Cognitive Psych Exam 3

Autobiographical memory

memory for specific experiences from your own life, combining episodic (the experience itself) and semantic (facts about yourself) components; multidimensional, binding together spatial, emotional, and sensory detail

Cabeza et al. (2004)

Compared brain activity when viewing your own campus photos versus photos of the same location taken by someone else; both activated medial temporal lobe (episodic retrieval) and parietal cortex (visual senses), but only your own photos additionally activated prefrontal cortex (self-referential processing) and hippocampus (recollection)

Functions of autobiographical memory (Bluck, 2003)

self-continuity function, links who you were to who you are now;

social function, builds and maintains relationships by sharing experiences;

directive function, uses past experiences to guide current and future decisions

The reminiscence bump

Adults recall a disproportionate number of autobiographical memories from adolescence and early adulthood (roughly ages 10-30); explanations include the cognitive hypothesis (encoding is best when rapid change is followed by a stable period) and the cultural life script (shapes what we think we should remember)

Emotion and consolidation

emotion improves memory, partly by enhancing consolidation, the process of stabilizing a memory trace after encoding; linked to amygdala activity

Easterbrook’s cue-utilization hypothesis

high arousal narrows attention to central, emotionally salient details,

central details are remembered better under arousal

peripheral details are remembered worse; sometimes called tunnel memory; previews weapon focus in eyewitness situations

Flashbulb memories

Vivid, detailed memories for shocking, highly charged, important events; originally thought to be especially accurate

Talarico and Rubin (2003)

compared 9/11 flashbulb memories to an everyday memory from the same period over time; accuracy and consistency declined at about the same rate for both, but confidence in the flashbulb memory stayed high even as accuracy dropped, flashbulb memories feel more accurate, they are not actually more accurate, just more vivid and confidently held

Reconstructive memory

retrieval changes the context of memory, sometimes distorting it, memory equals the actual event plus your existing knowledge, experience, and expectations

Confabulation

Supplying additional information that was not part of the original event, without intending to deceive

Spontaneous vs provoked confabulation

Spontaneous: is unprompted and sometimes bizarre, associated with frontal lobe damage

Provoked: happens in response to a question or memory test and can occur in healthy people under pressure to answer

Korsakoff’s syndrome

Severe memory loss, often from thiamine deficiency, in which patients may confidently fill in gaps with fabricated detail; confabulation is not lying, patients believe in what they report

Source memory and source monitoring errors

source memory: your ability to determine the origin of a memory

source monitoring error: (also called source misattribution) is misidentifying that origin of memory

Cryptomnesia

Unconscious plagiarism, producing someone else’s idea or words as your own because you do not remember where you first encountered it

Jacoby et al. (1989), the famous overnight study

participants read a list of non-famous names, then a day later judged fame from a new list mixing new non-famous names, the previously seen non-famous names, and genuinely famous people; the previously seen names were often misjudged as famous, familiarity misattributed to fame rather than having to read the name the day before

Source monitoring framework (Johnson, Hashtroudi, and Lindsay, 1993)

We judge the source of a memory by evaluating its qualities, vividness, sensory detail, and attached cognitive effort, not by reading off a stored label; vivid, detailed memories are judged as real or external, while memories with more attached effort or reasonings are judged as imagined or internal

Reality monitoring vs. external source monitoring:

Reality monitoring distinguishes memories of real events from memories of imagined events

External source monitoring distinguishes between two external sources, such as who told you something or in which conversation

Imagination inflation (Garry, Manning, Loftus, and Sherman, 1996)

Asking participants to imagine childhood events that may not have happened increased their later confidence that the event actually happened; imaging a recent adds vivid sensory detail, which source monitoring mistakes for the signature of a real memory

Schema vs. script

A schema is organized knowledge about an environment or category; a script is organized knowledge about an environment or category; a script is organized knowledge of a typical sequence of actions; memories of experiences can include things about that did not happen but fit the schema or script

DRM paradigm (Roediger and McDermott, 1995)

studying a list of words all associated with one missing critical lure produces high rates of false recall or recognition of that lure, sometimes even more confidently than items that were actually on the list

Spreading activation

hearing several words associated with a missing concept activates that concept in semantic memory even though it was never presented; that activation can feel like a memory trace at test

Fuzzy trace theory (Brainerd and Reyna)

We encode a verbatim trace (exact, item-specific detail) and a gist trace (the general theme) in parallel; verbatim traces fade quickly, gist traces are durable, and a gist trace alone can support false recognition of critical lure

Misinformation effect

Misleading information presented after an event can change your memory of the event itself

Loftus and Palmer (1974)

asked how fast cars were going when they contacted, hit, bumped, collided with, or smashed into each other; stronger verbs produced higher speed estimates, and in follow-up, more participants falsely remembered broken glass that was never in the film

Lofus, Miller, and Burns (1978)

misleading post-event information, such as a stop sign described as a yield sign, was often incorporated into a witness’s later memory

The Lost in the Mall studies (Loftus and colleagues, 1990s)

with help from a family member who confirmed a fabricated childhood story, researchers implanted a complete false memory of being lost in a shopping mall in roughly a quarter of participants, who then elaborated on it with invented sensory detail; shows misinformation can plant entire events, not just distort details

Eyewitness testimony

highly convincing to a jury despite being unreliable; the chance of change increases with time, confidence tends to be high even when wrong, and there is no way to distinguish accurate from inaccurate testimony without outside evidence

Wells and Bradfield (1998)

participants watched an 8 second video of a gunman, then viewed a lineup that did not actually contain the gunman; every participant still picked someone

Source of eyewitness error

attention and arousal (narrowed attention, as in weapon focus), familiarity (misremembering a face from somewhere else as the culprit, a source memory problem), and suggestion (the misinformation effect or post-identification feedback)

Weapons focus effect

attention narrows onto a weapon during a crime, at the cost of memory for the perpetrator’s face and other details, consistent with emotion and arousal narrowing attention

Cross-race effect (own race bias)

eyewitnesses are generally less accurate identifying faces of a race different from their own, thought to reflect more lifelong practice individuating faces within one’s own race

Post-identification feedback effect

confirming feedback after a lineup identification inflates a witness later reported confidence, even though it does not reflect their confidence at the time of the identification

Lineup and interview reforms

informing witnesses the perpetrator might not be in the lineup, using fillers similar to the suspect, sequential rather than simultaneous presentation, and the cognitive interview (mentally reinstating context, reporting everything no matter how trivial, recalling events in a different order, and recalling from a different perspective)

Construct validity

whether results actually support the theory behind the research, for example whether a staged, filmed crime actually captures the fear and stress of a real crime

Internal validity

whether a study provides real evidence of a cause-effect relationship, or whether something else could explain the result, for example whether the critical lure is really what causes false memories in the DRM paradigm

External validity

how well findings generalize beyond the specific study, for example whether results from college students in lab generalize to real eyewitnesses or real courtrooms

Attention

the ability to focus on specific things

Selective attention

attending to one thing while ignoring others

Divided attention

paying attention to more than one thing at a time; performance on both tasks usually drops compared to doing either alone, and cost grows as the tasks get harder or more similar to each other

Inattentional blindness (Simons and Chabris, 1999)

Missing a salient, fully visible part of the environment because attention was engaged elsewhere

Dichotic listening task

One message is presented to the left ear and a different message to the right ear; participants shadow, repeat aloud, one message, letting researchers test how much of the unattended message got through

Filter theory (Broadbent, 1958)

information processing is restricted by channel capacity; an early filter selects information based on physical features, such as which ear, before beaning is processed; predicts almost nothing from the unattended channel should be reported

Gray and Wedderburn (1960)

When ear channels were rearranged so a coherent phrase spanned both ears, participants reorganized the message by meaning rather than following the ear of presentation, a problem for purely physical early filter

Cocktail party effect (Cherry, 1953)

your own name spoken in an unattended conversation reliably breaks through and grabs attention

Selective filter model (Moray, 1959)

meaningful information will always be let through, regardless of which channel it is on

Attenuation theory (Treisman , 1964)

an intermediate selection model; an attenuator turns down, rather than blocks, unattended information; a dictionary unit contains words with individual activation thresholds, common or important words, like your own name, have low thresholds and can still activate even when attenuated

Late selection theory (Deutsch and Deutsch, 1963)

selection happens after perceptual analysis, everything presented is fully perceived and identified, and selection only determines what reaches awareness or triggers a response afterward

McKay (1973)

an unattended word (river or money) shifted how participants interpreted an ambiguous sentence in the attended ear, even without conscious awareness of hearing it, evidence for late selection

Load theory (Lavie, 2005)

whether selection looks early or late depends on task load;

under high perceptual load, resources are used up, consistent with early selection;

under low load, spare resources process irrelevant information, consistent with late selection

Controlled processing (Schnider and Shiffrin, 1977)

effortful, requires attention, one step at a time, flexible, for example adding a column of large numbers

Automatic processing

effortless, requires little or no attention, fast, hard to stop once triggered, for example reading a familiar word; usually starts out controlled and becomes automatic with extensive practice

Stroop effect (Stroop, 1935)

naming the ink color of a word is slower and more error-prone when the word names a conflicting color; reading the word is automatic and keeps happening whether intended or not, interfering with the controlled task of naming the ink color

Stroop conditions

congruent (word and ink color match), incongruent (word and ink color conflict), and neutral (a non-color word or symbol string); the Stroop effect is the slowdown or increase in errors specifically on incongruent trials compared to congruent or neutral trials

Overt attention

attention paired with actual eye movements; saccades are the rapid eye movements themselves; fixations are the short pauses on points of interest where information is taken in

Bottom-up and top-down guidance

bottom-up guidance comes from stimulus salience, color and motion are highly salient; top-down guidance comes from scene schemas, knowledge about typical scenes, and from the current task; eye movements typically precede actions

Visual search

looking for a target among distractors; feature search, where the target differs by one simple feature, is fast and seems to pop out, with little increases in search time as distractors are added; conjunction search, where the targets differs by a combination of features, is slower, with search time increasing steadily as distractors are added

Feature integration theory (Treisman and Gelade, 1980)

in the pre-attentive stage, individual features are registered automatically and in parallel across the visual field; in the focused attention stage, attention is required to bind separate features into one correctly combined object; without attention, features can be misbound (illusory conjunctions), which is why conjunction search is slow

Covert attention and precueing (Posner et al,. 1978)

attenuation can shift without moving the eyes; participants respond faster to a stimulus at an expected, cued location that at an unexpected location, even with the eyes kept fixed

Spotlight model of attention

attention behaves like a beam of light that can move independently of the eyes, with a focus, a clear center of enhanced processing, and margin, where enhancement fades gradually; it can move voluntarily or be captured automatically by a salient event

Posner and Peterson (1990), three attention networks

altering, achieving, and maintaining high sensitivity to incoming stimuli; orienting, selecting information from a specific location, the spotlight itself; and executive, resolving conflict among competing responses, as on the Stroop task

Change blindness

missing an actual change to environment, distinct from inattentional blindness, missing something that was always there; Simons and Levin (1998) door study, an experimenter was secretly swapped for a different person while a door passed between them and a pedestrian, and about half of participants failed to notice

Signal detection theory

describes how we perceive stimuli in a noisy environment; every trail produces a hit, a miss, a false alarm, or a correct rejection; d prime is measure of sensitivity (hits minus false alarms), independent of response bias

Response criterion

a liberal criterion produces more hits but also more false alarms, a conservative criterions produces fever false alarms but also more misses; real-world examples include a radiologist reading a scan, airport security screening luggage, and a juror weighing evidence, since the costs of a miss versus a false alarm are rarely equal

Hemispatial neglect

failure to attend to one side of space, usually the left, after brain damage, most commonly to the right parietal lobe; patients may eat from one side of a plate or draw a clock with the numbers crowded onto one side, and typically do not perceive this as a gap; a disorder of attention, not basic vision, since patients can often perceive the neglected side if directly cued to look there

Stroop Task Activity

The logic: whether naming ink color is slower on incongruent trials, where the words of ink color conflict, than on congruent trials, where they match

Independent and dependent variables:

• independent: trial type (congruent vs incongruent

• dependent: naming time and number of errors

Limitations: practice or fatigue effects from completing the congruent and incongruent lists in fixed order

Loftus and Palmer In-Class demo

The logic: whether a single word change in a question (smashed versus contacted) shifts estimated speed for an identical accident scenario

Independent and dependent variables:

• Independent: the verb used in the question

• dependent: estimated speed

Limitations: this was a quick, ungraded classroom demo, not a controlled, individually randomized study, since assignment to group was by seating side rather than at random

DRM Paradigm Activity

The logic: whether you falsely recall or recognize a critical lure that was never presented, after studying word list built around it

Independent and dependent variables:

• Independent: word type (studied item, critical lure, unrelated lure)

• dependent: false recall and false recognition rates

Limitations: the small, non-random class sample, word listen specifically chosen to produce the effect