memory and attention midterm 1

Memory

A record of ideas and representations; it can also be understood as a storage facility or a mental process.

Learning

Any change in an organism’s potential to alter its behaviour as a consequence of experience

Episodic memory

Memory for personally experienced events

Medial temporal lobe (MTL)

Brain region important for creating new episodic memories.

Hippocampus

Brain structure critical for the formation/consolidation of new episodic memories.

Memory impairment after hippocampal damage

Damage can prevent the creation of new episodic memories while leaving abilities such as object identification, language, and muscle memory relatively intact

Temporal availability

The idea that memories become less accessible as time passes; represented by the “conveyor belt” metaphor

Content addressability

The idea that memories can be accessed through their content or associations; represented by the “lock and key” metaphor

Forgetting details

The tendency to retain the general meaning or gist of an experience while losing specific details; represented by the “leaky bucket” metaphor.

Reconstruction

The process of rebuilding a memory using available information, prior experience, and knowledge to fill in gaps.

Metamemory

Knowledge and monitoring of one’s own memory processes.

Active processing

The idea that memory involves actively working with information rather than simply storing it; represented by the “workbench” metaphor.

Attention

The selective allocation of limited processing resources to information that is relevant to current goals.

Limited processing capacity

The brain cannot consciously process all incoming sensory information simultaneously.

Plato’s wax tablet metaphor

The idea that memories are like impressions left in wax; experiences leave traces that can later be retrieved.

Aristotle’s laws of association

Three principles explaining how ideas become connected: similarity, contrast, and contiguity.

Similarity

Things that resemble one another become associated

Contrast

Opposite or contrasting things can become associated.

Contiguity

Things that occur close together in time or space become associated.

Darwin’s natural selection

The process by which organisms change over generations in ways that help them exploit their environments.

Ebbinghaus

Early psychologist who systematically studied learning and forgetting using nonsense syllables.

Nonsense syllables

Meaningless combinations of letters used by Ebbinghaus to study memory without the influence of meaning or existing associations

Learning curve

A description of how performance changes as information is repeatedly learned.

Forgetting curve

A description of how memory decreases over time, particularly rapidly after initial learning

Bartlett

Psychologist who emphasized that memory is reconstructive, fragmented, and strongly influenced by meaning and prior knowledge.

Schema

An organized framework of prior knowledge that influences how new information is interpreted and how memories are reconstructed.

Gestalt psychology

Approach emphasizing that the whole is different from the sum of its individual parts.

Configuration

The arrangement and relationships among elements; these can influence how information is perceived and remembered.

Behaviourism

Approach arguing that psychology should focus on observable behaviour rather than unobservable mental processes.

Verbal learning

The behaviourist study of learning verbal material as associations between stimuli and responses.

Stimulus-response association

The behaviourist view that memorization involves attaching responses to stimuli

Lashley

Neuroscientist who searched for the physical location of memory traces, or engrams, in the brain.

Engram

The hypothetical physical or neural representation of a memory.

Lashley’s findings

Rat memory performance was affected more by the amount of brain tissue removed than by the specific location removed, challenging the idea of a single memory location

Hebb

Psychologist/neuroscientist who proposed that experience changes neural connections and organized collections of neurons.

Cell assembly

A group of neurons that become functionally connected through experience and can collectively represent information.

“Neurons that fire together wire together”

Hebbian principle stating that repeated simultaneous neural activity strengthens connections between neurons.

Cognitive revolution

Shift in psychology toward studying internal mental processes while retaining the methodological rigor of behaviourism.

Hardware vs. software analogy

The brain can be thought of as hardware, while cognitive processes such as memory and thought can be thought of as software.

George Miller

Psychologist known for research on the capacity of short-term memory and the importance of organization.

Magical number seven ± two

Miller’s proposal that people can typically hold about 7 ± 2 meaningful units in short-term memory.

Chunking

Combining individual pieces of information into larger meaningful units to increase the amount that can be remembered.

Modal model of memory

Atkinson and Shiffrin’s model proposing multiple memory structures: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.

Sensory memory

Very brief storage of incoming sensory information

Short-term memory (STM)

Temporary storage of a limited amount of information for a brief period.

Long-term memory (LTM)

Relatively durable storage of information over extended periods.

Declarative memory

Explicit memory for facts and events that can generally be consciously recalled.

Semantic memory

Memory for general facts, concepts, meanings, and knowledge.

Episodic memory

Memory for personally experienced events and episodes.

Nondeclarative memory

Implicit memory that influences behaviour without requiring conscious recollection.

Procedural memory

Memory for skills and procedures, such as how to perform an action.

Classical conditioning

Learning in which an association develops between stimuli, causing one stimulus to produce a learned response

Priming

Improved processing of a stimulus as a result of previous exposure to that stimulus or related information.

Laboratory research advantage

Greater experimental control and an easier ability to develop and test theories.

Laboratory research disadvantage

Participant populations and artificial tasks may limit how well findings generalize to everyday life.

Generalizability

The extent to which research findings apply beyond the specific participants, tasks, and conditions studied.

Brain activity as cognitive evidence

Changes in brain activity can provide evidence about how particular cognitive operations occur.

Attention

The process of selectively allocating limited processing resources to information relevant to current goals.

Selective attention

Choosing some information for further processing while filtering out other information.

Attention as biased competition

The brain constantly receives competing information, and attention biases this competition toward information relevant to current goals.

Parietal lobe

Brain region strongly involved in spatial understanding and attention.

Hippocampus

Brain structure involved in memory consolidation.

Temporal lobe

Brain region involved in semantic knowledge.

Prefrontal cortex

Brain region involved in planning, decision-making, and cognitive control.

Basal ganglia

Brain structures involved in motor learning and action-related processes.

Amygdala

Brain structure involved in emotional processing.

Primary visual cortex (V1)

Early visual processing region that extracts basic information from visual scenes

Hubel and Wiesel

Researchers whose single-cell recordings helped establish a hierarchical view of visual processing.

Single-cell recording

A technique that measures the electrical activity of individual neurons.

Action potential

Electrical signal produced when a neuron fires in response to stimulation.

Receptive field

The region of sensory space in which stimulation affects a neuron’s activity.

Hierarchical view of vision

The idea that visual information is progressively processed through stages, with later areas extracting increasingly complex information.

V5/MT

Visual area strongly involved in processing movement and motion direction

Pop-out search

A visual search in which a target differs strongly from surrounding items and is detected relatively automatically.

Sensory suppression

Reduced neural responses caused by competing or distracting stimuli.

Ventral visual stream

Visual processing pathway associated primarily with identifying what an object is.

Biased competition

The idea that competing stimuli influence one another’s neural representations and that attention biases the competition toward relevant stimuli.

Response enhancement

Increased neural response to an attended stimulus compared with the same stimulus when it is unattended.

Distractor

An irrelevant stimulus that competes with or interferes with the target of attention

Top-down attention

Goal-directed attention controlled by the observer’s intentions and current objectives.

Bottom-up attention

Stimulus-driven attention automatically captured by salient or noticeable stimuli.

Baseline activity

Neural activity occurring before a stimulus is presented.

Top-down feedback

Higher-level brain processes influencing activity in lower-level sensory areas according to current goals or expectations

Attentional domains

Different aspects of information that can be selected by attention: locations, features, objects, and sensory modalities.

Spatial attention

Selecting information based on its location.

Feature attention

Selecting information based on a particular feature, such as colour, shape, or orientation.

Object attention

Selecting an entire object or object representation

Voluntary attention

Goal-directed, top-down allocation of attention.

Involuntary attention

Stimulus-driven, bottom-up capture of attention.

Sensory memory

Ultra-brief retention of incoming sensory information before it is either lost or transferred for further processing.

Sensory register

A temporary storage system for information from a particular sensory modality

Saccade

A rapid eye movement between fixation points.

Fixation

A period when the eyes remain relatively still and visual information is gathered.

Iconic memory

The visual sensory register; a brief mental representation of visual information called an icon

Icon

A short-lived mental representation of visual information.

Trans-saccadic memory

Memory that allows visual information to be integrated across successive eye movements.

Sperling’s iconic memory experiment

Experiment demonstrating that a large amount of visual information is briefly available in sensory memory, even though only a small portion can normally be reported.

Partial-report procedure

Sperling’s method of cueing participants to report only one portion of a briefly presented display to estimate the amount of information available in iconic memory

Iconic memory capacity

Very large; much more visual information is briefly available than people can normally report.

Iconic memory duration

Approximately 250 milliseconds