psych exam #2

psych behind tufts, thinking & intelligence, memory, learning, cognitive development, social psychology of perceiving others

folk wisdom

the body of knowledge and experience that originates from the beliefs and opinions of ordinary people.

• birds of a feather vs opposites attract

• are romantic relationships more likely to last when partners are similar or different from one another

intervention study

an experiment that tests whether a type of treatment changes and/or improves behavior

• what kinds of interventions might improve college students sleep habits

  • eg. encourage students to put away their phones before bed

research limitations: independent variables

• can you use random assignment

• validity concerns (are you manipulating what you think you are manipulating)

• sample issues (will the variable be meaningful to your whole sample?)

research limitations: dependent variables

• issues with self-report measures

  • sometimes people cant tell you why they do what they do

  • sometimes people dont want to tell you

  • measurement is imprecise

• issues with behavioral data

  • people are reactive (they know you are watching)

  • may not generalize outside the lab

limits of perception

change blindness demos reveal:

• blindspots in our conscious perception of the world

• power of our attentional systems to encode information in the world around us

although we feel as if we perceive eerything in our visual field, we are only ever processing a portion of that info at any given time

power of perception

• even the minimal and focused information we encode from our environment can have significant influences on how we think about the world

• much of our thinking and decision-making have links to the basic ways we perceive the world around us

learning math

• math skills may have origin in system used to rapidly estimate sets of objects

• more accurate numerical estimation skills at age 14 predicted higher standardized math test scores in kindergarten

  • more accurate numerical estimation skills in college predict higher quantitative, but not verbal, SAT scores

learning math - brain

intraparietal sulcus (IPS) more active for math-relevant content (numbers, quantities)

• also processes math-relevant content in congenitally blind individual

• IPS activity in childhood related to formal math skills

• the more adult-like a childs ips is, the better children performed on standardized math tests

power of perception - math

• our ability to think mathematically may have roots in our ability to perceive quantity in the world around us

• across psych, we can find evidence of our thinking in both quick perceptual responses and slower decision-making tasks

thinking and development in psych

social environment → (brain → cognition →behavior)

two systems view of thought

system 1: fast, unconscious, automatic, everyday decisions, error prone

system 2: deliberate, we do all of these but we also do system 1 and much of psych is system 1

• slow, conscious, effortful, complex decisions, reliable

what is thought?

cognition: knowledge is stored in the mind in the form of representations

• thought is the result of activating and manipulating those mental representations 

• the goal of cognitive psych is to understand the structure of mental representations and how they influence behavior

mental representations

• we can form mental representations of any experience we have in the world

• directly impact behavior

• can quickly estimate quantity in our environment (approx number system)

  • accuracy of our ANS ^ is correlated w formal math skills

• we form representations for:

  • categories of items (concepts and schemas)

  • events (scripts)

concepts and schemas

symbolic, broad representations of a category of related items:

• ex. these are forks, these are utensils, there are dogs at the park

• summary of features and functions for items 

• reduces demands on memory

• helps with identifying things in the world

• prototype model: you construct a “best example” for the category

• can be organized into cognitive schema to provide a more efficient way to think about the world

• can lead to difficulties when items font fit well w prototype

scripts

organize information about actions and events

• basic features for how ppl behave or how to act in certain locations

• step by step list of actions for events (sports game)

• can be general or specific (any grocery list v shopping @ trader joes)

help us make predictions about the world around us

• enable us to make quick judgments with little effort

can lead to errors and acting in bias ways

• misremembering information based on schemas

• stereotypes

decision making

• sometimes we can use algorithms (step-by-step procedures) to solve a problem

• often use heuristics (shortcuts) to reduce the amount of thinking that is needed to make decisions

• can result in biases and faulty decisions

representativeness bias

• placing a person/object in a category if it is similar to a prototype

• basing a decision on the extent to which each option reflects what we already believe about a situation

• often occurs when you ignore base rate information

  • there are more bank tellers than feminist bank tellers

relative comparison

framing effect: peoples choices are dependent on the way the choices are presented to them

• the tendency to emphasize the potential losses or potential gains

anchoring effects: the tendency to rely on the first piece of info encountered

dunn, wilson, gilbert heuristics

• students rated expected happiness one year after being assigned to desirable or undesirable dorm

• one year later, students rated current happiness

• results: students made inaccurate prediction for both their future happiness and future unhappiness

affective forecasting

• people are poor at affective forecasting-predicting how they will feel about things in the future

  • both for positive and neg

• people misjudge the relative importance of how all parts of an event will impact their life

counteract reasoning based on heurisitcs

• metacognition: awareness of your own cognitive processes (thinking about thinking)

• although it may be difficult to stop a system 1 process, you may be able to control how you respond or act on this bias

what is intelligence?

two important points to consider:

• how do we assess intelligence?

• how should we assess intelligence?

how do we assess intelligence? 

standard approach: psychometric assessment

• focus on standardized test → IQ

  • predict only about 25 % of variation in performance at either school/work

  • IQ is only one factor that contributes to overall success

  • IQ ≠ intelligence, just one way to measure intelligence

• assesses both verbal and non-verbal abilities

general intelligence (g)

related to basic cognitive abilities (attention, memory, neural processing)

two components of intelligence

• crystallized intelligence

  • ability to use acquired skills and knowledge

• fluid intelligence

  • ability to think flexibly, solve problems, learn in new situations

triarchic theory of intelligence

• analytical intelligence: standard problem-solving and other academic challenges

• creative intelligence: using insight to solve novel problems - to think in new and interesting ways

• practical intelligence: excelling at everyday tasks, adapting to context

multiple intelligences

people can be intelligent in any number of ways

• linguistic intelligence → lawyer, author

• mathematical intelligence → accountant, scientist

• spatial intelligence → architect, artist

• musical intelligence → musician, singer

emotional intelligence

social intelligence and ability to use emotions to guide appropriate thought and action

• ex. regulating our moods, resisting impulses, and controlling our behaviors

assessing intelligence

• we would expect individual variation on most abilites or measures

• the focus then is on how you identify those differences and hwo you intemperate those differences

  • test could be biased → tells u more about the test-maker than the test taker

  • Students could be prepared or taught differently tells you more about the structures and environment that prepares the test taker than about the inherent ability of the test taker. 

what is memory

the capacity to encode, retain and retrieve information

• encoding: get information into memory

• storage: retaining information in memory

• retrieval: access information

encoding

memory is the result of brain activity

• encoding: brain changes information into neural code

  • perception, real world object to mental mode, translates internal representation thats supported by brain and neural activity

  • Translate into neural code

what determines which information sticks?

Levels of processing model

• More deeply an item is encoded → better remembered

• deeper processing → greater brain activity

• deep processing → intermediate processing → shallow processing

deep processing

• semantic, meaningful, symbolic characteristics are used

  • Associations connected w car are brought to mind, going beyond the concept of a car or whats physically in front of you

intermediate processing

• stimulus is recognized and labeled (ik thats a car)

  • Apply a label to the object 

  • the object is recognized as a car

shallow processing

• picking up on physical and perceptual features are analyzed

  • Lines angles and contours that make up object are detected

memory consolidation

• Process by which a long term memory becomes durable and relatively stable

• Involves structural changes in the brain

• Strengthening, stabilizing and enhancing of recently learned memory traces

• Happens during sleep better than during wake

• Active replay of new memory traces during sleep

• Slow wave sleep

long term potentiation (LTP)

• Caused by repeated stimulation over time

• Long lasting increase in signal transmission between neurons

• strengthening of connections between neurons  

  • Initially passing neurotransmitters, to strengthen it happens over time, see that after neurons talk to each other over time there is better/stronger signal

  • More neurotransmitters that are released

  • More receptors

where is memory stored?

• Is every memory stored in a specific area of the brain? No. 

  • Memories aren't stored in a specific part of the brian, they are distributed throughout the cortex

• Sights, sounds, smells stored in different brain regions

• Memories organized as assemblies (groups) in the brain

  • Sounds in one area, shape and color in another area

  • Put this information together as a combo of all these things stored throughout the brain

association networks

• association networks organize information in memory

• Similar concepts connected through their associations

memory retrieval

• Can happen everyday, cant remember where you parked your car, remembering passwords

• Reactivation of sensory information present at encoding 

  • Reactivating brain regions that were initially activated when we encoded it

• Many types of forgetting are failures of retrieval

• Tip of the tongue states

  • Retrieval failures

  • Come up with similar words

  • Know what it sounds like

• Using retrieval cues can help to access information in long-term memory

• Encoding context can serve as a retrieval cue

context-dependent memory

• students do better on tests if they study in the same place they take the test

• eyewitnesses remember information if they go back where they saw a crime occur

• happy memories are easier to retrieve when a person is happy (mood congruent memory)

3 memory systems

• Differ in terms of duration and capacity

sensory input → sensory memory (unattented info is lost) attention → short term memory: unrehearsed info is losed, maintenance rehearsal to get to long term memory where some info may be lost over time

sensory memory

• sensory input, unattended information lost

• Entryway to memory

• Very brief (fraction of second)

• Information quickly lost if not passed to short term memory

short term/working memory

• retains information for short periods (5-30 seconds)

  • Limited capacity (can hold 5-9 items at one time)

chunking

organizing info into meaningful groups

• limited capacity can be increased by chunking

• how guy remembered 100,000 digits of pi, gave numbers ideas and made a story

long term memory

• no known capacity limits

• relatively enduring

serial position effect

primacy effect: people have a good memory for items at the beginning of a list

• reflects long term memory

recency effect: people also have a good memory for items at the end of a list

• reflects working memory

probability of recall of words in the middle is lowest, graph curves like upside down hill

medial temporal lobe amnesia

• Anterograde amnesia: inability to form new memories for information encountered after brain damage

  • Severe anterograde amnesia, really hard to hold onto new memories 

• Retrograde amnesia: loss of old memories for information encoded before brain damage

• Past ← retrograde amnesia (EVENT) anterograde amnesia → present

long term memory

• Long term storage

  • Explicit memory (declarative): requires conscious effort and often can be verbally described

    • Episodic memory (personally experienced events, I remember statements)

    • Semantic memory (facts and knowledge, I know statements)

  • Implicit memory (nondeclarative)

    • Classical conditioning (associating two stimuli elicit a response)

    • Procedural memory (motor skills and habits)

semantic dementia

confused concepts

• progressive neurodegenerative disorder

• characterized by loss of semantic memory

definition of episodic memory

• memory for specific events or episodes

• specific in time and place

  • temporal and spatial tags

neurocircuitry of episodic memory

• cortical association areas send projections to medial temporal lobe

• hippocampus LINKS representations in cortex together

memory failures

• We forget more than we remember, and you dont want to remember everything

• Helps us retain the important information 

• Why do we forget?

  • Failure to encode: inattentive/shallow encoding

  • Poor retrieval cues

false memories

• memory illusions, not actual memories, just things we imagined

  • Memory is not a literal reproduction of the past

  • We actively reconstruct memories, not passively reproduce them

eye witness memory

• we know that memory is reconstructive, but we still rely on eyewitness identification

interference

other memories get in the way

• Proactive interference: older information disrupts ability to remember new information (new learning difficult) 

  • incorrectly writing the date during the first new months of a year, confusion when using foreign currency

• retroactive interference: new info disrupts ability to remember old info

  • forgetting the address of previous location and forgetting names of coworkers in previous work place

behaviorism

• What is learning?

  • Associations between events: if event A occurs, event B will occur

• Two types of associative learning

  • Classical conditioning: stimulus A → stimulus B

  • Operant conditioning: Behavior → consequence

classical conditioning 

a neutral object elicit a response when it is associated with a stimulus that already produces that response

• Have unconditioned stimulus (food) → unconditioned response (salivating dog)

• Neutral stimulus (metronome) wouldn't give any response alone, but if you pair it with an unconditioned stimulus, the pairing would predict the unconditioned response

  • Timing and order of events is critical to learning

  • Could take away unconditioned stimulus and keep neutral stimulus, and you can still get the unconditioned response

  • NOW: conditioned stimulus (metronome) → conditioned response (dog salivating

application of classical conditioning

• What are other every day examples of classical conditioning

  • Advertising

  • Anxiety-related clinical disorders: phobias, PTSD, fear conditioning: classically conditioning fear to neutral objects

  • Treatment: extinguish the association between the stimulus and fear: systematic desensitization (slowly increasing a patients exposure to the feared stimuli), counterconditioning: exposing a patient to small doses of the feared stimulus while engaging in an enjoyable task

operant conditioning

• behavior → consequence, behaviors change because they have been reinforced or punished

  • Positive reinforcement or negative punishment, positive or neg punishment

  • Reinforcement: pos or neg, anything that increases the behavior, doing it more frequently

    • Pos: the addition of a stimulus to increase behavior

    • Neg: the removal of a stimulus to increase behavior

  • Punishment: neg or pos, reducing the likelihood of a behavior

    • Positive: the addition of a stimulus to decrease behavior (shock, noise, odors)

    • Neg: the removal of a stimulus to decrease behavior

operant conditioning - reinforcers and punishers

• Categories of reinforcers and punishers can be broadened or narrowed by stimulus generalization or discrimination 

  • Secondary reinforces (dog clicker - increase the tricks)

• Timing of reinforcement or punishment is also critical

  • Continuous schedule: actions always lead to consequence

    • Quickest route to form an association

  • Intermittent schedule: actions sometimes lead to consequence (more unreliable)

application of operant conditioning

• What are other everyday examples of operant conditioning

  • Gambling, obedience training (shaping behavior, pets do tricks)

• autism-spectrum disorders

  • Applied behavior analysis (ABA)

  • identify a reinforcer, provide whenever child engages in desired behavior, remove whenever child engages in negative behavior

• can be used to improve social, language/communication, and cognitive behaviors

biological preparedness

• not all CS-UR pairings are associated equally well

  • pairing stimuli close in time isnt always sufficient to learning, certain pairings of stimuli are more likely to become associated than others

• built in fear detectors: more likely to fear snakes than flowers, more likely to form neg associations w/out group memories

latent learning

animals can learn w/out reinforcement

• rats are able to learn spatial layouts in the absence of rienforcement

social cognitive learning

• observational learning (by watching others)

  • dont need first-hand experience with all associations (vicarious learning)

• social world is a strong “higher order” reinforcer

  • we are highly motivated to imitate other peoples actions

neural development

• at birth the brain is sufficiently developed to support basic reflexes and learning

• major areas of the brain present early in prenatal development and able to process information

perceptual development

• by birth, infants perceptual systems are functioning and ready to sense and perceive external information

• strong sense of smell

• can see at birth

• can hear by the 5th prenatal month

• babies can hear sound before birth

• newborn babies prefer familiar stories, mothers voice, music and language patterns that are from their own culture

perceptual development - vision

• childrents vision becomes more focused over the first few years of life

  • initially prefer high contrast, black & white images

learning & memory development

• babies learn and remember the outcomes of their actions

  • length of memory is long when considered against length of childs life

neural development

• the brain organizes itself in response to its environmental experiences → learning

• synaptic pruning: the brain preserves synaptic connections that are used, and loses those that are not used

learning in childhodod

researchers rely on several kinds of behaviors early in development (looking, actions, explanations)

• in contrast to Piagets theory: children think abstractly about the world from a young age

  • learning is shaped by the social world

learning from visual experience

• even though infants have limited motor abilities, they can control where they look

  • when babies are shown the same thing repeatedly, they look less each time (habituation)

  • when they see something new, they regain visual interest (dishabituation)

• research using looking-time methods show that infants are learning about the physical and social world from very early in development

learning from exploration

• children learn by exploring their environment and testing hypotheses

  • child-as-scientist analogy

  • engaged in cause-and-effect reasoning by at least preschool years

learning from others

• motivated to imitate other peoples actions

• treat other people, particularly adults, as experts

  • over-imitation: imitate even when there are easier and more direct ways to solve a problem or complete a task

• motivated to imitate other peoples actions

• socio-cultural teaching has a strong influence on children’s learning

children learn language

the study of language involves understanding different components of language and how they interact

children learn language - words, rules & meaning

words

• phonemes: the basic sounds of speech

• morphemes: the smallest meaningful units, including suffixes and prefixes

rules

• syntax: the system of rules for combining words into phrases and phrases into sentences

words + rules = meaning

• semantics: the system of meanings that underlie words, phrases and sentences

learning sounds

• unlike adults, infants can hear all the sounds of all the worlds languages at birth

• over the first year, infant tune into sounds that are most relevant to their language

  • gain more exposure to native language

  • infant-directed speech makes sound differences more distinct

  • babbling gives infants practice making native language sounds

learning words

• first word around 1 year of age

• begin to combine words into two-word sentences between 1-2 years (ex momma up, doggy out)

• vocab spurt begins around 18 months of age

• children begin to learn ~7-8 new words each day

learning rules of language

• children readily learn the rules of language between 2 and 3 years of age

  • plural forms (-s in dogs) to novel words

  • verb tense (-ed, -ing)

  • order of words in a sentence

    • boy kicked ball vs ball kicked boy

cognitive aging

• research shows that intelligence, as measured on standard psychometric tests, declines with advanced age

• but other ways of assessing intelligence reveal more complex developmental changes

  • fluid intelligence: ability to think flexibly, tends to peak in early adulthood and decline steadily as we age

  • crystallized intelligence: ability to use acquired knowledge, typically increases throughout life

cognitive aging - 3 strategies for successful aging

• practice: continued practice on a task can help maintain or even improve performance across age

• compensate:  changing behavior to make up for losses in cognitive skill

• optimize: select goals and skills to practice that focus on ones existing strengths

social psychology

• the scientific study of the ways in which ppls thoughts, feelings and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people

our social processing “machinery”

first impressions, the need to belong, behavior in groups

do we form first impressions?

yes, we immediately perceive physical characteristics such as: 

• skin color

• emotional expression

• hair style

we also form complex impressions quickly, in as little as .01th of a second, we make judgements of trustworthiness, competence & aggression

thin slices

random samples of the “behavioral stream”

• less than 5 minutes long

• Participated viewed less than one minute of silent video of a college professor in the classroom

• Rated the professors competence, likability

• Predicted actual student evaluations

  • Asked random students who never had the professor to rate the teacher based on the thin slice, compared it to kids who spent an entire semester with the professor

    • Found they were statistically similar

self-fulfilling prophecy

we create the behaviors we expect in others

• rosenthal & jacobson (1968)

  • elementary school students took an IQ test

  • indep. var. - gifted or average

  • dep. var. - actual student performance 8 months later

• iq scores of students who had been labeled gifted increased more than the scores of the students who had been labeled avg. 

impressions distort reality

• impressions are shaped by biased expectations

  • bias: patterns in our judgement and behavior that we dont acknowledge

  • confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error

  • system 1 thinking

confirmation bias

the tendency to look for or pay attention only to info that confirms ones own belief

• ignore, trivialize or forget disconfirming information

• interpreting gifted behaviors

  • how might teachers respond to children who are quiet v loud?

attributions

attribution theory: people are motivated to explain their own and other peoples behavior

dispositional attribution: hard working/intelligent

situational attribution: fortunate/advantaged

fundamental attribution error

the tendency in explaining other peoples behavior, to overestimate dispositional factors and to underestimate the influence of the situation

• dispositional: the student is smart/hardworking

• situational: the teacher paid attention to the student/ the students parents hired a private tutor

• people rely on different sources of thinking to judge their own and others behavior

• self-serving bias: seeing the self in a positive light

affect heuristic

the tendency to consult ones emotions instead of estimating probabilities objectively

availability heuristic

The tendency to judge the probability of a type of event by how easy it is to think of examples or instances.

hindsight bias

The tendency to overestimate one's ability to have predicted an event after the outcome is known (i.e., the "I knew it all along" phenomenon).

non conscious process

Mental processes occurring outside of and not available to conscious awareness.

stereotype threat

A burden of doubt a person feels about their performance due to awareness of negative stereotypes about their groups abilities

subconscious processes

Mental processes occurring outside of conscious awareness but accessible to consciousness when necessary.

tacit knowledge

Strategies for success that are not explicitly taught but that instead must be inferred.

childhood amnesia

The inability to remember events and experiences that occurred during the first 2 or 3 years of life.

confabulation

The inability to retrieve information stored in memory because of insufficient cues for recall.

cue-dependent forgetting

The inability to retrieve information stored in memory because of insufficient cues for recall.

elaborative rehearsal

Association of new information with already stored knowledge and deeper analysis to make it memorable.