Cognitive Psych Exam Study Guide 1

In what way can highlighting help learning?

In what way can highlighting help learning?

Isolation effect; isolate things because they seem important.

Name two limitations of highlighting.

Unable to recall information that is not highlighted 

Unable to properly make inferences because it doesn't help students create relationships about information.

What are diminishing returns of learning in rereading?

brain uses less energy every time the information is read again and again

gets easier to read but you are not understanding more

When is rereading better than testing? When is testing better than rereading? Describe an experiment that would demonstrate these patterns of results.

re-reading is best for the day before (short delay)

testing is best for a week before (long delay) 

Experiment: participants are asked to read a passage and are tested on it right away (short delay) or after time has passed (long delay) 

Provide one example of a test/quiz that you would be better off rereading over and over again as opposed to testing yourself.

A test that is happening sooner than later.

What part of the cerebral cortex is involved in creating a mental representation of the space around you?

Parietal lobe

Discuss what the contributions that Santiago Ramon y Cahal and Edgar Adrian made to our understanding of the structure and function of the brain.

Ramon y Cajal determined that neurons aren't directly connected to one another

Adrian determined how to measure action potentials

How do neurons code for the intensity of a stimulus? Are action potentials stronger for more intense stimuli? Are action potentials fired more frequently for  more intense stimuli? Both? 

1. Neurons code for the intensity of a stimulus by the frequency or rate of action potentials, or "spike firing", increasing

2. all action potentials have the same properties, thus, action potentials are not stronger for more intense stimuli

3. Action potentials are fired more frequently for more intense stimuli

What was the significance of the work done by David Hubel and Thornsten Weisel? What was the significance of the work done by Charles Gross?

Hubel and Weisel found that each neuron in the visual area of the cortex responded to a specific type of stimulation presented to a small area of the retina.

Charles Gross found that neurons in the temporal lobe respond to complex stimuli, they also found some neurons that responded best to faces.

What is the difference between specificity coding and population coding? Use facial processing to make your argument. How does sparse coding build on the idea of population coding?

Specificity coding: In the temporal lobe, there's a bundle of neurons used for processing faces (there’s 1 neuron for every face we‘ve ever encountered)

Population coding: The neurons are all involved in processing faces, but each neuron processes certain features of a face 

Sparse Coding: Same as population coding, but sometimes a certain face may not have a feature other faces have. Not every neuron has to respond to every face, it depends on the features.

What part of the brain is involved in processing faces?

Temporal lobe; fusiform cortex.

What is prosopagnosia?

Prosopagnosia (Face blindness): A condition where you have difficulty recognising people's faces

What is a double dissociation in the context of neuropsychological studies of brain function?

Double dissociations: When two related mental processes are shown to function independently of each other

How would one demonstrate causation in a study aiming to demonstrate the effects of drug use on brain structure? 

Effects of marijuana intake on brain structure Gilman et al. (2014)

Criticism: How do you know the effects found in the study were due to marijuana and not other pre-existing conditions? You can’t do these types of experiments on groups who already smoke. You’d have to have 40 non-smokers, get 20 to smoke, and then measure effects

How do researchers commit 'reverse inference' when interpreting the results of brain imaging experiments?

Reverse Inference: Make inferences based on literature (cherry picking what fits your data)

Can brain images enhance the credibility of research? 

If a brain image is embedded in the conclusion section of a research study (not the title section), then it has been shown to increase the believability/credibility of research. McCabe & Castel (2008) 

Where in the brain is visual information mainly processed?

Visual cortex; Occipital lobe 

What is the difference between bottomup and topdown processing?

Bottom-up Processing: Using information in the world to guide my perception

Top-down Processing: My past experiences can determine what I see (or think that I see) in the world around me

Define object occlusion and viewpoint invariance.

Object occlusion: when one object is hidden by another object that passes between it and the observer.

Ex: 1st picture we look at glasses by themself & 2nd picture we see the glasses obscured
by a ton of other things, and we infer that the part of the glasses visible in the picture are the same glasses from before. (Top-down processing)

Viewpoint invariance: The ability to recognize an object seen from different viewpoints (chair from all different angles would be recognizable as a chair to us).

Describe Hemholtz's theory of unconscious inference.

Likelihood Principle: Based on our past experiences, what's the most likely interpretation of what we’re looking at

What are the two Gestalt principles of organization that we learned about? How do they relate to bottomup and topdown processing?

The Principle of Simplicity: What’s the simplest interpretation of what I’m looking at

The Principle of Similarity: Our brain defaults to grouping things that look alike

How do semantic regularities (e.g., things that typically occur in particular scenes) enhance and distort perception?

We are able to perceive things faster based on the background that they belong to. But we miss certain things at times because they do not belong in a particular setting or perceive something to be there when it is not.

What is experience dependent plasticity? What evidence did you learn about to support this principle?

That the brain's functioning can be "tuned" to operate best within a specific environment. Thus, continued exposure to things that occur regularly in the environment can cause neurons to become adapted to respond best to these regularities and in some cases ignore the regularities that stop appearing. Example of cats being shown the vertical lines and FFA tests for "greebles".

Where are the "what" and "where" pathways of the brain?

Temporal lobe is "what"

Parietal lobe is "where"

Define change blindness.

Failure to notice what's there right now and what was there moments ago. The difficulty in detecting changes in scenes is called change blindness. We encode what is relevant. We don't look at what is irrelevant at that time "like maybe their height or clothes".

Describe what Standing (1973) did to study memory for perceptual details. What kind of stimuli did he use? What did he find?

People presented with pics of 10,000 scenes and tested their memory using a two-alternative forced choice test (out of these 2 images which did u see earlier today) They were correct 83% of the time 

Limitation: In the test they didn’t control for the alternative strategy participants may have been using for remembering visual details; maybe participants weren’t remembering scenes, but they were just categorizing images and remembered for example that they didn’t see any beach scenes/images  

How did Brady and colleagues (2008) ensure that participants in their study had to remember specific visual details to perform well on their memory test?

Used Two-alternative forced choice test but had 3 different kinds of lures:

Novel: Lure comes from a category that was not presented during the study

Exemplar: For the 2 items they saw during the test, it was the same item/category, but it was just a different colour 

State: Exact same item just in a different state  

What task do researchers use to study attention to auditory information?

Dichotic listening task: Hearing 2 things at once, but focus on 1

Focus on the message in the left ear, while another message is playing in the right ear

Compare and contrast Broadbent's (1958) filter model of attention and Treisman's (1964) attenuation model of attention. How do they relate to the cocktail party phenomenon?

Cocktail Party Effect: You can drown out background noise, but if you hear your name you listen / pay attention to the background noise; We notice these things when the information is highly relative to you

Broadbent:The model states that there’s this hypothetical structure in our brain that filters out irrelevant information and stores important information that’s relative to us (WRONG)

Treisman: Attenuation Model of Attention; Showed that we do listen to background noise (cocktail party effect) especially with our names; Changed “filter” to “attenuator”; We dampen out background information not filter it out

How do stimulus salience and cognitive factors relate to bottomup and topdown processing?

Stimulus Salience: Bottom-up factors that determine attention to elements of a scene (ex. Look at people with a beard; they become more salient to you)

Cognitive Factors: top-down factors that use past experiences to determine what we look at (ex. I know that Leo and Rihanna used to date, so that’s what I’ll look at and focus on) 

What is the difference between overt and covert attention?

Overt: what you are paying attention to

Covert:  ability to pay attention to your peripheral

What did Posner and colleagues (1978) show us about covert attention?

People have a decreased reaction (good) time to a valid trial compared to an invalid trial, which shows people have the ability to focus on things in the periphery (covert attention)

Shows that even when things are in our peripheral vision, we still have the capacity to see things correctly in our environment 

Describe feature integration theory.

Feature Integration Theory: When we look at an object, our brain breaks up the features unconsciously in the preattentive stage, and in the focused attention stage, these features are brought back together and we are conscious of this

How have researchers indirectly and directly measures attention in the  classroom? What is an advantage of direct measures? 

Johnstone and Percival: noticed that people shifted around in class. Every time someone shifted, TA's would make a note of it. Overtime, people shifted in their seats more. Although this was interpreted as inattention, maybe people could just be uncomfortable in their seats.

Smilek and colleagues: looked at whether the rate of blinking predicted mind wandering. They asked participants if their eyes wandered, which was followed by rapid blinking. 

Describe the results of Szpunar, Khan, and Schacter (2013). What do these data tell us about the potential role of testing in the classroom?

Non-tested group: 40% of the time said they were mind wandering and they weren't paying attention. 

Tested throughout: they were able to cut the mind wandering to 20%. When people think that they would have to actually answer questions, they pay attention more often than those who think that they would not have to answer it. 

Describe the modal model of memory.

Atkinson & Shiffrin’s 1968

Walking around and information hits our sensory receptors

Sensory memory: visual system information our eyes are catching; brief retention of the effects of sensory perception 

Short term memory: information you are holding onto right now ex. forgetting password and get sent a code 6 digit

Long term memory

 What did Sperling’s (1960) studies using whole report, immediate partial  report, and delayed partial report tell us about sensory memory?  

Letters are flashed on screen; learn to read left to right so people normally remember the top row but the rest fades away 

Whole report: on average people get 4.5/12 items 37%

Immediate Partial Report: adding the use of tone 3.3 / 4 or 82% 

Delayed Partial Report: adding a delay after hearing tone 1.6 / 4 or 40%

Iconic memory = visual sensory memory (LASTS 1 SECOND) 

Explain how Brown (1958) showed that short-term memory decays over time,  and then how Peterson and Peterson (1959) showed that forgetting in short-term memory may be the result of interference instead of decay. 

Brown: remember DLG without being able to repeat the letter in your head start at 309 and could backwards from 3-18 seconds (prevents rehearsal)

when there is no delay performance is almost at 100% once you get down to 18 second people recall 10% of what they have been exposed to 

short term memory lasts about 20 seconds 

Peterson & Peterson: is it really time or decay?; it's not time that's causing forgetting, after you do trial after trial after trial as you are counting backwards the previous letters you had been exposed to are interfering 

What is short-term memory? 

Short term memory: information you are holding onto right now ex. forgetting password and get sent a code 6 digit

What is the capacity of short-term memory? What is chunking? 

short term memory lasts about 20 seconds 

hold more into mind when you chunk into meaningful units 

How does the concept of working memory build on the concept of short-term  memory? 

Working memory: Limited-capacity system for temporary storage and manipulation of information.

as we keep something in mind over a short period of time we can manipulate it 

What components make up Baddeley and Hitch’s (1974) model of working  memory? Describe what each of the components is believed to do. 

Phonological Loop: when we hold things in mind it is usually verbal (something someone has told us)

 Visuo spatial sketch pad: we also have a subsystem of memory that handles visual spatial information 

Central Executive: hypothetical construct when you navigate your world you have to do both visual and spatial and phonological (verbal) information  

Episodic Buffer: Influence of Long-term memory in working memory

 What three pieces of experimental evidence were used to argue for the existence of the phonological loop in working memory? Describe each piece of  evidence. 

Phonological Similarity Effect: if you make a mistake on F you are more likely to guess S instead of E because F sounds like S; more likely to make mistakes on sound than appearance 

Word Length Effect: more likely to remember the first one easier because the words are shorter (1 syllable) 

Articulatory Suppression: remember left one better because where there is other things on your mind it is harder to pay attention; two verbal signals will interfere with one another 

What did you learn about mental rotation? What part of working memory is  mental rotation relevant to? 

 Mental Rotation: can visually manipulate; depending on how much they are displaced from each other the longer it takes to mentally rotate and it take your longer to align and answer the question 

Part of Visuo spatial sketch pad

 To what extent do verbal and visuo-spatial information interfere with one another? Use Lee Brooks’ (1968) letter tracing study to support your argument. 

you can trace the letter F in your head without looking; the distraction does not interfere with it showing that they are separate from each other (phonological) and visual spatial is its own thing

 Why does brain training programs like Lumosity not work?

do not transfer to the things that matter (good at those games but not at remembering names etc. 

one thing that actually works: EXERCISE