Cognitive Psychology: Attention and Memory

Failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere. The stimulus is not attended to or perceived at all. It conforms to predictions made by load theory.

Cognitive tests where participants are shown multiple images and asked to report any changes they notice across the images.

Failing to notice changes in the environment, often occurring in changes that seem obvious such as discontinuities in film and television.

<p>The process by which features such as color, form, motion, and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The theory that scene perception takes place in two stages: 1) Preattentive stage: features are extracted from objects automatically and with no effort or attention required. 2) Focused attention stage: features are combined into whole, coherent objects (or ideas), where attention is needed. Binding errors occur in this stage as we use information from the preattentive stage to make assumptions about a stimulus.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Properties from different objects shown in Treisman and Schmidt's FIT tests are incorrectly placed together.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The process involving retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer present.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The model proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin that describes memory as a mechanism that involves processing information through a series of stages, including sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Active processes supporting encoding that can be controlled. There are two types of control processes: 1) Maintenance rehearsal: minimal retention benefits. 2) Elaborative rehearsal: optimal retention strategy where we relate new information to previously encoded information.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Information for memory is retained for a brief moment with a slight delay. This is the initial stage in the memory process. There are two types: 1) Iconic memory: brief sensory memory of things we see. 2) Echoic memory: brief sensory memory of things we hear.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Brief sensory memory of things we see. It is responsible for persistence of vision. For example: trails of light following a sparkler.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Sperling designed a paradigm to measure capacity and duration of sensory memory through an array of letters shown in a quick flash as well as a high tone played for the top row of letters, a medium tone for the middle, and a low tone for the bottom row. Sperling manipulated the two reports, where one group had a full report and others a partial. 1) Full report: attempt to report all letters. 2) Partial report: attempt to report letters from a single row depending on the audio tone played. - Partial report was manipulated as some participants were shown a delay from when they were shown the letters to when they had to respond, and a higher delay meant a lower accuracy of response. Overall, the full response condition showed the least accuracy, and partial report showed accurate responses until a delay was added, proving the existence of sensory memory capacity.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Peterson and Peterson measured the duration of short-term memory through asking participants to read three letters and a number, then counting backwards by threes, where delay duration before recall was manipulated. The test became more difficult to perform after many trials, so responses increasingly became less and less accurate. After 18 seconds of counting, participants performed at about 12% accuracy (compared to 80% accuracy after 3 seconds of counting) suggesting the length of ST memory.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>A series of numbers is shown to participants and they are asked to recall the numbers. In each trial, the length of numbers increases. The estimate was about 7+/-2, displaying the capacity of numbers in ST memory.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Researchers were interested in knowing if the capacity for numbers in ST memory (see above) is different than shapes. In change detection tests, images with shapes are shown and participants must describe if there were any changes.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Chunking based on previous memory is only accurate when the information being encoded follows the &quot;rules&quot; of the items in memory, so for example if youre trying to remember a play in football but it is inconsistent with the rules you are less likely to encode it.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Ongoing debate of the nature of ST memory- some evidence shows that the capacity of ST memory is fixed, while others believe that complexity of stimuli determines its encoding based on how much &quot;space&quot; it takes up. Ex: being shown squares of different shapes vs cubes with different sides being shaded vs Chinese characters will all be remembered differently based on familiarity to such stimulus and how difficult their changes are to spot.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>A newer understanding of short-term memory which involves the active and dynamic manipulation and processing of information across time (unlike how STM was believed before to be a passive storage system).</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The basepoint of WM which proposed 1) Mental operations could be performed on information held in conscious awareness independent to the LTM 2) Performance under dual task conditions work just as well as single task as long as the two tasks engage different domains of information (use different cognitive resources)</p> Signup and view all the answers

<ol> <li>Phonological loop: verbal and auditory information 2) Visuospatial sketchpad: visual and spatial information 3) Central executive: controls the flow of information and allocates needed components and pulls from LTM</li> </ol> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Measuring the ability to differentiate between information-bearing patterns and random patterns with the presence of distractors. Think about nback experiment.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Component of working memory that deals with verbal information.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<ol> <li>Phonological store: storage with limited capacity which holds information for a few seconds (remembering something you hear). 2) Articulatory rehearsal process: supports rehearsal, preventing information in phonological store to decay. Not always effective (ex: repeating a number over and over).</li> </ol> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The finding that serial recall of visually presented words is worse when the words are phonologically similar rather than phonologically dissimilar. Implies that we encode things more often phonologically than visually.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Memory for lists of shorter words is better than memory for lists of longer words since longer words take longer to rehearse and to produce recall, thus making you more likely to forget items from the list.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The part of working memory that holds and processes visual and spatial information.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Evidence towards the visuospatial sketch pad where participants were told to determine if two shapes presented at different angles are the same or not. In order to compare things we must manipulate them in WM to figure out if they are the same. Overall, a greater difference in the angles led to a larger reaction time in responding to the two images.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Acts as an attention controller in the working memory system: 1) Controls the flow of information to other components. 2) Focuses, divides, and switches attention. 3) Controls suppression of irrelevant information.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Perseveration: the continuation or recurrence of an experience or activity without the appropriate stimulus, or repeating an activity when it is not accomplishing our goals. This goes against the ideas of the CE as it would believe to diminish perseveration with time and practice. Black box: CE is compared to a homunculus, meaning that it describes an important system but lacks proper description, evidence, and testing (therefore too theoretical).</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>A third component of the WM which accounted for the idea that information that seems to be larger than our ST memory capacity is still remembered and used in WM (ex: someone telling you a 20 minute story and being able to remember how it started). We can believe that this component acts as a temporary storage place for information that is not immediately needed but will be retrieved from the visuospatial sketchpad or phonological loop soon.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Responsible for processing incoming visual and auditory information. Monkeys without prefrontal cortex have difficulty holding information in WM, as demonstrated with a delay response task.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>An archive or permanent storage of information about past events and knowledge learned, working closely with STM/WM. Storage stretches from a few moments ago to as far back in the past as one can remember, with more recent memories tending to be more detailed.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Studies by Murdoch displayed the distinction between ST and LT memories with a graph. Participants are shown a stimulus list and wrote down all of the words they remember. 1) Primacy effect: memory was better for stimulus presented at the beginning of the test- explained by participants having more time to rehearse earlier items (or experienced less interference). 2) Recency effect: memory was better for stimulus presented at the end of the test- explained by STM still being active while being tested (could eliminate this effect with a delay).</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Refers to the form in which stimuli is presented, which takes important implication. In both STM and LTM, visual, auditory, and semantic coding can be used.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>STM: if you remembered the pattern by representing it visually in your mind. LTM: visualing an image youve seen in the past, not always accurate.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>ST: representing the sounds of letters in the mind just after hearing them. LT: repeating a song you have heard many times before, over and over.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>ST: placing words in an STM task into categories based on meaning (basically making sense of what you are experiencing). LT: recalling information about something relevant to you in detail.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Coding interference which occurs when old information interferes with new information trying to be learned. Ex: learning French in elementary school then struggling to learn Spanish in high school.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Participants were presented w/words related to either fruits or professions; created proactive interference; interference is attributed to the meanings of the words; release from PI occurs.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Contributes to the understanding of the involvement in the hippocampus in encoding long term memories. Understood to be a double dissociation between STM and LTM: when someone has damage to one, the other still works (not to a full extent).</p> Signup and view all the answers

<ol> <li>Explicit: conscious memories, including episodic and semantic (both have a double dissociation) 2) Implicit: not conscious memories, including procedural memory, priming and conditioning</li> </ol> Signup and view all the answers

<ol> <li>Episodic details can be lost, leaving with only semantic (comes with time). 2) Acquiring knowledge may begin as episodic and fade to semantic. 3) Semantic can be enhanced if associated with episodic detail.</li> </ol> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Autobiographical memory: memory of a specific experience, including semantic and episodic. Ex: remembering a date (episodic) and the street address of the restaurant it was in (semantic). Personal semantic memory: semantic memories that have personal significance. Ex: remembering the place you went on the date and how it made you feel.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<ol> <li>Remember response: if a stimulus is familiar and the circumstances under which it was encountered can be remembered. 2) Know response: if a stimulus is familiar but one doesn't remember experiencing it before.</li> </ol> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Unconscious memories. There are three types: 1) Procedural: skill memory, or memory for action. 2) Priming: prior exposure to stimulus changes a subsequent response (ex: learning from environment). No memory of when or where it was learned. Can still be learned when there is damage to LTM. 3) Conditioning: a response from continuous exposure to stimulus (like pairing a neutral stimulus with a reflex).</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Expertise in a skill may result in it being carried out with a degree of automaticity that the individual performing the action has little to no recollection of what actually happened. Memories blend together or become unimportant/don't stand out.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The phenomenon that repeated exposure to novel stimuli increases liking of them. Propaganda effect: We rate statements as true if we've seen them before.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Represents another example of behavior mediated by procedural memory. Classically conditioned responses can affect behavior without conscious awareness, but at the same time retrieval leads to activity in explicit memory.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Act on and affect information in STM and WM. There are two types: 1) Maintenance rehearsal: repetition of stimuli that maintains information but does not transfer into LTM. 2) Elaborative rehearsal: using meanings and connections to help transfer info into LTM.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>There are three levels of processing: 1) Shallow processing: little attention to meaning, focusing on physical features, resulting in poor memory. 2) Deep processing: deep attention to meaning resulting in better memory.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>A fallacy in which the argument repeats the claim as a way to provide evidence- assuming whatever method produces better memory performances must have done so because it involved deeper LOP (explaining memory performance based on LOP).</p> Signup and view all the answers

<ol> <li>Linking words to yourself. 2) Visual imagery. 3) Generating information. 4) Organizing information. 5) Relating words to survival value (emotional response). 6) Retrieval practice.</li> </ol> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Learning through testing yourself is more effective than rereading, as shown by Roediger and Karpicke's study of retrieval.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Cued recall: 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, typically words or phrases. Free recall: a procedure for testing memory in which the participant is asked to remember stimuli that were previously presented. Cued recall is better as cues lead more to LTM as they may connect to arbitrary items, memories, facts, or related ideas.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>phenomenon of remembering something better when the conditions under which we retrieve information are similar to the conditions under which we encoded it. Ex: studying in the same room you will write the exam in.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>If learning is associated with a particular internal state (like mood or feelings), better memory if state at encoding matches state at retrieval. Ex: feeling excited when you encode a fact and feeling excited when you try and remember it.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The idea that memory is likely to transfer from one situation to another when the encoding and retrieval contexts of the situations match. Matching what you want to do with the skills being learned (do practice tests for an exam). Ex: the format of class content being similar to the format of tests/assessments --&gt; higher retrieval.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Transforming new memories from fragile state to a more permanent one (when actively trying to learn something and when experiencing sensory experience). 1) Synaptic consolidation occurs. 2) Systems consolidation: gradual reorganization of circuits in the brain (slow process).</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Retrograde amnesia: loss of memory for events prior to trauma. Larger for more recent memories prior to event. Anterograde amnesia: loss of memory for events after trauma. Sometimes both can occur at the same time.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Consolidation model in contrast to standard model (which believes hippocampus is only needed in initial encoding), which proposes that the hippocampus remains involved in the retrieval of some memories in the distant past. Hippocampus --&gt; conducts neural pathways --&gt; coordinates neural firing for memories. Evidence in Viskontas study indicates the continued involvement of the hippocampus for retrieving episodic memories, but not semantic. Overall, standard and multiple trace models may both be present in consolidation and retrieval, but hippocampus may just be more involved episodically.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Participants over 40 were asked to recall events in their lives, and found memory is high for recent events and for events that occur in adolescence and early adulthood (10-30)- called the reminiscence bump, which is usually when the most important, life changing events occur, causing more autobiographical memories to be encoded.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Memories associated with circumstances surrounding shocking, highly charged important events. Typically involves contextual content of an episodic nature- what were you doing, who were you with, what did you feel. Ex: where you were when 9/11 happened, not what actually happened.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The repeated viewing or hearing of an event can cause us to make mistakes about our own memories of it. The frequency in which the event is talked about makes it highly familiar, which may inflate confidence in the accuracy of the associated memory.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Source memory: the process of making attributions about the origins of memories. Source monitoring error: misidentifying the sources of the memory. Cryptoamnesia: unconscious plagiarism for another's work due to lack of recognition of its original source.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Memory based on knowledge gained through experience, which often includes information that is implied by, or is consistent with, the to be remembered information but was not explicitly stated.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Knowledge about some aspect of the environment (ex: bird- feathers, talons, wings, beak).</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Incorporating misleading information into one's memory of an event. Loftus and Palmer: did an experiment on misinformation effect by showing participants a video of a car crash and ask participants to estimate the speed at the cars at impact when manipulating the describing word used when asked: &quot;How fast were the cars doing when they... smashed/collided/bumped/hit/contacted&quot;</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Can be very convincing as people tend to assume we see and remember things accurately- but the constructed nature of memory and perception means our memory is often misleading, incomplete, or untrue. Errors in eyewitness testimony can occur due to attention and arousal --&gt; attention becomes narrowed by specific stimulus (like threatening stimulus at the crime scene). There can also be error as a result of feelings of familiarity (false positives).</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Studies show that a false suggestion can grow into a vivid, detailed, and believable personal memory. Liu study using optogenetic reactivation of hippocampal neurons to activate fear based memory in mice by delivering shocks, which in return inferred a retrieval of memory based on freezing behavior.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>MDMA assisted psychotherapy evaluated as a treatment for PTSD and propanolol (beta blocker) used a tool to disrupt memory consolidation for traumatic experience. With studies of propanolol, a relevant mechanism may be allowing patients to retrieve traumas in a less heightened way to allow them to reinterpret them in a much cooler, rational way. This suggests the fragility of memories, as shown in effects seen before in source monitoring errors.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Conceptual knowledge: knowledge that enables us to recognize objects and events and make inferences about their properties. Concept: mental representation used for a variety of cognitive functions. Categories: examples of a particular concept. Categorization: the process where things are placed in groups called categories.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Help us deal with novel information acting as &quot;pointers of knowledge&quot; or labels/placeholders. Parallels with schemas.</p> Signup and view all the answers