Cognition Flashcards

Question

What is hemispatial neglect?

Answer 1

a relatively common neuropsychological condition in which patients ignore one side of space.

Answer 2

- Awh & Pashler (2000) - Ppts are asked to report 2 numbers in a 5x5 grid filled with 23 letters - Cued (80%) valid to two squares. Interested in what happened on the invalidity cued trials - Zoom lens predicts space between cued locations should be included in the focus of attention – but this was not the case - Possibly have multiple attentional spotlights instead of one lens that can change

Answer 3

- Evidence from LaBerge o Press button when letter S (cue) is followed by letter R (target) - “Letter condition”: - Probe appeared in different spatial locations - Letter task attempted to focus ppts attention on centre of display. Faster reaction time when probe within central attentional beam - In word task, ppts required to categorise entire word = broader attentional beam

Answer 4

- Controlled by the individual’s intentions and expectations | - Involved when central cues are presented

Answer 5

- Automatically shift attention - Involved when uninformative peripheral cues are presented - Stimuli that are salient or that differ from other stimuli are more likely to be attended to

Answer 6

- Disengagement of attention from a given stimulus - Shifting of attention from one target stimulus to another - Engaging/locking attention onto a new visual stimulus

Answer 7

- “Attentional spotlight” - Can be focused on a particular location - Posner (1980) suggested that the attentional spotlight can shift to a different visual location without eye movements (covert attention)

Answer 8

o If the perceptual load is high: early selection o If the perceptual load is low: late selection - Stage of selection is variable, and task-irrelevant info can be processed if there is spare capacity

Answer 9

o There will be less interference from the distractor on the more difficult task relative to the easier task (because there’s less attentional resource left over for processing it)

Answer 10

o Perceptual load – number of units in the display and the nature of processing required for each unit (difficulty)

Answer 11

- Everyone has a limited attentional capacity - Total available capacity is always allocated - Spare capacity that’s not required for primary task is automatically allocated to irrelevant stimuli - Attentional capacity allocated to main task depends on perceptual load

Answer 12

Treisman & Riley – dichotic shadowing task but instructed to shadowing and to tap the desk whenever they heard a target word in either message - More target words detected in attended than unattended - Wouldn’t have expected this under D&D theory as all stimuli are processed equally – would’ve expected equal number of words detected in either message

Answer 13

- Suggest filtering occurs late – so that all stimuli are analysed equally and the most relevant stimulus determines the response - Accounts for the extensive processing of unattended stimuli just as well as Treisman’s Attenuation theory

Answer 14

it’s a bit circular – noticed unattended message because it was relevant, relevant because we noticed it (more descriptive than explanatory)

Answer 15

- Unattended input not completely rejected, but filter attenuates (reduces) analysis of the unattended signal - The threshold for processing stimuli is consistent with the context or our expectations lowered o Accounts for breakthrough effects - Partially process stimuli in the unattended message sometimes exceeds the threshold for conscious awareness - Making it more likely that we process task-related info e.g., like our own name at a cocktail party

Answer 16

- When ppts say a word that was presented in the unattended message in a dichotic listening task - Occurs more commonly when the word is highly likely given the content

Answer 17

- Dichotic listening task - At the end they had to paraphrase the attended message - Despite being unable to report the content of the unattended message, it still affected performance: more likely to interpret the attended message in a way that was consistent to the information presented in the unattended message

Answer 18

- Paired some words with a mild electric shock to ppts - Then conducted a dichotic listening task with those words presented in the unattended message - Ppts demonstrated an increased galvanic skin response (GSR – indicative of emotional response) - This suggests that there was some analysis of the content of the unattended message, and this affected unconscious physiological measures

Answer 19

- talking to your friend, actively paying attention - But if someone says your name from across the room you will notice this even though you weren’t paying attention - Broadbent’s theory can’t answer this

Answer 20

- Filter prevents overloading a limited-capacity mechanism beyond the filter - Filter allows one stream of info through - Other outputs remain in the buffer for later processing - Theory accounts for many of the findings from the dichotic listening task

Answer 21

Do notice: o Some basic physical characteristics e.g., if the voice stops or changes from male to female Don't notice: o Any of the content or individual words o When the language change e.g., English to German or when the speech was spoken backwards

Answer 22

- Ppts are played two different messages to different ears over headphones. - Asked to repeat back one of the messages

Answer 23

- Attention is an active process | - James suggested attention was filtering out what was not relevant

Answer 24

- explanations without prediction is common - difficult to falsify - typically de-emphasise motivational and emotional components of cognition

Answer 25

- theoretical assumptions are clear and precise | - increasingly used to model the effects of brain damage

Answer 26

– mathematical structures that “learn.” Don’t always know how the model reaches its conclusions. Makes the same mistakes that children do when learning.

Answer 27

Computational models: - Involves programming computers to model human cognition - Successful models need to perform the way humans do (make mistakes etc.) AI: - involves building computer systems that produce intelligent outcomes - don’t have to work in the same way as humans - e.g., Deep Blue was able to consider 200 million chess positions per second and so beat the chess grandmaster – a human couldn’t do this

Answer 28

– developing computational models to understand human cognition (not the same as AI)

Answer 29

- correlational data – correlation =/= causation - over-interpretation of data - difficulty relating brain activity to psychological processes - studies are often underpowered with a high likelihood of false positives (e.g., Bennett et al., 2009 – scanning dead salmon and picked up brain activity)

Answer 30

- variety of techniques offer a range of spatial and temporal resolution - can study functional specialisation - rich data allow elaborate assessment of neural functioning - TMS allows for causal inferences

Answer 31

Naturally occurring lesion likely to affect a region or even the whole brain and has quite poor temporal resolution (hours, days etc.)

Answer 32

A single cell recording has a very fine spatial resolution (cell level), temporal resolution varies depending on set up.

Answer 33

- creates temporary brain “lesions” by running an electrical current through a coil placed near the skull

Answer 34

– measures the magnetic fields produced by brain activity

Answer 35

– imaging blood oxygenation using MRI (indexes metabolic activity)

Answer 36

– brain scanning by measuring positrons

Answer 37

– present the same stimulus repeatedly and measure the pattern of electrical brain activity recorded from scalp electrodes

Answer 38

– use of a microelectrode to record the activity of a single neuron

Answer 39

– use converging evidence from brain and behaviour to understand cognition

Answer 40

- don’t usually know what patients were like before brain damage - patients can develop compensatory strategies to mitigate the effects of their brain damage - sometimes rely on single-case studies (but are these really necessarily problematic?)

Answer 41

- double dissociations are very powerful and provide strong evidence for modularity (different parts of the brain are responsible for different things) - casual links between damage and cognitive function - can reveal surprising complexities in cognition - provides insights that cannot be obtained in any other way

Answer 42

- Phineas Gage - a pipe went through his brain and altered aspects such as his personality - HM - issues with memory

Answer 43

– study patients with brain damage/neurological disease to understand how these affect cognition

Answer 44

- ecological validity – this can be mitigated by well-designed experiments to test specific questions - behavioural evidence offer only indirect evidence about the internal mental process – so researchers must infer what this means - theories can be too general and not make clear predictions - findings can be paradigm specific - no unifying model

Answer 45

- scientific and systematic approach to studying cognition - provided bedrock for other approaches to build upon - diverse and flexible – has strongly influenced lots of other areas of psych

Answer 46

Many processes occur in parallel and there is interaction between cognitive system (e.g., both attention and memory are involved in decision making)

Answer 47

– driven by expectation/knowledge about the world

Answer 48

– driven by environment (input produces output) but this is an oversimplification

Answer 49

– uses behavioural evidence to study cognition.

Answer 50

Alan Turing test – converse with a robot without knowing that you are talking to a robot. Difficult to pass but raises the questions about what it would *mean* to pass this test – is language intelligence or is it just following instructions?

Answer 51

Cognition came about as a response to behaviourism as many findings can’t be explained by a simple stimulus response

Answer 52

- asked rich and poor kids to estimate the physical size of coins. - Found that the poorer children overestimated the size. Argued that this was because the coins meant more to the poorer children and this “need” inflated their perception of the physical size of the coin – shows an internal representation and so presents problem for behaviourists

Answer 53

– challenge behaviourist view that nothing happens between S --> R Rats will learn layout of maze even when not reinforced to do so. Proposed that animal and people’s behaviour is goal directed – represent external world using internal mental representation

Answer 54

- Language is inherently generative (e.g., can produce unique utterances that they’ve never encountered before) - Language is learned even where there is poverty of stimulus

Answer 55

Issue with behaviourism is that it does not study the mental processes between stimulus and response

Answer 56

Skinner – way we learn language can be explained by behaviourists principles (reinforcement)

Answer 57

– involves pairing of the CS and US at exactly the same time | - unlikely to lead to an association (CC)

Answer 58

- positive contingency - so bell signifies a higher probability of seeing meat - negative contingency - where the bell indicates that meat is unlikely to come. - Both cases demonstrate clear learning - According to contingency learning, the animal updates their understanding of the probability of the US following the CS on a trial-by-trial basis - Learning occurs through things being surprises

Answer 59

– how often the US follows the CS

Answer 60

– when one thing follows another - In Psychology we think of it as the proximity in which a response follows a stimulus. - The timing of this is crucial in order to develop a clear, strong association

Answer 61

- Diabetes – inject insulin, to deplete blood sugar levels o After many injections, sight of needle starts to trigger early physiological response = increase in blood sugar levels o Body is striving for homeostasis – CR prepares for US (compensatory reaction)

Answer 62

- E.g., Mr Wolf sees cat shack, then hears footsteps and is then shocked - Initially, wolf ignores the footsteps, salivates - In later trails, wolf starts to suppress salivation - called a conditioned emotional response procedure

Answer 63

something that stops the CR, may be because the ppt learns that this stimulus is not similar to other stimuli that produce a CR

Answer 64

Yes, if a similar stimulus is seen, the CR can generalise to similar situations, as you go further from these similar situations however, level of CR response decreases

Answer 65

If CS is the continuously associated with CR, then this is called re-conditioning – not starting from zero, already have been conditioned once so sees a jump

Answer 66

Spontaneous recovery – if CS is accompanied by CR after it not being accompanied by it – conditioning response is initially not as strong

Answer 67

Extinction happens when CS is not accompanied by CR

Answer 68

a phenomenon whereby a conditioned stimulus (CS) acquires the ability to elicit a conditioned response (CR) without ever being directly paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US).

Answer 69

- Leaning = associations | - Either strengthening or weakening of existing associations

Answer 70

- Monitor performance - Detect conflict and resolve it - Flexibly switch between responses - Inhibit inappropriate response - Keep track of where system is – and was - Sustain attention on current goals - But raises the issue of what does the controlling? What chooses?

Answer 71

o Associated with medical frontal lesions | o Patients will grasp and utilize any object that is presented, even if this behaviour is inappropriate

Answer 72

o Cognitive, emotional, behavioural symptoms o Often associated with frontal lobe damage o Patients often have difficulty in planning, organising and controlling action

Answer 73

Norman and Shallice (1986) distinguished between different levels of automaticity: 1. Fully automatic (organised plans) 2. Partially automatic (e.g., contention scheduling) 3. Deliberate control by SAS - New tasks, deliberate planning, problem solving, conflict monitoring, “executive control,” or when a strong habitual response has to be prevented

Answer 74

Yes - Reminding – second presentation of to-be-learned material remind learner of the first learning opportunity - Consolidation – second learning episode benefits from the consolidation of the first learning process

Answer 75

Yes - Direct effect – changes that arise from the act of taking the test itself - Mediated effect – better learning at next study

Answer 76

- Asking why | - Can be fairly effective

Answer 77

No Exceptions include: - If highlighting is used sparsely - If highlighting is done by an expert in that topic so they know the relevant info

Answer 78

- Tolman - three groups of rats trying to find their way through a maze, 1 with food, 1 without, 1 given food after 10 days - Latent learning (Tolman) – rats had formed a “cognitive map” of the maze - Clear evidence for learning in absence of conditioning and instead through cognitive means

Answer 79

- law of effect: responses that are rewarded become strengthened, those that are not rewarded (or punished) are weakened. - The strength of response is therefore adjusted according to the consequences of that response. - Operant conditioning

Answer 80

- Subsequent research has shown that each of the stores is complex (not a unitary, monolithic store) - Subsequent research has shown that each of the stores is complex (not a unitary, monolithic store) - Much unrehearsed info gets into LTS (implicit learning, ‘incidental’ encoding) - Is STS strictly phonological and LTS strictly semantic? What about e.g., non-verbal info?

Answer 81

- Normal LTM - Impaired STM (poor digit span) - Provides issue with Modal Model of memory as it does not explain how info can move to LTM if STM is impaired

Answer 82

HM – had intractable epileptic seizures so had removed medial temporal lobes bilaterally - Went to study HM in 1955 - Found he had anterograde amnesia, couldn’t acquire new memories - Digit span normal - Memory for past intact \9up to 3 years pre-surgery) - Could acquire some skills

Answer 83

- inability to make new memories (patient HM) - But intact STM and LTM prior to incident - Reduced primacy but intact recency

Answer 84

o Auditory store o Duration: 1-5 sec o Capacity: depends on stimuli o Loss via: decay

Answer 85

o Visual store o Duration: 500 ms o Capacity 12+ letters o Loss via: decay

Answer 86

- Partial report technique (Sperling) o Tachistoscope presented a matric of letters o If asked to report all letters, could only report 3-4 o Reporting is a bottleneck – you forget most letter while reporting the first few (full report technique, not useful) o Partial report technique – after display, cued to report one row o Could still report 3-4, therefore they stored all 12

Answer 87

- Semantic confusability effect (Baddeley) o Delayed recall (20 mins) o Recall worse if words semantically similar o No effect of acoustic/phonological similarity - Info in LTM stored using semantic code for verbal stimuli

Answer 88

- LTM capacity and duration are assumed to be limitless o E.g., vocab increases over lifespan - Our LTM store vast amounts of info o E.g., language, social skills, motor skills etc

Answer 89

- Phonological confusability effect (Conrad) o Visually presented letters: recall performance was worse on similar sounding letters o Similar to errors made when trying to discriminate spoken letters against distracting noise - Baddeley o Immediate recall was worse if were phonologically similar o No effect of semantic similarity in immediate recall - Info in STM is stored using phonological code

Answer 90

- Brown-Peterson Paradigm o Ppts given a nonsense trigram to remember o Then count backwards in 3s from a number o Trace decay of unrehearsed items occurs exponentially over 20-30 seconds

Answer 91

- Miller (1956) – magic number 7 (+/- 2) o Digit span tsk o Can recall lists of lengths 5 to 9

Answer 92

Primacy effect = first few items tend to be recalled well because they are transferred from the long-term store - For first item, rehearsal is high - Rehearsal then declines as there is more items to remember so recall worsens - Primacy effect is related to the number of rehearsals: early items receive more rehearsals and are better recalled

Answer 93

Recency effect – last few items tend to be recalled well because they are from the STM - Delay conditions used, recency effect declines as delay increases, can no longer hold in STM (can only hold info for 30 seconds) - Filled delay between list and recall diminishes recency effect

Answer 94

Free recall task: - Study: words presented at fixed paced - Test: recall words in any order - Recall % plotted as a function of word’s position in the list - Produces a serial position curve - Upturn of % recall at beginning and end of list - Primacy effect (upturn at start), asymptote (flat middle recall), recency effect (upturn at end)

Answer 95

Sensory input --> sensory stores--> if pay attention --> short-term memory --> if rehearsed --> long-term store Possibility for decay at sensory stores, displacement in STM, and interference in LTM Info can be retrieved from LTM to STM and reported

Answer 96

- Performed hundreds of memory experiments on himself - Discovered many methods and effects including: o Consonant-vowel-consonant nonsense syllables o Learning curves, forgetting curves o Capacity of short-term memory = 7 (picked up then by Miller in 1950s) o Recollections vs. familiarity (picked up by Tulving in the 1970s/80s) o The serial position curve (picked up again by people in the 1960s)

Answer 97

- Primary memory – info that remains in consciousness after it has been perceived, forms part of the psychological present - Secondary memory – info about events that have left consciousness, part of the psychological past

Answer 98

Memory – the process of storing information and experiences for possible future retrieval

Answer 99

Transfer-Appropriate Processing – memory performance depends on the extent to which processes used at the time of learning are the same as those used when memory is tested - “deep” orienting tasks often produce better results because the test task engages the same “deep” processes - A form of encoding which is “shallow” for one purpose may be “deep” for another

Answer 100

- Main problem is circularity of the definition of depth o In order the break circularity, an independent measure of depth is required - Weak theoretical power - Concepts such as “elaboration” are just as slippery as “depth” - “Shallow” orienting tasks almost certainly involve some automatic semantic processing e.g., Stroop test - Its possible that “deep” processing only leads to better performance under certain testing conditions

Answer 101

Type II rehearsal is associated with increased retention – elaborative processing increases the number of associations between stimulus and context

Answer 102

- Type I – maintenance rehearsal | - Type II – elaborative rehearsal

Answer 103

o Subjects are unaware that their memory will be tested | o Therefore, they weren’t intentionally encoding

Answer 104

- Stimulus processing (of words at least) can occur at a number of different levels: o Orthographic – the letters that make up the word (level=shallow, retention=poor) o Phonological – the sounds associated with pronouncing the word (level=medium, retention=medium) o Semantic – word is a cue to further information associated with that word (level=deep, retention=good)

Answer 105

- Articulatory Suppression: This secondary task doesn’t fully prevent registration of visually presented words (which should be recoded phonologically) - STM-impaired patients: visual and verbal spans are usually similarly affected (e.g., digit span of 2, visual span of ~4; Baddeley et al., 1997) – why would that be the case if independent sub-systems are responsible? - Rehearsal: How is (non-verbal) visual information rehearsed? How do (pre-verbal) children rehearse verbal info? - Consciousness: How can consciousness ‘bind’ information from different modalities without a multimodal short-term store? o Baddeley (2000) later expanded the model to include an ‘Episodic Buffer’ – see textbook for more on this

Answer 106

- Most complex but least understood component of WM - A “workspace” divided between storage and processing demands - “In some ways the central executive functions more like an attentional system than a memory force” – Baddeley - Model suggests CE co-ordinates the activity of the 2 slave systems - Other potential roles for the CE include coordinating retrieval strategies and selective attention

Answer 107

- Geographical location – learning our way around an environment - Planning and performing spatial tasks

Answer 108

Dual task – Brooks Matrix tasks and pursuit rotor task - Result – tracking disrupts spatial but not non-spatial condition - Sketchpad relies on spatial coding

Answer 109

Brooks Matrix Task – learn sequence of sentences to remember o Spatial – “in starting square put a one, in the next square put a 2” etc. -Mentally can build up a matrix o Non-spatial – “in the starting square put a 1, in the next square to the quick put a 2” etc. o Recall is better for spatial sentences than non-spatial one - Non-spatial condition – performance is better with written instructions - Spatial condition – performance better with auditory instructions - Visual (written) instructions interfere with spatial imagery

Answer 110

- A workspace in which an image can be stored and manipulated to guide behaviour

Answer 111

- Learning to read – lower memory spans --> reduced reading ability - Vocabulary acquisition – correlation between non-word repetition ability (requires phonological loop) and vocab size - Language comprehension – patients with STM impairments have difficulty comprehending complex sentences

Answer 112

- Articulate irrelevant items while performing a verbal span task - Result – world length effect disappears (for written words only)

Answer 113

- Spoken duration appears to be crucial o Memory spans are greater for short-duration words than long-duration words even though they have the same number of syllables - Different languages – shorter articulation rate correlates with longer digit span - Individual differences – memory span and articulation rate are highly correlated

Answer 114

- Phonological store = stores memory traces for a few seconds before they face - Articulatory (phonological) loop = rehearsal process analogous to subvocal speech (inner voice)

Answer 115

- Dual task results - Phonological confusability effect - Word-length effect – greater span for short words than long words, whether written or heard and this seems to correspond well with the speed these words are read

Answer 116

- Dual task paradigms – primary and secondary task - If you could complete both tasks, suggests evidence that WM system was more complex than a simple short-term store - If the secondary task interfered with the primary task, then this was because they both relied on the same processing mechanism o E.g., overtly rehearse sequence of digits and perform a simple true/false reasoning task o Is possible to carry out o Error rate held constant o Increase in reasoning time is significant but not large (35%) – speed-accuracy trade-off

Answer 117

- Neural persistence – overlap in neural processing, very brief - Visible persistence – a “pre-categorical” phenomenon of sensory processing, Di Lollo - Informational persistence – “post-categorical” iconic memory that decays rapidly, Sperling

Answer 118

– as duration of S1 increases, performance should decrease o Processing starts from onset of S1 o SOA – stimulus onset asynchrony – the time between the onset of S1 and the onset of S2 o Predicts decline in performance as S1 duration increases because effective overlap decreases

Answer 119

– as there is no gap then performance should stay the same o Decay from the offset of S1 o Predicts no decline in performance as S1 duration increases because effective overlap doesn’t change (ISI = 0)

Answer 120

if we manipulate the duration of S1 and keep the interval at 0, the theories make different predictions - Found inverse duration effect – performance declines as S1 duration increases

Answer 121

- Can’t tell which account is correct since they predict the same pattern: declining performance as ISI (inter-stimulus interval) increases

Answer 122

o Processing starts from the onset of S1 and runs its course o If you present S2 when S1 is still being processed then they will fuse o Decline in performance as the interval increases due to less effective overlap between processing of S1 and processing of S2

Answer 123

o If you present S2 just after S1, then the memory trace for s1 is 100% available and you will fuse the two images o The onset of S2 to the complete decay of S1 is called the Effective Overlap o The longer the effective overlap, the more likely you are to fuse the two stimuli o The later you present S2, the shorter the effective overlap and the less likely you are to fuse the 2 stimuli

Answer 124

Sensory store decays at around 300ms

Answer 125

Dot fusion – two patterns of dots that form a nonsense syllable when superimposed - If the gap is increased between stimulus 1 and 2 then it becomes harder to fuse the 2 stimuli together

Answer 126

Flicker fusion – the perception of successive brief stimuli as a single unified percept

Answer 127

Visible persistence – the continued apparent visibility of a stimulus beyond its physical duration

Answer 128

- Retrieval success depends on “informational overlap” between encoding and retrieval - Focus is on context - Context can be intrinsic or extrinsic

Answer 129

- Retrieval performance improves with cueing o Performance: recognition > cued recall > free recall - Retroactive interference is weaker with cueing o Interference: recognition < cued recall <<<<< free recall - Recall declines as the number of lists presented after original learning increases (retroactive interference) o Retroactive interference selectively affects free recall (no cue) o Cued recall/recognition less affected because context is partly reinstated during test

Answer 130

- Assume a cue has a fixed capacity for activating memories – the more memories associated with a cue, the less well it can activate any of them - Or: if several possible memories share similar overlap with retrieval environment, successful recall is less likely

Answer 131

Proactive interference = prior learning disrupts subsequent learning - Interference builds up over trails - Performance declines over successive study-test with similar stimuli - Performance recovers when switch to dissimilar stimuli

Answer 132

Retroactive interference = later learning disrupts earlier learning - Memory decreases as the number of intervening trails increases

Answer 133

- Decay – memory simply fades with time - Interference: memory traces disrupted or replaced by subsequent/prior learning - Time and interference are usually confounded – the longer the delay, the more interference

Answer 134

- Time required to relearn a list of words = measure of forgetting - Information loss is rapid then levels off: a logarithmic function which holds for many different types of learned material

Answer 135

Procedural and priming

Answer 136

Semantic and episodic

Answer 137

No, they show normal declarative memory, impaired perceptual priming

Answer 138

- Amnesic patients show intact perceptual thinking o Perceptual identification: identify studied items faster than unstudied item o Recognition memory tests: perform better under indirect instructions

Answer 139

- Perceptual identification – name an object from image obscured by noise - Word-stem/-fragment completion – first word that comes to mind - Sentence completion – “conceptual” priming

Answer 140

Priming = the improvement in processing a stimulus as a result of a prior encounter with the same or related stimulus

Answer 141

o Episodic or “Direct” Test (recognition memory for previously presented items) is intended to measure episodic memory system (conscious retrieval of past episode) o Some episodic tests can be influenced by non-episodic memory systems – you can “know” that you have see an item recently without consciously “remembering” the encoding event (find it familiar but don’t recollect it)

Answer 142

- Episodic, semantic and procedural memories are interactive and defined by levels of conscious awareness

Answer 143

Procedural: Effects of past experience demonstrated via performance (anoetic – “unaware”) o e.g., how to tie shoelaces, how to ride a bike

Answer 144

Semantic: Word meanings, facts, categories, etc. (Noetic – aware of info, not origin) o e.g., that Paris is the capital of France

Answer 145

Episodic: Temporally distinct past experiences (autonoetic – “self-aware”) o e.g., an event that occurred in your first few years of primary school

Answer 146

- Retrieval success depends on “informational overlap” between encoding and retrieval - Focus is on context - Context can be intrinsic or extrinsic

Answer 147

Intrinsic context = features that are an integral part of target stimulus - Recognition cues were better if study and test intrinsic context were similar

Answer 148

Extrinsic context = other features present at the time of encoding (time, place, cognitive state etc.) - Godden & Baddeley – diver study o Study lists on land or underwater and then recall in similar or dissimilar environment o Better recall when in same environment (not the same for recognition)

Answer 149

- Freud – people actively repress unpleasant memories – evidence for this is limited - People can also motivate themselves to forget

Answer 150

- Physiological basis of memory: glutamate release, protein synthesis, neural growth and rearrangement - “Fixes” information in long-term memory, strengthens connections between cortical regions over hours, days, months (“systems’ consolidation”) - Over time, cortical components of memories become less dependent on hippocampus for retrieval (hence HM can retrieve old memories)

Answer 151

o New memories are initially sensitive to disruption before becoming progressively more stable (hence HM can’t recall events in the lead up to surgery) o This process is selective – not all memories will be consolidated

Answer 152

Reconsolidation – retrieving a memory puts it in a liable state again

Answer 153

- Extinction | - Pharmacological intervention

Answer 154

Possible use as treatment for PTSD, phobias

Answer 155

Most “accepted” idea of forgetting is a combination of theories, mainly cue dependent forgetting and consolidation failure account for most forgetting

Answer 156

- Eye-movement tracking | - EEG

Answer 157

no - Eyes don’t move smoothly when reading, they make jumps - Eye movements consist of eye fixations and saccades (jumps from one location to another)

Answer 158

- 10-15% of all eye-movements are backwards (called regressions) – allow reader to re-look at previous text

Answer 159

o Shining an infra-red light into the eye – generates 2 reflections which are measured by the eye-tracking camera o Two reflections result – by measuring how these reflections move relative to each other, its possible to calculate what the eye is looking at

Answer 160

o How long people fixate on a particular word o Which words they go back to re-read o Time spent on a word reflects the processes associated with how long it takes the reader to access the meaning of the word and integrate with the meanings of the words read previously o Also reflects how common or rare words are – increased fixation time to rare words

Answer 161

The immediacy hypothesis – the reader tries to comprehend a word as soon as it is encountered (don’t delay processing) The eye-mind hypothesis – there is no delay between looking at a word and the brain processing that word Together, these hypotheses assume that the brain starts processing a word as soon as it is encountered and the eye moving onto the next word signal processing has terminated

Answer 162

- Measures voltage chances on the scalp associated with the presentation of stimuli - ERPs are components of EEG and labelled according to their polarity and latency following the onset of the stimulus - N400 and P600 are 2 of the ERP components of most interest

Answer 163

o N400 has a negative potential – peaks around 400ms after stimulus onset o This reveals sensitivity to semantic incongruity o The last word in the sentence “I take coffee with cream and dog” is semantically anomalous and results in N400

Answer 164

o P600 typically indexes syntactic violations around 600ms after stimulus onset o In the sentence “the broker persuaded to sell the stock was tall” the verb is initially interpreted as the past tense of “persuade” rather than as a reduced relative (“who was persuaded”)

Answer 165

Parsing – computing the syntactic structure of sentences - Involves determining the relationship between the different elements of a sentence and assigning them to syntactic categories - Lots of implicit knowledge rapidly during parsing

Answer 166

Syntax – building of sentences according to grammatical rules; arrangements of words into an order that results in a meaningful sentence

Answer 167

- For example, the phrase “the ball” is temporarily ambiguous – it could be the object of the verb “passes” or it could be the subject of the next phrase “always gets to its target.” You find out only after you’ve read “the ball” which interpretation correct

Answer 168

- “The spy saw the cop with the binoculars” - This is ambiguous between an interpretation where the phrase “with the binoculars” is attached to the verb phrase (VP-attachment), and an interpretation where it is attached to the noun phrase (NP-attachment)

Answer 169

- Defines simplicity in terms of the simplest syntactic structure that could be constructed - Stage 1: identify syntactic categories and build initial structure - Stage 2: assess outcome against context, semantic plausibility, real-world knowledge. - Revise if necessary

Answer 170

This model was very influential – made clear predictions so generated lots of experiments Bulk of empirical evidence suggests that syntax isn’t “special” and that lots of different types of information influence parsing as it unfolds in real time.

Answer 171

- Propose that the parser is able to utilise all potentially relevant information to guide the early stages of processing

Answer 172

Discourse processing = involves the linking together of units of text in order to construct a coherent mental representation

Answer 173

o A level representing the surface form o A level representing the text base o A level representing the situation model

Answer 174

- Memory for the surface form of a discourse is rapidly lost | - What people remember is something akin to the text base and the situation model levels of representation

Answer 175

- Participant heard a sentence and then a similar sentence that was different on surface level but had the same gist – thought they had already heard the sentence - Didn’t do this when the sentences had different situation models

Answer 176

Inferences = a piece of information that isn’t explicitly stated in the text but is represented in a Situation Model.

Answer 177

- Logical - Bridging - Elaborative

Answer 178

- Based on formal rules and are 100% certain | - E.g., john is a bachelor – can logically infer that john is male

Answer 179

- Help us to relate new to previous information - We use them to make information coherent by linking new information to previously obtained information - E.g., Mary unpacked some picnic supplies. The beer was warm. – infer that the “beer” was part of the picnic

Answer 180

- Involve extending what is in the text with world knowledge - Sematic associations for the basis for this type of inference making - E.g., the delicate vase fell on the floor – make the inference that the vase will break

Answer 181

It has been found that inferences people generated were influenced by how they felt about the character in stories

Answer 182

- Accounts for how readers build situation models - Proposes that events are connected along dimensions of time, space, protagonist, causality and intentionality and that readers (at least implicitly) keep track of events along these dimensions - The model has led to much research and explains a number of previous findings, is also clearly defined

Answer 183

Anaphors = take their meaning from the thing they refer back to e.g., he, the fool, Bill - They differ in their level of ambiguity

Answer 184

- Found that it takes readers longer to understand a sentence if there is no explicit mention of the referent in the prior sentence as inference has to be used – is possible but takes longer to achieve - However, for highly constraining context, situational anaphora can be easy to understand even if the referent is not explicitly mentioned – anaphors can map onto entities in the situation model that might not be in the text base - But this doesn’t work for pronouns – - Pronouns only carry number and gender information so can match to many possible referents in a text. We are able to usually able to easily interpret them because they tend to refer to character that are in focus

Answer 185

Centring theory = a model of how attention shifts during a discourse

Answer 186

The repeated name penalty = arises when the character in focus is referred to using a proper name rather than a pronoun

Answer 187

Quantifiers = expressions that communicate something about quantity - Can subtly change the meaning of the sentence by using the same quantifier - E.g., a few of the fans went to the match. They … - E.g., few of the fans went to the match. They … - Changes the focus for the reader

Answer 188

Scalar expressions = a magnitude can give readers different meanings in a sentence e.g., “almost 500 votes” is viewed as more positively than “only 500 votes”

Answer 189

Depth of processing = making predictions about what is being asked so not accurately answering a question – links to top-down processing - E.g., how many animals of each type did Moses take on the Ark? People will answer two rather than realising that it was Noah who took the animals on the Ark and not Moses

Answer 190

Phonemes – smallest units of sound e.g., rice and lice differ by just one phoneme

Answer 191

Morphemes – smallest units of meaning in language e.g., dog-s is two morphemes

Answer 192

Phonology – rules governing the sound of words and parts of words

Answer 193

Semantics – the meanings of words and sentences e.g., bank, oink etc.

Answer 194

Pragmatics – the use of language as a function of context and social rules e.g., hello, hi, hey etc.

Answer 195

Language – a system of symbols and rules that allow us to communicate

Answer 196

People will try to predict the endings of sentences or how something will unfold – when given the start of a sentence and then 3 images you will look at the image that you anticipated will follow the sentence

Answer 197

- Conceptualization – think of something to say - Formulation – find a way to express your idea given the specific language tools - Articulation – physical action of moving your muscles to produce speech

Answer 198

- Idea - Zoom in on the appropriate lexical item in the mental lexicon - Retrieve a word’s morphemic code - Retrieve a word’s phonological code - Syllabify the word and access the corresponding articulatory gesture - Move the muscles and produce the speech waves o Serial – feed-forward information flow o Lemma is an intermediate stage between activating an idea and the speech sound o The link from meaning to sound (lexicalisation) is not a one stage process

Answer 199

- Set of nodes associated with semantics - A set of nodes associated with words - A set of nodes associated with phonemes o Semantics connect in multiple ways to words o Words connect in multiple ways to phonemes o Like a neural network with the multiple connections o Unilateral flow o Lemma is an intermediate stage between activating an idea and the speech sound o Lexicalisation is not a one stage process

Answer 200

- Occur when we have conceptualization but cannot find the appropriate words o Evidence that lexicalisation is not a one stage process

Answer 201

o Can retrieve the first phoneme of the target word, the number of syllabuses of target words, gender of target word o Occurs most often with low-frequency words

Answer 202

- Sematic relatedness slows down picture naming e.g., a picture of an apple appears with the word lemon makes it harder to name the apple - Phonological relatedness speeds up picture naming e.g., picture of house appears with word mouse o Lexicalisation is not a one stage process

Answer 203

- Gain insights into how the complex cognitive systems involved in speech production works when it breaks - Understand how information flows between different mental processes during speech production - Understand how much planning speakers do when they speak

Answer 204

- Semantics substitution – use a different word than intended but has the same meaning e.g., bat and racquet - Word-exchange – swap words round in a sentence e.g., chair and room - Sound-exchange – swapping sounds of words so instead of take and shower you say shake and tower

Answer 205

Lexical bias effect = more likely to make errors that result in other words in your language than made up words Mixed-error effect – more likely to say “let’s start” but not “let’s being” instead of “let’s stop”

Answer 206

Spreading activation model is most compatible with the supporting evidence from TOTs, picture-word interference and speech errors that lexicalisation is not a one stage process

Answer 207

Co-articulation = pronunciation of a phoneme by a speaker depends on the proceeding and following phonemes - No one-to-one relationships between acoustic signal and phonemes - Allows for prediction and makes perception faster

Answer 208

- Listeners perceive spoken words by reproducing the movements of the speaker’s vocal tract rather than by identifying the sound patterns that speech generates - The motors system is involved in both speech production and perception with a “bridge” between the two

Answer 209

o Mirror neurons o McGurk Effect – an illusion occurs when the auditory component of one sound is paired with the visual component of another sound leading to the perception of a third sound – auditory and visual information processing is merged o Categorical speech perception – tend to perceive phonemes as distinct categories o Motor cortex and speech perception – fMRI – listening to speech and imagining you are speaking activates speech motor cortex TMS – motor TMS decreases phoneme discrimination

Answer 210

- Different levels in speech system corresponding to auditory features, phonemes and words – activates different potential outcomes - Nodes influence each other creating patterns of activation - Interaction of bottom-up and top-down processes

Answer 211

o Ganong effect – when listening to sounds ranging from /dash/ to /tash/, phonemes were assigned to words rather than non-words o Phonemic restoration effect – will fill in missing phonemes in context of a sentence to make to sentence make sense

Cognition Flashcards

(238 cards)