Cognitive Psych Exam 2:

Encoding in Long-term Memory: Encoding-specificity principle = recall is 

better if the context during retrieval is similar

the context during encoding. (repeating the info)

* When the 2 contexts do not match you’re more likely to forget it.

Marian and Fausey (2006)—> took bilingual English/Spanish speakers stories and question in either Spanish or english. Switched the language when answering the question. 

Ex: story was in english and the questions were in spanish & vice versa

Research on Encoding-Specificity: 

 1. Different kinds of memory tasks 

* Recall task v.s. Recognition task 

* Real life vs. Lab

* Short delay vs. Long delay 

* Encoding specificity is typically strong in recall, real-life, long-delay situations 

2. Physical vs. Mental Context 

Levels of Processing and Encoding Specificity:

Encoding specificity can override levels of processing 

* Bransford and colleagues (1979) —> various levels of processing tasks during encoding. Test rhyming task. Semantic processing is effective only if the retrieval conditions also emphasize deeper more meaningful features 

Retrieval in Long-term Memory:

* Retrieval: the processes that allow you to locate info that is stored in long term  and to have access to that info 

Explicit Vs. Implicit Memory Tasks:

* Explicit Memory: recall, recognition

* Implicit Memory: assesses memporey indirectly. Memory revealed w/o conscious effort. (Ex: word completion, repetition priming task)

Even if people can’t remember stimuli when they are tested using an explicit memory task, they may remember the stimuli when tested using an implicit memory task 

* Dissociation: when a variable has a large effect on Test A but little or no effect on Test B. or when a atriable only has one effect if measured by Test A and an opposite effect on Test B.

People recall more words if they have used deep levels of processing to encode them.

Implicit memory test, semantic and perceptual encoding may produce similar memory scores or people may eve score lower if they had used semantic encoding 

* People often know more than they can reveal in actual recall

Expertise: Retrieval in Long-term Memory

* researchers have found as strong positive correlation between knowledge about an ara and memory performance in that area 

* People who are experts in one aras may not display outstanding general memory skills 

* Memory experts typically do not receive exceptional scores on tests of intelligence   

Retrieval In Long-term Memory:

* Own-ethnicity Bias: you are generally more accurate in identifying members of your own ethnic group than members outside of that group.

* You have more experience with interacting with people from your own ethnic group  

* Faces representing your own ethnic group acquire distinctiveness 

* Experts possess a well-organized, carefully learned knowledge structure, which assists them during both encoding and retrieval. They typically have more vivid visual images for the it’s grouped together. 

Research in the US, Europe and Great Britain 

Walker & Hewstone (2006): white and South Asian British high school students altered photos on a continuum from “South Asian” to “White”….same different task

British white students were better at identifying white faces than South Asian faces v. the British South Asian students were equally accurate for both kinds of faces 

* Amnesia: severe deficit in episodic memory.

* Retrograde Amnesia: loss of memory for events that occurred prior to brain damage 

* Anterograde Amnesia: loss of the ability to form memories for events that occurred psych that have occurred after brain damage   

Hippocampus: a brain structure important for retain and memory

Patient H.M.

* Henry Molaison had a bilateral medial temporal lobe to my to they and cure his epilepsy 

* Could remember his childhood and other facts but not new words or what had happened more than a few minutes ago. But he could still learn knew skills

* Emotion: a reaction to a specific stimulus 

* Mood: more general, long lasting experience. 

* Pollyanna Principle: pleasant items are usually processed more efficiently and more accurately than less pleasant items     

More accurate recall from pleasant items. List of words: pleasant, eucalyptus, unpleasant.  Ex: pleasant > unpleasant > neutral

* Waring and Kensinger (2011): photos of stimuli judged to be positive, negative or neutral recognition test

* Recognition of neutral stimuli substantially lower than positive or negative. Stimulus/background tradeoffs

Emotions and Memory:

* More accurate recall for neutral 

Stimuli associated with/ pleasant 

Stimuli. Bushman (1998) Over time 

Unpleasant memories fade more than pleasant memories (Walter and Colleagues

1997) personal events; pleasantness and intensity ratings 

* Positivity Effect: after time has passed the person begins to look back at memories in a more positive view 

* Students with and w/o depressive tendencies showed the positivity effect. They showed the same amount of fading for unpleasant and pleasant events.

Special Topics in Long-term Memory 

Anxiety disorders and Explicit and Implicit Memory…

* Anxiety disorders, generalized anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, social phobia.

* Mitte (2008) —Meta-analysis implicit memory task: high anxious and low-anxious people performed similarly. 

* Recognition Tasks: high anxious and low-anxious people performed similarly

* High anxious participants were MORE likely that low anxious participants to recall negative, anxiety arousing words but LESS likely to recall neutral and pleasant words     

Autobiographical Memory: memory for events and issues related to yourself

* we sometimes make errors but our memory is often accurate for a variety of info

* Our memories often blend together inf from a variety of sources; we actively construct a unified memory at the time of retrieval

Schema: your mental model of general knowledge or expectations based on past experiences 

Consistency Bias: tendency to exaggerate the consistency between out past feelings and beliefs and our current viewpoint 

Flashbulb memory: memory for the circumstances in which you first learned about a very surprising and emotionally arousing event

* In reality people make A LOT of errors in recalling details of nations events. Even though they claimed that their memories for these events were very vivid

* Talarico and Rubin (2003) tested people’s memory on where they were during 9/11. Recall testing  after 1,6, or 32 weeks. Consistent vs. Inconsistent details confidence

Schemas and Autobiographical Memory:

Schema: your mental Odell of general knowledge or expectations based on past experiences 

Consistency Bias: tendency to exaggerate the consistency between our past feelings and beliefs and our current viewpoint

Sources monitoring: trying to identify the origin of a particular memory

Marsh and Colleagues (1997)

* Open ended discussion…later identify idea as one’s own or someone else’s accurate self-monitoring

* Source monitoring errors

Reality Monitoring: trying to determine whether or not an event actually happened. 

Eyewitness Testimony:

-The Post-Event Misinformation Effect

* Someone views an event

* Then they’re given misleading info about what happened 

* Later on they mistakenly recall the misleading info rather than the event they actually saw 

Proactive Interference: people have trouble recalling new material because previously learned old material keeps interfering with/ new memories 

Retroactive Interference: recalling old material because some recently learned new material keep interfering with/ old memories 

* Loftus and Colleagues—> people with inconsistent info condition were much less accurate than people in the other 2 conditions. They often selected a sign on the basis of the info questionnaire rather than choosing the original slide.

Constructivist Approach: emphasizes that we 

1. People may create  memories that are consistent with/ their schemas

2. People may make errors in source monitoring

3. Post-event misinformation may distort people’s recall

* Eye witnesses make more errors when they’ve witness a stressful crime (ex: someone had a weapon) 

* They also make more errors when there’s. Large gap of time between the original event and the time of the testimony.

Special Topics in Long-Term Memory:

The Relationship Between Memory Confidence and Memory Accuracy: participants are almost confident about their misinformation based memories as they are about their genuinely correct memories 

* Majority of law enforcement officers and jurors are not aware that a confident eyewitness is not necessarily an accurate eyewitness.

* Often police techniques can encourage these kinds of errors

Recovered memory Perspective: memory for traumatic events (like child abuse) may be forgotten for many years and then come flooding back into consciousness.

False Memory perspective: most recovered memories are actually incorrect, constructed stores about that never happened.

* memory is less than perfect

* Social pressure enhances the likelihood of memory errors 

* The accuracy of childhood memories is not easy to determine 

The Recovered Memory/False Memory Controversy: Arguments for False Memory

* Roediger and McDermott (1995) listed associated words. The false recall Rae was 55% (intrusion errors)

* Intrusions are common on this task, because each word that does appear on a list is commonly associated w/ missing word.

* research showed that people can create false memories from childhood.

* But people annoy be convinced to create false memories for more embarrassing events, such s having had an enema as a child.

* Some people who have medical documents regarding their sexual abuse as a hold have a hard time of recalling the situation an adults.

Betrayal Trauma: (Freyd and colleagues) children may respond adaptively when a trusted parent or caretaker betrays them by sexual abuse 

* The child still depends on the adult and must actively repress memories of abuse in order to maintain an attachment to this person.

Templates: are specific patterns that are stored in memory that is compared to new stimuli.

* people may forget about their child abuse until a critical event triggers their recall.

* in contrast other people have never experienced child sexual abuse but suggest abuse may create a false memory of childhood experiences that never really happened.

* others don’t have any issues with recalling childhood abuse  

Distal stimulus: the actual object that’s “out here” in the environment 

Proximal Stimulus: the info registered on your sensory receptors 

Sensory memory: a large-capacity storage system that records info from each of the Sienese w/ reasonable accuracy.

Iconic?Visual-Sensory Memory: preserves an image of a visual stimulus for a brief period after the stimulus has disappeared

Retina; covers the inside back portion of your eye: it contains millions of neurons that register and transmit visual information from the outside world.

Primary Visual Cortex: located in the occipital lobe of the brain; is is the portion of your cerebral cortex that is concerned/ basic processing of visual stimuli.   

Theories of Visual Object Recognition:

Feature-Analysis Theory: a relatively flexible approach in which a visual stimulus is composed of a small # of characteristics or components 

Distinctive Feature: each individual visual characteristic that can be extracted from a visual stimulus for

* When reading we compare new letters to stored list of distinctive features.

Feature-Analysis Theory: Problems with the theory include…complex shapes in nature, relationship between feature, distortion of features

* Recognition by Components Theory: Irving Biederman 

Geons: simple 3d shapes. Combining geons to form meaningful objects FMRI research

* Modifications; need to account for quicker recognition w/ standard viewpoint compared w/ different viewpoint.

Viewer Centered Approach: we store multiple views of objects, rather that a single view

Bottom-up processing: stimulus characteristics 

Top-Down Processing:concepts, expectations, memory

* Top-Down processing s strong when a stimulus is registered for just a fraction of a second

* We use this processing to fill in the gaps. (When receiving the stimulus is incomplete or ambiguous) Ex: seeing the aftermath of a firework going off

* Objects recognition combines bottom-up and top-down processing    

Top-Down Processing and Reading:

* context us recognize letters of the alphabet during reading 

* We don’t read letter by letter

Word superiority: we can identity single letter more accurately and more rapidly when it appears in a meaningful word than when it appears alone or in a string of unrelated letters 

* The context of the sentence helps with recognition in a sentence 

* Ruekl and Oden’s bears/beans experiment both bottom-up and top-down processing operate in a coordinated fashion 

  “Smart Mistakes” in Objects Recognition:

Change Blindness: when we fail to detect a change in an object or scene. 

* Simons and Levins strange-and-the-door study  

* Detecting the difference between 2 scenes. Top-down processing encourages us to assume that the basic meaning of the scene will remain the same 

* Big changes are more noticeable 

* Do not store a detailed representation of. Scene

Inattentional Blindness: when we fail to notice when an unexpected but completely visible objects suddenly appears

Ecological validity; Simmons and charles basketball study

* Perceptual representations change rapidly; the visual system does not track each detail. Your visual system is really good at creating the “gist’ or general interpretation of the scene. It’s really accurate 

* Focus on what is important

Recognize Faces: we need to recognize faces from different angles,in different settings w/ different expressions 

Facial Features in Context V.S. Holistic (recognition) approach 

* Gestalt: the overall quality that transcends its individual elements  

Prosopagnosia: a condition where people can’t recognize human faces, despite perceiving other objects relatively normally.

* Brain’s response to faces in upright and upside down positions 

* Face-inversion effect 

* fMRI studies; fusiform face area in temporal cortex; face recognition cells in monkeys 

Neuroscience research on Face Recognition:

* controversies: localization of processing; processing o the other stimuli in fusiform area 

Applied Research on Face Recognition:

* Cashiers’ judgment about ID photos 

* Security surveillance systems

* Video clips of professors…later recognize from pics. Familiarization and expertise  

Schizophrenia: difficult perceiving faces and facial expressions general cognitive deficit or specific to faces? Similar accuracy judging facial emotion control group responded faster than people w/ schizophrenia.

Speech Perceptions: 

* Speech perception requires the auditory system to…record sound vibrations of someone talking translate vibrations into a sequence of sound that you perceive to be speech

* Distinguish sound pattern of one word from all other irrelevant words 

* separate the speaker from background noise 

Phoneme: the basic unit of spoken language (Ex: sounding out letters)

* Four characteristics of Speech perception

1. Listeners can impose boundaries between words, even when those words are not separated by silence

2. Phoneme pronunciation varies tremendously    

3 Context allows listeners to fill in the blanks or missing sounds 

4.  Visual cues from the speaker’s mouth help us interpret ambiguous sounds  

Word Boundaries: clear cut pauses to mark the boundaries esteem words

* Listeners use knowledge about lasagne in order to determine the boundaries between words

Inter-speaker Variability: the term used to refer to the observation that different speakers of the same language produce the same sound differently.

* Pitch, tone, and rate  

* Lack of precision, sloppy pronunciation  

Coarticulation: when your pronouncing a specific phoneme, your mouth remains I somewhat the same shape it was when you pronounced it previously phoneme; your mouth is preparing to pronounce the next phoneme. 

Phonemic Restoration: you can fill in a missing phoneme, using contextual meaning as cue.

* Visual cues from the speaker's mouth help us interpret ambiguous sounds

* McGurk Effect: the auditory component of one sound is paired w/ visual component of another sound leading to the perception of a third sound 

*  compromise between discrepancies sources of info, superior temporal sulcus.  

The special mechanism: humans are born w/ a specialized device that allows us to decode speech stimuli

* Speech sounds are processed more quickly and accurately than other auditory stimuli 

* More people favor the special mechanisms approach 

* Humans use the same neural mechanisms to process both speech sounds and non speech

* event-related potentials (ERP) reach phoneme judgment and visual cues. 

Visual Imagery: the ability to create a mental picture of a scene or object that isn’t currently present  

Auditory Imagery: a complex process by which an individual generates and processes mental images in the absence of sound perception. Imagining sound 

Shepard and Metzler Research: same/different task using of the line drawings

2 vs. 3 dimensions of rotation; reaction time to decide same/different

Decisions time is influenced by the amount of rotation required to match the figures. Larger rotations take more time.

* Research w/ stimuli (ex: letters of the alphabet) also fins clear relationship between amount of rotation and reaction time

* Takeda ad colleagues (2010). Handedness

* Upright vs. upside-down pictures  

Mental Rotation:

* Other research; age; ASL

* Kosslyn, Thompson and colleagues had people rotate blocks (and other geometric figures) in their hands  

* Made hem perform the Shepard & Metzler task 

Results: participants who had rotated the original figure w/ their hands no showed activity in the primary motor cortex 

* Participants that only watched did not    

* Standard instructions activated the right frontal lobes and parietal lobes 

* BUT “Rotate self” individuals activated the left temporal lobe and a different pat of the motor cortex 

* Implications for peoples recovering from strokes   

The Imagery Debate:

Perception vs. language 

Analog Code vs. Propositional Code  

* Analog code: a representation that closely resembles the physical object

Propositional Code: An abstract, language like representation; storage is neither visual nor spatial and it does not physically resemble the original stimulus.

Analog Perspective:

* Create mental image of an object that is close to the actual, perceptual image on the retina 

* Most theorists believe that the mental image is stored in the analog code

* Mental imagery is closely related to perception

* responses to mental images are frequently similar to responses to physical 

HOWEVER…

* People don’t think that individuals literally hold identical images of the the picture in their head

* When looking at an object some details will be missing from their mental image     

Propositional Perspective:

* Dr. Zenon Pylyshyn>> mental images not necessary component of imagery 

 - Differences between perceptual experiences and mental images

Imagery Debate:

* mental rotation supports analog-coding 

* It takes longer to perform a large rotation than a small one, thus activating visual properties of the objects 

* A propositional code would predict similar reactions times of or these 2 conditions  

* Primary visual cortex activation occurs when people perceive objects as well as work on task that require detailed visual imagery 

* People w/ prosopagnosia cannot recognize human faces visually and they have comparable problem in creating visual imagery for faces. Can’t use mental imagery to distinguish between faces

* Visual Imagery activates 70%-90% of the ame brain regions that are activated using visual perception 

-Brain damage of the visual cortex leads to parallel problems in both visual perception and visual imagery. Have trouble w/ visual perception and visual imagery

* Behavioral and cognitive neuroscientists data support an analog code  BUT the effect of ambiguous visual images is difficult for the analog account to accommodate. So they use analog coded and sometimes propositional codes to create an image.

Fine and Colleagues (1989): combine mental images; identify new interpretations; locate similar, unanticipated shapes in mental images

Reed (1974): people must store these pictures a descriptions, in propositional codes

* Chambers and Reisberg (1985): strong verbal propositional code can dominate over an analog code 

* It’s easy to reverse an image while you are looking at an ambiguous picture but reversing a mental image is difficult.

Distance and Shape Effects on Visual Imagery:

Stephen Kosslyn: time to scan the distance between 2 point in an mental image 

Shepard and Chipman (1970): more complex shapes; US states

Paivio (1978) hands on imagery clock; high imagery vs. low imagery participants 

Conclusions About the Characteristics of Mental Images (so far):

* people rotate a visual imagery, large rotation takes longer when making a large rotation w/ physical stimulus 

* people make distance judgments in a similar fashion for mental images and physical stimuli 

* people makes decisions about shape in a similar fashion for mental images and physical and physical stimuli   

Visual Imagery and Interference:

* Mental imagery can interfere w/ visual perception 

* Sgal and Fusella (1970): create visual image, detect physical stimulus, people struggled more w/ detecting physical stimulus when in the picture and the physical  stimulus were in the same sensory mode.

Mast and Colleagues (1999) : tested imagined lines with distortions and the participant's judgment about the orientation of the line segments

* Ishai and Sagi (1995)…masking effect + acuity  

Demand Characteristics: all of the cues that might convey the experimenter's hypothesis to the participant. All know as…Experimenter expectancy  

Auditory Imagery: the mental representation when the sound are not physically present.

Ex: Laughter, animal noises, car noises, etc.

Pitch: a characteristics of sound stimulus that can be arranged on a scale from low to high

* Intons Peterson: “traveling” the distance between 2 auditory stimuli

* The distance between 2 actually tens is correlated w/ the distance between the 2 imagined tones 

Timbre: a characteristic of sound describing the quality of a tone (ex: flute v.s. trumpet)… its pronounced like “timber”

* Halpren and Colleagues tested young adults with musical training, similarity ratings, perception condition v.s. imagined condition

Cognitive Maps:

Cognitive Map: mental representation of geographic info, including the environment that surrounds us. Ex: my car was parked next to this tree, It’s near that green house 

* Relationships among objects

* Characteristics…homes, neighborhoods, cities, countries used fr areas too large to be seen in a single glance

* Real world settings, ecological validity  

Spatial Cognition: your thoughts about cognitive maps. Remember the world we navigate.

Keeping track of objects in spatial array  

Roskos Ewaldsen (1998): made the survey maps that show the relationship among locations that we acquire by directly learning a map or by repeatedly exploring an environment.

Orientation Maps: judgments are easier when your mental ma and the physical map have matching orientations

Heuristic: general problem-solving strategies that usually produces the correct solution. but not always 

Distance and Shape Effects on Cognitive Maps:

* Estimating the distance between 2 known points

* Often distorted…ex: # of interviewing locations, category membership, landmarks 

Distance Estimates and Category Membership:

  Hirtel and Mascolo (1986): learn a hypothetical map and town, estimate the distance between pairs of locations. People tended to shift each location closer to other sites that belonged to the same category. (ex: gov building)

* Border Bias: people estimated that the distance between 2 specific locations is larger if they are on different sides of a geographic border compared to 2 locations on the same side of the border

Landmark effect: tendency to provide shorter distance estimate when traveling to a landmark, rather than a non-landmark.

McNamara and Diwadker (1997): memorize an informal map containing pictures of objects.

* Landmarks and non-landmarks

*    Estimate distance between various pairs of objects

* Asymmetry in distance estimates, consistent with landmark effect  

* We can construct cognitive maps in which the shapes are more regular that they are in reality.

Moar and Bower (1983): cognitive maps of Cambridge, England estimates for the angles formed by the intersection of 2 streets

90-degree-angle-heuristic: tendency to provide”regularize” the angles so that they were more like 90 degree angles    

Stevens and Coupe (1978): east/west and north/south judgments of cities

Tversky (1981,1998): We use heuristics when we represent relative positions in our mental maps

1. Heuristic Examples: we remember slightly tilted geographic strictest as abe in either more vertical or more horizontal…Rotation Heuristic

2. We remember a series of geographic structures as being arranged in a straighter line that than they really are….Alignment Heuristic

Alignment  Heuristic: A series of separate geographic structures will be remembered as being more lined up than they really are.

Relative Positions Effects on Cognitive Maps:

* Heuristics encourage the construction of cognitive maps that are more orderly and schematic than geographic reality.

* Heuristics make sense but can cause us to miss important details and fail to pay attention to bottom-up info  

 Creating a Cognitive Map The Spatial Framework Model:

1. The vertical dimensions is correlated w/ gravity

2. The vertical dimension on an up bright human's body is physically asymmetric 

* People can identify north/south (up/down) judgments more quickly than east/west (left/right) 

* Our cognitive maps reveal certain biases. Connecting to our bodies and physical properties of the external world.

* Short response times to answers, which objects were above and below. People required longer to decide which objects were ahead or behind. Response times were even longer to decide which objects were to the right or to the left.

Situated Cognition Approach:

Central Importance of Spatial Thinking; language, use of spatial diagrams to represent relationships