Cognitive Psychology Midterm

Question Distribution

• The midterm is worth 100 points and accounts for 30% of the final grade
• The exam includes multiple-choice and short-answer questions distributed across several topics
• Introduction: 5 multiple-choice questions
• Visual and auditory/speech perception: 11 multiple-choice questions and 1 short-answer question (worth 5 points)
• Attention: 9 multiple-choice questions and 1 short-answer question (worth 5 points)
• Memory (short-term/working; long-term): 15 multiple-choice questions and 2 short-answer questions (working 1 worth 4 points and long-term 1 worth 6 points)
• Mental imagery: 10 multiple-choice questions
• There are a total of 50 multiple-choice questions, each worth 1.6 points, totaling 80 points
• There are 4 short-answer questions, totaling 20 points

Introduction

• Two philosophical approaches are nativism (nature) and empiricism (nurture)
• Behaviorism focuses on observable behavior and contributes significantly to contemporary research methods
• The cognitive revolution criticizes the dominance of the behaviorist approach
• Psychology needs to incorporate mental functioning to fully understand human behavior
• Research techniques have been developed to infer the characteristics of mental processes from observable behavior
• The computer serves as a model for the human mind
• A new trend, big data, addresses the replication/reproducibility crisis
• Cognitive processes are active, efficient, accurate, and interrelated
• Cognitive processes rely on both bottom-up and top-down processing (e.g., visual perception)

Visual Perception

Factors Affecting Perception

• Sensory adaptation involves not perceiving stimuli that remain constant
• Attention can be affected by inattentional blindness and change blindness
• Language affects perception via the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, where language structure influences how speakers perceive and think

From Eye to Brain

• The primary visual cortex (V1) is retinotopic, retaining the spatial arrangement of light on the retina

Visual Perception - Pathways and Disorders

• Visual processing pathways are bi-directional (feedforward/bottom-up and feedback/top-down)
• The jumbled word effect is an example of the word superiority effect
• Visual processing is highly modular
• Modules include V4 and Achromatopsia, and V5/MT and akinetopsia
• Ventral ("what") and dorsal ("where"/"how") streams exist
• Visual agnosia involves disorders of object recognition, impairing the "what" stream
• Apperceptive agnosia is a type of visual agnosia
• Integrative agnosia involves failure to integrate parts into wholes in visual perception
• Associative agnosia is a type of visual agnosia
• Optic ataxia impairs the "where"/"how" stream, resulting in poor visual guidance of reaching

Visual Perception - Object and Face Recognition

• Selfridge's (1959) pandemonium model includes features, cognitive demons, and a decision demon
• The pandemonium model gets complicated for three-dimensional objects
• Recognition by components (geons) makes verifiable predictions about which viewpoints should be difficult to recognize objects
• The prototype is an average/standard representation of the object in memory within template matching
• Bruce and Young proposed a model of face recognition in 1986
• The fusiform face area (FFA) is important for face recognition
• Prosopagnosia is a deficit in facial recognition

Auditory/Speech Perception

• Speech does not consist of discrete phonemes with clear word boundaries
• Speech sounds smear into each other
• Coarticulation is the process of overlapping phonemes in the speech stream
• Lack of invariance exists, meaning an unreliable relationship is present between a phoneme and the acoustic signal
• Context affects speech perception through top-down processing
• Phonemic restoration is filling in missing segments of the speech stream with contextually appropriate material
• Multimodal perception involves the modality appropriateness hypothesis and visual prepotency effect (conflict resolution)
• The McGurk effect can be explained with /ba/, /da/, and /ga/

Attention

Selective Attention

• Dichotic listening technique is a method used in studying attention
• Early selection and late selection are theories of when attention filters information
• Automaticity can impact attention
• The Stroop task/effect demonstrates automaticity
• Congruent and incongruent trials are used in the Stroop task
• Controlled and automatic processes impact attention

Spatial Attention

• Spatial attention can be likened to a spotlight metaphor
• Attention can be influenced by exogenous orienting/shift (attention capture) and endogenous orienting/shift
• Non-spatial attention is object-based, time-based, and can result in attentional blink
• Pseudo-neglect is over-attention to the left side of space
• Neglect involves failure to attend to stimuli on the opposite side of space to a brain lesion
• Neglect typically results from a right-sided lesion, leading to inattention to the left side of space

Attention - Divided and Sustained

• Structural limits occur when interference between tasks is more likely if they share processing resources
• A central bottleneck happens when doing two things, alternating attention between the two tasks
• Distracted driving has been studied by Strayer and Johnston (2001) and Just, Keller and Cynkar (2009)
• An fMRI study shows a decrease in brain activation associated with driving when listening to someone speak
• Sustained attention has to do with vigilance
• The Mackworth clock task is used to study vigilance
• Vigilance decrement can be caused by overload or underload

Memory

Sensory Memory

• Sensory memory includes iconic and echoic memory
• Sensory memory registers a large amount of information
• Sensory memory typically decays quickly

Short-Term/Working Memory

• Short-term/working memory has a limited amount of information
• Retention span and digit span are measures of short-term memory capacity
• Rehearsal and chunking improve short-term memory
• Pronunciation time and word length affect it
• The serial-position effect is related to short-term memory
• Primacy and recency effect
• Working memory not only stores information temporarily but also manipulates it
• It is an alternate version of short-term memory
• Baddeley’s model includes the phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and episodic buffer
• The central executive is the "working" component of working memory
• the N-back task is used to assess working memory

Long-Term Memory

• Long-term memory includes the distinctions episodic and semantic memory
• Retrograde and anterograde amnesia affect long-term memory
• Memory changes across the lifespan
• It is affected by infantile amnesia (not a memory disorder) and the reminiscence bump (many first-time events occur during this period, so distinctive)
• Flashbulb memories are detailed, vivid memories
• Flashbulb memories are subject to distortions and inaccuracies but confidence remains high
• Consolidation theory and forgetting affect long-term memory
• Retroactive and proactive interference play a role in long-term memory

Encoding and Retrieval

• Craik and Lockhart proposed levels of processing
• More meaning-based handling of information leads to better encoding of that information
• Craik and Tulving (1975) investigated levels of processing through visual, auditory, and meaningful processing
• Transfer-appropriate processing involves matching the tasks/cognitive processes
• Deeper processing at encoding does not always result in better retrieval
• Matching the encoding and retrieval tasks results in better retrieval, shown by Morris et al. (1977)
• The encoding specificity effect is about matching conditions/contexts (environmental surroundings) and internal states

Imagery

Overview

• Mental imagery is exclusively top-down in nature, knowledge driven
• Mental imagery is not directly observable

Mental Rotation

• Shepard and Metzler (1971) studied mental rotation
• Larger rotations take more time
• Gender differences exist in cognitive abilities for mental rotation

Cognitive Maps

• Estimating the distance between two known points is often distorted by:
  • Number of intervening cities
  • Category membership
  • Landmark effect, a general tendency to provide shorter distance estimates when traveling to a landmark, rather than a non-landmark

Imagery - Synesthesia and Coding

• In synesthesia, synesthetic responses can be elicited by concepts as well as percepts
• Paivio’s dual-coding theory includes imagens and logogens
• Paivio’s study (1965) used paired-associate learning and concrete/abstract stimuli
• An analog code deals with perception vs. language
• The propositional knowledge hypothesis suggests knowledge about the world is stored in memory in the form of propositions (images are epiphenomenal, by-products of something else)
• Mental rotation supports analog-coding

This exam covers key concepts in cognitive psychology, including perception, attention, memory, and mental imagery. The midterm consists of multiple-choice and short-answer questions. Topics range from philosophical approaches like nativism and empiricism to behaviorism.