Lecture pre midterm Flashcards
(104 cards)
1
Q
Structuralism
A
Wundt, 1879, and Tichner, 1898
2
Q
What did structuralists study?
A
Components of conscious experience
3
Q
Functionalism
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James studied the function of mental processes
4
Q
Sir Francis Galton
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Looked at individual differences in abilities and standardized tests
5
Q
Gestalt Psychology
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- Studied perceptual wholes/complexes, and the laws of perceptual groupings
- Wertheimer, Koffka, and Kohler
- Studying people’s subjective experiences of stimuli
- Focus on how people use and impose structure in their mental organizations
6
Q
Behaviorism
A
- Mid 1800s-mid 1900s
- Started at the same time as Gestalt Psychology
- Wanted to explain observable stimuli and observable reactions, rejected introspection and unobservable processes
- Theories included classical conditioning and operant conditioning
7
Q
Watson
A
- Behaviorist
- Banished all mental language from use
- Largely negative contribution to psychology
- Believed that scientific study of mental processes was not possible
8
Q
Skinner
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Argued that mentalistic entities should not be excluded from study, but did not believe in the existence of mental representations
9
Q
Classical conditioning
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- mechanisms = associations
- Pavlov
10
Q
Operant conditioning
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- mechanisms = associations and motivations
- Thorndike
11
Q
Inadequacies of Behaviorism
A
- Does not include attention, planning, strategies, imagery
- Does not include perception, memory, concepts, language phenomena
12
Q
Cognitive Revolution
A
- During and following WWII, there is a new series of psychological investigations
- This is mainly a rejection of the behaviorist assumption that mental events and states were beyond the realm of scientific study or that mental representations did not exist
13
Q
Human factors psychology and military needs
A
- Come into play around 1940s and 1950s
- Human factors engineering =
A new field established at this time, engineers quickly found they needed to design equipment to suit the capacities of the people operating it - Person machine system- the idea that machinery operated by a person must be designed to interact with the operator’s physical, cognitive, and motivational capacities and limitations
- People are described as limited capacity processes of information
14
Q
Chomsky
A
- Revolution in language in 1950s and 1960s
- Said linguistics is the part of cognitive psychology that studies language
- Wrote an article on behaviorism in which he explained how one of the main tenets of behaviorism did not explain language or the acquisition of language
- Generative grammar
15
Q
Generative grammar
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Underlying people’s language abilities is an implicit system of rules, collectively known as generative grammar (Chomsky)
16
Q
Paradigm
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- Body of knowledge structured according to its proponents consider important and what they do not
- Intellectual frameworks that guide investigators in studying and understanding phenomena
17
Q
Mental representations
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- Dominant theoretical approach
- They are about something- like data structures (ex. concepts, rules, images, analogies)
- Mental computational procedures are similar to computational algorithms i.e. rules (inputs to outputs)– (ex. deduction, search, comparison, matching, retrieval, rotating)
18
Q
Computers as a research tool
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Computer science gave psychology a tool- much easier to investigate research hypotheses
19
Q
Computers as a competitor of humans
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Ai and robotics
20
Q
Computers as a model of humans
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Computer simulation and the computer metaphor
21
Q
Aaron Beck- what is the main goal of CBT?
A
To modify the dysfunctional cognitive processing
22
Q
Information Processing Approach
A
- Says that we are in some ways like a computer, have inputs and outputs, inputs are our senses— take in stimulation through senses, transduced to neural information that becomes cognitive at some level
- Not all stimulation becomes part of the cognitive system.
- Once we receive stimulation we either ignore/lose/drop, or attend to it and process it further, relate it to other information we already have
- Mostly studied in vision and audition, but there is a growing interest in proprioception
- Processing occurs serially in discrete stages
23
Q
Parallel Distributed Processing aka Connectionism
A
- A competing theoretical approach
- Denies the importance of mental representations
- Inspired by brain composition and complexity
- Each unit is connected to other units in a large network, and has some level of activation at any given time, and the exact level of activation depends on the input to that unit from both the environment and the other units to which it is connected
- Processing occurs in parallel- at the same time
- Individual neurons do not transmit large amounts of symbolic information, instead they compute by being appropriately connected a large number of similar units
- Some connectionist model-based experiences can model some human behaviors
24
Q
Fodorian Modest Modularity
A
- Refers to the idea that a mind might be composed of innate neural structures that have evolved distinct established developed functions
- Input systems are modular—bottom-up, automatic categorization and generalization of specific stimulus
- Systems involved in perception and language
- Central functioning NOT modular—top-down, conceptual, theoretical, less automatic and more deliberate application
- Systems involved in belief fixation and active reasoning, are not modular
9 features:
o Domain specificity: modules only operate on certain kinds of inputs—they are specialised- restricted to one subject matter
o Informational encapsulation: modules need not refer to other psychological systems in order to operate- restriction on the flow of info into the system
o Obligatory firing: modules process in a mandatory manner
o Fast speed: probably due to the fact that they are encapsulated (thereby needing only to consult a restricted database) and mandatory (time need not be wasted in determining whether or not to process incoming input)
o Shallow outputs: the output of modules is very simple
o Limited accessibility
o Characteristicontogeny: there is a regularity of development
o Fixed neural architecture.
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Massive Modularity View
- Carruthers and Robbins
- Claim that domains within central cognition are also modular
- Define modules as functionally specialized cognitive systems that are domain-specific and may also contain innate knowledge about the class of information processed.
- Evidence: loss of the capacity to name things while retaining the capacity to name non-living things, loss of the capacity to recognize faces but not other objects and vice versa, loss of the capacity to acquire language but difficulties in spatial reasoning
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Dual Systems- History
- Art Reber coined implicit vs. explicit learning- and some of the traits of both systems
- Coined the term cognitive unconscious- processes that occur outside of consciousness
- Experiments on artificial grammars-- subjects learned to correctly categorize "grammatical" strings even though they could not explain correctly how they did this
- Found that implicit functions have low variability across individuals and are independent of intelligence
27
Wason selection task
- Frankish and Evans
- Logic task involving turning over cards
- Subjects choices appeared to be based on a matching bias, but their explanations were about the instructions to verify or falsify the conditional statement
- Concluded that matching bias was an unconscious determinant of responding
- Eventually posit Type 1 and Type 2 processing
- Argued the main reason for dual processes is that non logical biases seem to complete with logical processes
28
Challenges to embodied cognition
Principles of EC are:
1) co-opted from other sources, such as evolution
2) vague, such as model building is not feasible
3) trivially true, offering little new insight
4) nonsensical
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Embodied cognition
- A challenge to current views of cognitive science
- Definition: Cognition is embodied when it is deeply dependent upon features of the physical body of an agent, that is, when aspects of the agent’s body beyond the brain play a significant causal or physically constitutive role in cognitive processing
- Behaviors taken as evidence for thinking since you can’t directly observe evidence
- What to be explained is not just what people are thinking, but more about they do, opens up the possibility that what the person brings is part of the dynamic system
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Body as a constraint
- An agent’s body functions to significantly constrain the nature and content of the representations processed by that agent’s cognitive system
- Ex. A spiral staircase, would want to use my body to explain what it is
- Ex. People’s whole body changes if you ask them to talk about certain topics
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Body as a distributor
- An agent’s body functions to distribute computational and representational load between neural and non-neural structures
- Ex. Is motor knowledge an example of this? ---Playing the piano- planning has to occur in a central way- not enough msec to execute the sequence while "actively" thinking about it
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Body as a real time regulator
- An agent’s body regulates cognitive activity over space and time, ensuring that cognition and action are tightly coordinated
- Ex. Role of gesture in speech, McGurk effect (Illusion- what we see overrides wat we hear)
- Ex. Role of body in speech errors
33
What is perception?
A process that connections sensory information to thinking, via attention
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Template matching theory
- Involves storage of entire patterns- Would require stored pattern templates and a matching theory
- Every object, event, or other stimulus that we encounter and want to derive meaning from is compared to some previously stored pattern or template
Issues with this view:
- Too many variations of most easily recognized patterns- we would need to have stored an impossibly large number of templates
- We can recognize things we don’t have a previously stored pattern for
- People recognize patterns as more or less the same thing, even when the stimulus patterns differ greatly (i.e. even in different people’s handwriting, we can read the same word and derive the same meaning
35
Feature Analysis Approaches
- Feature analysis approach = a visual pattern is characterized mentally by a representation, which is a list of features
- We store features- features are the parts that are searched for and recognized
- When we see something new, we inspect it to see the features that it has, and compare the features of the new item with the features that we already have stored in memory, recognition of a whole object, then, depends on recognition of its features
36
Distinctive Feature Analysis Approach
- Each object that we have stored as a list of features- that list of features is special, distinctive, specific
- A visual pattern is characterized mentally by a representation of where the features are
- Ex. Identifying features of specific letters, whether a letter has symmetry, open, closed—maybe this can help us explain or predict how people are able to identify and discriminate letters
- Features must be “necessary and sufficient” i.e. “distinctive”
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Evidence for distinctive feature analysis approach
o Reaction time studies- most easily done on a computer
- Same-different judgements of letter pairs
- How long does it take people to make a judgement about whether these are the same or different letter- takes longer for people to distinguish between P and R than it does for G vs W—it makes sense because P and R share more features in common than G and W
o Error pattern studies
- Stimuli presented very briefly, only get to process some of the information (100 msec)
- Less time, and the more distinctive the items are, the faster you can pick up on the distinctive features
o Another variation- give people 1 letter, ask them to name or identify it
- Tasks:
- 1) name a letter, errors in identification are tabulated
- 2) same-different judgements of letter pairs, errors in judgement are tabulated
- This is actually a similar phenomenon in speech, i.e. on the phone you may mess up hearing v and b, d and g, the sounds that are the most similar are the easiest to mess up
38
Perceptual Learning
- Gibson
- As you are exposed to things in your environment that you want to understand and differentiate, you start to notice more and more specific features, and differentiation of patterns is learned
- Perception changes with practice---You will become increasingly attuned to specific features, which leads to expertise
39
Primal Sketch
- Marr
- Visual perception starts by constructing three different mental representations, or sketches
- Posited the idea that there are stages in perception: first extracting features, then noticing groupings of features, then putting groupings together to be able to recognize objects (complete primal sketch level)
- The primal sketch and the 21/2 D sketch rely on bottom up processes, and then expectations construct the final 3D sketch or visual scene
- Larger patterns are derived from groupings of surfaces and common areas, i.e. configural information
- Influenced by Gestalt psychology (the whole is more than the sum of it’s parts)--- which also described different ways in which we can group elements to determine a pattern
40
Biederman’s Recognition by Components (RBC) Theory
- Objects are built from object primitives called “geons”
- Uses a type of featural analysis that is also consistent with some of the Gestalt principles of perceptual organization
- Perceiver must determine how a visual object is segmented into geons
- How do people go from knowing nothing about an object to being able to recognize it?
- Two key components of the decision of object recognition:
1) locating concavity
2) deciding which edge information remains invariant across different viewing angles/which Gestalt features are present (invariant properties are like curvature, parallelism, etc.)
- With the information you gained up until this point, the components of the figure, the geons are determined
- This set of components is matched with object representations in memory
- When a match is found, the object is identified
41
Prototype matching/Prototype Theory of Recognition
- Attempts to correct some of the shortcomings of both template matching and featural analysis models
- A prototype is an idealized representation of some class of objects
- Recognition can still employ elements, features, or other levels of perceptual processing (i.e. geons) but elements are not a definite set, not individually necessary and jointly sufficient
- A prototype is a set of highly probably elements, i.e. a shoe- they each differ from one another, but some features are more important than others in defining as a shoe, some shoes are better examples than others at what a shoe is
- In reality, the features in our world are not so cleanly related, they are more related in a way we think of as probabilistic
42
Bottom-up/data-driven processing
- The perceiver starts with small bits of information from the environment and combines them in various ways to form a percept
- Computational and driven by the stimulus features
- Driven by pattern, the incoming data, using the data that came in through your senses
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Top-down/conceptually driven processing
- The perceiver’s expectations, theories, and concepts guide the selection and combination of the information in the pattern-recognition process
- Influenced by the context and higher-level knowledge
- Context suggests we should expect some part to be a certain way
- Context in which a pattern of object appears sets up certain expectations in the perceiver about what will occur
- Can be applied to: distinctive feature patterns, prototype/probabilistic feature patterns
44
The Interactive Activation Model of Perceptual Processing
- A system that includes both bottom-up and top-down processing
- Several levels of processing, each concerned with forming a representation of the input at a different level of abstraction (i.e. features, letters, and words)
- Memory does not depend on how long material is stored or on the kind of storage in which material is held, but on the initial encoding of the information to be remembered- Processing occurs at several levels at the same time
- The contribution of each level of processing may differ depending on the quality of the stimulus (bottom up info) at a given time
- If the bottom up info is particularly degraded, more top-down may be involved-
- Ex. Ambiguous patterns---- Bottom up stimuli are the same if you can see it both ways- but using top down processing, can re-interpret the pattern coming through your eyes and perceive in more than one way*
45
Attention
- Attention = executive control of working memory as measured by specific tasks
- Many different meanings:
- Altertness or arousal
- Conscious processing/awareness
- Orienting reflex or response (even when people are asleep)
- Spotlight attention and search
- Mental resources
- Supervisory attentional system
46
How is incoming perceptual information processed?
1) We are constantly confronted with more information than we can "pay attention" to
2) There are limitations in how much we can attend to at any one time
3) We can respond to some information with little, if any, attention
4) We may engage in different attentional strategies
47
Early Selection Filter Model
- Broadbent
- Attention is allocated before pattern recognition occurs
- A selective filter chooses one message based on physical characteristics to attend to for short-term memory
- Information filtered out is lost
Problems with this model:
Ex. Cocktail Party Phenomenon
Ex. GSR Shadowing Study
48
Treisman’s Attenuation Theory
- Her response to Broadbent, a model of selective attention
- Instead of considering unattended messages as being completely blocked out before they can be processed for meaning, their “volume” is “turned down”, so some meaningful information in unattended messages might be available, even if it hard to recover
- People only process as much is necessary to separate the attended from the unattended message
- How much of a stimulus is processed depends on how easy it is to process-----Perhaps because the system is primed, or the task us automatic, or it is chosen to reach a higher state of processing
- Some pattern recognition comes before conscious attention**
- Allows for many different kinds of analysis of all messages, whereas filter theory allows for only one kind of analysis. Filter theory holds that unattended messages, once processed for physical characteristics, are discarded and fully blocked, while attenuation theory holds that unattended messages are weakened but the information they contain is still available
49
Kahneman’s Spot Light Theory
- Another model of selective attention, but might be too simplistic
- Explains that there is a single pool of attentional resources that can be freely divided among multiple tasks
- Attention is a mental resource that is limited and takes mental effort, and uses up some capacity
- But there is a processing continuum- tasks very in degree of required processing, some information is easier to process than others (the more complex the stimulus, the harder the processing, and therefore, the more resources engaged)
- Not all complex mental tasks require awareness---i.e. typing, driving, and some innate abilities
- One effect of being aroused is that more cognitive resources are available to devote to tasks, but the level of arousal depends on a task’s difficulty, so arousal thus affects our capacity for tasks
- Ideas relate well to current theories of Working Memory and Dual Systems
- You might not see the same effect in the Treisman study if you were shadowing in a language you didn’t speak, or speak well
50
Automatic vs. Controlled Processes
Automatic:
- Occurs without intention, without a conscious decision
- Can occur obligatorily when a specific eliciting stimulus is present
- Once initiated runs to completion
- Not open to conscious awareness or introspection
- Consumes little if any conscious resources
- (Informal) process operates rapidly, usually within 1 sec
Controlled:
- Only occurs with intention, with a deliberate decision
- Controlled from initiation to completion
- Open to conscious awareness and introspectin
- Drains the pool of conscious attentional capacity
- (Informal) slow, taking more than 1-2 secs for completion
51
What causes the Stroop effect?
- Response competition
| - - Overlearned-automatic name that word reading response competes with less familiar name that ink task
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Treisman's FIT Theory
- Treisman revises her previous approach of the Attenuation Theory---
There are 2 types of attentional processing:
- pre-attentive, which is distributed = parallel, automatic, effortless, applies to single features, “easy” tasks
- post-attentive, which is focused – serial, controlled, effortful, slow, hard
- We perceive objects in two distinct stages: in the first, we register features of objects, such as their shapes or colors, and is preattentive or automatic, and in the second, attention allows us to “glue” the features together into a unified object
- Overall, Treisman argues that individual features can be recognized automatically, with little mental effort, but what requires mental capacity is the integration of features, the putting together of pieces of information to recognize more complicated objects
Evidence for this model:
Ex. Visual search tasks
Ex. Illusory Conjunction task
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Limitations to Treisman's FIT Theory
Can't explain:
- consciousness
- automaticity
- inhibition
- role of expectations
- limits on capacity
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Neisser's Schema Theory
- Top down processes (expectations) will guide selective looking, and some information never gets selected because we have decided in advance that it is not important
- We don’t filter, attenuate, or forget unwanted material, we just never acquire it in the first place
- Ex. Inattentional blindness
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Types of Constraints on Attention
- Effects of mood on attentional strategies
- Individual differences- age
- Disorders
- --- i.e. brain damage to to right parietal hemisphere (inattention blindness)
- --- i.e. ADHD
56
Iconic memory
- Visual sensory memory
- Sperling
- See how much info we are able to take in at a glance by presenting info for a very short period of time and control what comes before and after a stimulus
-
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Visual Persistance
- The apparent continuation of a visual stimulus past its physical duration
- These phenomena are illusory
These phenomena seem to arise from some sort of "visual buffer" that holds visual information for a short time
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Echoic memory
- Auditory sensory memory
- Sound is inherently temporal
- Auditory buffer has been called auditory sensory memory or echoic memory
- Did the same experiment for iconic memory but for auditory
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Working Memory (as revised by Baddeley and Hitch)---2001
- Revised STM into WM to account for information that resides in WM in visual and verbal codes
- WM is not unitary, but a multi-component system
- Emphasized active nature of WM
- WM is a workbench where the function is to hold several bits of unrelated info simultaneously so that it can be handled, combined, and transformed
- If 2 tasks make maximal use of the same component of WM, they cannot be performed successfully together
- If two tasks make use of different components, it should be possible to perform them as well together as separately
60
Episodic Buffer
- Time-limited storehouse
- Manipulates information from previous experience (episodes in life)
- Allowing interpretation of new information from previous experience
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Central executive
- Domain general attentional system
- Supervises and coordinates a number of subsidiary slave systems
- Currently under extensive reconceptualization by other researchers
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Reconceived Working Memory System
- Stores are now-- temporarily activated representations in long-term memory, links or pointers to existing representations in long-term or secondary memory
- Attentional control-- moves representations from inactive to active memory, maintains activation above a threshold, de-selects, inhibits, or suppresses unwanted representations
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Retention duration
If not rehearsed, information is lost from STM in as a little as 20 seconds
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Decay
The encoded mental representation of the to be remembered information that is not rehearsed will break apart within about 20 seconds
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Interference
- Some information can displace other information, making the former hard to retrieve
- Both decay and interference can cause forgetting in STM
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Do we search for information in STM in a parallel or serial manner?
- Parallel = look at everything at the same time, serial = comparisons are done one at a time
- Self terminating search = stops when a match is found
- Exhaustive search = even if a match is found, you continue looking through the other items in the set
- Sternberg (1966) found that we most likely retrieve information from STM in a serial, exhaustive search**
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Patient HM
- 27 year old epileptic patient, had structures on both sides of the brain removed, including most of the hippocampus, amygdala, and some adjacent structures
- Lost ability to transfer new episodic memories into LTM
- No longer form memories of new events = anterograde amnesia
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Concept
- A mental representation of some object, event, or pattern that has stored in it much of the knowledge typically thought relevant to that object, event, or pattern
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Category
- A class of similar things (objects or entities) that share one of two things: either an essential core, or some similarity in perceptual, biological, or functional properties
70
Conclusion specificity
People will choose the argument that isn’t too broad, i.e. bluejays and falcons are more similar to birds than animals
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Premise diversity
People will choose the argument that IS broader, i.e. if lions and aardvarks have a quality, then all animals are more likely to have it, whereas if lions and tigers have a quality, harder to say all animals have it because lions and tigers are more similar than lions and aardvarks
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Premise monotonicity
People will choose the argument with more premises- i.e. all birds are more likely to have something if 3 birds have it over than if 2 birds have it
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Exemplar view of concepts and categorization
- Asserts that concepts include representations of at least some actual individual instances, based on items that person encounters
- People categorize new instances by comparing them to representations of previously stored instances = exemplars, category judgements would be based on similarity of newly encountered items to a previous one
- Concept = mental exemplar
- Like the prototype view, explains people’s inability to state necessary and defining features: there are none to be stated
- Typical instances are more likely to be stored than less typical instances, or to be more similar to stored exemplars, or both
- In trying to retrieve info about a typical instance, finding very similar stored exemplars is relatively fast
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Challenges to the Exemplar View
- Issues with this view from the book:
- Too unconstrained- fails to specify which instances will be stored as exemplars and which will not
- Does not explain which exemplars will come to mind at the time to categorization
- Reber conducted experiments on this issue—people are given strings of letters to learn, and found that participants that learned letter strings that followed grammar made fewer errors than did control participants learning random letter strings
- Reber concluded that when complex underlying structures exist (ie grammar), people are better off memorizing exemplars than trying to figure out what the structure is, primarily because participants who try to guess the structure often include or invent incorrect rules or structures
- Issues with this view from lecture:
- How could exemplar type meanings combine in sentences? i.e. when we picture a dog jumping for a ball, what dog are we picturing?
- What about abstract words? Where is the “thing” ex. Love, proof, attempt
- People actually do know general meanings for some words
- Know definitions for bachelor, grandmother
- Recognize new members of newly learned categories that are never before encountered
- Exemplar view says you don’t have featural knowledge--- only a holistic picture****
- Ex. The exemplar of Trump
- All words or descriptions that pick out the same exemplar should have the same meaning, but president doesn’t equal married to Melania Trump, doesn’t equal Hilary Clinton wanted to be…
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Classical View of Concepts
- Concepts are mental bundles of features, holds that the features represented are individually necessary and collectively sufficient; the belief that all examples or instances of a concept share fundamental characteristics or features
- Singly necessary = every member must have that feature
- Jointly sufficient = everything that has all those features must be a member
- Dates back to Aristotle and was the dominant view in Psych until 1970’s
- Assumes that concepts mentally represent lists of features
- Assumes membership in a category is clear cut
- Implies all members within a category are created equal; there is no such thing as a better or worse triangle
- Work by Rosch and colleagues showed that people do consider some examples of birds better examples than others
- Categorization compare items encountered to stored set of features
- Membership is all or nothing, in or out, Likely examples of classical concepts are: Bachelor, even number, grandmother, nitrogen
Evidence for the classical view:
- People can list the features for some words and use those concepts in an all or nothing fashion
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Challenges to the classical view
- Definitions are difficult to specify for every word
Ex. Maybe some concepts work like a family resemblance
Ex. Games
Ex. Chairs
Typicality effects- some items seem to be better examples of concepts than others, some examples are even iffy (ie birds)
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Prototype View of Concepts
- A concept is a mental bundle of features = prototype
- -Features are neither necessary nor sufficient
- -Features in the prototype are the salient ones, the ones that are true of most instances, highly probable
- -Instances of a concept that exhibit most of the features in the prototype are called prototypical
- Ex. Robins are prototypical birds, they embody the prototype bird, the birdy features are: small beak, feathers, wings, flies, claws on feet, lay eggs, small head to body ratio
- Denies the existence of necessary and sufficient features lists (except for a limited number of concepts like math), instead regarding concepts as a different sort of abstraction
- Prototypes of concepts include features or aspects that are characteristic--- typical of members of the category rather than necessary or sufficient
- Family resemblance structure of concepts- metaphor for the prototype view of concepts, ie Smith family
- The more characteristic features an instance of a concept has, the stronger the family resemblance between that instance and other instances, and therefore the more typical an instance it is
- A prototype is some sort of abstraction that includes all the characteristic features of a category, and the prototype may or may not be an actual instance of the category, categorization involves comparing features of instances encountered to the prototype
- Membership is a matter of degree---Graded/probabilistic/guzzy, Rather than all or nonw
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Evidence for the prototype view
- When asked for examples, people will produce typical examples first (Armstrong’s research)
- How much do fig vs. olive vs. apple represent a fruit?
- These types of typicality ratings are reliably made for many everyday categories
- Ex. Vehicles, car and truck are typical, scooter and sled less typical, and elevator and skis atypical
- People can make quicker true/false judgements about typical objects- reaction time studies
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Challenges to the prototype view
- Fails to capture people’s knowledge about the limits of conceptual boundaries- i.e. why are a Chihuahua and a Great Dane categorized together
♣ If concepts have fuzzy boundaries- where will the categories stop?
♣ Rosch argued some constraints around different categories come from the environment itself
♣ Boundaries between categories come from both cognitive processors of information but also from knowledge about the way the work works: certain patterns of attributes or features occur in the world, and others don’t
o Typicality ratings
♣ The typicality of an instance depends to some extend on context (i.e. are you seeing a robin in a neighborhood or in a barnyard)
o Armstrong et al found additional problems with typicality ratings
♣ Participants rated the typicality of instances of natural concepts and well-defined concepts
♣ People both said that 3 was a more typical odd number than 57, and said that odd number category is well defined and absolute
♣ The task is flawed, at least for discovering the underlying representation of concepts
♣ Previous research results were taken as evidence that a concept has a prototype structure and NOT a definition
♣ Typicality results were also obtained for odd number, female, bachelor, etc.
♣ Typicality results do not rule out definitions
o Are some features more important than others? How do we mentally weigh the phrases we use?
o How could prototypes work in word phrases?
Ex. Pet fish--- how do we jump to gold fish?
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Hybrid View of Concepts
- People can have different types of mental structures for different concepts
o Even number, nitrogen
- People can have more than one mental structure for the same concept
o Ex. Grandmother- Jane Fonda vs. Betty White, who is a more typical view of a grandmother, concepts have more than 1 structure for the same concept
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Essentialist heuristic
- Things that look alike do tend to share deeper properties, but not always
o A dolphin is more similar to a shark than a deer in many observable ways
o Yet dolphins and deer are both mammals because of internal properties backed by
biological theories
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Long Term Memory
- Stored representation of all that a person knows
- Without it we could not function as human beings
- Integral to our sense of self
- Has "unlimited" capacity
- Long-lasting
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Implicit or procedural knowledge
- Memories that allow for doing or learning
- Skills that may not require or involve conscious recall
- Motor and cognitive skills such as:
riding a bike
perceptual scanning
pronouncing words
dispositions towards certain behaviors
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Explicit & declarative knowledge
- Information that we can state
- Images (visuospatial, auditory, etc.)
- Concepts/categories
- Propositions (facts/general knowledge)
- Episodic memories (memories of experienced events)
- Autobiographical memories (organization of personally experienced episodes)
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General event representations
- AKA Scripts
- Organized sequences of events, central characters, and roles into a larger event category
- Generalized-- no time, place, person tags
- Allow us to make predictions
Help us to comprehend life, texts, fill in missing information
- Culturally variable
86
Pattern of recall of autobiographical memories
- Memories of recent past = 1 hour to 17 years ago, different ages perform similarly
- Memories of early childhood = up to age 7, different ages perform similarly (little remembered)
- Memories of remainder of lifespan = S function with big "reminiscence" bump ages 10-30, WHY?
Is it due to maturation and environment?
87
Schacter's 7 sins
```
Types of FAILURE:
- Transience
- Absentmindedness
- Blocking
Types of DISTORTION:
- Misattribution
- Suggestibility
- Bias
- Persistence
```
88
Chunking
Get information into meaningful units or chunks, usually though massive repetition/overlearning
89
Relations
Connect new information to stored information, ex. activate existing semantic networks
90
Relational hierarchies
Group information into broader and broader categories, ex. your class outlines, concept maps
91
GER's, how do they improve LTM?
sequence episodic information temporally
92
Anterograde amnesia
- Often damage to the hippocampus
- HM and Clive Waring have transience problems
- Can't form new LT memories
- There are other structures involved in LTM's
93
Meta-memory
Beliefs about memory
| - Lead to behaviors that affect learning, etc.
94
Three types of meta-memory
1) Beliefs about how memory works
2) Monitoring current state of own memory system
3) Self-referent beliefs
95
Memory Accuracy Details (MAD) belief
(false) The more details a memory has the more accurate it is
96
Burnt in Memory (BIM) belief
(false) Highly emotional experiences give rise to highly accurate memories
97
Age of first memory (AFM) belief
(false) Believing that other people have earlier first memories than you do
98
What does the research show on Flashbulb memories?
o Research is still ongoing with mixed results
o Emotion charged events make flashbulb memories very accurate (Brown & Kulick, Pullemer)
o Highly emotional reaction led to poorer memory for some information (Stephen & Schmidt)
o Rehearing and retelling account for the better memory of same information (Neisser)
o Most evidence suggests that flashbulb memories only appear to be more accurate, and suffer from same distortions as other memories***
99
McGurk Effect
The McGurk effect is a perceptual phenomenon that demonstrates an interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception.
The 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.
The visual information a person gets from seeing a person speak changes the way they hear the sound
100
Apperceptive Agnosia
- Form
| - Can see the outlines of objects but have a hard time matching one object to another or categorizing an object
101
Associative Agnosia
- Can match objects or drawings and copy drawings, but can't readily name the objects they have seen and drawn
102
Feature analysis approach vs. distinctive feature analysis approach
Feature analysis approach- a visual pattern is characterized by a representation that is a list of features
Distinctive feature analysis approach- a visual pattern is characterized by a representation of where the features are
103
Evidence for distinctive feature approaches
- RT studies with same different judgements of letter pairs
| - Error pattern studies where stumuli are presented briefly
104
Modularity
- Domain specificity: modules only operate on certain kinds of inputs—they are specialised
- Informational encapsulation: modules need not refer to other psychological systems in order to operate
- Obligatory firing: modules process in a mandatory manner
- Fast speed: probably due to the fact that they are encapsulated (thereby needing only to consult a restricted database) and mandatory (time need not be wasted in determining whether or not to process incoming input)
- Shallow outputs: the output of modules is very simple
- Limited accessibility
- Characteristic ontogeny: there is a regularity of development
- Fixed neural architecture
