Cog Psych 200 Exam 2

Attention

process of focusing on specific features of the environment or on certain thoughts or activities

Covert

directing focus without moving your eyes

Overt

moving your eyes to what you’re focusing on

Selective attention

ability to focus on one message and ignore all others

Dichotic listening

One message is presented to the left ear and another to the right ear

Cocktail party effect

recognizing your name in another conversation

Broadbent’s early selection model

Filters message before incoming information is analyzed for meaning

McKay’s late selection

Attending ear heard ambiguous sentence; Unattending ear heard biasing words

Treisman’s attenuation theory

Attended message is let through attenuator at full strength while unattended is let through with much weaker strength

Dictionary unit

contains words, each of which have thresholds for being activated; uncommon words have HIGH threshold

Divided attention

Practice enables people to simultaneously do two things that were difficult at first

Spelke

After hours of practice, participants could read and categorize dictated words

Schneider & Shiffrin

Divide attention by remembering target and monitoring rapidly presented stimuli; Memory set and test frames (3 is target with letters)

Consistent mapping condition

target would be numbers and distractors would be letters

Automatic processing

occurs without intention and only uses some of a person’s cognitive resources

Stroop effect

Name of the word interferes with the color of the word

Varied mapping condition

rules change from trial to trial; Overtime participants never achieved automatic processing

Controlled processing

participants paid close attention and their search was slow and controlled

Inattentional blindness

a stimulus that is not attended is not perceived, even though a person might be looking directly at it

Stimulus salience

areas that stand out and capture attention; Color and motion are highly salient

Scene schema

knowledge about what is contained in typical scenes

Location-based

moving attention from one place to another

Precueing

directing attention without moving the eyes

Object-based

attention being directed to one place on an object

Egly

participants saw two rectangles followed by a target cue; Reaction time fastest when target appeared where indicated

Feature Integration Theory (FIT)

Preattentive stage and Focused attention stage; Treisman and Schmidt tested this

Preattentive stage

Automatic, no effort or attention, unaware of process

Focused attention stage

Attention plays key role, features are combined

Memory

a collection of processes involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli after the original information is no longer present

Modal Model of Memory (Atkinson & Shiffrin)

Computer used as a model for human cognition

Control processes

active processes that can be controlled by the person; ex. Rehearsal

Sensory memory

registers all or most information that hits our visual receptors; Holds a large amount of information for a short period of time

Persistence of vision

retention of the perception of light

Sperling

measured the capacity and duration of sensory memory; Array of letters flashed across the screen and participants had to recall as many as possible

Whole report

participants asked to report as many as could be seen

Partial report

participants heard tone that told them which row of letters to report

Delayed partial report

presentation of tone for a fraction of a second after the letters were extinguished

Short-term memory

Stores small amounts of information for a brief duration; Includes new information from sensory stores and information recalled from long-term memory

Proactive interference

when information learned previously interferes with learning new information

Chunking

small units can be combined into larger meaningful units

Ericcson

Trained a college student with average memory ability to use chunking; S.F. could remember up to 79 digits after 230 hours of training sessions

Chase & Simon

Memory for chess pieces on a board; When the pieces were randomly placed, they were equal

Coding

the way information is represented

Physiological

how stimulus is represented by the firing of neurons

Mental

how stimulus or experience is represented in the mind

Auditory coding (Conrad)

Participants saw target letters and were asked to write them down after a short delay; Errors most often occurred by letters that sounded alike

Visual coding (Della Sala)

Presented visual information that is difficult to verbalize

Digit span

how many digits can you remember; usually 5-8 items

Semantic coding (Wickens)

Participants listened to three words, counted backwards for 15 seconds, and attempted to recall the three words; On trial 4 he changed the category of words

Working memory

Limited capacity system for temporary storage and manipulation of information for complex tasks such as comprehension, learning, and reasoning

Phonological loop

Composed of 2 sub-systems; Baddeley formed this

Phonological memory store

Holds traces of acoustic or speech-based material with limited time capacity

Articulatory subvocal rehearsal

Maintains phonological memory traces; Translates visual information by subvocal naming; silently repeat yourself

Auditory (phonological) input

Info: Sensory memory → Central executive → Phonological memory store; Trace kept active using articulatory subvocal rehearsal unit; 2 sec

Visual/Visuospatial unit

Info: Sensory memory → Central executive → Visuospatial sketchpad; Input then transferred to phonological memory store

Word length (Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan)

Serial recall; 4-8 words & 1 vs 5 syllables; Words appear to be coded by temporal duration and not in meaningful units

Articulatory suppression (Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan)

word length effect should occur in conditions where rehearsal is allowed; Suppression eliminated the word length effect because material not coded phonologically

Visuospatial sketchpad

Brooks ran experiments and concluded if the task and response are the same WM component, performance is worse

The Central Executive

Attention controller: focus, divide, switch attention; Vogel ran experiments with red and blue rectangles

Prefrontal cortex

responsible for integrating incoming visual and auditory information

Long term memory structure

“Archive” of information of past events and knowledge learned

Clive Wearing & H.M.

Could have functioning STM but cannot form new LTM’s

K.F.

Could have poor STM but functioning LTM

Murdock

Tested with free recall test and serial position curve

Primacy effect

Earlier words can be rehearsed more; Number of rehearsals correlates to recall performance

Recency effect

No time to rehearse; Number of rehearsals unrelated to performance

Glanzer & Cunitz

Tested delay and spacing with free recall tests

Results

delay prevents recency; spacing influences primacy

Explicit/declarative memory

personal events/episodes; facts knowledge

implicit/non-declarative memory

procedural (like riding a bike); priming

Episodic memory

specific events, personal events, Remembering

Semantic memory

General fact/meaning, not tied to experience, Knowing

K.C.

No episodic memory, cannot relive any events of his past, but semantic memory intact

Italian woman

Impaired semantic memory; Episodic memory for past events was preserved

Tulving, Schacter & Stark

Word completion/standard recognition tasks

Repetition priming effect

When the same stimulus reappears, processing is faster; Slow decline over time; Does not rely on explicit memory

Types of implicit memory

Procedural, priming, classical conditioning, non associative learning

Neath

classification of memory tests

Depth of processing experiment (Jacoby & Dallas)

3 orienting tasks and 2 different tasks; No relationship between depth and implicit memory; Strong relationship between depth and explicit memory

Retrograde amnesia

forgetting past memories

Anterograde amnesia

not able to create new memories

Korsakoff

Both amnesias

Graf, Squire & Mandler

Cued recall: use the 3 letter cue to form a word from the list (direct test); Stem completion

Propaganda effect

more likely to rate statements read or heard before as being true