Psych 85 Final Exam Study Guide Memory&Mental Imagery

Proactive Interference

when old learning interferes with new learning

Proactive Interference example

say you hear 3 items from the same category and recall them (e.g. robin, sparrow, starling). For each rendition of 3 birds recall linearly declines. but if a 4th rendition of table, chair, desk is given your brain resets.

Release from proactive interference

STM is organized around concepts in LTM so if you change the category you stop interfering

Retroactive interference

when new learning interferes with old learning

Misinformation effects

exposure to misleading information in between encoding and retrieval leads to false memory

Interaction with source monitoring and individual differences

Individual differences play a key role in monitoring accuracy. Younger adults typically perform better than children and older adults who are more prone to confusion about where memories originated

Source monitoring

the process of determining the origins of one’s memories, knowledge, or beliefs, such as whether an events was personally experienced, witnessed on television, or overheard

Experiments in misinformation

Loftus & Palmer (1974) showed that memory can be distorted by the wording of questions. Participants watched a video of a car accident and were then asked how fast the cars were going when they "hit," "smashed," "collided," "bumped," or "contacted." The verb used affected speed estimates—those who heard "smashed" reported higher speeds than those who heard "contacted." A week later, participants who heard "smashed" were more likely to falsely remember seeing broken glass, even though there was none. The study demonstrated that post-event information can alter memory, a key finding in understanding the misinformation effect.

Mental imagery

a kind of mental representation sharing certain properties with pictures that can involve any of the sensory modalities and that: preserve metric spatial information, changes with viewpoint, empty space explicitly represented, experienced using spatial attention

What are NOT mental images

Symbolic or linguistic representations. e.g. DOG: pointy ears on top of head head on top of body…

The Modality Specific Viewpoint (Analog Viewpoint)

Image is a picture. Visual mental images are analogous to pictures in the head, they have functional equivalence meaning its not quite the same as a picture but they will function similarly in the mind

Evidence 1 for the Modality Specific Viewpoint

1. Anecdotal evidence: the experience of imaging feels very much like seeing a picture in one’s mind

Evidence 2 for the Modality Specific Viewpoint and Counterargument to Amodal

2. Shepard and Metzler’s mental rotation (1971) reaction times got slower with increasing rotation angle as if I have an image in my head that can update

The Amodal Viewpoint (Propositional Viewpoint)

Image is a description. Although we may believe we experience images as “pictures” the underlying mental representations are actually non-pictorial abstract concepts

Evidence 1 for the amodal viewpoint

1. Reed and Johnsen (1975) Whole-part relationship. Which of the pics on the next slide are part of this picture (triangle rhombus thing). Found that subjects only succeeded 55% of time suggesting subjects don’t store images as picture

Evidence 3 for Modality specific viewpoint and counterargument to Amodal

3. Rabbit next to bee is easier (faster) to imagine than rabbit next to elephant

Evidence 2 for the Amodal Viewpoint and counterargument to Modality specific

2. Chambers & Reisberg (1985) showed participants ambiguous figures (like the duck-rabbit) . When asked to form a mental image and find a second interpretation, they couldn’t but they could once they drew it. Suggests mental images are stored as abstract, propositional representations rather than detailed, picture-like ones

Evidence 3 for the Amodal Viewpoint

3. Slezak figures pick an animal and memorize what it looks like, rotate in your mind 90 degrees clockwise and visualize what it looks like. No one could identify the new animal produced by mental rotation. Argued that images are intrinsically bound to structural interpretation

Key difference between modality-specific and amodal theories of mental representation

Modality-specific theory holds that mental representations are tied to the sensory systems (e.g., visual or auditory), while amodal theory argues that representations are abstract and symbolic, not linked to any specific sensory modality.

What about the debate

It is likely that we have multiple representation formats in the brain that work together to represent and simulate objects

Evidence 4 for modality-specific viewpoint

neuroimaging data from fMRIs imagery decoding results show that activity patterns in left lateral occipital region could predict what the subject was imagining 62% of the time