Cognitive Psychology D570

Newell and Simon created the General Problem Solver, which is?

One of the first computer programs designed to simulate human problem-solving.

Behaviorism focused solely on?

Observable behaviors and dismissed internal mental states (e.g., thoughts, memories, beliefs)

Ulric Neisser's Schema Theory is the concept of what?

mental frameworks that help people organize and interpret information.

Schemas influence how people perceive events, recall memories, and fill in gaps in incomplete information.

Flashbulb memories are? Whose Theory was this?

vivid memories of emotionally charged events (High level of confidence in these memories but not necessarily accurate)

Neisser

Atkinson and Shiffrin Model of memory is also called?

the multi-store model of memory

The multi-store model of memory consists of 3 types of memory, which are?

Sensory Memory, Short-Term Memory (STM), and Long-Term Memory (LTM)

How long does sensory memory last?

Less than 1 second (visual information) to a few seconds (auditory information).

Short term memory lasts how long? How many different items can your STM remember at once?

15-30 seconds without rehearsal. 7+- 2 (5-9)

Tulving memory consists of what 3 different types of memory?

Episodic Memory, Semantic Memory, and Procedural Memory

What is Episodic memory?

Memory for personal experiences and specific events that occur at a particular time and place.

Autobiographic, temporal context (time and place), Mental time travel

What is Semantic memory?

Memory for general knowledge, facts, and concepts that are not tied to personal experiences.

example: Knowing that Paris is the capital of France or that 2+2=4.

Explain the difference between Episodic memory and Semantic memory (Use your own words, dont memorize this)

They distinct from each other but they interact. For example, learning a historical fact (semantic) might be remembered alongside the context in which you learned it (episodic).

What is procedural memory? Give your own example

Memory for skills and actions, often performed automatically without conscious awareness. (You dont think, you just do)

Riding a bike

(these skills might not have always been procedural, but with repetition they can be).

What is Tulving's Heirarchical Model?

· Procedural Memory: The most basic and foundational, shared by many species.

· Semantic Memory: Builds upon procedural memory, requiring more cognitive processing.

· Episodic Memory: The most advanced and unique to humans, relying on self-awareness and the ability to mentally time-travel.

Colin Cherry introduced the concept of selective attention which is also known as?

cocktail party effect

What is the cocktail party effect

The ability to focus on one message while ignoring others in a noisy environment.

What is a Dichotic Listening Experiment?

Participants listened to different messages in each ear and were asked to shadow (repeat) one.

How does nurture vs nature shape behavior and development?

Nature: Traits are inherited through genes (e.g., intelligence, genetic disorders).

Nurture: Traits are shaped by environment, upbringing, and experiences (e.g., education, culture).

What is the Normative approach?

Identifying typical milestones or norms for behaviors and abilities at specific ages, such as when children typically begin walking or speaking.

Paiget created the what?

Cognitive Development Model

The Cognitive Development Model has how many stages? What is it?

4 Stages. This model outlines how children's thinking develops in stages as they grow.

What are the 4 stages of the Cognitive Development Model? Give a quick explanation of each.

Sensorimotor: 0-2, experiences worlds through senses and actions.

Preoperational: 2-6, uses words and images to represent things but lacks reasoning (egocentric, pretend play)

Concrete operational: 7-11, Understand events and analogies logically, preforms math

Formal operational: 12+, Formal operations, uses abstract thinking, moral reasoning.

What is Zone of Proximal Development? Who created this?

Emphasizes the role of social interaction in early development, where children learn best with guidance from more knowledgeable others.

Vygotsky

What is Developmental Psychology?

Study of how people grow and change throughout their lives, focusing on physical, cognitive, emotional, and social development

What is Crystallized intelligence? How do you get this?

Knowledge and skills accumulated over a lifetime, including facts, vocabulary, and learned abilities.

It relies on past experiences and education and tends to increase with age.

Must gain knowledge and skills to have this.

What is a Neuron?

The basic units of the brain and nervous system that transmit information through electrical and chemical signals.

What is the Principle of Neural Representation?

Experiences and perceptions are not directly from stimuli but are represented in the brain by patterns of neural activity. For example, seeing an object involves specific neurons firing in response to its features like shape or color.

Hubel and Wiesel discovered feature detectors, which are what?

Specialized neurons in the brain's visual cortex that respond to specific features of a stimulus, such as edges, angles, or movement

Explain Experience-dependent plasticity

The brain's ability to change and adapt based on specific experiences. Neural connections are strengthened, weakened, or formed depending on the activities and environments an individual is exposed to, shaping the brain's structure and function over time. Example: Learning to play a musical instrument alters brain regions involved in motor and auditory skills.

Name the brain areas (Lobes) that are specialized for specific cognitive functions, and what those functions are.

Occipital Lobe: Visual processing.

Temporal Lobe: Memory and language.

Parietal Lobe: Spatial and sensory processing.

Frontal Lobe: Decision-making and problem-solving.

Explain Localization of Function

Specific brain regions are specialized for certain functions, such as the occipital lobe for vision or Broca's area for speech production.

What is Prosopagnosia? Damage to "______" is often associated with it?

Inability to recognize faces, often caused by damage to the fusiform face area (FFA) of the temporal lobe.

What is Broca's Aphasia? Damage to "______" is associated with it?

Difficulty in speech production due to damage to Broca's area in the frontal lobe. Patients can understand language but struggle to form coherent sentences.

What is Wernicke's Aphasia? Damage to "______" is associated with it?

Difficulty in language comprehension due to damage to Wernicke's area in the temporal lobe. Patients produce fluent but nonsensical speech.

Explain Functional Connectivity.

Coordinated activity between brain regions during tasks or rest, revealing networks like the default mode network involved in introspection and memory.

What are the key parts of a neuron and what do they do?

Dendrites: Receive signals from other neurons.

Cell Body (Soma): Processes incoming signals and contains the nucleus.

Axon: Sends electrical signals to other neurons.

Axon Terminals: Release neurotransmitters to communicate with other neurons.

Name the and explain the 3 "things" dealing with communication between neurons.

Synapse: The small gap between neurons where communication happens.

Neurotransmitters:

o Chemicals (e.g., dopamine, serotonin) that transmit signals across the synapse.

o Bind to receptors on the receiving neuron to pass along the message.

Action Potential:

o An electrical impulse that travels down the axon when a neuron is activated.

o All-or-nothing process: the neuron either fires or doesn't.

What is sensory coding?

How sensory information is represented in the brain through neural activity.

What is Specificity Coding?

A specific neuron that responds to a specific stimulus (e.g., one neuron for recognizing a face).

What is Population Coding?

A stimulus that is represented by the pattern of activity across a large group of neurons.

What is Sparse Coding?

a stimulus that is represented by a small group of neurons, with most remaining inactive, combining aspects of specificity and population coding.

What is the Default Mode Network (DMN)

A brain network active during rest or when not focused on a task, associated with introspection, mind-wandering, and memory.

Explain Paired Associate Learning. Give an example (Create your own)

A memory task where participants learn pairs of items (e.g., word pairs) and, during testing, recall the second item when presented with the first.

Learning "dog-table," then recalling "table" when prompted with "dog."

What does Conceptual Peg Hypothesis (Paivio) suggest?

That concrete words (e.g., "apple") create mental images that act as "pegs" to which other information can be linked, enhancing memory.

Mental Chronometry (Shepard and Metzler) is used to measure what? Explain their experiments.

The study of reaction times to infer cognitive processing.

In their experiments, participants judged whether two 3D objects were identical or rotated, and reaction time increased with the degree of rotation.

Significance: Provided evidence for mental rotation and demonstrated that mental imagery operates similarly to physical object manipulation.

What is Mental Scanning (Kosslyn)? Explain their experiment.

A cognitive process where individuals visualize an image in their mind and scan it for details.

In Kosslyn's experiments, participants imagined a map and took longer to mentally scan between distant landmarks, suggesting mental images preserve spatial relationships.

Significance: Supports the idea that mental imagery is spatial and analogous to real-world perception.

What is Epiphenomenon?

An epiphenomenon is like a side effect or extra result of something that happens but doesn't actually change or affect the main process.

In mental imagery, the idea is that when you "see" pictures in your mind, those pictures are just a byproduct of how your brain is working. They come from the brain's thinking processes but aren't necessary for how you make decisions or solve problems.

Explain the concept of Propositional Representations

Propositional representations are like mental descriptions or statements that use words or symbols to store information in your brain, rather than pictures or images.

For example: Instead of imagining a picture of a cat under a table, your brain might store the idea as a sentence, like "The cat is under the table." It's abstract and doesn't rely on visualizing the scene but still holds the meaning of the situation.

Think of it as your brain's way of writing notes about the world, using words or symbols instead of drawings.

Explain the concept of a Topographical Map

Topographical Map: like a mental map in your brain that keeps the layout of what you see in the real world.

In your brain's visual cortex, there are groups of neurons (brain cells) that respond to specific parts of what you're looking at. If two things are next to each other in your field of view, the neurons responding to those things are also next to each other in the brain.

It's as if your brain is copying the structure of what you see and keeping it organized, so the spatial relationships (what's next to what) are preserved. This helps you process and understand visual information efficiently.

Explain the Kreiman Figure

The Kreiman Figure refers to a study or illustration related to how the brain processes images, particularly in mental imagery. In simple terms, it shows how certain brain areas become active when you imagine something, even if you're not actually seeing it.

For example, if you imagine a tree, parts of your brain that would light up when you see a tree in real life are also active during imagination. The Kreiman Figure might display this overlap, often used to support the idea that imagining and seeing share similar brain mechanisms

Explain the Le Bihan Figure

The Le Bihan Figure is often used to show how the brain's visual system responds to both real images and imagined images.

It demonstrates that when you see something (like a tree) or imagine the same thing in your mind, similar areas of your brain light up. Specifically, it focuses on how the visual cortex, the part of your brain responsible for processing what you see, is active during both seeing and imagining.

Explain Multivoxel Pattern Analysis (MVPA)

Multivoxel Pattern Analysis (MVPA) is a brain imaging technique that looks at patterns of activity across many small areas (voxels) in the brain to figure out what a person is thinking or experiencing.

It's like looking at a detailed "heatmap" of the brain. Instead of just checking if one part of the brain is active, MVPA studies the specific patterns of activity in multiple spots to see if they match something, like a specific thought or image.

Explain Transcranial Mental Stimulation-Perception or Imagery (Kosslyn)

When you look at an object (like a chair), certain areas of your brain become active.

When you imagine that chair, many of those same brain areas light up, even though you're not actually seeing it.

Kosslyn's work showed that perception (seeing) and imagery (imagining) share similar brain processes, meaning your brain treats imagining something almost like seeing it for real. This helps explain why mental imagery feels so vivid for some people.

Explain the method of Loci

A memory technique where information is associated with specific locations in a familiar environment (a mental "map").

Mentally place items to remember along a known route or within a familiar setting. During recall, "walk" through the route to retrieve the information.

What makes up the Hierarchical Nature of Language? explain each level.

Phonemes: Smallest units of sound (e.g., /b/ in "bat").

Morphemes: Smallest units of meaning (e.g., "un-" in "undo").

Words: Combined morphemes forming meaningful units (e.g., "book").

Phrases: Groups of words organized according to syntax (e.g., "the red book").

Sentences: Complete thoughts composed of phrases.

What are some examples that could confirm The Universal Need to Use Language

· Language Exists Across All Cultures

· Children's Language Acquisition

· Sign Language in Deaf Communities

· Neurobiological Evidence

What is Psycholinguistics?

The study of how humans acquire, understand, produce, and use language.

What is a Lexicon?

The mental dictionary of words a person knows, including their meanings, pronunciations, and relationships to other words.

Explain the concept of semantics.

The study of meaning in language, focusing on how words, phrases, and sentences convey meaning.

Understanding that "run" can mean physical movement or operating a machine, depending on context.

Explain the concept of Lexical Semantics.

A branch of semantics that examines the meanings of individual words and their relationships (e.g., synonyms, antonyms, and word hierarchies).

Example: Exploring how "big" and "large" are similar, but "big" and "tiny" are opposites.

Explain word frequency and the effect

Refers to how often a word appears in a given language or context. High-frequency words (e.g., "the," "cat") are used more often than low-frequency words (e.g., "serendipity").

Highlights the impact of familiarity on cognitive processing in language.

Explain Rayner and Duffy (1986) - Fixation Duration findings

Readers fixate longer on low-frequency words (e.g., "galleon") than on high-frequency words (e.g., "ship").

Significance: Demonstrates the word frequency effect, showing that familiarity with words influences reading efficiency and cognitive processing.

Explain the concept of Speech Segmentation

The process by which listeners perceive distinct words within the continuous flow of speech, despite the lack of Silence Between Words.

In natural speech, words are often spoken without pauses or silences, making segmentation challenging. (Easy for languages you speak, but why when you hear a language you don't it just sounds like one long noise)

Explain and give an example of Lexical Ambiguity

Occurs when a word has multiple meanings.

The word "bank" could mean Wellsfargo or the side of a river.

Explain and give an example of Lexical Priming

Refers to how exposure to one word influences the processing of a related word.

Seeing the word "doctor" makes the word "nurse" easier and faster to recognize due to their association.

Explain the Concept of meaning dominance (there are 2 types).

Biased Dominance: Occurs when one meaning of a word is much more common than others.

(e.g for gay the "homosexual" meaning is more dominant than "happy")

Balanced Dominance: Occurs when multiple meanings of a word are used with roughly equal frequency.

(e.g. For "cast," meanings like "actors in a play" and "a medical cast" are similarly common.)

What is Syntax?

Refers to the set of rules governing the structure and arrangement of words in sentences to convey meaning.

"The cat chased the mouse" follows proper syntax, whereas "Cat the mouse chased" does not.

Explain parsing

The mental process of analyzing a sentence's syntax to determine its grammatical structure and meaning.

When reading "The old man the boat," parsing helps resolve ambiguity to understand "The old man is in the boat."

Explain the Garden Path Model of parsing

Proposes that readers/listeners initially use simple syntactic rules (heuristics) to interpret a sentence, which can lead to errors and reanalysis when the sentence takes an unexpected turn.

For example: When you read a sentence, your brain guesses its meaning based on the easiest and most straightforward interpretation. Sometimes, this guess is wrong if the sentence takes an unexpected twist, and you have to go back and rethink what it means.

It's called a "garden path" because it's like being led down a path that suddenly doesn't go where you thought, so you have to backtrack and figure out the right way.

Explain Heuristics

Mental shortcuts or rules of thumb used to simplify parsing and make quick decisions about sentence structure.

Example: Assuming the most straightforward interpretation of a sentence.

Name factors that influence prediction

Context: Prior words or sentences set expectations (e.g., "The baker put the bread in the...").

Grammar: Knowledge of syntax shapes predictions for upcoming sentence structures.

Semantics: Meaning helps predict logical continuations (e.g., "The key opened the...").

What is an Anaphoric Inference

Connecting pronouns or references to previously mentioned entities.

Example: "Sara found a puppy. She took it home." ("She" refers to Sara, "it" refers to the puppy.)

Explain Instrument Inferences

· Inferring tools or methods used in a scenario based on context.

o Example: "He pounded the nail." (Inferring he used a hammer.)

Explain Casual Inferences

Establishing cause-and-effect relationships between events.

o Example: "She forgot her umbrella. She got wet." (Inferring the rain caused her to get wet.)

Why is common ground important?

important for effective communication, ensuring messages are interpreted as intended. Engaging conversations.

What is Syntactic Coordination

The tendency for conversational partners to align their sentence structures during communication, making the conversation flow more smoothly.

What is Syntactic Priming?

The phenomenon where exposure to a specific sentence structure increases the likelihood of using that same structure in subsequent speech or writing.

You're on a meeting, they are going around the room. The first person they call on says "Nothing from me sir" Most others will say the exact same thing.

Attendance in school first person says "Here" most others will say the same thing

Explain the concept of The Persistence of vision

Persistence of vision is the idea that when you see something, your eyes and brain hold onto the image for a tiny moment, even after it's gone.

For example: If you wave a sparkler in the dark, you see a trail of light. That trail isn't really there—it's just your brain holding onto each flash of light for a split second, making it look like a continuous streak.

This is why movies and animations work. They show a series of still images very quickly, and because of persistence of vision, your brain blends them together into smooth motion.

Explain Sperlings experiment on iconic memory

He flashed a grid of 12 letters (3 rows of 4) on a screen briefly.

People couldn't remember all the letters—only 4 or 5—when asked to recall everything (because the memory faded too fast).

When he played a tone to tell them which row to focus on, they could remember almost all the letters in that row.

Takeaway: Your brain briefly stores much visual information, but most of it fades quickly unless you focus on it.

What is chunking? Give an example

Grouping individual pieces of information into more significant, meaningful units to remember them more easily.

Example: Instead of remembering "1, 9, 7, 6," you chunk it into "1976" (a year). Go from remembering 4 items to 1

What is working memory?

is like your brain's temporary workspace—you actively hold and manipulate information to complete a task.

What are the components of working memory according to Baddeley and Hitch's model)? Explain them

Central Executive: The "boss" that directs attention and controls what you focus on.

Phonological Loop: Deals with verbal and auditory information (e.g., rehearsing a phone number).

Visuospatial Sketchpad: Handles visual and spatial info (e.g., imagining how furniture fits in a room).

Episodic Buffer: Integrates info from different sources (e.g., combining what you see and hear into a coherent story).

Explain the Phonological Similarity Effect

Similar sounds are more complex to remember

Explain the Word Length Effect

Longer words are more challenging to remember.

Explain Articulatory Suppression

Distracting sounds disrupt your memory.

What does the serial position curve show? (Murdoch, 1962)

how people recall items from a list based on their position.

What is the Primacy effect?

Items at the beginning of the list are remembered better.

What is the Recency Effect in regard to lists?

Items at the end of the list are also remembered better.

What is Visual Coding?

Storing information as mental images or visual representations.

What is Auditory Coding?

Storing information based on how it sounds.

What is Semantic Coding?

Storing information based on its meaning.

Explain Proactive Interference

Proactive interference happens when old memories make it harder to learn or remember something new.

Example:

You used to park your car in the same spot at work every day. Then you start parking in a new spot. But at the end of the day, you keep walking to the old spot because your brain is stuck on the habit of where you used to park.

Explain recognition memory

Identifying something as familiar when presented with it again.

The hippocampus is crucial for what?

Forming and retrieving long-term and episodic memories.

What is episodic memory?

Memory of specific personal experiences or events.

What is semantic memory?

Memory of general knowledge, facts, and concepts not tied to personal experiences.

What is autobiographical memory?

A mix of episodic and semantic memories related to your life.

Remembering you graduated in 2015 (semantic) and recalling the ceremony and how you felt (episodic).

Explain the Semanticization of remote memories

Episodic memories (detailed, personal experiences) gradually lose their specific details over time and become more like semantic memories (general knowledge).

Example: You might forget specific details about a birthday party from years ago, but remember that you celebrated it at your favorite restaurant.

What is the difference between Explicit and Implicit long term memories?

Explicit Memory (You Think About It):

Example:Remembering your last birthday party.

Knowing the name of the president.

Implicit Memory (You Don't Think About It):

Example:Knowing how to ride a bike. Driving a car.

Explain Classical Conditioning

learning through association. It happens when you connect two things so that one starts to trigger a response you originally had only to the other. (Ivan Pavlov)

Training a dog, bell means dinner