Cognitive Psychology Exam #3

*Semantic memory: consists of perceptual symbols and is built up of sensory and motor elements derived from experience; an interpretive system, not a recording system; typically unimpaired in episodic-memory disorders (both retrograde and anterograde amnesia); a type of long-term, explicit memory responsible for storing general knowledge, facts, concepts, and word meanings independent of personal experience

Anomia: a deficit in word-finding; it affects the part of semantic memory where our world 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: can contain a huge amount of information for certain concepts that can seemingly be retrieved without interference; an interrelated set of concepts

Nodes: a point or location in the semantic space; may be linked by pathways

Cognitive economy: only nonredundant facts are stored, information is represented in the most economical way

Inheritance: 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

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

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: people categorize new information by comparing it to a mental "prototype"—a best example, average, or idealized representation of a concept

Ad hoc categories: people often make up new categories based on situational circumstances (things to take out of a burning building, foods found in the diet aisle of a grocery store, ect.)

Embodied cognition: the way our minds represent information reflects the fact that we need to interact with the world

DRM procedure: give subjects list containing sets of words, all related to a single (unrepresented) critical item, false memory very high for critical item,

*Misinformation effect: a psychological phenomenon where a person's recall of episodic memories becomes less accurate because of exposure to incorrect information after an event (example of phrasing: Give higher estimates when asked to judge speed when cars “smashed into each other” than when “hit each other”)

*Cryptomnesia: unconscious plagiarism, a memory bias where a forgotten memory returns without being recognized as such, leading a person to believe it is a new or original idea.

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; phase 2 - practice retrieval of some items; test - later recall practiced items is enhanced but recall of nonpracticed items 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 of personal memories

Infantile amnesia: one extreme cause of autobiographical forgetting; little to no memory for events in the first few years of life

*Reminiscence bump: an exception to recency effect in autobiographical memory; superior memory than would otherwise be expected for life events around the age of 20; the tendency for adults over 40 to have an increased recollection of personal events from late adolescence and early adulthood, typically between the ages of 10 and 30

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: recalling events rather than specific episodes, has been found in people with depression or PTSD but not in other populations (e.g., people with phobias)

Metamemory: knowledge about memory and its functioning

Prospective memory: the ability to remember to do something in the future

Source monitoring: the ability to accurately remember the source of a memory, be it something you encountered or something that you imagines

Judgments of learning: prediction made after studying some material whether it will be remembered on a later test; accuracy is enhanced if the judgements 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 or left frontal lobe

Wernicke’s aphasia: comprehension is impaired, as are repetition, naming, reading, and writing, but syntactic and aspects of speech are preserved; caused by damage to a region toward rear or 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 sound that matters psychologically; groups of language sounds that are treated the same, despite physical differences; occurrence of specific allophones is determined by rule

Allophones: phones belonging to the same phoneme

Morphemes: the smallest unit of language that has meanings

Polysemy: many words in a language that have multiple meanings

Categorical perception: early discrimination across categories, difficult discrimination within categories; sounds on different sides of a boundary are clearly distinct even if physically similar; all the sounds falling within a set of boundaries are perceived as the same, despite physical differences between them

Linguistic relativity hypothesis: specific languages shape the way you think

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

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

TRACE: a connectionist, interactive model of speech perception; acoustic input activates feature-detector nodes, feature-detector nodes activate phonemes that contain those features, phonemes send activation to all words that contain them, words are simultaneously receiving top-down activation from context, words send feedback to phonemes they contain; model forms a memory trace of order in which phonemes are being heard

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

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: Bock had subjects alternate between repeating spoken sentences and describing pictures. They tended to use same synaptic structures (e.g., passive voice, position of preposition phrases) as in sentence that just repeated

Deep structure: a basic representation of meaning for an utterance

Surface structure: actual form of an utterance

Origin of English: 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); its a Non-African language, it is an Indo-European language, it is a Germanic language

Dual-Route Cascaded Model: assumes that there are two paths from print to meaning in reading, these paths overlap in time (cascade) and race to a node

Surface-level representation of text: first layer of representation in reading; a verbatim representation of the wording used in the text

Textbase: second layer of representation in reading; a propositional representation of the ideas explicitly stated in the text

Situation models: third layer of representation in reading; a representation of what the text is about, it is an amalgam of information that is contained in the textbase and information that had been retrieved from the comprehender’s general store of world knowledge

*Mental Structure Building: a cognitive psychology framework where individuals construct coherent mental representations (memory nodes) to understand information, primarily through laying foundations, mapping new information onto existing structures, and shifting to create new sub-structures

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 words or phrases are misinterpreted

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)

Anaphoric reference: interpretation of pronouns and possessives

*Perceptual span in reading: the effective visual field from which information is extracted during a single eye fixation

Moving-window task: control availability of information by replacing letters outside the fixated area

*Preview benefit: prior visual access to an upcoming object or word (parafoveal preview) speeds up its processing time once it is fully fixated, leading to faster object naming, reading, or visual search

Metacomprehension: monitoring how well we understand and will remember information later

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: utterances that function as social actions—such as promising, ordering, or apologizing—rather than just conveying information

Direct theory of mind: we contract 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