Unit 2: Cognition

Cognitive Dissonance → the way the brain processes information

• Cognitive → our cognitions: thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, values

• Dissonance → inconsistency, clash, not in harmony

• reason that you find ways to justify your actions

• Ex:

  • Beleif: I dont eat donuts. Action: I just slammed three donuts

    • clash = dissonance = bad = reduce

    • change your thought → “I don’t eat donuts past noon”

• What can you do about it?

  • Change a thought

  • Change a behavior

  • Add a thought

  • Trivialize the inconsistency

Leon Festinger

• classic experiment demonstrating cognitive dissonance

  • had people preform a really boring task

  • asked them to report to the next subject that the task was enjoyable

    • ½ the people paid $1

    • ½ the people paid $20

Metacognition → thinking about the way that you think

Clive Wearing → man in England got sick with Herpesviral Encephalitis

• attacked Hypocamus

  • transfers short-term memory to long-term

    • only remebers 10 seconds at a time

• one doctor recemmended journaling to try and remember

  • would forget he wrote stuff and would cross it our and re-write it

• suggested making a video to watch every day

  • didn’t work as he would forget it everyday

Sensory Memory

• George Sperling

  • flashed 3×3 grid for twentieth of a second to participants

  • had to reall one of the rows immediatley after

  • indicaated which to remember with tone

  • participants could recall

Primacy Effect → ability to remember things at the beginning but forget things at the end

Recency Effect → ability to remember things at the end more than at the top

Serial Position Effect → remember things at the beginning and the end but foget things in the middle

Short Term Memory is stored in acoustic formation →ex: rhyming words

Long Term Memory is stored in semantic format → ex:similar words but acoustically dissimilar

Semantic Network Theroy → storage in our LTM based largley in semantics

• similar to word webs in another class

• folders in your bag or you HD computer

sleep, slumber, tired, night, day, dream, comfort, morning, awake (9)

Sleep wasnt on the list but because of semantic network we thought it was

Types of Memory:

• Episodic → memories of specific events,”flashbulb”

• Semantic → general knowledge of the world

• Procedural → memory of skills and how to perform them, “Muscle memory”

• Explicit Memories → conscious memories of facts or events we try to remember

• Implicit Memories → Unintentional memories that may not know we have

Retrival errors

• Proactive Interference → can‘t remember new information because old information is interfering

  • forgetting new infromation

• Retroactive Interference → can’t remember the old information because of the new information

Levels of Processing → Long-term Potentiation

• focus on the depth of processing involves memory, and predicts the deeper information is processed, the longer a memory trace will last

Shallow Processing

• Structural processing → when we encode only the physical qualitites of something

• Phenomic processing → which is when we encode its sound

  • shallow processing only involves mainting rehearsal and leads to fairly short-term retention of information

Deep Processing

• Semantic processing → happens when we encode the meaning of a word and relate it to similar words with similar meaning

• Deep processing → elaboration rehearsal which involves a more meaningful analysis

  • giving words meaning or linking them with previous knowledge

Constructive Memory → Elizabeth Loftus

• memories are not always what they seem

• Constructed memory = created memory

  • aka “false recollection”

  • aka “misinformation effect”

  • your memory of what happened, what others said happened,and what you wished had happened

• used 6 different groups

  • verbs and mean speed estimates:

    • smashed - 40.5

    • collided - 39.3

    • bumped - 38.1

    • hit - 34.0

    • contacted -31.8

  • 6th group - “Was the car going faster or slower than 60mph?” How fast was the car going?

• Called all participants back and asked if they had seen any broken glass

  • Smashed → yes - 16 no-34 Hit → yes- 7 no - 43

Trial-and-Error → trying and failing, over and over again

• Thomas Edison tried thousands of light bulb filaments before he stumbled upon one that worked

Algorithms → step-by-step procedure that guarantees you arrive at the correct answer

Heuristics → a mental shortcut that allows people to solve problems and make judgments quickly and efficiently

• Why do we use them?

  • reduce mental efforts needed to make decisions

  • simplify complex and difficlt questions

  • they’re generally a fast and accurate way to make conclusions

  • helps with problem solving

• Downsides?

  • make out lives easier

  • allows us to use a rule-of-thumb to make decisions

  • leads to Cognitive Biases

Anchoring Heurisitcs→ influences the way people intuitvely assess probabilities

Availability Heurisitics → mental shortcut that relies on immediate, easily recalled examples that come to mind

Representativeness Heuristics →decisions made based on whether or not they match our prototype

• Prototype matching

Language → the combination of gestured,spoke, and/or written words to communicate meaning

• phonemes

• morphemes

• grammer

• syntax

• semantics

Phoemes → smallest distinctive sounds in a language

• not the same as letters

  • english uses about 40

• Bat “b-a-t”

• That “th-a-t”

Morphemes → smallest meaningful units of language

• most morphemes combine two or more phonemes

• some are words, others are parts of words

• “Readers” = 3 morphemes

Grammar → Language’s set of rules that enable people to communicate

• Guide us in deriving meaning from sounds(semantics) and ordering words in a sentence(syntax)

Language development → babbling stage

• 3-4 months after birth

  • a stage of speech development where the infact utters sounds unlike the family language

  • consonant-vowel pairs

• 10 months or so - recognize native language

Language Development → one-word stage

• around first birthday

  • learned that sounds cary meaning

    • can begin to say small words

    • meant to convey a sentence

• 18 months = 1 word per day

Language Development → Two-word Stage

• telegraphic speech

  • around the 2nd Birthday

  • Mostly nouns and verbs

Language Acquisition and Development

• Behavioritste beleive that languge develops as a result of certain behaviors

• Nativisits beleive that we’re born with a specific language-learning area in our brain

Behaviorists → langage like all behaviors is learned through operant conditioning and shaping

Nativisits

• Noam Chomsky

  • Language Acquisition Device

    • theorized that humans are born with langiage acquisition devices(ability to learn language rapidly as children)

    • critical period for learning language may exist

    • nativist theory of language acquisition

Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis

• Language and Cognition

  • Physcologist Benjamin Whorf

  • the language we use might control, and in some ways limit our thinking

Broca’s Area

• area of the brain that is chiefly responsible for structuring speech

• Temporal Lobe of the dominant hemisphere (usually left)

• Patients know what they are trying to say, and know that they get it wrong. Just can’t help it

Aphasia → speech problem

Wernicke’s Area

• area of the brain that is chiefly responsible for the understanding of written and spoken language

• In the parietal lobe of the dominant side of the brain

• patients know in their head what to day, are unaware that they are not speaking correctly

  • Fluency Aphasia

Insight Learning → when one suddenly realizes how to solve a problem

Wolfgang Kohler → Gestalt Psychologist

• explors insight learning with chimpanzees

• suspended a bannana from the ceiling out of reach of a group of chimpanzees

  • room had many boxes with tools

  • chimps spent most time running around in frustration

  • suddenly, they piled up the boxes, climbed up, and grabbed the bannana