Exam 2: Cognitive Psychology Flashcards

Question

Describe Luck and Vogel’s (1997) study on the capacity of STM.

Answer 1

‣ called change detection ‣ The display on the left was flashed for 100 ms, followed by 900 ms of darkness and then the new display on the right. The participant’s task was to indicate whether the second display was the same as or different from the first. This task is easy if the number of items is within the capacity of STM but becomes harder when the number of items becomes greater than the capacity of STM

Answer 2

* performance was almost perfect when there were one to three squares in the arrays, but that performance began decreasing when there were four or more squares. Luck and Vogel concluded from this result that participants were able to retain about four items in their short-term memory

Answer 3

chunking uses LTM in addition to STM

Answer 4

‣ for example, for the shaded cubes, which were the most complex stimuli, a participant would see a display containing a number of different cubes, followed by a blank interval, followed by a display that was either the same as the first one or in which one of the cubes was different. The participant’s task was to indicate whether the two displays were the same or different. ‣ Alvarez and Cavanagh concluded that the greater the amount of information in an image, the fewer items that can be held in visual short-term memory

Answer 5

* limited-capacity system for temporary storage and manipulation of information for complex tasks such as comprehension, learning, and reasoning

Answer 6

◦ one of the things he noticed was that under certain conditions it is possible to carry out two tasks simultaneously ◦ But he found that participants could hold a short string of numbers in their memory while carrying out another task, such as reading or even solving a simple word problem

Answer 7

‣ The part of working memory that holds and processes verbal and auditory information.

Answer 8

* has a limited capacity and holds information for only a few seconds

Answer 9

* Rehearsal process involved in working memory that keeps items in the phonological store from decaying.

Answer 10

(i) What is the phonological similarity effect? (ii) What is the word length effect? (iii) What is articulatory suppression?

Answer 11

◦ An effect that occurs when letters or words that sound similar are confused. For example, T and P are two similar-sounding letters that could be confused. ◦ occurs when words are processed in the phonological store part of the phonological loop

Answer 12

◦ The notion that it is more difficult to remember a list of long words than a list of short words. ◦ the longer list will be more difficult to remember because it takes more time to pronounce and rehearse longer words and to produce them during recall

Answer 13

◦ Interference with operation of the phonological loop that occurs when a person repeats an irrelevant word such as “the” while carrying out a task that requires the phonological loop. ◦ which reduces memory because speaking interferes with rehearsal

Answer 14

‣ The part of working memory that holds and processes visual and spatial information ‣ When you form a picture in your mind or do tasks like solving a puzzle or finding your way around campus

Answer 15

‣ The part of working memory that coordinates the activity of the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketch pad. The “traffic cop” of the working memory system. ‣ pulls information from long-term memory and focusing on specific parts of a task and deciding how to divide attention between different tasks ‣ helping you ignore the messages

Answer 16

* frontal lobes are involved in a variety of mental functions, including personality and planning

Answer 17

‣ serves as a “backup” store that communicates with both long-term memory and the components of working memory. It holds information longer and has greater capacity than the phonological loop or visuospatial sketch pad. ‣ it represents a way of increasing storage capacity and communicating with LTM.

Answer 18

* central executive as being an attention controller. It determines how attention is focused on a specific task, how it is divided between two tasks, and how it is switched between tasks

Answer 19

* neurons that responded only when the square was flashed in a particular location and that these neurons continued responding during the delay * number of areas of the brain are involved in working memory is an example of distributed representation

Answer 20

* The classic example of PFC damage causing changes in behavior is the case of Phineas Gage and the tamping rod

Answer 21

* A task in which information is provided, a delay is imposed, and then memory is tested. This task has been used to study short-term memory by testing monkeys’ ability to hold information about the location of a food reward during a delay. * PFC is important for holding information for brief periods of time. In fact, it has been suggested that one reason we can describe the memory behavior of very young infants as “out of sight, out of mind”

Answer 22

explicit and implicit

Answer 23

a form of long-term memory that doesn't require any conscious retrieval. There are several types of implicit memory, including procedural memory, priming, and conditioning. Together, these subtypes help you carry out everyday tasks, from riding a bike to having a conversation with someone.

Answer 24

centers on remembering facts and events. You must consciously make an effort to recall things from your explicit memory. Includes semantic and episodic memory

Answer 25

* In a memory experiment in which participants are asked to recall a list of words, a plot of the percentage of participants remembering each word against the position of that word in the list * indicates that memory is better for words at the beginning of the list and at the end of the list than for words in the middle

Answer 26

participants are more likely to remember words presented at the beginning of a sequence

Answer 27

participants had time to rehearse the words at the beginning of the sequence and transfer them to LTM

Answer 28

‣ Words presented early in the list were rehearsed more, and were also more likely to be remembered later. This result supports the idea that the primacy effect is related to the longer rehearsal time available for words at the beginning of the list.

Answer 29

better memory for the stimuli presented at the end of a sequence

Answer 30

the most recently presented words are still in STM and therefore are easy for participants to remember

Answer 31

Glanzer and Cunitz therefore concluded that the recency effect is due to storage of recently presented items in STM

Answer 32

* Visual: This is visual coding in STM if you remembered the pattern by representing it visually in your mind. * Auditory: which showed that people often misidentify target letters as another letter that sounds like the target (confusing “F” and “S,” for example, which don’t look alike but which sound alike) ◦ dominant in STM * Semantically: Because placing words into categories involves the meanings of the words, and because participants were recalling the words 15 seconds after they heard them, this represents an effect of semantic coding in STM.

Answer 33

‣ The delay caused by the counting eliminated the recency effect.

Answer 34

All made experiment: Participants in each group listened to three words (for example, banana, peach, apple for the Fruits group), counted backward for 15 seconds, and then attempted to recall the three words. They did this for a total of four trials, with different words presented on each trial. Because participants recalled the words so soon after hearing them, they were using their STM.

Answer 35

the tendency of previously learned material to hinder subsequent learning

Answer 36

A situation in which conditions occur that eliminate or reduce the decrease in performance caused by proactive interference (changing the "chunk" to another "chunk")

Answer 37

* Visual: You also use visual coding in LTM when you visualize a person or place from the past * Auditory: when you “play” a song in your head * Semantically: The finding that specific wording is forgotten but the general meaning can be remembered for a long time has been confirmed in many experiments. This description in terms of meaning is an example of semantic coding in LTM. ◦ dominant in LTM

Answer 38

hippocampus, parietal lobe, and surrounding structures

Answer 39

◦ A subcortical structure that is important for forming long-term memories, and that also plays a role in remote episodic memories and in short-term storage of novel information. ◦ short-term memory remained intact, so he could remember what had just happened, but he was unable to transfer any of this information into long-term memory

Answer 40

◦ poor STM was indicated by a reduced digit span—the number of digits he could remember Whereas the typical span is between five and nine digits, KF had a digit span of two; in addition, the recency effect in his serial position curve, which is associated with STM, was reduced. Even though KF’s STM was greatly impaired, he had a functioning LTM, as indicated by his ability to form and hold new memories of events in his life. ◦ Double dissociation

Answer 41

◦ lost the episodic part of his memory, but his semantic memory is largely intact ◦ He is aware of the fact that his brother died 2 years ago but remembers nothing about personal experiences such as how he heard about his brother’s death or what he experienced at the funeral.

Answer 42

◦ although she had lost semantic memories, she was still able to form new episodic memories ◦ she had difficulty recognizing familiar people but she could remember what she had done during the day and things that had happened weeks or months before

Answer 43

* autobiographical memory: memory for specific experiences from our life, which can include both episodic and semantic components

Answer 44

◦ how knowledge (semantic) affects experience (episodic) ◦ the makeup of autobiographical memory.

Answer 45

* memories we are aware of

Answer 46

memories we aren't aware of

Answer 47

◦ The results of the recall experiment show that the amnesiac patients (those with Korsakoff’s syndrome) recalled fewer words than the two control groups. This poor recall confirms the poor explicit memory associated with their amnesia. But the results of the word completion test, showing the percentage of primed words that were created (implicit memory), indicate that the patients with amnesia performed just as well as the controls.

Answer 48

* Memory for how to carry out highly practiced skills. Procedural memory is a type of implicit memory because although people can carry out a skilled behavior, they often cannot explain exactly how they are able to do so. * also called skill memory because it is memory for doing things that usually involve learned skills

Answer 49

* occurs when the presentation of one stimulus (the priming stimulus) changes the way a person responds to another stimulus (the test stimulus)

Answer 50

* occurs when the test stimulus is the same as or resembles the priming stimulus

Answer 51

◦ participants are more likely to rate statements they have read or heard before as being true, simply because they have been exposed to them before. This effect can occur even when the person is told that the statements are false when they first read or hear them. The propaganda effect involves implicit memory because it can operate even when people are not aware that they have heard or seen a statement before, and may even have thought it was false when they first heard it

Answer 52

* occurs when the following two stimuli are paired: ◦ a neutral stimulus that initially does not result in a response and ◦ a conditioning stimulus that does result in a response

Answer 53

a neutral stimulus that is paired with a biologically relevant stimulus (US) to elicit a response (CR)

Answer 54

a biologically relevant stimulus that naturally elicits a response without prior association or conditioning.

Answer 55

the automatic reaction to that stimulus

Answer 56

a behavior that does not come naturally, but must be learned by the individual by pairing a neutral stimulus with a potent stimulus

Answer 57

you meet someone who seems familiar but you can’t remember how you know him or her. Have you ever had this experience and also felt positively or negatively about the person, without knowing why? If so, your emotional reaction was an example of implicit memory.

Answer 58

* The process of acquiring information and transferring it into memory.

Answer 59

Rehearsal that involves repetition without any consideration of meaning or making connections to other information

Answer 60

Rehearsal that involves thinking about the meaning of an item to be remembered or making connections between that item and prior knowledge

Answer 61

elaborative

Answer 62

The idea that memory depends on how information is encoded, with better memory being achieved when processing is deep than when processing is shallow.

Answer 63

‣ Shallow processing involves repetition with little attention to meaning and is associated with maintenance rehearsal. ‣ Deep processing involves attention to meaning and is associated with elaborative rehearsal.

Answer 64

involves attention to meaning and is associated with elaborative rehearsal - results in better memory than shallow processing according to levels of processing theory

Answer 65

◦ Structural processing question: A question about the physical features of the word. For example, participants see the word bird and are asked whether it is printed in capital letters ◦ Phonemic processing question: A question about rhyming. For example, participants see the word train and are asked if it rhymes with the word pain. ◦ Semantic processing question: A fill-in-the-blanks question. For example, participants see the word car and are asked if it fits into the sentence “He saw ____ on the street.”

Answer 66

‣ physical features = shallow processing; ‣ rhyming = deeper processing; ‣ fill in the blanks = deepest processing.

Answer 67

‣ information in LTM can also be coded both visually and acoustically

Answer 68

that memory retrieval is affected by how items are encoded

Answer 69

◦ generating images in your head to connect words visually

Answer 70

‣ Bower and Winzenz presented a list of 15 pairs of nouns, such as boat–tree, to participants for 5 seconds each. One group was told to silently repeat the pairs as they were presented, and another group was told to form a mental picture in which the two items were interacting. When participants were later given the first word and asked to recall the second one for each pair, the participants who had created images remembered more than twice as many words as the participants who had just repeated the word pairs ‣ can enhance memory

Answer 71

‣ Memory is better if you are asked to relate a word to yourself ‣ improves the effectiveness of memory due to the better engagement of the brain

Answer 72

Memory for material is better when a person generates the material him- or herself, rather than passively receiving it.

Answer 73

‣ If presenting material in an organized way improves memory, we might expect that preventing organization from happening would reduce the ability to remember. ‣ participants who saw this picture before they read the passage remembered twice as much from the passage as participants who did not see the picture or participants who saw the picture after they read the passage. The key here is organization. The picture provides a mental framework that helps the reader link one sentence to the next to create a meaningful story. The resulting organization makes this passage easier to comprehend and much easier to remember later. This example illustrates once again that the ability to remember material depends on how that material is programmed into the mind.

Answer 74

◦ long-term memory is organized through a hierarchical arrangements of concepts. Concepts may represent physical objects, events, attributes, or abstractions ◦ One reason for this result is that remembering words in a particular category may serve as a retrieval cue—a word or other stimulus that helps a person remember information stored in memory.

Answer 75

elaboration that results in better memory can also be achieved by testing memory

Answer 76

* highlighting material in text or notes and rereading text or notes are not very effective * elaboration—thinking about what you are reading and giving it meaning by relating it to other things that you know is good * repeatedly testing yourself on material you are studying pays dividends in improved memory. * The goal of organizing material is to create a framework

Answer 77

◦ In their experiment, participants studied a list of 40 Swahili–English word pairs, such as mashua–boat, and then saw one of the words in each pair and were asked to remember the other word. ◦ The enhanced performance due to retrieval practice is called the testing effect. ◦ This result shows that being tested is important for learning because when testing was stopped for Group 3 once items were recalled correctly, performance decreased.

Answer 78

◦ Study in a number of shorter study sessions rather than trying to learn everything at once

Answer 79

◦ some study techniques favored by students may appear to be more effective than they actually are

Answer 80

* the information is “in there,” but we can’t get it out -- retrieval failure

Answer 81

◦ "Forgetting" is a general term for the inability to recall information, while "retrieval failure" is a specific type of forgetting where the information is stored in memory but cannot be accessed due to a lack of appropriate retrieval cues or context

Answer 82

A procedure for testing memory in which the participant is asked to remember stimuli that were previously presented

Answer 83

◦ location / sights ◦ odors / smells ◦ songs / sounds

Answer 84

Retrieval can be increased by matching the conditions at retrieval to the conditions that existed at encoding.

Answer 85

A procedure for testing memory in which a participant is presented with cues, such as words or phrases, to aid recall of previously experienced stimuli

Answer 86

◦ The principle that we learn information together with its context. ◦ In this experiment, one group of participants put on diving equipment and studied a list of words underwater, and another group studied the words on land. These groups were then divided so that half the participants in the land and water groups were tested for recall on land and half were tested underwater. The results, indicated by the numbers, show that the best recall occurred when encoding and retrieval occurred in the same location.

Answer 87

◦ The principle that memory is best when a person is in the same state for encoding and retrieval. This principle is related to encoding specificity. ◦ They did this by asking participants to think positive thoughts while listening to “merry” or happy music, or depressing thoughts while listening to “melancholic” or sad music. Two days later, the participants returned, and the same procedure was used to put them in a positive or negative mood. When they reached the mood, they were given a memory test for the words they had studied 2 days earlier. The results indicate that they did better when their mood at retrieval matched their mood during encoding

Answer 88

retrieval is better if the same cognitive tasks are involved during both encoding and retrieval. The procedure for their experiment was as follows: ‣ The important thing about these two groups of participants is that they were asked to process the words differently. In one case, they had to focus on the word’s meaning to answer the question, and in the other case they focused on the word’s sound. ‣ The key result of this experiment was that the participants’ retrieval performance depended on whether the retrieval task matched the encoding task. Participants who had focused on rhyming during encoding remembered more words in the rhyming test than participants who had focused on meaning. Thus, participants who had focused on the word’s sound during the first part of the experiment did better when the test involved focusing on sound.

Answer 89

the process that transforms new memories from a fragile state, in which they can be disrupted, to a more permanent state, in which they are resistant to disruption.

Answer 90

A process of consolidation that involves structural changes at synapses that happen rapidly, over a period of minutes

Answer 91

Hebb’s idea was that repeated activity can strengthen the synapse by causing structural changes, greater transmitter release, and increased firing. Hebb also proposed that changes that occur in the hundreds or thousands of synapses that are activated around the same time by a particular experience provide a neural record of the experience

Answer 92

The increased firing that occurs in a neuron due to prior activity at the synapse.

Answer 93

A consolidation process that involves the gradual reorganization of circuits within brain regions and takes place on a long timescale, lasting weeks, months, or even years

Answer 94

‣ Proposes that memory retrieval depends on the hippocampus during consolidation, but that once consolidation is complete, retrieval no longer depends on the hippocampus.

Answer 95

‣ proposes that memory unfolds according the sequence of steps in which the hippocampus is involved in encoding new memories, and makes connections with higher cortical areas). ‣ However, with the passage of time, connections between the hippocampus and cortical areas weaken, and connections between cortical areas strengthen until, eventually, the HC is no longer involved in those memories

Answer 96

Loss of memory for something that happened prior to an injury or traumatic event such as a concussion.

Answer 97

When amnesia is most severe for events that occurred just prior to an injury and becomes less severe for earlier, more remote events.

Answer 98

‣ This gradual decrease in amnesia corresponds, according to the standard model, to the changes in connections between the hippocampus and cortical areas; as time passes after an event, the cortical representation becomes stronger.

Exam 2: Cognitive Psychology Flashcards

(122 cards)