CogPsych Exam 3 (Units 8- )

Reminiscence Bump

enhanced memory for adolescence and young adulthood in people over 40

Self-Image Hypothesis

memory is enhanced for events that occur as a person’s self-image or life identity is being formed

Ss asked to write “I am” statements they felt defined them as a person and average age assigned to the origin of these statements was 25

Cognitive Hypothesis

periods of rapid change that are followed by stability cause stronger encoding of memories

Cultural Life Script Hypothesis

distinguishes between a person’s life story, which is all of the events that have occurred in a person’s life, and a cultural life script, which is the culturally expected events that occur at a particular time in the life span

events in one’s life become easier to recall when they fit the cultural life script for that person’s culture

What is the relationship between emotional memories and neutral, encoding memories?

they’re located in different segments of the brain

subjects with unilateral damage to the medial temporal lobe showed significant impairment in gist memory under the emotional, but not the neutral, encoding condition

How does cortisol impact memory?

it can improve memory (cortisol and amygdala activity = better memory of it) but can also impair it (ss more likely to say they remember negative pictures than neutral, but this does not give them enhanced detail of it. in fact, sometimes, it reduces detail because the brain is overwhelmed and primarily focuses on one threatening detail)

Flashbulb Memory

memory for circumstances surrounding shocking, highly charged events (but shock value isn’t a precondition)

refers to memory for the circumstances surrounding how a person heard about an event, not memory for the event itself

According to the repeated recall procedure, did flashbulb memories change over time?

yes, they decay just like regular memories, but people maintain their original confidence about them

Narrative Rehersal Hypothesis

flashbulb memories seem highly vivid and salient, but potentially due to news coverage and rehearsal following the event

Ss asked if they saw the video where Princess Diana died, and 20/45 said yes. There is no video lol

How is a memory constructed?

what actually happened + person’s knowledge + experiences + expectations

Source Monitoring

process of determining the origins of our memories, knowledge, or beliefs

Monitoring Errors / Source Misattribution

misidentifying the source of a memory (very common)

Cryptoamnesia

unconscious plagiarism of the work of others

What would increase the presence of memory errors (misremembering or misattribution)?

a delay between learning the info and being tested on it

Repeated Reproduction

at longer intervals (after first reading), reproductions were shorter than original and contained many omissions and inaccuracies, tended to reflect Ss own culture

Pragmatic Inference

occurs when reading a sentence leads a person to expect something that is not explicitly stated or implied by the sentence

inferences are based on knowledge gained through experience

Schema

one’s knowlege about some aspect of the environment

Ss included things that were not in the office but seemed to fit into their office schema, like books

Script

conception of the sequence of actions that usually occurs during a particular experience

Ss would include material that wasn’t presented but was part of a script (false recall, like thinking you saw the world sleep on a list of related words

How can flexible reconstructed memory be useful?

constructive properties allow us to understand language, solve problems, and make decisions

fill in the blanks when there is incomplete info based on knowledge and experience

otherwise there would be an overload of info and we can use cognitive resources for other tasks

What is it like to have exceptional memory?

exhausting!! you remember way too much (system overload)

not good at reasoning that involved drawing inferences or “filling in the blanks” based on partial information

struggled with creativity and other types of memories

Misinformation Effect / Misleading Post-Event Information (MPI)

misleading information presented after a person witnesses an event can change how the person describes the event later

Creating False Memories for Early Events in People’s Lives

after being told a false memory and given some delay time, Ss thought they genuinely remembered events that never existed

Eyewitness Testimony

testimony by a person who was present at the crime about what they saw during commission of the crime

people are not always entirely accurate and others wrongly serve time do to inaccuracies

source monitoring errors based on familiarity

Post-Identification Feedback Effect

increase in confidence due to confirming feedback after making an identification

Conceptual Knowledge

knowledge that enables us to recognize objects and events and make inferences about their properties

Concepts

mental representation of a class or individual; the meaning of objects, events, and abstract ideas

Categories

includes all possible examples of a particular concept, like different dog breeds

Categorization

process by which things are placed in categories

Definitional Approach to Categorization

decide whether something is a member of a category by determining whether a particular object meets the definition

Why don’t definitions work for categories?

not all members of categories have the same features and some concepts don’t meet the definition of a certain category-variation is the norm

Family resemblance

thigns in a particular category resemble one another in numerous ways

Prototype Approach to Categorization

membership in a category is determined by comparing the object to a prototype that represents the category

Prototype

“typical” member of the category

not an actual member of a category; an average representation of diverse instances of a category

High Typicality

category member closely resembles category prototype

Low Typicality

category member does not closely resemble category prototype

Sentence Verification Technique

an experimental procedure in cogpsych used to measure how quickly and accurately people process category membership

typicality effect

Typicality Effect

high typicality objects > low typicality objects for categorization speed

Which one would be named first: high typicality objects, low typicality objects, or the prototypical objects?

prototypical objects (ex. apple before pomegranate)

Prototype Theory/Approach

rosch — concepts are organized around a central prototype rather than strict, binary checklists of defining features

AKA, a category name does not activate a generic checklist of criteria or structural fragments. Instead, hearing a category name causes the brain to automatically generate a highly specific mental representation reflecting the prototype

Rosch 1975 Priming Experiment

priming resulted in faster judgements for prototypical colors than non-prototypical colors

facilitation and inhibition effects

Rosch — The Facilitation Effect

when primed with “fruit” and then shown “apple-apple,” participants responded significantly faster than they did in unprimed conditions.

The prime facilitated their response because the mental representation of “fruit” naturally activated highly typical examples like apples

Rosch — The Inhibition Effect

when primed with “fruit” and then shown “pomegranate-pomegranate,” participants actually took longer to respond than in unprimed trials.

The prime inhibited their response beacuse the mental image generated by the word “fruit” did not match the unexpected target

Exemplar Approach to Categorization

involves determining whether an object is similar to other objects by thiking of exemplars of that category

similar support to the prototypical approach

Exemplar

actual members of the category that a person has encountered in the past

What’s are advantages of using the exemplar approach rather than the prototype?

by using real examples, it can more easily take into account atypical cases such as flightless birds

deals more easily with variable categories like games

better for smaller categories

Is there a psychologically “privileged” level of category?

rosch provided evidence that the basic level is "“psychologically privileged” because going above it to global results results in a large loss of info and going below it results in little gain of info

AKA, faster RTs for basic level words/objects

HOWEVER, that “special” level is not hte same for everyone—people with more expertise and familiarity with certain category focus more on specific info

Semantic Network Approach

concepts are arranged in networks

networks consists of nodes connected by links, which represents a category of concepts, and related concepts are connected

Collins and Quillian’s Hierarchical Network Model

consists of levels arranged so that more specific concepts at the bottom and more general concepts at higher levels

Superordinate Level: living thing

Basic Level: plant, animal, tree, flower, bird, fish

Subordinate Level: canary, robin, oak, rose, etc.

Nodes: words that represent specific concepts or categories

Links: “is” statements

**To save mental storage space, general properties are stored at the highest possible level rather than repeated for every single item. For example, “can move” and “has skin” are stored at the animal node, so the brain doesn’t need to re-store “has skin” individually under canary, robin, salmon, etc.

Statements that required further travel away from “canary” resulted in longer RTs

Activation — Collins and Quillian’s Hierarchical Network Model

activity that spreads out along any link that is connected to an activated node

also spreads to other nodes in the network

Lexical Decision Task — Activation in Hierarchy

when words were closely related (bread and wheat), faster to say yes both are words

retrieving one word from memory triggered a spread of activation to nearby locations in a network

What’s a criticism of the Collins and Quillian model?

it can’t explain the typicality effect

“A canary is a bird” is verified more quickly than “an ostrich is a bird”, but the model predicts equally fast RTs

Connectionism

a computational framework that models human mental processes using artificial neural networks

Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) Model (Connectionism)

propose that concepts are represented by activity that is distributed across a network

some units can be activated by stimuli in the environment (input), some by signals received from other units (input units —> hidden units —> output units)

Connection Weight

determines how signals from one unit either increase or decrease activity of the next unit (along with the specific type of signal that originates form the input units)

Activation of Hidden Units — Connectionism

activation in hidden units activate similar words (canary—grow, move, fly, and sing) property units

Learning Process — Training a Network

erroneous responses in property units cause an error signal to be sent back through the network by back propagation (then the weight is adjusted)

What are the pros of connectionism?

operation of connectionist networks is not totally disrupted by damage (because the info is distributed)

connectionist networks can explain generalization of learning (training a system to recognize the properties of one concept also provides info about other related concepts)

Mental Imagery

the ability to recreate the sensory world in the absence of physical stimuli

also occurs in senses other than vision

Visual Imagery

seeing in the absence of a visual stimulus

Image[less] Thought Debate

is thought possible without an image? / are perception and imagery different from each other?

Galton 1883 observed that people who had difficulty forming visual images (aphantasia) were still capable of thinking

Think in words, concepts, or other non-visual information

Why was research in imagery stalled?

behaviorism told people nothing mental and unobservable can be reliably studied

How does visualization influence performance?

athletes who visualize their performance beforehand tend to perform better than those who do not visualize

Mental Chronometry

moving an object through space in mind (like the mental rotation study)

easier to remember concrete than abstract nouns

Conceptual Peg Hypothesis

concrete nouns (high-imagery) create images that abstract nouns (low-imagery) can hang onto

ex. “dog-book” —> imagining a dog sitting on a book

Kosslyn

analog (spatial/pictorial) positioning… mental images are represented in “quasi-pictorial” depective format rather than abstract language-like descriptions

What experiment did Kosslyn run?

he asked Ss to study a picture of a boat and then imagine it afterward. longer distances took longer mental scanning times

How did Lea criticize Kosslyn’s experiment?

as participants scanned, they may have encountered other interesting parts, such as the cabin, and this distraction may have increased their reaction time

Pylshyn

starts the imagery debate: is imagery based on spatial mechanisms, or mechanisms related to language (called propositional)?

Who would agree with the sentence “imagery and perception form a double dissociation”?

Kosslyn

Spatial Representation

different parts of an image can be described as corresponding to specific locations in space (Kosslyn)

Epiphenomenon

something that accompanies the real mechanism but it’s not actually part of the mechanism (Pylshyn)

ex. lights flashing as a computer mainframe does calculations—lights indicate that something is going on inside the computer, but not necessarily what is actually happening

Propositional Representation

relationships can be represented by abstract symbols such as an equation or statements (Pylshyn)

ex. discursive sentences, simplified network maps, and computer icons

Depictive Representation

representations that are like realistic pictures of an object, so that the parts of the representation correspond to parts of the object (Kosslyn)

Tactic Knowledge Explanation

we unconsciously use knowledge about the world when making judgments

Pylshyn proposed that Ss are responding to Kosslyn’s tasks based on what they know about what usually happens when they' are looking at a scene

ex. when you look for a friend in the crowd, you imagine their face first, and that mental image influences what you notice

What experiment was used to argue against tactic knowledge?

dot & arrows — took longer to respond for greater distances between the arrow and the dot

Ss wouldn’t ahve had time to memorize the distances between the arrow and dot before making judgments, so it is unlikely they used tactic knowledge

Mental Walk Task

observe or imagine an entity (car, elephant, rabbit, etc), and estimate when they experienced “overflow” (when image filled visual field or edges became fuzzy

Ss moved closer for smaller animals tan larger ones; answered questions about rabbit faster when it filled more of visual field

this proves kosslyn’s spatial theory because visual or mental, the items were still fixed in a field of view

Perky (1910)’s Banana Experiment

a banana was flashed on a screen Ss could not see through, but Ss said they saw a banana anyway

supports Kosslyn’s theory because it links visual and mental images

How should we gather information for the imagery debate?

instead of relying on behavioral experiments, we should investigate how the brain responds to visual imagery

we can’t completely rule out the tactic knowledge explanation because previous knowledge may be impacting perception

What neuroimaging evidence do we need for the imagery debate?

fMRI, TMS, EEG, and case studies

What is this graph of imagery neurons suggesting for the imagery debate?

perception and imagery fires roughly the same for the same stimulus

Which part of the brain area lit up for both perception and imagery? Which part didn’t?

for both = frontal lobe

perception > imagery = occipital lobe

How was TMS used in the imagery debate?

”are the stripes in Q3 longer than those in Q2?”

when TMS was applied to visual cortex, both perception and imagery were stalled

AKA, brain activation in response to imagery is not an epiphenomenon, visual cortex plays a causal role in both

What two effects happened when part of the visual cortex was removed?

decreases image size

distance in mental walk task increased (reduced field of view)

How does perception interact with imagery through damage?

perceptual problems are accompanied by problems with imagery

people who lose the ability to see color also unable to create colors through imagery

Unilateral Neglect

ignore objects in one half of the visual field due to parietal lobe damage

Visual Agnosia

could recognize features of objects but couldn’t integrate them into a meaningful whole

What suggests a separation between perception and imagery in studies?

some people can perceive objects in front of them (perception) but can’t draw from memory (imagery)

other people can draw from memory (imagery) but can’t recognize what the object is after a delay (perception; visual agnosia)

Behrmann et al. on the imagery debate

overlap

visual perception begins as bottom-up and eventually meets imagery, which moves top-down

Conclusions from the Imagery Debate

imagery and perception are closely related and share some, but not all, mechanisms

perception is stable, imagery is fragile

harder to manipulate mental images than perceptual images

Method of Loci

things to be remembered are placed at different locations in a mental image of a spatial layout

(to help remember a dentist appointment, you could visually “place” a pair of teeth in your living room)

Pegword Technique

visualizing images by associating them with concrete words

(ex. shoe-milk —> think of a shoe filled with milk —> remember to buy milk at the store)