Exam 2 Memory and Cognition

Describe Scuba Diver study on context-dependent learning:
(Godden and Baddeley)

Asked scuba divers to learn various materials. Some of the divers learned the material while sitting on dry land; others learned it while underwater.
-Within each group, 1/2 of the divers were tested while above water and half while below water.
-Expected that divers who learned material while underwater will remember the material best if they're again underwater at the time of the test. This setting will enable them to use the connections they established earlier.

Flashbulb Memories

Flashbulb memories are vivid, detailed memories of significant events, often associated with strong emotional responses

Cocktail Party Context Study (Owens et al., 1979)

Intrusion errors, knowledge intrudes into the remembered event. Half of the participants read a passage and the other participants read the same passage but with a prologue. People who had read the prologue recalled more of the original story.

DRM Paradigm (Deese et al., 1957; Roediger and McDermott, 1995)

Yields errors even if participants are put on their guard before the procedure begins, told about the nature of the lists and the frequency with which they produce errors. The mechanisms leading to these errors are so automatic that people can’t inhibit them.

Native American Schema Study (Barlett, 1932)

Presented with story taken from the folklore of Native Americans. Participants did well in recalling the gist of the story but made many errors in recalling the particulars. The details omitted tended to be ones that made little sense to British participants. They polished the story so that is would be more coherent from their perspective.

Car Wreck Study (Loftus and Palmer, 1974)

Showed participants a series of pictures depicting an automobile collision. Later asked questions but they were phrased in different ways for different groups. Small difference in wording had a substantial influence.

Planting False Memories

It’s easier to plant plausible memories rather than implausible ones. Errors are also more likely if the post-event information supplements what the person remembers. It’s easier to “add to” a memory than it is to “replace the memory”.
Use of pictures, movies, or live events

Confidence Malleability Study (Wells and Bradford, 1998)

Asked participants how confident they were that they identified the correct culprit of a crime. If they received feedback after making their selection but before indicating their confidence level it dramatically increased confidence.

Findings for explanations for forgetting

Decay theory of forgetting: memories fade or erode with the passage of time
Interference theory: the passage of time isn’t the direct cause of forgetting, new learning disrupts older memories
Retrieval Failure: forgotten memory is still in long-term memory but it cannot be located

Retention Interval

Elapsed time between encoding information and testing memory

Memory Consolidation

Memories are biologically cemented in place

Emotions relevancy with memory consolidation

An event that is emotional is likely to be important to you, guaranteeing you’ll pay close attention as the event unfolds. Mull over emotional events in the minutes or hours following the event.

Accurate vs. Inaccurate Flashbulb Memories

Accuracy: feel vs reality
Inaccuracy: high confidence and retelling, “polishing story”, accidental incorrect information, brain reconstructs, core facts of memory vs reception of the memory

Reminiscence Bump

Spike in recalled memory with late adolescence and early adulthood, 16-25 years old

General Processes of Memory

Encoding: process of getting info into our memory banks.
Storage: process of keeping info in memory
Retrieval: reactivation and reconstruction of experiences from our memory stores.

Collective Remembering

Communities build, negotiate, and solidify shared narratives

Collective Forgetting

Groups choose to emphasize specific stories to unify their identity, naturally leaves other parts of the past silent or less accessible.

Optimal Learning

Elaboration, spaced repetition, interweaving, testing, beware of self judgment about learning

Claparéde and Korsakoff’s amnesia patient and implicit memory

Patient with Korsakoff’s amnesia refused to shake hand and vaguely said “sometimes pins are hidden in people’s hands”, behavior altered by past experiences without recalling how.

Retrograde Amnesia

Inability to remember experiences that occurred before event triggered memory disruption

Anterograde Amnesia

Inability to remember experiences after event triggered memory disruption

H.M. patient

Medial temporal lobes, severe anterograde amnesia

Lexical Decision Task

Spread of activation and priming, within networks. Task involving pairs of words, semantically related and others unrelated. Second word reliably faster if primed.

Word stem completion

Repetition priming, read list of words for spelling errors and then a string of letter with the task of producing a word beginning with string. Words read in first task more likely used later.

False fame

How implicit memories lead us astray. Asked to produce list of names, later shown a list of famous or fictitious names. 24 Horus later, asked to remember more and rank how famous. Familiarity of those names were misattributed.

Illusion of truth

Effect of implicit memory in which claims that are familiar end up seeming more plausible. Statements from first set were judged to be more credible. Marketing guides choices during shopping.

Mug shots

Brown, Deffenbacher, and Sturgill 1977. Attributing simplicity memory to the wrong source. Bit of information was learned or last encountered stimulus is misremembered.

Explicit Memories

Conscious intentional recollection of an event or item of information

Implicit Memory

Long term memory, perform automatic tasks/skills/habits. Basal ganglia and cerebellum, no conscious recall

Familiar without source memory

Gut feeling or knowing, recognizes the items but lacks consciousness to recollect episodic context

Source memory without familiarity

Recollecting specific context of where or when it was learned

Semantic priming and memory network model

Activation of an idea in memory causes activation to spread to other ideas. Words semantically paired or related, responses to second word were reliably faster if the word had been primed. IMPORTANCE OF SUBTHRESHOLD

Source memory

Recall exact context, origin, who/what/when/where

Source confusion

Memory error, mistakenly associates

Attribution

Correctly assign qualities to context

Misattribution

Incorrect context, “sin of memory”

Nodes

Individual unit within association network, represents single ideas. Becomes activated with strong signal, then can activate other nodes.

Association

Recall a specific piece of information

Activation Level

Seeing a stimulus raises activation level of relevant detectors.

Response Threshold

Below activation level, won’t trigger response. Can accumulate leading to R.T.

Fire

Activation level increases at node and reaches activation threshold and then fires

Subthreshold Activation

Stimulus too weak to cross response threshold and to trigger action potential

Summation

2 subthreshold activated inputs added and brings nodes together

Context dependent learning

External environmental concerns, recall tests only, same mood at recall the same as encoding time and location.

State dependent learning

Internal state, mood congruence

Memorizer contributes to process of memory

Only maintenance rehearsal, may not be remembered much. Prior knowledge needed for connections and memory.

Laundry folding study

Laundry schema active, able to remember and comprehend new information because it can be related to past information.

Mnemonics

Provide organization for material to be learned, increase recall accuracy and strength encoding and retrieval from long term memory. May encourage surface level recall.

Connections promote retrieval

Memories depend on connections, which also facilitate interference. Fade with passage of time, generic knowledge fills in for gaps. Recent memory, long ago, emotional, complex, and simple.

Maintenance Rehearsal

Repetition without consideration of meaning of making connections, little or no encoding. Shallow processing.

Elaborative Rehearsal

Involves thinking, bridges connection for better memory. Deep processing, relating items, better memory than shallow processing.

Serial Position Effect

Form of memory bias with ability to recall a given item from a series depends on its position in the series

Recency Effect and working memory

Minimal cognitive effort, fresh and active in the mind

Primacy effect and long-term memory

Remember beginning of list, first to enter long term memory

Acquisition

Gaining information, observation, learning, experience

Storage

Remains until retrieved

Long term: stored extended
Short term: holds temporary

Consolidation

Process through memories are biologically cemented in place, takes place behind the scenes. If it is interrupted, no memory is established and recall later will be impossible.

Automatic tasks, controlled tasks, and Stropp interference with Divided Attention

Stroop interference name the color of ink used to write a word and word itself is a different color. Participants being unable to ignore the words content even if it’s task irrelevant. Controlled tasks require flexibility and require full attention. Automatic tasks

Executive control

Allow you to control your own thoughts, current goals, and no habits.

Perseveration errors and goal neglect

Frontal lesions, produce same response even when tasks requires some change. Goal neglect fails to organize their behaviors toward goals.

Specificity of resources

Brain utilizes dedicated alongside flexible general processing capacity to acquire, store, and manipulation of information.

Generality of resources

Can’t do one task without diverting attention and resources from another task. Reaction time of driving, running red lights, and passenger conversations showed this. Tasks differ but still drawing from one pool of resources.

Endogenous control of attention

Person chooses focus location

Exogenous Control of attention

Attention automatically directed

Spatial Attention Posner et al. (1980)

Spatial attention is limited in capacity and response time for arrows pointing correctly were faster than incorrect.

Expectation based priming $50 grocery budget

You can spend more on ice cream if you wish, but then less money to spend on other foods. Trade off only because of the limited budgets, if an unlimited supply of activation were available - you could prime some detectors and leave the others.

Repetition Priming

Produced by a prior encounter with stimulus with zero effort.

Expectation based priming

Deliberately prime detectors for inputs upcoming, with zero interest. Priming wrong detector takes away from others, effort and allocation of limited resources. LIMITED CAPACITY SYSTEM.

Early selection hypothesis

Hillyard 1998, distractor stimuli fall out of stream of processing at early stage. 80 milliseconds after inputs, unattended inputs arrive then. Attended input is identified from the start.

Müller Lyer Illusion

People unaware of distractors but are influenced anyways, unnoticed distractors guide attended stimuli. Connected to late selection hypothesis.

Late selection hypothesis

All inputs receive complete analysis, selection done after. Attended inputs are simple, more resources for unattended inputs.

Change blindness with inattentional blindness

Illustrates limited capacity system, observers’ inability to detect changes in scenes they’re directly observing.

Mack and Rock (1998) inattentional blindness

No conscious perception without attention, unconsciously detect in word in absence of attention

Cherry, 1953: Selective attention and selective listening

Ignore message in one ear and listen in the other. Couldn’t tell if unattended channel contained coherent or random words.

Treisman, 1964: Selective attention and selective listening

After a minute of shadowing, 4 out of 30 people detected peculiar character of unattended message

Broadbent, 1958: Selective attention and selective listening

Filter that shields from potential distracted out of brain and attended channel processed

Dichotic Listening Task

2 similar messages, ignore one and listen to attended channel

Retrieval Failure Studies

“Tip of their tongue”, often recall the starting letter for the sought-after word and approximately what is sounds like, TOT phenomenon

Interference Forgetting Studies

Baddeley and Hitch (1977) asked rugby players to recall the names of the other teams they had played against over the course of a season. Reported that the mere passage of time accounts for very little, what really matters is the number of intervening events.

Transport Errors in Memory

Part of one memory knits to another or memory is confused about an event

Intrusion Errors for Memory

Other knowledge intrudes into another event, a node is then connected to the memory

Divided Attention among Tasks

Poor performance if trying to shadow one list of words while hearing others. Do better with shadowing while seeing other words and also seeing pictures. The greater the difference between two tasks the easier it is to combine them.