PY344: Cognition Exam 1

What is cognition?

The mind; less concrete and physical than the brain; outside of our observation from an external perspective.

Epistomology

Questions of how we know about the world.

Rationalism

We don’t perceive the world how it truly is; our perceptions are illusions; we should trust our reasoning capacities, not our senses.

Rationalism is an example of ______ processing.

Top-down

Empiricism

Our knowledge of the world comes through our senses; implies an information processing approach.

Are most psychologists empiricists or rationalists?

Empiricists

Rationalism is an example of ______ processing.

Bottom-up

Mechanistic explanation

The physical process by which something happens (e.g. brain structures).

Ontogenetic explanation

Relies on an organism’s/individual’s development.

Phylogenetic explanation

The development of a species; not just the progression of time, but how behaviors are adaptive.

Behavioral development reflects which of Tinbergen’s types of explanations?

Ontogenetic

Brain structures reflect which of Tinbergen’s types of explanations?

Mechanistic

Evolutionary psychology reflects which of Tinbergen’s types of explanations?

Phylogenetic

The bystander effect illustrates which of Tinbergen’s types of explanations?

Functional

Functional explanation

Relating one concept to other concepts to explain a phenomenon.

Who are two people who founded rationalism?

Plato and Descartes

Who are two people that founded empiricism?

Locke and Hume

Turing machine

Defines the minimal set of what a computer needs to work

What are the elements of a Turing machine?

Input, rules/instructions for processing, definable end, memory, output.

What is the mind-body problem?

How does the mental/nonphysical interact with the physical, and vice versa?

What is the Chinese room argument?

Chinese symbols slipped into a room, exhaustive rulebook without translation, outputs are Chinese, person in the room doesn’t know Chinese, but the output would be indistinguishable from a Chinese person.

What does Searle argue regarding the mind-body problem?

No algorithm is an explanation for the mind because that is not how we form mental content.

What did Donders contribute through his reaction time experiment?

The subtraction method to calculate the time needed for various stages of processing.

What does the Stroop effect demonstrate?

Automatic processes interfere with conscious cognitive processes.

According to the hardware software metaphor, the mind is…

The set of rules that relate the two together

Materialism

All mental states and operations are identical in principle with physical states and processes.

Radical behaviorism

Behaviors are simply responses to stimuli, not a mind-body interaction.

Logical behavioralism

Translates mental language into the language of stimuli; every mental ascription is equivalent to an ‘if-then’ statement.

Central-state identity theory

Mental processes are identical to neurophysiological events, and being in a certain mental state is identical to being in a certain neurophysiological state.

Functionalism

What determines the psychological type a mental particular belongs to is its causal role to the organism’s mental life

Strong AI

Thinking is the manipulation of formal symbols, which is what computers do.

According to Searle, computers merely manipulate symbols according to a program’s rules, thus…

Running a computer program does not guarantee cognition.

The brain has a unique structure that could be simulated, but…

The brain causes mental events through neurobiological processes, thus a simulation of cognition cannot produce the neurobiological effects of cognition.

Why might the college sophomore problem not be an issue?

The results do not invalidate results but calls for more findings to further assess generality; the investigated processes don’t significantly vary across demographics; replication of findings ensures wider generality.

What did word stimuli interfere in the Stroop experiment?

Naming the color ink the words were printed in.

Parsimony/Occam’s razor

With all else being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be preferred.

What does the cocktail party effect assume?

You don’t have the capacity to intake all other streams of information.

What did Treisman find about the selective filter in dichotic listening?

If the linguistic contexts switched ears, subjects would repeat 1-2 lines from the ‘rejected’ ear before returning to the correct ear.

Not only important words, like your name, but _____ _________ words, may be heard from the rejected ear.

Highly probable

Are contextual cues alone enough to override selective attention?

No

Inattentional blindness

When attention is diverted, observers often fail to perceive an unexpected object, even at the point of fixation.

Change blindness

Observers often fail to notice large changes in objects or scenes from one view to the next, especially if not in the center of interest.

What does conscious perception seem to require?

Conscious attention

Broadbent Y-tube theory of attention

There are two tubes of information, but a gate closes one stream to focus on the other, blocking one ear to hear what’s happening in the other.

What did Treisman add to attentional theory?

People attenuate streams of info they are interested in, not necessarily shutting down the other stream.

What did Wards and Scholl demonstrate about the inattentional blindness paradigm?

Even the implication of odd happenings resulted in inattentional blindness; inattentional blindness is a genuine deficit in conscious perception, not a lack of memory or accessibility.

Inattentional blindness can arise not just from a lack of expectation, but…

From a wrong expectation

What did Spelke’s study on divided attention find?

There appears to be no general limit to attentional skills, challenging the idea of a fixed cognitive bottleneck and showing that any learned practice can become automatic.

Describe the procedure of Spelke’s divided attention study.

Two participants read stories for comprehension while doing increasingly harder tasks, from writing unrelated words at diction to detecting semantic relations among dictated words and categorizing words with forced semantic information.

Making something automatic can make you concentrate on…

A different activity.

What is the general trend for attentional blink?

The 2nd target accuracy has a V-shaped relationship as separation between targets increases.

Naive realism

The common belief that the world is essentially the way we perceive it.

What do illusions show us?

Differences between how the physical world really is and our perception of it; something about the underlying mechanism of perception.

Perceptual systems seem to be constant, not hallucinatory, but…

There seems to be a function that relates our perceptions and a changing physical world.

Describe perceptual constancy in the context of illusions.

Perceptual systems adjust to make sure things are not radically changing through contextual cues.

True or false: Prior knowledge of what you think you’re looking for can impact perception.

True (as seen in ambiguous figures)

What is the most common form of color blindness?

Red-green

Why do negative afterimages occur?

Staring at something, then moving to a neutral image, results in an image because receptors get fatigued from focusing on colors.

Trichromates

Three different kinds of receptors

Opponent-process theory

Two different channels of vision, red-green and blue-yellow

How does our vision actually work?

A red-green channel feeds into a blue channel, which leads to a blue-yellow channel; combination of trichromatic and opponent-process theories.

Word superiority effect

Letter recognition is more accurate when stimuli are 4-letter words than single letters.

Diagnostic decision

Determining whether a condition will occur with incomplete or ambiguous evidence.

What can standardizing features assessed for diagnosis result in?

Faster recognition of key diagnostic features and easier communication from decision makers.

Discriminability

The difference between the peaks of two stimulus populations

What is the criterion/bias line?

A line movable by a subject delineating at what magnitude one will begin reporting a signal; if below, one will not report perception.

Receiver operating curve (ROC)

Differing probabilities of making a hit and a false alarm based on where the criterion line is positioned.

If there is no discriminability, the ROC is…

A straight diagonal line.

Stage theory

Reaction time is assumed to be the sum of the durations of the stages in the series of processes between stimulus and response.

Assumption of pure insertion

Changing from one task to another simply inserts a new processing stage without altering the others.

The Donders subtraction method depends on the validity of…

Stage theory and assumption of pure insertion.

What did Sternberg’s memory-scanning study find about reaction time and set size?

There seems to be a linear relation between reaction time and positive set size.

Serial search

Each of a set of items is compared one at a time to a target item.

Self-terminating serial search

Test stimulus compared successively to one item in memory after another until a match occurs or all comparisons are completed.

Exhaustive serial search

Test stimulus compared successively to all memorized items, only then a response is made.

Increasing serial-position functions are sufficient evidence for inferring a search pattern is…

Self-terminating

Flat serial-position curves indicate what type of serial search?

Exhaustive search

What do free-recall tasks demonstrate about item position and recall?

There is a U-shaped relationship between the probability of recalling an item and that item’s serial position.

Rehearsal of an item does what in relation to short term and long term memory?

Maintains the item in short term store and results in the transfer of information about the item into long term store.

Recency effect is an ___ phenomenon, while primacy effect is due to higher ___ information accruement.

STS; LTS

What did Loftus & Palmer find about reconstruction of automobile destruction events?

Stronger verbs resulted in higher speed estimates and an increased false memory of broken glass one week later.

Over time, what happens with original perceptions and externally provided information?

They may be integrated such that we are unable to tell from which source a given detail is recalled.

Reproductive memory

Accurate and rote production of material from memory.

Reconstructive memory

The active process of filling in missing elements while remembering, with frequent errors.

What is the source monitoring error, in the context of false memory studies?

Either remember recalling the item, or thinking about it during study phase, then confusing the source of remembrance.

Dual-storage

Information goes into short-term memory, and if it’s rehearsed sufficiently, it then moves into long-term memory.

What did Bransford and Johnson find about meaningful processing?

Appropriate context before reading prose was necessary for meaningfully understanding the content of the prose.

What is the critical role of appropriate context during the ongoing process of comprehension?

Helping create contexts that can be used to understand the passages in the first place.

For prior knowledge to aid comprehension, it must become…

An activated semantic context.

What did Loftus and Pickrell discover about false childhood memories?

People will create false recalls of childhood experiences in response to misleading information and social demands inherent in repeated interviews.

In Loftus & Pickrell, the mere suggestion of being lost does what?

Leaves a memory trace, which can become linked to other knowledge about being lost.

False remembering may arise from repeated retrieval. How so?

Prior recall may trigger false recall, and activation from related words may enhance false recognition by priming the lure.

What is the attributional analysis of memory in the context of false memories?

The ease with which one can bring events to mind increases the probability of attributing the event to memory, explaining the experience of remembering non-presented critical words.

What was the remember-know judgments in Roediger & McDermott?

Having a vivid memory of an item’s presentation versus knowing an item was shown but lacking a feeling of the actual occurrence.

Traditional models of memory focused primarily on what?

Forgetting

Ebbinghaus forgetting curve

Steep at beginning after mastering a list and flattens out at around 5%; ubiquitous phenomenon

Overlearning

Rehearsing beyond mastery reduces loss of material.

Savings

The idea of memory retention contributing to needing less time to relearn a list of information compared to the original learning session.

Decay theory of memory

All memories have a half life unless refreshed; use it or lose it.

Interference theory of memory

Learning new material can reduce memory of older learned material, and vice versa.