maybe this will help me cognitively process my life

Comprehensive, practice-exam flashcards covering Mental Imagery, Sensory Memory, Working Memory I & II, Long-Term Memory (Episodic & Implicit), Semantic Memory Networks, Reconstructive Memory, and Artificial Memory.

How do declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge differ in mental representation?

the first is "knowing that" (verbally describable, conscious facts and memories), whereas the second is "knowing how" (unconscious execution of skills, actions, and habits).

What is a mental representation according to cognitive psychology?

A state of the mind that is linked with an external object or concept.

What characterizes an analog (depictive) representation?

It preserves the measurable, metric spatial properties of the distal stimulus, functioning as a spatial medium where physical relations in the representation directly correspond to the real-world object.

What characterizes a propositional (symbolic) representation?

It represents concepts using arbitrary language-like symbols that do not physically resemble the objects they represent, expressing relationships as predicate-argument structures (e.g., $\text{ON(GLOBE, DESK)}$).

How do depictive and propositional representations contrast when representing the relative sizes of an elephant and a mouse?

A depictive representation preserves physical size differences directly on the spatial medium, whereas propositional representations use arbitrary symbols (e.g., words like "elephant" and "mouse") that convey nothing inherently about physical size in their symbol structure.

What is the homunculus problem (infinite regress) in the context of depictive imagery?

If mental images are literal internal pictures, an internal "viewer" (a homunculus) must inspect them; this requires another homunculus inside that viewer's mind, creating an infinite explanatory regress without explaining how visual comprehension works.

What were the design and findings of Segal & Fusella's ($1970$) modality-specific interference study?

Participants performed visual or auditory imagery while detecting faint visual or auditory signals. Visual imagery interfered selectively with visual detection, and auditory imagery interfered selectively with auditory detection, showing shared processing systems within modalities.

What is Zenon Pylyshyn's propositional counter-explanation for Segal & Fusella's ($1970$) interference effect?

Interference occurs because tasks sharing conceptual, semantic content (e.g., visual concepts like "bright" or auditory concepts like "loud") compete for overlapping propositional processing resources, not because they rely on an analog spatial canvas.

What did Stephen Kosslyn's boat-scanning experiment demonstrate regarding mental imagery?

When participants mentally focused on one end of an imagined boat and verified a feature elsewhere (e.g., motor vs. anchor), reaction times increased linearly with the distance they had to scan across the mental image.

What were the findings of the Kosslyn, Ball, & Reiser ($1978$) fictional island scanning experiment?

Reaction times to mentally travel between memorized landmarks on an island increased in direct linear proportion to the physical distance between the landmarks on the original map.

What did Kosslyn's ($1975$) rabbit zooming experiment demonstrate?

Participants took longer to verify details of a rabbit when imagining it next to an elephant compared to when imagining it next to a cricket, interpreted by depictive theorists as the time required to "zoom in" on smaller mental images.

What were the primary findings of Shepard & Metzler's ($1971$) mental rotation experiment?

Reaction times to determine whether two $3\text{D}$ block objects were identical increased linearly as the angular disparity between their orientations increased, supporting continuous spatial transformation in mental imagery.

What did Klein et al. ($2004$) find when comparing fMRI brain scans during bowtie perception and bowtie imagery?

Both visual perception and visual mental imagery activated early visual cortex ($\text{Area V1}$) in retinotopically organized patterns.

How do individuals with aphantasia differ from those with hyperphantasia during bright light imagery tasks (Kay et al., $2022$)?

When instructed to imagine a bright light, hyperphantasics display pupil constriction similar to actual light perception, while aphantasics show no pupil constriction despite retaining the ability to reason conceptually about visual content.

What does this bisected rectangle task illustrate about the metric qualities of mental imagery compared to visual perception?

Perception possesses precise metric qualities that allow trivial identification of where diagonal lines cross, whereas mental imagery lacks precise metric accuracy, causing participants to make significant errors.

What did Reed ($1974$) find regarding part-whole relationships in mental imagery using the Star of David?

Participants who memorized the Star of David were inaccurate at identifying hidden sub-shapes (such as parallelograms) from mental imagery alone, demonstrating that mental images are not stored like unparsed visual photographs.

What did Chambers & Reisberg ($1985$) discover about mental images of ambiguous figures (e.g., duck/rabbit)?

While participants easily reverse the interpretation of ambiguous figures during perception, they cannot spontaneously reverse their interpretation when viewing their own mental image in the "mind's eye."

What did Pylyshyn's ($1981$) "teleport" experiment show regarding cognitive penetrability in mental scanning?

When participants were instructed to mentally "teleport" rather than scan between island landmarks, reaction time no longer scaled with distance, showing that scanning effects are cognitively penetrable and driven by tacit knowledge or demand characteristics.

What is Stephen Kosslyn's compromise theory of mental imagery?

Long-term memories are stored in a propositional format; when imagery is demanded, these propositional codes are used to generate a temporary depictive surface image on a spatial visual buffer for mental manipulation.

How are encoding, storage, maintenance, and retrieval defined in human memory?

Encoding transforms sensory input into neural representations; storage retains information over time; maintenance keeps information temporarily active in working memory; retrieval reactivates stored representations when needed.

What are the primary characteristics of sensory memory?

Sensory memory holds a high-capacity, photograph-like, pre-categorical representation of perceptual input for a very brief duration ($150\text{--}300\,\text{ms}$ for vision; $2\text{--}4\,\text{s}$ for audition).

What is visible persistence (the icon)?

The brief perceptual continuation of a visual image in the nervous system after the distal physical stimulus has vanished, decaying rapidly over hundreds of milliseconds.

What was the procedure and typical performance ceiling of George Sperling's ($1960$) whole report paradigm?

Participants viewed a $12\text{-letter}$ array for $100\,\text{ms}$ and attempted to recall as many letters as possible; performance plateaued at approximately $4\text{--}5$ letters due to the capacity bottleneck of working memory.

How did Sperling's ($1960$) partial report technique overcome the capacity bottleneck of working memory?

A tone cue (high, medium, or low pitch) immediately followed the array offset to indicate which single row to report, allowing participants to report items directly from fading iconic memory before decay occurred.

How is total iconic memory capacity estimated using partial report accuracy?

Capacity is calculated as: $\text{Estimated Capacity} = \text{Proportion Correct in Cued Row} \times \text{Total Number of Items in Array}$.

Why does the whole report method underestimate the true storage capacity of iconic memory?

The icon decays within approximately $300\,\text{ms}$, so by the time a participant outputs $4\text{--}5$ items, the remaining traces have vanished from sensory memory.

What happened in Sperling's experiment when the partial report cue tone was delayed by $1000\,\text{ms}$?

Performance dropped to the whole-report level (about $4$ items), showing that the iconic trace had completely decayed within less than one second.

What evidence indicates that iconic memory stores information in a pre-categorical, perceptual format?

Partial report cues work effectively when based on physical features like spatial location, brightness, or color, but fail when based on categorical distinctions (e.g., cueing letters vs. numbers).

What is the hardware substrate of iconic memory according to Teeuwen et al. ($2021$)?

Single-unit recordings in primate primary visual cortex ($\text{Area V1}$) reveal decaying sustained firing that mirrors the time course and capacity of the icon.

What are the duration and attentional properties of echoic memory?

Echoic memory lasts approximately $2\text{--}4\,\text{s}$, operates automatically and pre-attentively, and allows attention to shift to auditory input after the physical sound has terminated.

What is the standard capacity of short-term memory (STM) in Miller's digit span task?

$7 \pm 2$ items (or approximately $4$ meaningful chunks).

What did Peterson & Peterson ($1959$) demonstrate using their distractor counting task?

Without rehearsal (prevented by counting backward by $3\text{s}$), short-term memory for three-letter syllables decays rapidly and drops close to zero within $18\,\text{s}$.

In a serial position curve, which cognitive systems produce the primacy effect and recency effect?

The primacy effect reflects transfer into long-term memory (due to greater rehearsal), while the recency effect reflects maintenance in short-term / working memory.

What happens to the serial position curve when recall is delayed by a $30\text{-second}$ counting task?

The recency effect is completely eliminated because the counting task overwrites working memory, whereas the primacy effect remains intact in long-term memory.

What are the three core assumptions of the Modal Model of memory (Atkinson & Shiffrin, $1968$)?

(1) Time in STM determines transfer to LTM; (2) information flows serially from sensory to STM to LTM; (3) STM is a single, unitary workspace for all cognition.

Why is the Modal Model's assumption that "longer rehearsal in STM leads to better LTM transfer" incorrect?

Maintenance rehearsal (repetitive rote repetition) does not reliably improve long-term retention; long-term memory transfer depends on depth of processing and elaborative rehearsal.

How does Patient K.F. challenge the serial pipeline assumption of the Modal Model?

Patient K.F. suffered brain damage leaving him with a severely impaired STM (digit span of $1\text{--}2$ items) but an intact LTM, proving that information does not need to pass through STM to enter LTM.

How did Baddeley & Hitch ($1974$) disprove the Modal Model assumption that STM is a single unitary workspace?

Participants holding a near-capacity $6\text{-digit}$ load performed reasoning tasks with only minor slowing and no increase in errors, showing that short-term storage and reasoning do not share a single unitary buffer.

How is working memory conceptually distinguished from traditional short-term memory?

Short-term memory refers to passive, brief storage of information, whereas working memory is an active, multi-component system that holds and manipulates information during complex cognition.

What is the primary function of the Central Executive in Baddeley's working memory model?

It acts as an attentional control unit that coordinates slave subsystems, directs and focuses attention, switches between tasks, and retrieves information from LTM, without possessing storage capacity of its own.

What behavioral deficits characterize Frontal Lobe Syndrome (central executive dysfunction)?

Perseveration (inability to switch rules or tasks) and extreme distractibility, including utilization behavior (compulsively acting on environmental objects).

What are the two subcomponents of the Phonological Loop?

The phonological store (a passive buffer holding speech-based traces for $\sim 2\,\text{s}$) and the articulatory rehearsal process (the "inner voice" that subvocalizes to refresh traces).

What is the phonological similarity effect (Conrad)?

Working memory span is significantly worse for letters or words that sound similar (e.g., B, C, P, T, V or mad, cat, man) compared to items that do not sound alike, confirming speech-based coding in the phonological store.

What is the word length effect in working memory?

Memory span is greater for lists of short words than for lists of long words because the phonological loop stores approximately as much verbal information as a person can vocalize in $2\,\text{seconds}$.

What did Ellis & Hennelly ($1980$) discover regarding digit spans in bilingual Welsh speakers?

Welsh speakers showed larger digit spans in English than in Welsh because Welsh digit words require longer pronunciation durations, filling the $2\text{-second}$ phonological loop with fewer items.

How does articulatory suppression affect the phonological similarity effect for visually presented words?

Repeating an irrelevant syllable (e.g., "the, the, the") occupies the articulatory rehearsal process, blocking subvocal re-coding and eliminating the phonological similarity effect for visually presented lists.

What are the two subcomponents of the visuospatial sketchpad?

The visual cache (stores visual form, color, and appearance) and the inner scribe (rehearses spatial paths, movement sequences, and spatial locations).

What double dissociation did Brooks ($1968$) establish between phonological and visuospatial working memory?

Mentally tracing a block letter "F" was slowed by pointing responses compared to vocal responses, whereas holding a verbal sentence was slowed by vocal responses compared to pointing.

What is the role and capacity of the Episodic Buffer in Baddeley's updated model?

It is a limited-capacity store ($\sim 4$ chunks) that binds information from the slave subsystems and LTM into integrated, multi-modal chunks and coherent episodes (e.g., allowing immediate recall of a meaningful $15\text{-word}$ sentence).

What did Luck & Vogel ($1997$) demonstrate regarding visual working memory capacity using change detection?

Visual working memory capacity is strictly limited to approximately $3\text{--}4$ visual objects, regardless of how many feature dimensions (e.g., color, orientation, conjunctions) each object contains.

How does an concurrent verbal load affect performance on visual object change detection (Luck & Vogel, $1997$)?

A simultaneous verbal load (holding digits in memory) does not reduce visual change detection performance, demonstrating that visual object memory operates independently of the phonological loop.

What is Cowan's ($2001$) formula for estimating visual working memory capacity ($K$)?

$K = (H - FA) \times N$, where $H$ is hit rate, $FA$ is false alarm rate, and $N$ is the set size of the memory array.

What does this ERP waveform comparison illustrate regarding Contralateral Delay Activity (CDA)?

The CDA amplitude becomes increasingly negative as memory set size increases from $1$ to $3$ items, but plateaus at set sizes $3$ and $4$ as working memory capacity ($K \approx 3\text{--}4$) is reached.

Why does the change in CDA amplitude between set size $2$ and set size $4$ correlate with individual working memory capacity ($K$)?

High-capacity individuals successfully store items $3$ and $4$, causing a large amplitude jump from $2$ to $4$, whereas low-capacity individuals ($K \approx 2$) cannot store extra items, resulting in no amplitude increase.

What physiological mechanism of working memory maintenance is depicted in these single-unit recording histograms?

Persistent delay activity in primate prefrontal cortex (PFC), where neurons maintain elevated spiking activity across the delay period specifically for a target location ($270^\circ$) until the response is made.

What is the sensory recruitment hypothesis of working memory?

The hypothesis that working memory maintains information by reactivating the same sensory cortical areas (such as V1) that initially perceived the sensory input.

What did Serences et al. ($2009$) demonstrate regarding feature storage in early visual cortex using MVPA decoding?

When participants held either the orientation or the color of a grating in working memory, fMRI classifiers decoded only the intentionally remembered feature from V1 delay activity, proving feature-selective sensory recruitment.

How does attention act as a gatekeeper to working memory according to Vogel, McCollough & Machizawa ($2005$)?

High-capacity individuals filter out distractors (their CDA for $2\,\text{targets} + 2\,\text{distractors}$ resembles $2\,\text{targets}$), while low-capacity individuals fail to filter distractors (their CDA resembles $4\,\text{targets}$).

What did Conway, Cowan, & Bunting ($2001$) find when testing the cocktail party effect in individuals with low vs. high working memory capacity?

$65\%$ of low-WM-capacity participants noticed their own name in the unattended ear compared to only $20\%$ of high-WM-capacity participants, showing that low capacity correlates with poor attentional filtering.

How does working memory guide visual attention (Link 2)?

Items held in working memory serve as an active attentional template that automatically biases visual attention toward matching objects in the environment, even when matching items are irrelevant distractors.

What did Soto et al. ($2005$) find regarding search times when a search target was presented inside a shape matching WM contents?

Visual search was significantly faster on valid trials (target inside the remembered shape) and slower on invalid trials (distractor inside the remembered shape), proving WM contents automatically capture spatial attention.

What is the retro-cue effect in working memory (Griffin & Nobre, $2003$)?

Presenting an attentional cue during the memory delay period—after the display has vanished—improves memory recall accuracy to the same extent as a pre-cue, demonstrating that attention operates internally within WM.

How do simple span and complex span tasks differ in cognitive psychology?

Simple span tasks (e.g., digit span) only measure passive short-term storage, whereas complex span tasks (e.g., reading span, operation span) require holding items in storage while actively executing a simultaneous processing task.

What cognitive abilities are predicted by complex working memory span scores?

Complex span predicts reading comprehension (Daneman & Carpenter, $1980$), fluid intelligence, and general reasoning ability (Engle et al., $1999$; Johnson et al., $2013$).

What did Standing ($1973$) discover regarding the storage capacity of long-term episodic memory?

Participants shown $10{,}000$ distinct pictures correctly recognized approximately $90\%$ on a two-alternative forced-choice test two days later, demonstrating nearly limitless capacity.

What did Bahrick, Bahrick, & Wittlinger ($1975$) find regarding the duration of high school classmate face/name recognition?

Participants matched classmate names to photos at approximately $60\%$ accuracy even $47\,\text{years}$ post-graduation (against a $20\%$ chance level), demonstrating that episodic duration can span a human lifetime.

What is Hermann Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve, and how is savings quantified?

Forgetting of nonsense syllables occurs rapidly within the first hours/days and then levels off; savings is quantified as: $\text{Savings} = \frac{\text{Original Learning Time} - \text{Relearning Time}}{\text{Original Learning Time}}$.

What did Bransford & Franks ($1971$) discover using their sentence idea-integration experiment?

Participants recognized compound sentences containing all constituent ideas with the highest confidence, despite never having seen those compound sentences during study, proving memory stores semantic ideas rather than verbatim sentences.

What did Sachs ($1967$) demonstrate in the Galileo passage experiment regarding syntax vs. semantics?

Participants detected semantic changes in sentences across long delays, but their ability to detect syntactic changes (e.g., active vs. passive voice) or word-order changes dropped to chance levels, showing memory preserves gist over syntax.

What did Konkle et al. ($2010$) conclude regarding the representational format of visual episodic memory?

Long-term visual memory interference is driven primarily by conceptual distinctiveness rather than perceptual distinctiveness; having more exemplars of the same conceptual category systematically reduces recognition memory.

What does Craik & Lockhart's ($1972$) Levels of Processing framework predict?

Deeper semantic processing (judging pleasantness or meaning) during encoding produces stronger, more durable memory traces than shallow processing (judging font case or phonemic rhyme).

What did Hyde & Jenkins ($1969$) find when comparing shallow and deep processing tasks?

Incidental memory for words was highest when participants performed a deep semantic task (rating pleasantness) and lowest for shallow physical tasks (checking uppercase/lowercase), even matching intentional learning performance.

What is the encoding specificity principle?

Memory retrieval is optimized when the contextual cues, environmental features, and internal cognitive states present at retrieval match those that were encoded with the original memory.

What were the findings of Godden & Baddeley's ($1975$) context-dependent memory scuba diving study?

Divers who learned words underwater recalled significantly more words underwater than on land, and divers who learned on land recalled significantly more on land, confirming physical context-dependent retrieval.

What did Grant et al. ($1998$) find regarding noise level as an environmental context cue?

Testing performance was superior when the test environment matched the study environment (quiet with quiet, or noisy with noisy) compared to mismatching study-test conditions.

What is state-dependent memory?

The phenomenon where recall is enhanced when an individual's internal physiological or psychological state (e.g., mood, sobriety, arousal) at retrieval matches their state at encoding.

What is the difference between organic amnesia and psychogenic amnesia?

Organic amnesia is caused by physical brain damage or neurological trauma, whereas psychogenic amnesia is caused by severe psychological trauma or distress without physical brain lesions.

What types of memory loss are represented in panels (a) and (b) of this amnesia timeline diagram?

Panel (a) depicts temporally-graded retrograde amnesia (loss of memories preceding trauma, with older memories preserved); panel (b) depicts anterograde amnesia (inability to form new long-term memories following trauma).

What surgical procedure did Patient H.M. undergo in $1953$, and what was the resulting deficit?

Bilateral medial temporal lobectomy (removing the hippocampus and surrounding cortices) to treat epilepsy, which resulted in profound anterograde amnesia and temporally-graded retrograde amnesia.

Why was Patient H.M.'s retrograde amnesia temporally graded?

Memory consolidation takes years; memories formed long before surgery had already been consolidated and transferred to the neocortex, whereas recent memories still depended on the excised medial temporal lobes.

How did Baddeley & Warrington ($1970$) and Jeneson et al. ($2012$) demonstrate intact short-term storage in amnesia?

Amnesic patients showed normal digit spans and normal visual working memory capacity ($K$) on change detection tasks, failing only when tested after an unfilled or filled long-term delay.

What constitutes the double dissociation between working memory and long-term memory established by Patients H.M. and K.F.?

Patient H.M. had intact working memory but impaired long-term memory; Patient K.F. had impaired working memory but intact long-term memory.

What forms of implicit memory were shown to be spared in Patient H.M. and other amnesic patients?

Mirror reading, the Tower of Hanoi puzzle, picture-naming repetition priming (Cave & Squire, $1992$), and probabilistic habit learning (the Weather Prediction task).

What dissociates amnesic patients from Parkinson's disease patients on the Weather Prediction task (Knowlton et al., $1996$)?

Amnesic patients acquire the implicit probabilistic forecasting habit normally despite forgetting the testing episodes, whereas Parkinson's patients fail to acquire the habit but retain explicit memory of the testing session.

Why is the capacity of semantic memory described as practically impossible to quantify?

Semantic memory is endlessly generative (e.g., understanding infinite nested hierarchical facts, compositional concepts, and linguistic propositions), making it impossible to establish an empirical upper bound.

What did Harry Bahrick's ($1984$) Spanish retention study reveal about the duration of semantic memory?

Knowledge of Spanish vocabulary dropped over the first $3\text{--}6\,\text{years}$ but then stabilized into a "permastore" that remained unchanged for up to $50\,\text{years}$.

What did Conway et al. ($1991$) find regarding long-term retention of university cognitive psychology course material?

Memory for concepts and researchers declined during the initial months post-course and then stabilized into a permastore state with little further forgetting across $12\,\text{years}$.

What neuroanatomical structure serves as the primary hardware hub for semantic memory?

The anterior temporal lobe (ATL).

What dissociation is observed in semantic dementia patients (Graham et al., $2000$)?

Patients with anterior temporal lobe atrophy exhibit severe impairment in semantic naming and category fluency, while retaining relatively intact episodic recall for recent visual events.

What semantic network model is represented in this hierarchical diagram, and who designed it?

The Teachable Language Comprehender (TLC) model developed by Collins & Quillian ($1969$).

What are cognitive economy and inheritance in Collins & Quillian's TLC model?

Cognitive economy stores properties at the highest possible categorical node (e.g., "can fly" at Bird); inheritance allows subordinate nodes (e.g., Canary) to inherit those properties automatically without duplicating them.

What did the sentence verification task show in support of the original TLC model?

Verification reaction times increased linearly with the number of hierarchical links separating the subject and predicate (e.g., "A canary is a bird" was faster than "A canary is an animal").

What is the reverse distance effect, and why did it present a problem for the TLC model?

People verify "A dog is an animal" faster than "A dog is a mammal," contradicting TLC's strict taxonomic hierarchy where "mammal" is closer than "animal."

What is the typicality effect (Rosch, $1973$), and why could the TLC model not account for it?

People verify typical category members ("A robin is a bird") faster than atypical members ("A chicken is a bird"), but TLC stored both at the exact same hierarchical distance from "bird."

How did Collins & Loftus revise the TLC model into the Spreading Activation Model?

They removed the strict hierarchical structure, introduced variable-length associative links representing semantic relatedness, and allowed labeled links and spreading activation.

How does the Spreading Activation Model explain semantic priming in lexical decision tasks?

Activating a concept node (e.g., "doctor") automatically spreads activation along links to adjacent nodes (e.g., "nurse"), pre-activating them and speeding recognition time.

What is the primary scientific criticism of the Spreading Activation Model?

Because link lengths and associative strengths can be arbitrarily adjusted post-hoc to fit any empirical result, the model is essentially unfalsifiable.

What defines the Basic Level of categorization according to Eleanor Rosch?

It is the level that maximizes category informativeness and distinctiveness; it is the default level used for naming, the fastest to identify, and the first acquired by children.

How do localist models and distributed (connectionist) models differ in representing semantic concepts?

Localist models represent each concept as a single dedicated node; distributed models represent each concept as a pattern of activity across a shared population of units.

How do distributed semantic models account for both child language development and semantic dementia?

Broad, shared distinctions (e.g., animal vs. vehicle) are learned first in development and preserved longest in dementia, whereas fine-grained distinctions are learned last and degraded first.