cognitive 3

Semantic memory

memory for general factual knowledge and concepts

typically unimpaired in episodic-memory disorders. Impaired by anomia

Anomia

a deficit in word-finding. It affects the part of semantic memory where our word knowledge (as distinct from conceptual knowledge) is stored

Category specific deficit

a disruption in which the person loses access to one semantic category of words or concepts while not losing others (e.g., several brain-damaged patients who had difficulty identifying living things but not nonliving things).

Semantic networks

first as an AI attempt to represent knowledge in computers and then as a theory of how humans organize knowledge in semantic memory

According to them the structure of semantic memory is a network (an interrelated set of concepts)

Nodes

a point or location in the semantic space

Cognitive economy

only nonredundant facts are stored; information is represented in the most economical way

Inheritance

required for cognitive economy

properties of higher nodes apply to lower connected nodes unless specifically negated

Spreading activation

the mental activity of accessing and retrieving information from the network

Feature-comparison models

–Concepts are represented by lists of features.  Sentences are verified by comparing lists.

•If feature lists are highly similar, say ‘yes’

•If feature lists are highly dissimilar, say ‘no’

•If intermediate, carry out slow comparison process of necessary features

Semantic relatedness effect

Concepts that are highly interrelated can be judged more quickly than those with a lower degree of relatedness. This can also be shown by looking at event-related potentials (ERPs)

N400

Negative peak around 400 ms after presentation. This seems to reflect the unrelatedness of two concepts in semantic memory

Schema

Stored framework or body of knowledge about some topic

Script

Large-scale knowledge structures that guide interpretation and comprehension of daily experience

Examples: Restaurant, office visit

Automatic vs. strategic priming

•Automatic Priming

–Fast (can be found even at very short SOAs)

–Positive (facilitation)

–Unrelated to strategy or intention

•Strategic Priming

–Slow (only found at long SOAs)

–Positive (facilitation) or Negative (inhibition)

–Dependent on strategy.  More likely to occur if primed trials occur frequently in experiment

Prototypes

the best or average exemplar of a category. For example, the prototypical bird is some kind of mental average of all the different kinds of birds of which a person has knowledge or with which a person has had experience.

Ad hoc categories

a category formed to meet a special criterion or demand, usually in the moment that it is needed. For example, one might form the category things I would take from my house if it were on fire.

Embodied cognition

Concepts as perceptual symbols, built up of sensory and motor elements derived from experience.

he human mind is largely determined by the structures of the human body (morphology, sensory and motor systems) and its interactions with the physical environment.

DRM procedure

•Give subjects list containing sets of words, all related to a single (unpresented) critical item

–HILL, VALLEY, CLIMB, SUMMIT, PEAK, TOP, GLACIER, SUMMIT

–False memory very high for critical item

• MOUNTAIN, in the example set above

Misinformation effect

a phenomenon in which a person mistakenly recalls misleading information that an experimenter has provided, instead of accurately recalling the correct information that had been presented earlier.

Ex.

–Exposure to original event (e.g., film of auto accident)

–Exposure to questions, including one potentially misleading one

–Later test on memory designed to see if misleading question altered memory for original event

Cryptomnesia

unconscious plagiarism

people mistakenly believe that a current thought or idea is a product of their own creation when, in fact, they have encountered it previously and then forgotten it

Fan effect

The more propositions are associated with a concept, the more time it takes to access each one.

Retrieval-induced forgetting

–Phase 1:  Study List of Words from Categories

•FRUIT-GRAPE, ANIMAL-TIGER, FRUIT-APPLE, JOB-LAWYER, FRUIT-BANANA, ANIMAL-BEAR, JOB-DOCTOR …

–Phase 2: Practice Retrieval of some Items

•FRUIT-A……, JOB-L……., FRUIT-A……., JOB-L…..

–Test:  Later Recall of practiced items (e.g., APPLE, LAWYER) is enhanced but recall of nonpracticed Items (e.g., GRAPE, DOCTOR) is Inhibited. As you practice retrieval of some items, you strengthen them. Stronger items block retrieval of weaker items.

Autobiographical memory

The study of one’s lifetime or collection or narrative of personal memories

Infantile amnesia

•One extreme cause of autobiographical forgetting:  Little to no memory for events in first few years of life

•Possible explanations:

–Repression (Freud): Little evidence in support

–Encoding-specificity principle?

–Development of sense of self?

Result of changes in nervous system?

Reminiscence bump

An exception to recency effects in autobiographical memory:  Superior memory than would otherwise be expected for life events around the age of 20 (i.e., between 16 and 25).

Imagination inflation

•Imagining that something happened increases later memory reports that it actually did happen. Imagination inflates the probability of a false memory

Overgeneral memory

pattern of recalling categories of events rather than specific episodes

has been found in people with depression or PTSD but not in other populations

•This may have multiple causes:

–Functional avoidance (avoiding episodes that may be upsetting to remember)

–Capture and rumination (general event cues just activate general events, not event-specific knowledge)

–Impairment in working-self processes that limit an individual’s capacity to focus on retrieval in the face of distraction

Metamemory

Knowledge about Memory and Its Functioning

Prospective memory

•The ability to remember to do something in the future.  There are two basic kinds:

–Event-based: Remembering to do something when a certain event occurs

–Time-based: Remembering to do something based on the passage of time (more difficult)

Source monitoring

–The ability to accurately remember the source of a memory, be it something you encountered or something that you imagined

•Implicated in false memory in DRM task

Can result in cryptomnesia

Judgments of learning

prediction made after studying some material whether it will be remembered on a later test

Accuracy of judgments of learning is enhanced if the judgments are not made immediately after studying has ended but rather after a delay

Feeling of knowing

Your prediction as to whether you would recognize information you can’t recall

Broca’s aphasia

•severe difficulties in producing speech

–Caused by damage to a region toward rear of left frontal lobe

Wernicke’s aphasia

•comprehension is impaired, as are repetition, naming, reading, and writing, but syntactic aspects of speech are preserved

–Caused by damage to a region toward rear of left temporal lobe

Conduction aphasia

•less common, inability to repeat what was just heard, separating comprehension from production

–Caused by damage to pathway between Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas

Phones

smallest unit of sound

Phonemes

–The smallest unit of sounds that matters psychologically

–Groups of language sounds that are treated the same, despite physical differences

Allophones

Phones belonging to the same phoneme

Morphemes

The smallest unit of language that has meaning

Polysemy

Many words in a language have multiple meanings

Categorical perception

•Easy discrimination across categories, difficult discrimination within categories

–Sounds on different sides of a boundary are clearly distinct even if physically similar

•Two sounds can be proven to belong to different phonemes if different words result from substituting one for another

–All the sounds falling within a set of boundaries are perceived as the same, despite physical differences between them

Linguistic relativity hypothesis

•or Sapir-Whorf or Whorfian) hypothesis: Specific languages shape the way you think

–Whorf (1956): “All observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar …”

Whorf believed that interpretation of reality was influenced by language.  There is no evidence for this claim

weaker evidence: color and spacial relations/directions

Results when apes are taught human language

–Mastery of about 200 words

–Possibly creative

–Can form two-word utterances

–Unclear evidence of syntax

–Limited range of topics

–Learning only through reinforcement

Homesign

Creation of language by deaf children

Pidgins vs. Creoles

Pidgin: a crude spoken communication system, generally used by adults who speak different languages

Creole: a pidgin that has been learned by children as a native language

TRACE

•A connectionist, interactive model of speech perception (feature, phoneme, word levels)

•Acoustic input activates feature-detector nodes

•Feature-detector nodes activate phonemes that contain those features

•Phonemes send activation to all words that contain them

Assumptions

–Spoken word recognition involves the interactive processing of information at multiple levels.

–As a word is heard, multiple lexical representations (i.e., words) are activated.

–Level of activation depends both on the degree of fit (similarity) between a lexical item and the incoming speech and on prior probability (frequency of occurrence; possibly top-down expectations)

–Spoken word recognition is guided by competition among activated representations.

Linguistic competence

the internalized knowledge of language and its rules that fully fluent speakers of a language have

Linguistic performance

The actual language behavior a speaker generates

Phrase-structure rules

–The rules accounting for the constituents of the sentence, the word groupings and phrases that make up the utterance, and the relationships among these constituents

•E.g., breaking sentence into noun phrases and verb phrases

•Fail to address distinction between surface structure (actual form of an utterance) and deep structure (a basic representation of meaning for an utterance)

Transformational rules

Rules that convert a deep structure into one of several possible surface structures

Given-New strategy

People choose syntactic forms that let them place given (more accessible) information earlier

Syntactic priming

–People tend to use syntactic forms they’ve seen or heard recently

•Bock (1986) had subjects alternate between repeating spoken sentences and describing pictures.  They tended to use same syntactic structures (e.g., passive voice, position of prepositional phrases) as in sentence they just repeated

Deep structure

a basic representation of meaning for an utterance

Surface structure

actual form of an utterance

Origin of English

•First, it is a NonAfrican language

–All non-African languages are more similar to each other than African languages are to each other.

–One interpretation: When modern humans walked out of Africa 60,000 years ago (not the first excursion but the first to endure), they were speaking one African language that became the parent of all subsequent non-African languages

•Second, it is an Indo-European language

–Most likely originating about 5000-6000 years ago in eastern Europe (the steppes of eastern Ukraine among people sometimes called the Yamnaya) that eventually spread from Ireland to western China (a now-extinct language called Tocharian that died about a thousand years ago)

–Sir William Jones noticed similarities among ancient Greek, ancient Latin, and ancient Sanskrit.

–The parent of almost all languages spoken in Europe, as well as in Iran and the most common languages in South Asia (including Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali)

•Third, it is a Germanic language

–However, it has a complicated history in England

•Earliest inhabitants were hunter-gatherers of unknown language

•Next inhabitants spoke Celtic (Indo-European)

–The name ‘Britain’ is probably of Celtic origin

•Romans brought Latin (Indo-European)

•Vikings brought Scandinavian (Germanic branch of Indo-European)

•Germanic invaders brought North German (Germanic; largest influence on English)

•Normans in 1066 brought a dialect of French

Dual-Route Cascaded Model

This model assumes that there are two paths from print to meaning. These paths overlap in time (cascade) and race to a node:

Sublexical Route (Print to sound to meaning): Working from left to right in a word, we convert visual symbols to sounds using the rules of the language.

Easier to use when orthography is more consistent (e.g., Spanish)

We use these rules to name pseudowords (e.g., “blask”)

Lexical Route (Direct route of print to meaning)

Takes longer to develop but typically faster and requiring fewer attentional resources in adults

This route may be required for words that have pronunciations that don’t follow conventional rules (e.g. “pint”)

Surface-level representation of text

Very short-lived representation of the exact wording of a text

Recognition of exact wording (vs. paraphrases) begins to decline briefly and is generally gone within a day

Exceptions are cases where exact wording may be critical:

Memory for jokes or insults (Murphy & Shapiro, 1994)

Memory for poetry, especially epic poetry and rhymes in oral cultures (Rubin, 1995)

Textbase

A propositional representation of the ideas explicitly stated in the text.

Situation models

A mental representation that serves as a simulation of the world described by a text. The building of a situation model goes beyond the text, requiring inference

Mental Structure Building

•Processes

–Laying a foundation

–Mapping information

–Shifting

•Control Mechanisms

–Enhancement

–Suppression

Advantage of first mention

Mental structure building leads to a long-term advantage in accessibility for the first term in a text

Advantage of clause recency

Mental structure building leads to a short-term advantage in accessibility for recent terms in a text

Eye-Mind Assumption

The pattern of eye movements directly reflects the complexity of the underlying cognitive processes

Immediacy Assumption

Readers try to interpret each content word of a text as that word is encountered in the passage

Inference

the process by which a comprehender draws connections between concepts, determines the referents of words and ideas, and derives conclusions from a message

Garden-path sentences

•Sentences in which early word or phrases are misinterpreted

–“While she was sewing the sleeve fell off her lap”

–“Many professional fishermen were here. Some of the best bass guitarists…”

Conversational maxims

•Rules that govern our conversational interactions with others, all derived from the cooperative principle (the idea that each participant assumes that speakers will follow the rules and that each contribution is sincere and appropriate)

–Relevant: all utterances are relevant to the conversation:

–Quantity: be as informative as required

–Quality: say what is true

–Manner and tone: Be clear, brief, and polite

Anaphoric reference

interpretation of pronouns and possessives

–Repeated-name penalty: An increase in reading times when a direct reference is used again, rather than a pronoun

–Advantage of first mention and advantage of clause recency matter here

Perceptual span in reading

How many characters can you analyze at a time

Moving-window task: shows your perceptual span

Skilled readers of English get information 3-4 spaces to the left and 14-15 spaces to the right of fixation

No information from other lines in reading

Less skilled readers have smaller spans

Moving-window task

•: Control availability of information by replacing letters (e.g., by Xs) outside the fixated area

–EXAMPLE:  “Our eyes don’t simply glide across the page even though”

–Fixate near y: ”Xur eyes don’t sXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX”

Fixate near first g: “XXXXXXXimply glide acrossXXXXXXXX

Preview benefit

•How much do we gain by information to the right of fixation?  Change word during saccade (unnoticed due to saccadic suppression)

•If readers have an invalid preview of the next word (to the right of the fixated word), fixation times increase by 30-50 ms

–No preview benefit for second word from fixated word

Metacomprehension

•Monitoring how well we understand and will remember information later

–A type of metacognition, closely related to metamemory (knowledge about memory)

Labor-in-vain effect

People spend too much time trying to learn information too far beyond current level of knowledge

Region of proximal learning

information just beyond current level of understanding

Speech acts

an instance of the use of speech considered as an action, especially with regard to the speaker’s intentions and the effect on a listener

•Language as purposive behavior: the intended consequences of an utterance

–These consequences may sometimes be best achieved through figurative (nonliteral) utterances

•Indirect requests

•Sarcasm

•Idioms

•Metaphors

Comprehension involves understanding the intended consequences of the utterer

Direct theory of mind

We construct a mental model of what our conversational partner knows and is interested in

Second-order theory of mind

–An evaluation of the other person’s direct theory; what you think the other person believes about you

People are often surprisingly egocentric at first and take other people into account only as conversation unfolds