceived through a

decoding of the auditory signal; phonemes are

matched with their acoustic correlates (how a

computer does it)

Motor theory of speech perception

speech is perceived by internally

recreating articulatory gestures to "mirror" the sound

heard

subvocalization

is a very common habit among readers. It involves saying words in your head while reading and it's one of the main reasons why people read slowly and have trouble improving their reading speed.

Morpheme

- basic unit of meaning

Translation

Requires knowledge of more than just the formal language

• Requires knowledge of both cultures

• Computers can do it...kind of

Parsing

Mental decoding of syntax

Ambiguous syntax/semantics

situation where a sentence may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous .

• Ambiguous syntax changes semantic meaning

• Ambiguous semantics change syntactic parse

Prosody

The "musical" aspects of speech: rhythm and

melody

• Includes emphasis and spacing

• How would you say the following

• She knows many languages you know

• She knows many languages, you know

On-line processing

Mental lexicon

"Dictionary" of words and

their meanings

• Process of retrieving

information from the lexicon is

known as lexical access

• Stored information about a

word (phrase?)

- Pronunciation

- Spelling

- Meaning

- Part of speech

- Mental image?

Neologisms

a newly coined word or expression.

Grice's maxims

• Cooperative principles for language use

• Maxim of Quality

- Say things that are true

• Maxim of Quantity

- Don't say more than you need to, but say enough

• Maxim of Relevance

- Stay relevant to the conversation

• Maxim of Manner

- Avoid ambiguity and be clear

Language is most cooperative when people follow

the Maxims

- flouting maxim : sarcasm

Grounding

Some information may be mutually understood

• "What did you get on the test?"

Discourse markers

clarification and turn taking

Backchannels

indicates listener's level of

understanding

- Mmhmm

• Head nods, facial expresssions

• Huh?

• Ok

Overhearing

"Overhearers" (not strictly

part of the conversation) have

less comprehension of a

conversation than discourse

partners

Planning scope

Is planning scope fixed or variable?

• What is the smallest unit that can be planned?

• What is the largest unit that can be planned?

Speech errors

"Slips of the tongue"

• Why are speech errors important to study?

- • Planning scope can be beyond the word

• Phonemes exchange over word boundaries

• Corresponding phonemes are more likely to slip

• Beginnings with beginnings, ends with ends

• Some errors happen frequently

• Errors which produce actual words are more common

• Some errors never happen

• Follows phonotactic regularities

Linguistic relativism

the idea that the language a person speaks has an influence on this person's cognition.

Embodied simulation theory

We understand

meaning by mentally

"simulating" the utterance

- Understanding the sentence

"She ran to the park" requires

understanding bodily process of

running

• Aligns with motor theory

• Evidence from Parkinson's

disease

Conceptual metaphor theory

refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another

DRC model of reading

• Dual-route cascaded model

Two routes

• Lexical - stored pronunciations

• Orthographic - words read by "rule"

• Grapheme-phoneme

correspondence rules

• Read the word "molaft"

• Both routes contribute to

production of lexical word

Reading mixed up text

• 50% of words not mixed up

• first and last letter always correct

• words of 3 letters or less won't be changed

• often function words, e.g. "to," "a," "the"

• Ordering of pairs of letters within a word often

preserved

• "porbelm," not "plbreom"

• Heavily constrained by context ("ltteers")

• Reading it is a bit slow and difficult

Grammatical aspect

Its main

purpose in a language is to express how

events unfold in time.

problems

• Situation in which there is a goal, but effort must

be made in reaching it (obstacles)