Cognitive Area Flashcards

Question

Outline the procedure of experiment 2 in loftus and palmers study?

Answer 1

* All participants were shown a one-minute film which contained a four-second multiple car crash. * They were then given a questionnaire which asked them to describe the accident and answer a set of questions about the incident. * There was a critical question about speed: - One group was asked, “About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” - Another group was asked, “About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?” - The third group did not have a question about vehicular speed. * One week later, all participants, without seeing the film again, completed another questionnaire about the accident which contained the further critical question, “Did you see any broken glass – Yes/No?” There had been no broken glass in the original film.

Answer 2

-Smashed produced the fastest speed estimates and contacted the slowest. -For the four staged films where speeds were accurately measured -More participants in the ‘smashed’ condition (16) than either the ‘hit’ or control groups reported seeing broken glass -The majority of participants in each group correctly recalled that they had not seen any broken glass

Answer 3

-The verb used in a question influences a participant’s response ie the way a question is phrased influences the answer given. -People are not very good at judging vehicular speed. -Misleading post event information can distort an individual’s memory

Answer 4

* Context-dependent memory refers to improved recall of specific episodes or information when the context present at encoding and retrieval are the same. * Context-dependency effects for memory recall are typically interpreted as showing that the characteristics of the environment are encoded as part of the memory trace and can be used to enhance retrieval of other information in the trace

Answer 5

* Research has shown that context-dependence may play an important role in numerous situations, such as memory for studied material. * Grant et al were interested in determining whether environmental context-dependency effects would be found with the type of material and the type of tests typically encountered in school. * Their focus is more on study conditions than on differences in class

Answer 6

aimed to show that environmental context can have a more positive effect on performance in a meaningful memory test when the test takes place in the same environment in which the to-be-remembered material was originally studied (the matching condition) than when the test occurs in a different environment (mismatching condition).

Answer 7

* This was a laboratory experiment using an independent measures design. * The independent variables (IVs) were: (i) whether the participant read the two page article under silent or noisy conditions (ii) whether the participant was tested under matching or mismatching conditions - The first IV – study context (silent versus noisy) and the second IV – test context (silent versus noisy) were manipulated in a between-subjects factorial design, producing four conditions. * The dependent variable (DV) was the participant’s performance on (a) a short-answer recall test and (b) a multiple-choice recall test.

Answer 8

Eight members of a psychology laboratory class served as experimenters. Each experimenter recruited five acquaintances to serve as participants. * There were 39 participants, ranging in age from 17 to 56 years (M = 23.4, SD = 5.9), 17 were female, 23 were male. (1 participant’s results were omitted from the analyses.)

Answer 9

* Each experimenter ran one participant for each of the four conditions and an additional participant for one of the conditions as assigned by the instructor. Experimenters randomly assigned their participants to their five conditions. * Stimuli (a) Each experimenter provided his/her own cassette player and headphones, were exact copies made from a master tape of background noise recorded during lunchtime in a university cafeteria. consisted of occasional distinct words/phrases embedded within a general conversational hum that was with the sounds produced by movement of chairs, was played at a moderately loud (b) A two-page, three-columned article on psychoimmunology (Hales,1984) was selected as the to-be-studied material. (c) 16 multiple-choice questions, each consisting of a stem and four alternatives were generated, which tested memory for points stated in the text. 10 short-answer questions were derived from those multiple-choice stems that could easily be restated to produce a question that could be answered unambiguously by a single word or phrase. The order of the questions on each test followed the order in which the tested points were made in the text. The short-answer test was always administered first to ensure that recall of information from the article was being tested and not recall of information from the multiple- choice test. -Instructions, describing the experiment as a class project and stating that participation was voluntary, were read aloud. - Participants were asked to read the given article once were allowed to highlight and underline as they read. - Participants were informed that their comprehension would be tested with both a short-answer test and a multiple-choice test. - All participants wore headphones while they read. Those in the silent condition were told they would not hear anything over the headphones whilst those in the noisy condition were told they would hear moderately loud background noise, but that they should ignore it. - Reading times were recorded by the experimenters. - A break of approximately two minutes between the end of the study phase and the beginning of the test phase was incorporated to minimise recall from short-term memory. - The short-answer test was given, followed by the multiple-choice test. - Participants were tested in either silent or noisy conditions and were informed of the condition before testing. Regardless of testing condition, all participants wore headphones. - At the end of the testing phase participants were debriefed concerning the purpose of the experiment. - The entire procedure lasted about 30 minutes.

Answer 10

-Results suggest participants in all groups spent roughly equal amounts of time studying the material. Therefore reading time was used as a co-variable in the analysis of test performance. -There was no overall effect of noise on performance

Answer 11

-There are context-dependency effects for newly learned meaningful material regardless of whether a short-answer test or a multiple-choice test is used to assess learning. * Studying and testing in the same environment leads to enhanced performance. * Students are likely to perform better in exams if they study for them with a minimum of background noise because, although there was no overall effect of noise on performance, the fact that there was evidence for context-dependency suggests they are better off studying without background noise as it will not be present during actual testing.

Answer 12

-Focused visual attention: the cluttered scenes of everyday life present more objects than an individual can respond towards simultaneously, and often more than can be fully perceived at any one time. Accordingly, mechanisms of attention are required to select objects of interest for further processing. In the case of vision, one such mechanism is provided by eye movements, which allow an individual to fixate on particular regions so they benefit from the greater acuity of the fovea(Driver) -Attention is necessary for change detection.

Answer 13

-Previous studies had shown increasing interest in the issue of the precision of visual representations. In these studies observers had to engage in a continuous task that required them to focus on one aspect of a dynamic visual scene whilst ignoring others. At some point during the task an unexpected event occurred -This study therefore builds on classic studies of divided visual attention to examine inattentional blindness for complex objects and events in dynamic scenes.

Answer 14

- This is primarily a laboratory experiment that used an independent measures design. - The independent variables (IVs) were whether the participant took part in: (i) The Transparent/Umbrella Woman condition (ii) The Transparent/Gorilla condition (iii) The Opaque/Umbrella Woman condition (iv) The Opaque Gorilla condition For each of the four displays there were four task conditions: (i) White/Easy (ii) White/Hrad (iii) Black/Easy (iv) Black/Hard * Overall there were therefore 16 individual conditions. *The dependent variable (DV) was the number of participants in each of the 16 conditions who noticed the unexpected event (Umbrella Woman or Gorilla). * A controlled observation was subsequently conducted in which participants watched a different video and had to attend to the White team and engage in the Easy monitoring task

Answer 15

-Four video tapes, each 75 seconds-Each tape showed two teams of three players, one team wearing white shirts, the other black shirts, players moved around in a relatively random fashion -The members of each team passed a standard orange basketball to one another in a standardised order: player 1→ player 2 → player 3 → player 1. Passes were either bounce or aerial -After 44-48 seconds of action either of two unexpected events occurred: in the Umbrella-Woman condition, and a the Gorilla condition -There were two styles of video: in the Transparent condition, the white team, black team and unexpected event were all filmed separately , and the three video streams were rendered partially transparent and then superimposed by using digital video-editing software. In the Opaque condition, all seven actors were filmed simultaneously and could thus occlude one another and the basketballs.

Answer 16

*For the experiment: 228 participants (referred to as‘observers’throughout the original study), almost all undergraduate students. Each participant either volunteered to participate without compensation, received a large candy bar for participating, or was paid a single fee for participating in a larger testing session including another, unrelated experiment. - NB: data from 36 participants were discarded so results were used from 192 participants. These were equally distributed across the 16 conditions. *For the controlled observation: 12 different participants watched the video in which the gorilla thumped its chest.

Answer 17

-Twenty-one experimenters tested the participants. To ensure standardisation of procedures a written protocol was devised and reviewed with the experimenters before data collection was begun. -Before viewing the video tape, participants were told they would be watching two teams of three players passing basketballs and that they should pay attention to either the team in white (the White condition) or the team in black (the Black condition). -They were told to keep either a silent mental count of the total number of passes made by the attended team (Easy condition) or separate silent mental counts of the number of bounce passes and aerial passes made by the attended team (Hard condition). -They were then asked the following additional questions: (i) While you were doing the counting, did you notice anything unusual in the video? (ii) Did you notice anything other than the six players? (iii) Did you see a gorilla/woman carrying an umbrella walk across the screen? -After any “yes”responses, participants were asked to provide details of what they noticed. If at any point a participant mentioned the unexpected event, the remaining questions were skipped. -Participants were debriefed; this included replaying the video tape on request

Answer 18

-NB: data from 36 participants were discarded for the following reasons: (i) they already knew about the phenomenon and/or experimental paradigm (ii) they reported losing count of the passes (iii) passes were incompletely or inaccurately recorded (iv) answers could not be clearly interpreted -Out of all 192 participants across all conditions, 54% noticed the unexpected event and 46% failed to notice the unexpected event. -More participants noticed the unexpected event in the Opaque condition (67%) than the Transparent condition (42%). -However there was little difference between those attending to the Black team and those attending to the White team in noticing the Umbrella Woman (Black 62%, White 69%, per condition).

Answer 19

*Individuals have a sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. *Individuals fail to notice an ongoing and highly salient but unexpected event if they are engaged in a primary monitoring task. *Objects can pass through the spatial extent of attentional focus (and the fovea) and still not be ‘seen’ if they are not specifically being attended to. *There is no conscious perception without attention.

Answer 20

-Cognitive psychologists are only able to infer mental processes from the behaviour they observe. -Cognitive psychology, as a consequence, occasionally suffers from being too abstract and theoretical in nature. -Experimental studies of mental processes are often carried out using artificial stimuli (such as memory tests with lists of words). They may not represent everyday memory experience. -May lack external validity.

Answer 21

-The cognitive approach is founded on soft determinism - it recognises that our cognitive system can only operate within the limits of what we know, but that we are free to think before responding to a stimulus. -This is more of a reasonable "interactionist" position than the hard determinism suggested by some other approaches.

Answer 22

-Computer analogy: even though there are similarities between the human mind and a computer (inputs, storage systems, outputs, the use of a central processor) analogy used by many. -Machine reductionism ignores the influence of human emotion and motivation on the cognitive system, and how this may affect our ability to process information. -Research has found that human memory may be affected by emotional factors, such as the influence of anxiety on eyewitnesses.