Cognitive Psychology: Key Concepts - Week 1

Week 1

• A prominent theory suggests the recency effect in memory list recall involves constantly rehearsing recent items in short-term memory.
• Performing arithmetic after each word would eliminate the recency effect if this theory holds.
• Elena's theory of a parallel universe with undetectable alternate selves is classified as non-falsifiable.
• Processing that doesn't tax cognitive resources is automatic, while processing that consumes cognitive resources is controlled.
• The primary purpose of conducting an experiment in cognition is to test a cause-and-effect relationship.
• Bottom-up processes use sensory information from the environment; top-down processes use prior knowledge and expectations.
• Mental representations can be unconscious.
• Understanding whether learning a new skill followed a power or exponential function was important because the two functions had practical implications for how people should practice new skills.
• The method of subtraction is used to isolate a single stage of processing.
• A dependent variable is the outcome measured or observed in response to changes in the independent variable.
• An independent variable is the variable manipulated by the researcher.

Week 2

• The processes for pattern recognition are:
  • A sensory input is detected
  • Information is brought into the sensory register
  • A mental representation is created
• The recency effect involves recalling the most recently learned items because short-term storage has limited capacity
• Newer items quickly replace older ones in the rehearsal buffer.
• Mental rotation is NOT evidence for the phonological loop.
• In the retrieval phase of a recognition memory task, participants view an item and judge whether it is old or new.
• According to the word superiority effect, the letter B is recognized fastest and most accurately when it is part of the word TABLE.
• Ebbinghaus's hypothesis about forgetting is best represented by a large amount of water being dumped out right away, and then over time the rest of the water is slowly dumped out.
• Evidence that there are cells in the cortex that respond to lines at a specific orientation supports the feature model of pattern recognition.
• Responding faster to "monkey is a mammal" compared to "platypus is a mammal" best illustrates the typicality effect.
• Correctly judging a NEW item as NEW best describes a correct rejection.
• A potential issue with the feature comparison model of semantic memory was that it had no clear account for how the features were learned or what they would be for different concepts.

Week 3

• False memories in the DRM paradigm are due in part to breakdowns in controlled monitoring.
• Proactive interference is most encountered when trying to remember the last resume after having read many previous resumes.
• Mind wandering typically increases when a given task is challenging.
• Noticing many women pausing when a child yells "MOM!" is an example of the cocktail party effect.
• Memory errors and the seven sins of memory suggest that memories are largely reconstructive.
• A word that sounds similar to the actor's name is most likely to help if someone’s name is on the tip of your tongue.
• Performance on a task, according to capacity models of attention, does NOT depend on the amount of information that is filtered through during early selection.
• A shift from silence to speech is most likely to be detected in a shadowing task.
• A bright light is an example of an exogenous cue.
• Retrieval-induced forgetting mainly affects related but unpracticed items.

Week 4

• Spontaneous recovery refers to an animal who suddenly shows a previously extinguished conditioned response.
• Flashbulb memories suggest that confidence and vividness do not consistently predict accuracy.
• Morris, Bransford, and Franks demonstrated evidence for the transfer-appropriate processing principle.
• In both recognition tasks,memory performance is better for rhyming words.
• In the self-reference effect study, memory performance was worse in the structural condition than the meaningful condition.
• The generation effect suggests that Group B, reading clues and producing animal names themselves, would show better memory.
• In Pavlovian conditioning, neutral stimulus describes a sound prior to conditioning. Showing multiple suspects along with feedback is considered an unreliable method for collecting eyewitness testimony.
• Most learning occurs when students make high confidence errors and receive feedback.
• KITTEN would be remembered the best when KITTEN rhymes with MOOSE.
• Thorndike showed that chicks, cats, and dogs were able to escape out of puzzle boxes faster and faster with practice.

Week 5

• Item similarity in the exemplar model was done by calculating distance between faces in a multi-dimensional space, transformed through an exponential function.
• Exemplar models and MINERVA 2 are both instantiations of instance theory.
• Similarity is calculated to each MacDonald's and Campbell's in the exemplar model and summed to produce total activation and the higher activation is chosen as the classification.
• Prototypes can be acquired even if they have never been seen.
• The prototype approach is based on abstractions, and the exemplar approach is based on actual memories.
• Given a baby learning to say bottle consistent with a prototype model rather than a exemplar model that baby.
• The prototype model compares the features of the new object to every stored memory of bottles they have seen before
• "Things to take on a 21st birthday party in a tropical location" is an ad hoc category.
• One benefit of categorization is that it enables us to use prior knowledge to guide our functioning.
• Nosofsky (1991) found that the exemplar model provided a better account of the data than the prototype model for the classification task.
• Whether a face shown was a MacDonald or Campbell was the independent variable in Nosofsky's (1991) classification experiment.

Week 6

• The relationship between "eat" and "apple" reflects direct co-occurrence, and the relationship between "apple" and "food" reflects indirect co-occurrence.
• Savic et al. (2022) found that targets were identified faster when presented with related primes compared to unrelated primes, regardless of direct or indirect co-occurrence.
• Arbitrariness in language is best described as the connection between a word's form and its meaning being purely random.
• If "botha," "grib," and "cholu" are used to label objects A, B, and C, respectively, then "botha" refers to object A, "grib" refers to object B, and "cholu" refers to object C.
• A baby is shown a sequence of coin tosses for two coins, A and B. They have seen a coin toss before. If the result of the toss for coin A is consistently "heads" and coin B is more random, then, the baby is more likely to look towards coin A more than coin B.
• Skinner argued that language could be learned, and Chomsky argued that language depended on innate capacities. Mechanisms are listed of models in the list; Memorizing a dictionary of words and what they mean does not underlie with large language
• Language models use extremely large amounts of data as opposed to speech sounds.
• Words are represented by large language models as high-dimensional vectors (list of numbers) learned from the data.
• Arbitrariness is beneficial for language, because communication enables communication about abstract concepts.