Cognition Exam 1

Cognitive Psychology

The scientific study of the human mind and brain (as one)

Epistemology

Study of knowledge

Empiricism

Knowledge comes from what we observe and our experiences

Rationalism

Knowledge arises from reasoning (innate) 

Metaphysics

nature of the universe

materialism

the view that the world is made up of one kind of stuff (physical matter)

DUalism

the view that the world is made up of the material and the mental (mind and body are separate) 

3 stages of scientific psychology: #1

Introspectionism (structuralism): Wilhelm Wundt, think of thought and content as to how it is structured and the parts of it in relation to the mind. All conscious experiences consist of percepts. Relies on peoples interpretations of their own experiences. Thoughts might be composed of parts but the people may not be consciously aware of them.

3 stages of scientific psychology: #2

Behaviorism: Strongly empiricist. Never mentioned mental processes or states because they could not be directly measured. Unable to deal with delayed and goal oriented behavior, stimuli with rich structure, and spatial maps. Failed to provide any actual theory of cognition.

3 stages of scientific psychology: #3

Modern cognitive psychology (information processing) says that information comes from perception of the world and memory. Processing involves the internal transformation, manipulation, and storage of information/ Rationalist and empiricist. 

Sensory Memory

Memory for most recent sensory stimuli. Leads to the persistent perception of a stimulus even when it is no longer present.

George Sperling 1960

Asked several questions about visual sensory memory like capacity and duration. Consisted of two different conditions.

Whole Report Condition

Blanks screen followed by a fixation point and 12 letters. Results found that participants were able to recall 4.5/12 letters. 

Partial Report Procedure

Subjects were asked to recall only the certain row they were prompted to by a certain tone. Subjects were able to get all or most of the letters when done this way.

Decay Hypothesis

Information about all the letters goes into a visual sensory store. The subject must attend to all letters in the store one by one in order to report them. Information here decays rapidly so there is not enough time to recall all of the letters.

Working Memory 

Information here is part of our conscious experience right now. Information is readily available, which makes it serve as a staging ground for subsequent tasks like reading and comprehension, problem solving and reasoning, and transfer between long-term memory (also can be described as primary memory)

Working Memory Information Includes:

Recently attended sensory information, items retrieved from long term memory, and things inferred on the basis of reasoning.

How long does information stay in working memory?

Can be done in a simple experiment of reading off a number of items, waiting a set time, and then recalling. Information in working memory can be maintained almost indefinitely by rehearsal (this was tested by the Brown-Peterson task, in which they prevented rehearsal by having subjects count backwards by 3s)

retroactive interference

interference from new information that effects the quality of old information. 

proactive interferene

how earlier information might interfere with the quality of new information.

Waugh and Norman 1965

Conducted a test of decay hypothesis and retroactive interference. The experimenters manipulated the potential amount of retroactive interference in the experiment by adding a probe digit into the recall, and varying the position. They concluded that loss of information from working memory was due to mainly interference rather than decay.

Magic Number 7 Plus or Minus Two 

Paper by George Miller in which he stated that chunking illustrates that information coming into wm can be recoded. One can recall 7 digits plus or minus two using chunking. 

Baddeley and Hitch Model: Phonological Loop

Responsible for verbal working memory, consists of the phonological store and the articulatory control process (which are responsible for holding verbal information and rehearsal).

Phonological similarity effect

If the phonological loop stores verbal like material, this should affect the type of errors that are made.

Conrad 1964

Presented letters visually to subjects then asked them to recall the letters and he analyzed the types of errors in recall. He found that many of the errors were made between those that looked familiar and sounded familiar. He found that more errors with the ones that sounded familiar.

Word Length Effect

If the phonological loop stores verbal like material, its capacity should be determined by the size of the verbal code.

Visuospatial Sketch Pad

Represents visual and spatial information. Contains mental images with many of the properties of actual images. Many examples of mental imagery.

Shephard and Metzler 1971

Measured how long it takes people to rotate mental images of objects.

Dual task experiments

directly test whether there are separate stores (testing subjects ability to do two things at once). If they are able to do these two things at once that means that visual and verbal stores are separate. 

Logie et Al.

Subjects performed one of two primary memory tasks (verbal span or visual span). Simultaneously performed one of two secondary tasks (running sum or number imaging task). Found that verbal span performance was worse with a verbal secondary task compared to visual and vice versa.

Central Executive

Coordinates which memory stores get used for which subtasks. Keeps track of where one is in a multistep mental process. Directs attention to important sources of information.

Episodic Buffer

Revised addition to the model. Name for where semantic information goes. Understands the meaning of words being presented. 

Implications of working memory (Learning Vocab)

The phonological loop is important for acquiring vocab items. To memorize a new word, one must hold the phonemes in their WM.

Implications of working memory (Language Comprehension)

Working memory is critical to language comprehension

Implications of working memory (aging) 

Decreases in working memory is one of the primary reasons that cognitive function decreases with age. 

Implications of working memory (anxiety)

Anxiety lowers intellectual performance because it lowers working memory capacity. Filling your working memory with anxious thoughts means you cannot attend to what you should.

Luck and Vogel 1997

Presented subjects with two images one after the other and asked them if anything had changed. Found that modern estimates of working memory capacity are lower than Millers, at around 4.

Serial position curve

Shows primacy and recency effects

Primacy effect

how we remember the letters in the beginning of a sequence

Recency Effect

how we remember the letters at the end of a sequence ( this results from them being retrieved from working memory)

Glanzer and Cunitz 1966

Tested subjects who would recall immediately and those after a 30 second delay. Found that evidence for the recency effect can be found in working memory.

Dewey Rundus 1971

Sought direct evidence that rehearsal improved long term memory. Subjects studied a list of 20 words and presented 5 seconds per word. Found a close correspondence between number of rehearsals and probability of recall for most of the list (but not at the end of the list where WM is working for recall)

Semantic information in WM

Often includes semantic information recalled from long term memory. Delos Wickens 1972, tested for this presence. Showed that the existence of the release from PI provides evidence for semantic coding in WM.

Evidence that WM and LTM are separate

Psychopathologies involving amnesia (like HM, Clive Wearing, and KF)

Evidence against separate WM and LTM

neuroimaging (similar brain activation during WM and LTM recall) 

Retrograde Amnesia

Loss of memories from before a certain brain injury

Anterograde amnesia

inability to form new memories after a brain injury has occurred

Studying patients with brain injuries looks at double dissociations which are…

One group exhibits a deficit on cognitive function A but not B. Another group exhibits a deficit on cognitive function B but not A. They provide evidence that A and B are based on separable brain mechanisms

Clive Wearing

Contracted viral encephalitis in 1985 which destroyed parts of his medial temporal lobes including his hippocampus. He only remembers the last 1-2 minutes of conversations

Patient KF

suffered damage to his parietal lobe in a motorcycle accident. Which resulted in a severely impaired working memory in which he only had a digit span of 2. He had normal LTM.

Ranganath and D’Esposito 2001

Assessed the role of the hippocampus in a short term memory test. They used fMRI to measure hippocampus activation while subjects remembered a familiar or novel face during a short delay. They found that novel faces showed elevated hippocampus activation. 

Episodic memory

memory for specific events and episodes. Recall involves mental time travel, which is traveling backwards in time to when the event originally occurred (Tulving, 1985).

semantic memory

general knowledge about the world, not tied to a source of the knowledge, not tied to a particular time.

Evidence for semantic and episodic memory systems being separate

Psychopathologies involving amnesia, neuroimaging (different brain activation during episodic and semantic recall) 

Evidence against semantic and episodic memory systems as separate

HM was able to learn neither new semantic nor episodic facts. Suggests that the hippocampus was involved in creating both types of memories. Retrograde Korsokoff patients suffer loss of both semantic and episodic memories. Many episodic memories appear to be interwoven with semantic information (autobiographical memories).

declarative memories

those that can be verbalized and are assessed by explicit tests

non-declarative memories

Those that are unconscious and not verbalizable. These are assessed by implicit tests.

Evidence for separate declarative and non declarative

procedural memory, repetition priming, and conditioning 

Evidence against separate declarative and non declarative

Patient LSJ was a violinist who lost both semantic and episodic memories due to encephalitis, however, she retained the ability to play the violin

Procedural Memories

Memory for motor and cognitive skills

Corkin 1968

Studied HM on the basis of procedural memory. Had him draw in front of a mirror copying the outline of what was shown in the mirror. HM ended up learning and made fewer errors as the days went on showing that amnesiacs are able to learn new skills. 

Repetition priming

The effect of a repeated item on an implicit memory test

Cohen and Squire 1980

Assessed rerpetition priming using a mirror reading task. Had 5 korsakoff patients and 6 controls. They found that procedural memories are durable as the performance remains the same after 3 months. Also found that amnesiacs and the controls were equal, and that repetition priming was larger for the controls due to their spared declarative memory.

Grad et al. 1985

Compared amnesiacs to controls (alcoholics and medical inpatients). Had subjects rate words which had first 3 letters common with others. They were asked to finish the stem of the word and they found that amnesiacs did worse than the control subjects. 

Propaganda Effect

An effect of repetition priming that repeated stimuli are often viewed more favorably, and they are often more likely to believe something is true if they have seen it before.

emotional conditioning

the unconditioned response is an emotional reaction that gets associated with the conditioned stimulus

instrumental conditioning

the role of the conditioned stimulus is now a voluntary action taken by the organism (operant) 

depth of processing

how much an item is semantically elaborated

shallow processing

incidental sensory processing

deep processing

looking at the meaning of an item 

Craig and Tulving 1975

asked how depth of processing affects memory for words. Subjects were asked one of three types of questions for each word like rhyming etc. They found that deep processing leads to overall better recall.

Bower and Winzens 1970

Presented subjects with paired associates and compared two encoding conditions. Half were asked to create a mental image and half were asked to repeat the words.

Method of Loci (memory palace) 

Used in Ancient Greece and Rome, two steps: to be memorized items are associated with locations on a familiar path, memorizer constructs an image which includes both new item and familiar location (the more bizarre or unusual the better) 

Ross and Lawrence 1968

Assessed thee Method of Loci and found that it yields 70-100% improvement in memory

Concrete Material (Pavio and Foth 1970)

The advantage of imagery is usually demonstrated with this, making images easy to create.

Abstract Materials (Pavio and Foth 1970)

Imagery enhances memory of concrete material, but the opposite occurs for abstract material, which needs more semantic coding 

Karpicke and Roediger 2008

Asked subjects to study and be tested four times on a list of 40 Swahili-English word pairs. They found that repeated study rather than repeated test improved long term memory.

Herman Ebbinghaus

Conducted the first experiment on human memory. He used himself as a subject and studied his own retention. Rate of forgetting varies with material but is always rapid initially and then slows with time. The forgetting curve is what you observe when you do these straightforward tests.

Retrieval cue 

A retrieval cue is information in WM that elicits information from LTM. Retrieval is more likely to the extent that the cue is similar to, or overlaps in content with LTM item. 

Encoding specificity principle 

When an item is encoded, it is encoded with the current context (where you were and what time it was etc) 

Golden and Baddeley 1975

Tested members of a diving club. They found that recall was better when one is tested in the same physical context obtained while studied.

State Dependent Learning

Encoding specificity applies to both external and internal context. Physical cues and temporal cues vs psychological states

Transfer appropriate processing

Processing information in the same way at study and the test can improve recall (because the retrieval cues are more likely to match) 

Morris et al. 1997

Found that meaningful study leads to normal depth of processing advantage on a standard recognition test. However for the items recognized by sound they found that shallow processing worked better.

Intrusions

Recall of a different memory 

Retrieval Failure

Unable to recall anything

consolidation

a general principal about new memories is that they are often initially weak. the brain processes that strengthen memories over time.

synaptic consolidation

takes place over minutes or hours and involves changes to synapses 

system consolidation

takes place over days, months, or years and involves the reorganization of long term memories (initial evidence for this came from retrograde amnesia)

Butters and Cermak 1986

Patient PZ tested for information in his own autobiography and found that earliest memories exhibit the least loss and most recent memories exhibit the greatest loss

Standard model of consolidation

Consolidation arises as an interaction between two brain regions (the hippocampus and the cortex). During an initial experience, the hippocampus receives input from sensory/motor cortices. It stores the pattern of cortical activation which creates a memory. The hippocampus periodically reactivates the cortical areas involved in the memory. By being coactivated, those areas begin to become associated with each other. Via repeated reactivations, the cortical representation of the memory becomes stronger over time, becoming more resilient in the face of brain injury and disease. 

Multiple trace model of consolidation

States that it remains involved in the retrieval of consolidated memory (this is something the standard model does not consider)

Gais et al 2006

tested for going to sleep right after studying and found that the sleep group retained more information (the awake group showed more interference) (shows consolidation is frequent during sleep)

Wilhelm et al 2011

Asked if knowing that you will be tested later enhances consolidation during sleep. Subjects first learned the location of pairs of cards in an array, then slept. Found that the expected group performed better, and that memory that we deem to be important are more likely to be consolidated. 

Theory of reconsolidation

When a memory is retrieved, its representation becomes unstable or fragile. For the representation to be retained, it needs to be reconsolidated (in the absence of reconsolidating the memory is weakened or lost).

Nader et al 2000

Prevented reconsolidation in a study on rats and memory. Injected them with anisomycin, which is an antibiotic that disrupts the consolidation of memories. The rats acquired a fear of tone in classical conditioning, and the study measured whether or not the rats would remember this using anisomycin.

Arousing stimuli result in…

release of stimulant cortisol, which may result from an increase in consolidation

Cahill et al. 2003

Asked if cortisol enhanced all memories or only for that of arousing stimuli. Found that it is in fact only for the stimuli that elicit it.

flashbulb memories

memories for extreme (typically negative) events that people feel they remember very well (ex: 9/11)

Talarico and Rubin 2003

Found that flashbulb memories are no more durable than everyday memories. They are special because subjects are more confident in them, and they are more vivid.