Cognition Week 5

tiki tenya ida

Memory Stratergies

Mental activities performed to enhance encoding and retrieving

• paying attention

• processing information deeply improves memory

• research on levels of processing confirms processing information deeply results in more accurate recall of stuff to be learned

• actively engaging wit marital and formin elaborative representation

Total Time Hypothesis

Amount of learned is proportional to the time devoted to learning

• quality matters the most

• need to be careful on how you are going to recall the information later → recognise how you are expected to recall it

Mnemonics

Mental strategies designed to improve memory

• visual imagery

• generating unusual/bizarre and interacting visual images of things to be remembered enhances recall

Keyword Method

Identify a kew word that sounds similar to what you wanna remember, create a visual imagine of those things linked together and it helps memory

Method of Loci

Mnemonic used for recalling lists of items in which you associate the items to be learned with a series of physical locations

• very popular in mega-memory course/books

Organizational Mnemonics

Work to organise material as you learn it slotting new information into organised framework

• chunking combines small units of information into larger units

• hierarchy technique arranges items into a series of categories, from general to specific

First Letter Technique

Organisational technique in which you take the first letter of each of the items you need to remember and crease a word/sentence using those letters

Narrative Technique

Organizational technique in which you create a story that links items to be remembered together

• populat in memory enhancement books/courses

Prospective Memory

Remembering things you need to do in the future. Two Steps:

• Recognition of need to do something particular in the future

• At the future, fulfill the intention

External mrmory aids effective for prospective memory tasks

External Memory Aids

External devices that facilitate memory. Three conditions that make external aid maximally effective

1. be given as close as possible to the time action is required

2. be active

3. provide a hint about what has to be done

Metamemory

Higher order cognitive processes involved in memory function, encapsulating beliefs, attitudes, sensations and knowledge about memory functions. Involves

• ability to monitor one’s own memory performance

• Knowledge of our own individual memory skill

• assessment of how well we know or understand new information/knowledge

• predictions about future memory performance

• Can decide whether we produce a response during recall and make judgements -? liklihood that the answer is correct

Metamemory Knowledge Maxmises Memory Performance By

• Selecting processing tasks

• deciding to stop or continue studying new material

• deciding to continue to search memory for an item that has not yet been activated

Judgement of Learning

Peoples estimates of how well they have learned something

• involve monitoring quality of encoding information before test and , making explicit prediction about performance

• judgements of learning reasonably accurate estimates

• delayed JOL more accurate than immediate JOL

• if you make high JPL, you will study less than if predicting a low JOI

• underestimate amount of study required for low JOL

• JOL for items rememvered vs forgotten more accurate

Foresight Bias

Overestimation of the number of correct answers on future tests

Metamemory and ADHD

People with ADHD have difficulty paying close attention, whether at school, work or home

• difficulty paying attention affects memory

• people with ADHD overestimate performance on memory tests by 30%

• they do not differ from people without ADHD when estimating their performance item-by-item

Feeling of Knowing

The capacity to predict recognition of non-recallable item judgements can be elicited in experimental conditions by asking general knowledge/trivia question

• judgements typically sound predictors of future memory performance

Tip of the Tounge Phenomena

Closely related to feeling of knowledge, experience once a week in which there is an inability to recall a word, name, phrase, etc we know.

• selective failure of word retrieval

• one can realr word starts with particular letter/sound, and gives examples of words it rhymes with

What Languages Share

• Creative - create sentences never shared before

• Average person has a vocabulary of 20-40k words → uni student has 75k words

• Allows us to create virtually infinite sentences

Tacit Knowledge

Cannot say outloud the rule yet we obey it - aspects of language that serve foundation for all language

• most knowledge we use to comprehend knowledge is this, difficult to describe

Syntax

Grammatical structure and sentences and the rules for building sentences out of words

Semantics

Meanings of words, phrases or sentences

• some words semantically ambiguous

Phonemes

Basic unit of spoken languages

• 40 phonemes

Phonology

Refers to the sound patterns of laguage, including basic elements, and rules for combination

Morpheme

Basic unit of meaning

• reduplicated

• re, duplicate, ed

• each convey meaning and some can work independently

Morphology

Refers to the study of morphemes

Pragmatics

Refer to the rules for how literal meaning is changed by social rules/context

• allow us to go beyond literal meaning of words, concerning things like

1. the choice of words

2. lexical meanings

3. implications in conversation

Language Structure

Language full of tacit rules/knowledge that allows to combine morphemes into sentences

• obey rules without understanding why

• phrase structure is used to describe the syntactic structure of sentences

• hierarchical based on syntactic constituents

Constituents

adjectives, nouns and verbs are examples of basic constituents

• they can be combined to form other constituents

• sentence is created by combining noun phrase and verb phrase

Langauge Structure Recursion

Allows us to create infinite number of sentences of a finite vocabulary

Factors that Influence Comprehension

• negation

• passivity

• nested structure

• ambiguity

Negation

Any sentence creating a negative word or an implied negative takes longer to process than affirmative sentence

• they did nothing to prevent it, we were going nowhere

• double negative: i do not disagree, we don’t need no thought control

Passivity

A passive sentence involves making the object of an action the subject of the sentence

• sentences written in passive voice are more complex than those written in active voice

• greater complexity makes the passive voice harder to understand , especially with those with less formal education

Nested Structure

Desires a phrase that is embedded within another structure

• more complex and as harder to process, making it take greater demands on readers memories

• the friend that im meeting after this lecture is a good egg, the scientist collaborated with the professor who had advised the student who copied the article

Ambiguity

Many words have multiple meanings, with morphemes being ambiguous when out of context

• can denote plural, possessive, or present tense of the verb

• when its ambiguous, they are more difficult to understand

• understand but takes longer to process, biased towards selecting the most common meaning of the ambiguous word if the rest of the sentence if consistent with the meaning