Lecture Notes on Memory, Perception, and Cognition

Flashcards based on lecture notes about memory, perception, and cognition.

What does Craik and Tulving's 'depth of processing' experiment suggest?

Semantic or meaningful processing leads to the best memory performance.

What is a proximal stimulus?

An object or event in the world (e.g., a tree or a car).

In what type of memory is the name of the first US President stored, and what kind of memory are you engaging in when you recall it?

Generic memory; explicit memory.

What does the older term 'short term memory' emphasize, and what does the more current term 'working memory' imply?

Duration of storage; a 'cognitive workbench'.

If a football player sustains a concussion and has no memory of the play leading up to the injury, what has probably occurred?

Interruption of trace consolidation.

In terms of sensation and perception, what do our knowledge of the world, objects and events equate to, and what does our experience of the world (colors and sounds) equate to?

Perception; sensation.

If short wavelength light looks blue to us, and our experience of seeing blue depends on blue-yellow opponent process cells being excited, what must the connection from short wave cone cells to those opponent process cells be?

Excitatory.

What best explains mis-remembering an earlier story of Celebrity A's harassment behavior because you keep thinking of later harassment behavior of Celebrity B?

Retroactive interference.

What does episodic memory include?

Your memory of what you ate for dinner last night.

What does the recency effect refer to?

Difficulty of remembering words from the middle of a list.

What are feature detectors?

Neurons in the visual cortex that respond best to lines that are either horizontal, vertical, diagonal, or some other specific orientation.

What ability do patients suffering long-lasting anterograde amnesia usually lose?

Ability to make new explicit memories.

As you read a complex paragraph of text, where are the intermediate phrases and sentences you're comprehending being assembled, and where are the definitions of words you're accessing?

Working memory; generic memory.

What is lateral inhibition responsible for?

Enhancing boundaries or edges, inhibition of a less-activated neuron in the retina by a highly-activated neighboring neuron, the mechanism underlying brightness contrast.

What is the kind of amnesia called that involves forgetting things that occurred BEFORE a brain trauma?

Retrograde amnesia.

How does short-term memory differ from long-term memory in terms of its neural basis?

Its neural basis is dynamic activity among a group of neurons rather than a structural pattern of connections.

When Gestalt psychologists claim that the whole is different than the sum of the parts, what observation does that include?

Perception of movement could happen in the absence of any sensations of movement.

What happens when the brain fuses the two slightly different-angle images of the world coming from each eye into one image?

It creates an impression of depth.

If two objects of different sizes produce the same size retinal image, what must be true of the larger object?

Farther away than the smaller.

According to the encoding-specificity principle, what would be the best retrieval cue for a particular word from a list that was learned earlier?

A word that brings back the context from learning the list.

Pushing gently on the side of your closed eye will create visual sensations even though no light is present; what is this evidence for?

The doctrine of specific nerve energies.

How does implicit memory differ from explicit memory?

Implicit memory does not require conscious awareness of remembering.

What has Elizabeth Loftus shown about reconstructed memories?

They seem equally true to the person doing the remembering, whether they are accurate or not.

Why should you look a little to the side of a faint star in order to see it better?

The rod cells that can detect light are not found in the center of the retina.

Electromagnetic radiation gives rise to our experience of color based on its ____ and of brightness based on its ____

Wavelength; intensity.

What was Helmholtz's maximum likelihood principle intended to take account of?

The way the world usually is, when making unconscious inferences.