PSY100 - Test 2 Review

PSY100 Quiz 2 Review

Chapter 9 - Memory

Modes of Memory

The Information Processing Model: Flows from bottom-up to top-down through the nervous system

• Encoding Phase: info is acquired and processed into neural code that the brain can use
• Storage Phase: retention of encoded info
• Retrieval Phase: recovery of stored info

The Multistore Model of Memory

Multi-store model of memory: Atkinson-Shiffrin Model. Sensory memory → Short term memory → Long term memory

Sensory Memory

Sensory Memory: holds large amounts of incoming data for brief amounts of time.

• Iconic Memories (Visual Codes): sensory memory for visual info
  • Haptic Codes: process touch and body senses
• Echoic Memories (Acoustic Codes): Sensory memory for auditory info
  • Acoustic lasts longer than visual

STM - Short Term Memory

Short-Term Memory: immediate memory; holds a small amount of information for a limited time.

• Working Memory: a adaptation of STM; stores and manipulates info

Has 4 Components:

• Phonological loop: auditory and verbal information
• Visuospatial sketchpad: visual information
• Central executive: control center and directs attention to relevant information
• Episodic buffer: integrates information, links to long-term memory

LTM - Short Term Memory

Long-Term Memory: location of permanent memories

Types of LTM

Declarative/Explicit Memory: memory that is easy to verbalize; consciously aware of

• Semantic memory: a general knowledge memory; things you may know but not remember
• Episodic memory: a memory for personal past experience
  • Autobiographical memory: includes both semantic and episodic knowledge of the self
  • HSAM: ability to recall large amounts of experiences, dates throughout a lifetime

Nondeclarative/Implicit Memory: memories we acquire and use without awareness of intention; unconscious memories

• Procedural Memory: Motor skills habits we remember how to do without thinking about it
• Priming: Improvement in identifying or processing a stimulus that has been experienced previously (explains everyday effects of familiarity)
• Classical Conditioning

How is LTM Memory Organized?

Connectionist Theories

Spreading Activation Model: A connectionist theory proposing that people organize general knowledge based on their individual experiences

• Ex. asking someone to report the 1st thing to mind when you say red, will get diff answers

Inferences - Using Schemas

Schema: a set of expectations about objects and situations

False schema would be people's accounts of 9/11; bias

Types of Rehearsal

Maintenance Rehearsal: simple repetition of material

Elaborative Rehearsal: linking new material to thing we already know; Levels of processing theory

• Levels of Processing Theory: processing applied to info that predicts the ease of retrieval (includes appearance - hardest, and sound/meaning - easiest)
  • **SOUND/MEANING is the easiest to ENCODE because it has deeper levels of attention

How to Prevent Loss of Info - STM?

• We start off with chunking/maintenance rehearsal then transfer to elaborate for LTM
• Chunking: grouping similar info together (1,5,7,9, → “15” “79”)

How do we Retrieve Memories?

STM

• We search through short-term memory in a linear manner, one at a time.
  • For example, cafhk. If someone asked you whether H was in the word, you would go in order from C until you reached the said letter

LTM

Cue: anything that helps someone recall information from memory; encoding specificity principles

• Encoding Specificity: when you form long-term memories that are encoded in unique ways as the memory or sequence of events is unlikely to occur again

Context dependent memory: memory enhancement that occurs when the recall situation is similar to the encoding situation

State dependent memory: memory enhancement that occurs when one’s internal state during the recal situation to the coding situation

Distinct Memory Systems

• Medial temporal lobe (includes hippocampus): critical for episodic and spatial memory, encoding, consolidation and retrieval
  • Removed in patient HM

What are DIfferences in Working Memory and Long-Term Memory?

• Differences between the two can be seen in the serial position effect.
• Serial position effect: We perform the worst remembering words in the middle of the list.
  • Primacy effect: participants had time to rehearse words, encode to LTM
  • Recency Effect: refers to the superior recall for the last words on the list, STM

Why do we Forget?

• Prefrontal areas of the brain actively suppress memories that are used less frequently.

Decay: reduction in ability to retrieve rarely used information overtime

Interference: Competition between newer and older information in memory.

• proactive interference: old memories interfere with trying to remember new ones
• retroactive interference: new memories interfere with trying to remember old ones

How to improve Memory

Mnemonics: Memory aids that link new information to well-known information.

Method of loci: uses visualizations of familiar spatial environments to recall info

• Ex. thinking of a house, and moving through it

Chapter 10 - Thinking, Language & Intelligence

The Sapir-Whor Hypothesis

The Sapir-Whor Hypothesis: argues language we speak influences our perceptions and conditions

• Linguistic determinism (strong form) vs linguistic relativism (weak form)
  • Aka determinism allows us to process better

bilingualism/multilingualism: being fluent in 2 or more languages

• Helps intelligence; Mental flexibility

Examples of Aphasia

Aphasia: language impairment affecting speech

• Broca’s aphasia/nonfluent aphasia: characterized by difficulty in producing speech; makes sense
  • Broca’s Area: left frontal lobe
• Wernickes’s aphasia/fluent aphasia: affects comprehension; meaningless
  • Wernicke’s area: left temporal lobe + primary auditory cortex

Knowledge Representation

Representation: anything that stands in for or corresponds to something else

• Ex. a map is a representation of city streets

Mental Representation: is a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represent s external reality

• Analogical representations: representations maintain some physical characteristics (i.e they are analogous to) the actual object (eg. a image of a princess)
• Symbolic representations: representations which do not correspond to physical characteristics of actual objects (eg. the word princess)

Knowledge Categorization

• We use symbolic representations (language to represent our much of our knowledge)
  • How do we use our knowledge efficiently?

Concept: a mental representation that groups objects, events or relations around common themes

Categorization: the process of grouping things based on shared information

• Defining-Attribute/Classical Categorization: objects are categorized according to a certain set of rules of specific set of features
  • Prototype: represents your entire category
  • Exemplar: specific memory of the category that's use to represent
• Problems:
  • We often make expectations to our rules
  • Some attributes are more important for designing category membership than others (e.g has wings)
  • Some concepts appear to better category members than others

What are Cultural Differences?

Categorization Strategies

• Taxonomic (Western)
• Thematic (Eastern)

Thinking Styles

• Analytic thinking (Western)
• Holistic Thinking (Eastern)

Perception and Categorization

• Holistic (family resemblance) vs. analytic (rule based)

Decision Making

Satisfciers vs Maximizers

Satisficers: choose outcomes that are ok

Maximizers: strive for the best outcome

Emotions and Decision Making

• The somatic marker hypothesis

Heuristics and Decision Making

Heuristics: A shortcut to problem solving; rule of thumb

• Benefits of Heuristics
  • Require minimal cognitive resources
  • Allows us to decide quickly
  • Often lead to reasonable good decisions
    • But → can lead to errors and biases
• Availability Heuristic: estimating the frequency of an event based on how easily examples of it come to mind
  • Ex. which is more frequent in the English language, words begin with k? Or words that have k as 3rd letter
• Representativeness Heuristic: making judgements of likelihood based on how similar the person or object is to our prototype for that category

An Effective Heuristic

Recognition Heuristic: A more recognizable stimulus has a higher value.

Decide on a Solution

Affect heuristic: emotional response (“gut” feeling) to choose one alternative over another.

Framing Effects

Mental Set: A framework for thinking about a problem.

• Functional Fixedness: example of a mental set, using things for a different purpose

Framing Effects: changes in the way information is perceived as a result of the way in which the information was presented

• Ex. framing a decision to emphasize either the potential losses or potential gains of a decision alternative
  • Eg. kahneman and tversky asian disease study
• We see this in the media and politics ALL THE TIME

How do we Measure Intelligence?

• Validity, Reliability, Psychometric
• One of the first people to become interested in measuring intelligence was Sir francis galton

Psychometrics: a branch of psychology concerned with the objective measurement of mental abilities and other attributes → galton

Beginnings of Intelligence Testing

• 1904: Binet & Simon: Focus on the cognition; notion of “mental age”
• Lewis Terman (Stanford-Binet → US version)
• Intelligence Quotient (IQ): a score on the normed test of intelligence (i.e how your scores compared to others who have taken it before you)
  • IQ = (mental age/ chronological age) x 100
  • Eg, (6/5) x 100 = 120
  • Avg IQ is a set at 100 with the standard deviation of 15

Flynn Effect: A secular increase in population IQ observed throughout the 20th century

Conceptualizing Intelligence

General Intelligence (g): the idea that one general factor underlies all mental abilities

• Cattel divided general intelligence into 2 types:
  • Fluid intelligence: ability to think logically without the need to use learned knowledge
  • Crystallized intelligence: ability to think logically using specific learned knowledge

Factor Analysis

Factor Analysis: statistical method that looks and how lots of different observations correlation and determines how many theoretical constructs could most simply explain what you see.

• Ex. sea monster example → intuitive correlation
• Being intelligent doesn’t guarantee rational behavior or sound reasoning
  • Stanovich notion of “dysrationalia”: the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence
  • The Cognitive reflection test: is a BETTER predictor of performance on heuristics and biases problems than IQ-type measures

What is the Mindset Theory?

Mindset Theory: fixed vs growth, carol dweck

Multiple Intelligence & Learning Styles

• Sternberg proposed 3 types of intelligence → analytical, creative and practical
• Howard Gardner → multiple intelligences and learning styles (not scientific)

Emotional Intelligence

Emotional Intelligence (EQ): the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions

• EQ is a predictive of grades, ability to deal with challenges of university exams

Morpheme vs Phoneme

Morphemes: smallest meaningful units in a language such as syllables or words

Phoneme: basic speech sounds in language

Chapter 12 - Personality

Ways to Assess Personality

• Idiographic Approaches: person centered focuses on individual lives; qualitative
  • narrative approach; humanistic perspective
• Nomothetic Approaches: common traits and unique combinations; quantitative
  • projective measures → rorschach inkblot, TAT
    • Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) is needed for achievement, power and affiliation
  • objective measures → self reports, informant ratings

Types of Perspective on Personality

Psychodynamic (Freudian, Neo-freudian)

Freud’s Psychodynamic Approach: id, ego, and superego.

• Id: primitive drive for energy of personality; at birth → pleasure principle
• Ego: the self that others see → reality principle
• Superego: difference of right and wrong → moral principle
  • We are not conscious of the id, but we can be consciously aware of the ego and superego.
• Defense Mechanism

Neo-Freudian Approach: Carl Jung, analytic psychology and Karen Horney, Feminist psychology

• • Analytical Psychology: personal vs collective unconscious; personality types reflecting opposing ways we can orient ourselves to the external environment

Humanistic (Maslow, Rogers)

Humanistic Approach: personal experiences and belief systems; inherently good

• Carl Rogers → Phenomenology → subjective human experience
• Self-actualization → Abraham Maslow

The Self

• Self-Concept: People’s description of their own characteristics, such as “I am in university.”
• Self-Schema: collection of all the self-concepts. Used to organize thinking.
• Self-Awareness: knowledge of the self.
• Self-Esteem: judgment of value
• Self-Regulation: self-control to manage the self.
• Self-Handicapping: people begin to produce an excuse in advance, in case they fail
• Self-Actualization: a state of fulfilled potential

Cultural Differences in The Self

Western Cultures → independent self-construals

Non-Western cultures → interdependent self-construals

Social cognitive (Bandura, Mischel)

reciprocal determinism: features the mutual influence of the person and that of the situation on each other → Bandura

Self-efficacy: self belief to perform well

Locus of control: the degree to which people believe that they (as opposed to external forces) have control over the outcome of events in their lives

• Internal (active) vs External (passive)
  • Ex. i make things happen vs things happen to me

Self-Regulation: is the process by which people alter or change their behavior to attain personal goals

Self-control: process of self-regulation in context and involving a clear trade-off between long term goals and short-term temptations

• Ex. The marshmallow test (walter mischel) → delayed gratification

Traits (The big five)

Personality trait: a characteristic; a dispositional tendency to act in a certain over time and across circumstances

Personality type: a classification based on particular configurations of personality traits or other characteristics

Big 5 Theory: A trait theory that identifies five main characteristics that account for most individual differences in personality, OCEAN

• Openness: fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, actions, ideas, and values
• Conscientiousness: incorporates competence, order, dutifulness, achievement striving, self-discipline, and deliberation
• Extraversion: warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity, excitement seeking
• Agreeableness: trust, straightforwardness, altruism, compliance, modesty
• Neuroticism: anxiety, angry hostility, depression, self-consciousness, impulsivity,

Four Personality Types

• average, self-centered, reserved, and role model

What is If-Then Behaviour Profiles?

• Emphasis on the interaction between the situation and the individual
• People may not behave consistently across all situations (if A, then she X but if B, then she Y”, but these patterns of behavior tend to be consistent