cog psych 20007 final exam

Sir Fredrick Bartlett (1932)

studied memory by having participants memorize stories/pictures and examining how those memories changed over time.

The War of the Ghosts: experiment using a culturally unfamiliar story. used repeated production - overtime many details forgotten or changed. illustrates that Memory is comprised of an overarching scheme or gist which is used to fill in missing details.

selective attention

focus on one object

divided attention

attending to more than one thing

covert attention

noticing something in your peripheral vision

overt attention

move eyes to look at something

hierarchy of representations

higher levels build on the lower levels

The Mysterious Disappearance of the HMAS Sydney (war ship 1941)

ship went missing. German survivors’ reports didn’t match up, not believed because they were the “enemy” → folk devil theory

Kirsner and Dunn (1991) used the reports and Zipf’s Law to find the location of the HMAS Sydney

Folk Devil Theory

Stanley Cohen (1971)

how we categorize/stereotype other people

3 stages or reporting folk devils:

1. symbolization: the folk devil is portrayed in an oversimplified, easily recognizable, stereotyped fashion

2. exaggeration: the facts of the controversy surrounding the folk devil are distorted or made up (usually linked to something negative)

3. prediction: further immoral actions on the part of the folk devil are anticipated

Ex: witch hunts

tells us that we use categories to determine how to act and what to believe

leads to negative interpretation of neutral facts

categorization benefits

• we think in categories

• reduce complexity

• drive appropriate action

• allows us to structure our knowledge

simple categories are easier to learn

Shepard, Hovland and Jenkins (1961)

examine how people learn categories that differ in the number of features that define the category

attention focuses on some features: differences on those are easier to detect

attention has limited capacity: attention to one feature takes attention away from other features, making differences on the unattended harder to detect

salience

attention grabbing or relevant attributes

not all salient features are valid (important) for defining a category

category

a set of entities that are grouped together

categorization is an automatic process that helps us make sense of the world (shapes our understanding)

Estes and Nosofsky - categories determine concepts

concept

a mentally processed idea/notion

mental representations of characteristic, relationships, and specific entities

Lakoff - concepts determine categories

Ashley and Lee (1993)

categorization is among the most important decision tasks performed by organisms

generalization

inferring something about the general category (or another object) from some given object

probability of generalization drops as similarity decreases

basic level

Ex. Apple

contain the most information about the concept - privileged status

superordinate level

Ex. fruit

subordinate

Ex. variety of apple (pink lady, granny smith, envy)

typicality

typical category members are verified faster and more accurately

more typical → more shared attributes with other category members

Zipf’s Law

the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank