finals

Question 1

three types of psychology studies

Answer 1

Introspection, behaviourism and cognitive psychology

Question 2

Introspection

Answer 2

(Wilhem Wundt 1879)
 Not accepted since it wasn’t scientific enough; ‘unobservable’ phenomena and corroboration was not possible
 Not reliable; people could lie about their data

Question 3

Behaviourism

Answer 3

 Reinforcer: if we do things and we enjoy it, we will do it more often
-Strengthens the relationship between stimulus and response

 Limited because there is only stimulus and response; everyone would have the same response to the same stimulus

Question 4

Cognitive Psychology

Answer 4

 Computer metaphor: unseen variable can impact response

Brain = hardware (computer chips) 
Mind = software (programs)

Question 5

Mental chronometry (speed of thought)

Answer 5

 Simple reaction time: time it takes to determine shape (square of triangle?)
 Choice reaction time: time it takes to respond on shape you saw (x if …., y if ….)

Question 6

Attention

Answer 6

 Look (pay attention to object) in order to see (consciousness)
 Listen (attention to sound) in order to hear (consciousness)

Question 7

Attentional selection

Answer 7

need to focus on physical characteristic of the voice. You will not remember hearing an unattended message. I.e. listening from the left ear and ignoring the right.

Question 8

Early Selection

Answer 8

1. Stimulus: attend to physical characteristics
2. Semantic description and identification: decide what it means
3. Memory, awareness, and response selection: process the information

Question 9

Late Selection

Answer 9

Cocktail party effect: Highly important information such as your name captures your attention.

Question 10

Two types of attention

Answer 10

 Endogenous (controlled internal attention): Mindful breathing; deliberately listening to a person; Looking for keys.
 Exogenous (captured attention) ‘Diana’, ‘look shiny things’ & ‘Free money!’

Multi-tasking & task switching: Often is 2+ endogenous attentional demands

Question 11

Controlled processes:

Answer 11

doing something for the first time.

New skills: learning to ride bike, to drive, to fly. Talking in a loud room; solving math problems.

Question 12

Automatic processes:

Answer 12

A (mental) act is automatic if:
 It occurs without intention
 It occurs without awareness
 It does not require attentional resources

Example: Writing your signature, changing gear, run with the dog.

Question 13

Three types of Memories

Answer 13

Episodic: something you ‘remember’. E.g. Participating in Rio carnival
Semantic: something you ‘know’. E.g. Rio is not the capital
Procedural: something you ‘do’. E.g. knowing how to samba.

Question 14

Visual and auditory memory

Answer 14

Visual “iconic” memory - e.g. sparklers forming an image in your mind.
Lasts for less than a second.
Auditory “echoic” memory. E.g. “huh?” and then you realise what they said. Lasts for a few seconds

Question 15

STM

Answer 15

 Requires rehearsal to hold things in memory
 Recency effect
 Lasts ~30 seconds

Question 16

LTM

Answer 16

 Better for distinctive items
 Stored for later retrieval
 Primacy effect
 Lasts infinitely

Question 17

primacy and recency

Answer 17

People tend to remember words at the start and end of the list better- the primacy (first words) and recency (last words) effect.

Question 18

rehearsal hypothesis

Answer 18

Peterson and Peterson (1959)

 Remember the list of words, and then count down from 801 in threes.
 The counting prevents rehearsal - known as retroactive interference
 The recent words are pushed out of STM

Question 19

Von Restorff Effect

Answer 19

 Easier to remember things that don’t belong - the disruptancy effect
 Distinctive items are more easily recalled

Question 20

The visuo/spatial scratch pad

Answer 20

 Provides a place to jot down 3D pictures

Question 21

The Central Executive

Answer 21

1. Maintain attentions to goal-relevant information
2. Decide on how best to achieve present goals based on this information
3. Inhibit inappropriate automatic responses (habits)

Question 22

Goal directed behaviour

Answer 22

Immediate goals: Obtaining food, shelter, warmth, etc.

Distant goals: Passing exams, exploring the world

Question 23

Frontal Lobe Dysfunction

Answer 23

1. Central executive thought to reside in the frontal lobe
2. Damage to this area changes your behaviour
3. Phineas Gauge (1823 - 1860)
    Couldn’t control emotions; was like a child who could not focus on his goals

Question 24

Long Term Memory

Answer 24

Episodic Memory: remembering. E.g. Brazilian holiday
Semantic Memory: knowing facts. E.g. Rio is not the capital
Procedural Memory: knowing how to do things. E.g. knowing how to samba

Question 25

Declarable Memory:

Answer 25

You could describe these memories in words such as your episodic memory and semantic memory.

Question 26

Procedural Memory:

Answer 26

A skill. I.e. I can’t describe exactly how to write my signature (but I could show you).

Question 27

Ebbinghaus (1885)

Answer 27

 Studied the process of learning new information in a quantitative manner
 Found that there was no difference in the amount of time rehearsed per day, it only mattered how much he rehearsed on the first day; this was known as the saving effect.
 Rehearsals on day 1 was not enough to remember on day 2, but, the more time spent on day 1 meant the less time required for day 2.

Question 28

Consolidation

Answer 28

 The time it takes for the brain to change itself and set a memory in place.
 Synaptic changes are required, involving the hippocampus.
 Can be disrupted by a bang on the head (retrograde amnesia; failing to remember what happened in the lead up to the injury).

Question 29

Spacing Effect (instead of Chunking or Rehearsal)

Answer 29

 Cognitive scientist Harry Bahrick (1993) conducted a nine-year experiment where his family learnt Spanish.
 He concluded that studying was more effective when it was spread out over time as opposed to studying the same amount of content in a single session.

Question 30

Depth of Processing

Answer 30

 Shallow: perceptual characteristics (i.e. “is this in capital letters?”)
Medium: auditory characteristics (i.e. “does this word rhyme with train?”)
 Deep: having to understand the meaning of the word (i.e. “does this word work in this sentence?”)
 As processing deepens, retention improves

Question 31

Self- Reference Effect

Answer 31

 Symons and Johnson (1997)
 How well do these adjectives describe the person next to you, vs how well to they describe you?
 Self-referential effect: the more related it is to yourself, the better the retention

Question 32

Visual Imagery

Answer 32

 Helps to increase retention; most useful for remembering lists and complex ideas.

Question 33

To encode information in LTM:

Answer 33

 Rehearse, elaborate and make information personally relevant.

Question 34

Context and Memory: Context specifity Godden and Baddeley (1975)

Answer 34

Manipulate context of retrieval and encoding.

Extrinsic context:

 Learn a word list on land or under water; tested on land or under water

Results:

 Those trained and tested on land and water = good performance
 Those trained in one environment and tested in the other performed poorly.

Context Speciality

 Better recall when training and test contexts match- retrieval cues.
 Forgetting often due to a context change between training and test (i.e. a butcher man on a bus).

Question 35

Different Contexts of learning

Answer 35

 The environment
 Mood/ mental state (depression)
 Drugs (i.e. alcohol)

Question 36

Two ways to test Memories

Answer 36

Recall:

 free response test; write down words you see in the study list.
 “What was on the list before?”
 Not as specific retrieval cue; not present on test

Recognition:

 forced choice test (multiple choice)
 “Which of these words were shown in the list before?”
 Easier because the word is the specific retrieval cue for the learned item

Both measures of declarative memory (includes semantic and episodic forms, but not procedural).

Question 37

Priming

Answer 37

 Image of rabbit primes the rabbit interpretation, not the duck interpretation
 It is “implicit memory” - it is not deliberate remembering
 Implicit tests will not ask you about your memory previously; will just assess whether some prior exposure to a stimulus changes your performance - if so = performance primed. Examples: anagram tests.

Question 38

Subliminal Messages

Answer 38

• Experiment by Vicary (1957)
   Conducted an experiment of images of popcorn and coke through the movies to see if concession sales increased.
   He claimed that it did but was later debunked.

Question 39

Amnesia

Answer 39

 Damage to hippocampus and temporal lobes results in amnesia
Retrograde amnesia: failure to remember things that happened before damage
Anterograde amnesia: failure to remember things after damage (more permanent)
E.g. Clive Wearing

 Syphilis damaged temporal lobe and hippocampus; can only recognise wife now
 Has less than 30sec memory

Relevant brain structures: hippocampus, temporal lobe (medial)

Question 40

Intact Memory in Amnesia

Answer 40

 Amnesia patients and controls studied a list of words
Tested in 3 ways:
 Recall (which words can you remember?)
 Recognition (was this word on the list?)
 Word fragment completion (complete this stem: Wh___ [whale/whisk])

Question 41

Experiment by Graf et al (1984)

Answer 41

 Amnesiacs retain performance on word completion but had significantly lower results on the other two tests compared to average person
 Patients with amnesia can’t consciously remember their past, but their past does affect their performance on indirect “implicit” tasks.
 Amnesia memory spared: digit span (STM), placing piano (procedural).

Question 42

False Recall (memory for imagined events)

Answer 42

 Memory can fail by forgetting things that happened or by remembering things that didn’t happen.
 Relationship between imagination and memory use the same type of architecture - they interact with each other; it is impossible to perfectly distinguish between an imagined event and a memory of an event.
 Can also have false memories of entirely unexperienced events - false episodic memories.
E.g. Elizabeth Loftus
 Participants were given four narratives of being lost in malls where 3 were real and the last one was not.
 When asked about the last one, 25% of people agreed and provided embellishing details of a non-existent event.

Question 43

Vividness Heuristic

Answer 43

 Real events that we remember instead of imagining have more detail and vividness.
 E.g. “Imagine last Monday vs next Monday”.
 Help to separate memory and imagination.