PSY654 Cognitive Psychology Exam 2

What is the difference between short- and long-term memory?

What is the difference between short- and long-term memory?

Short term memory: ability to retain information within the present moment

Long term memory: the retrieval of encoded information

Describe Murdock's (1962) serial position curve.

Had a list of words (barricade, children, diet, baseball etc); Asked to recall words in any order
Primacy Effect: remembering what you interacted with first the best
Recency Effect: remembering what you interacted with last the best

The tendency to recall the first and last information more than information within the middle.

What accounts for the primacy portion of the serial position curve? Is this part of the curve typically associated with short- or long-term memory?

The primacy portion is due to more rehearsal attempts and is more associated with long-term memory

What accounts for the recent portion of the serial position curve? Is this part of the curve typically associated with short- or long-term memory?

The things at the end of the list are remembered better because you still have short term memory

Did patient HM have short term memory? Long term memory?

Patient HM's short-term memory was still intact but his long-term memory was not
He can recall things with cued recall or constant rehearsal

What is the distinction between declarative and procedural memory?

Declarative memory: things that you know that you can talk about, ability to remember things we personally experience (ex. What is the capital of paris)

Procedural memory: remembering how to do things like ride a bike, motor type of memory, comes naturally 

What is the distinction between episodic and semantic memory?Which one  did patient KC retain? How are both these kinds of memory declarative? 

Semantic Memory: your general knowledge about things and the world

Episodic Memory: your ability to bring back memories to mind and vividly re-experience events that you have gone through in your past

KC had good semantic memory but very poor episodic memory

These are both declarative memory because they both involve knowing things and being able to express them in a way others can understand; Require conscious awareness to retrieve the memory

What did Petrican et al. (2010) demonstrate regarding the functioning of episodic and semantic memory in older adults?

showed older adults pictures of historical events in the past 10-50 years and asked them what event is taking place and if they remember anything they learned about the event

People generally knew of the events, but had difficulty remembering the details of what they learned about the events (especially so for events 40-50 years ago)

Episodic memories deteriorate with age; Overtime the details of events are lost

What did research using word-stem completion with amnesiac patients demonstrate about implicit memory?

demonstrated that implicit memory has the ability to impact behaviour in ways where we are not even consciously aware of

Word stem completion is acting as a primer — when given the first few letters of the word, HM was able to recall the world he was asked to remember

despite not being able to explicitly recall priming material, it can still implicitly complete word-stem prompts.

What types of processing during encoding did you learn can improve memory? Why do each of these help? (6 examples)

1. Levels of Processing (the more meaningful the content the better encoding)

2. Self-Processing (relatable; better relation to self the better encoding)

3. Survival processing (survival/self-process),

4. Visual Imagery (words + image),

5. Generating Information (fill in blanks), and

6. Retrieval Practice (self-test)

These all help because they use different methods to encode the information and assist in remembering the information much better

Describe and discuss the encoding specificity principle and transfer appropriate processing. What is the difference between the two? How is state dependent memory similar to encoding specificity principle? What evidence did you learn that supports these theories of encoding/retrieval interactions?

Encoding Specificity: given a list of words and asked to learn them (on land vs in water), and recall them (on land, vs in water)
When the encoding conditions match the recall conditions, you remember much better

Transfer Appropritate Processing: given a list of words and asked to learn them by asking superficial questions (does it rhyme with far?) or asking the meaning (can you travel long distances in it?) With a recall test, you remember the meaning better: with a rhyme test, you remember the superficial features better

State-dependent memory: similar to encoding specificity because how you process information at the encoding stage will determine how well you remember that information later on if that processing matches what you're doing at retrieval

Evidence of this is retrieval practice: testing yourself is a good method of studying because it matches what you'd be doing by exam time

Compare and contrast the three accounts of reminiscence bump.

Reminiscence Bump: best remember late teens to early 20s in all lifetime

Self-Image Hypothesis: we crystalize what we understand about who we are as a person

Cognitive Hypothesis: experiencing novel things, our brain is good at paying attention to new things

Cultural Life Script Hypothesis: Things we expect people to go through in life (go to school, get a job, get married, have kids etc)

What parts of the brain are important for emotional memory?

amygdala ->hippocampus

Are all aspects of emotional experiences remembered well? Provide evidence for your answer.

Not all aspects of emotional experiences a well remembered: in emotional events such as having a gun pointed at you, you remember the gun much more than anything else (ex. Poor focus on the perpetrator's face, your surroundings)

If shown a neutral image and an emotional image, it's harder to remember the colour details in the emotional image than the neutral image (periphery details are difficult to remember)

What does the research say about the memorability of flashbulb memories? Can people have false memories related to flashbulb memories?

You tend to remember a lot of things in relation to key historical events (9/11, Diana's death, the challenger explosion etc)

Belief stays consistent, but details decrease over time. Individuals can have false memories related to flashbulb memories (i.e. 44% remember seeing car chase that was never shown for Princess Diana's death)

Name two pieces of evidence indicating that memorization abilities and autobiographical memory are different from another.

Neuroimaging: the areas that light up when you remember lab-based stimuli (like a list of words) vs remembering details about our own lives don't really overlap

Exceptional Memory: people with exceptional memories can remember their whole lives, but their memorization abilities can be just as average as another person (and vice versa - memory Olympics)

Name six examples that demonstrate the constructive nature of human memory.

1. Perspective: we experience things through our own eyes (1st, 3rd person perspective: we only experience 1st person so our mind constructs what it'd be like to be 3rd person)

2. Cultural Influences: (Frederick Bartlett, 1932) had them read a story, and then the next day they had to recall, they remembered best what was in line with their own cultural experiences (hunting fish instead of seals)

3. General Knowledge: (Kathleen McDermott & Jason Chen) pragmatic Inferences: people remember and fill in the blanks with the most probable information (The baby ____ all night)

4. Schematic Knowledge: certain things we anticipate occurring in specific situations (remembering books in an office where there were no books in the first place)

5. Script Knowledge: there is a script that you expect to happen when you go places (restaurant, be seated, handed a menu, etc): fills in details of past experiences even if they weren't there

6. Spreading Activation: (Kathleen McDermott & Henry Roediger) give words to memorize, distract with math problems, when given a test, we say we saw the word sleep, but in reality, we saw words related to sleep

What did Loftus et al., (1978) find using the misinformation paradigm?

Presented with an event, then presented misleading information about the event, and then given a memory test
Watched a video of a car crash, asked if another car passed the (stop vs yield) sign, during the memory test, they much more likely to report seeing a yield sign if asked about it

We can modify memory just by asking about specific details

Memories can be influenced by misleading info such as how a question is asked (i.e. asking if car passed when at yield sign, when there was a stop sign).

What did Loftus and Palmer (1974) learn about suggestibility in memory?

Word choice can influence contents of memory, i.e. saying smashed instead of bumped leading to memory of higher speed and broken glass. can occur for personal past experiences leading to therapy issues creating false memories.

What four techniques can be used to improve the accuracy of eyewitness line-ups?

1. Should inform witness the suspect may not be in the line-up

2. Should use fillers similar to the suspect (the rest of the people in the lineup)

3. Should present individuals sequentially rather than simultaneously

4. Should use "blind" administrator (the person the police actually suspect should not be known to the individual administrating the lineup)

What is a prototype? Name three pieces of evidence indicating that people may think about categories in terms of prototypes.

Prototypes: over our lifetime of experiencing a specific thing, our brain creates a statistical average of what that thing is

1. Ratings of Representativeness: how well does this represent the image you have in your mind?

2. Sentence Verification: fill in the blank ("a ____ is a bird": say yes or no

3. Listing Examples: people mention things that fit their definitions more frequently than others

What is difference between exemplar and prototype?

Prototypes - the statistic average of a thing

Exemplars - we remember specific examples we have been exposed to already ( walking down the street and see a 3 legged dog you still categorize it but we might have seen one in a tv show or movie and we can classify it still)

What are the three levels of organization of category knowledge? What is the name of the overall structure of the organization of category knowledge?

Semantic Networks "Hierarchical Organization"

1. Basic Level: a category (Birds)

2. Superordinate Level: most general (animals)

3. Subordinate Level: sparrow, robin, penguin (highly specific)

Do people always think about categories in terms of their basic level?

Children: superordinate level because they're still learning

Experts: subordinate level because they know so much

How does the multi-factor approach to category knowledge inform the sensory-functional hypothesis?

Hypothesis: the way we think of living things (animals what they look like) is different than the way we think about non living things (how we use them) depending on the concept and category we think about things in different ways (JUST AN IDEA) 

Multifactor approach: have a list of concepts, rate how much its associated with different factors (colour, sound, taste etc)

associated sensory features (colour, motion) more with animals, and associated functional features with tools/artifacts

According to the semantic category approach how is conceptual knowledge represented in the brain?

Distributed across the brain

Specialized parts of the brain that represent specific features/concepts: combine all features to get a coherent sense of what we're looking at

Describe the embodied approach to category knowledge?

Your brain simulates you doing the action before sending instructions to do so

Before we enact a specific behaviour/if we see others perform it, the premotor cortex goes off

How does the distributed-plus-hub view of category knowledge help to explain deficits that often accompany semantic dementia?

Semantic dementia: lose access to the general knowledge that you have about the world around you

Anterior temporal lobe brings all concepts together to make coherent information: becomes degraded with semantic dementia
Due to this, your brain loses the ability to recognize everyday objects