PSY270 Cognition Test 1 Key Terms (2024) - PDF

PSY270 – Cognition Key Terms and Key Concepts, F2024 When names/dates appear on this list, you are expected to know what they did and when. If you see authors’ name and a date (e.g., Treisman and Gelade, 1980), you should know what that work says, as discussed in lec...

PSY270 – Cognition Key Terms and Key Concepts, F2024 When names/dates appear on this list, you are expected to know what they did and when. If you see authors’ name and a date (e.g., Treisman and Gelade, 1980), you should know what that work says, as discussed in lecture (you don’t need to read the paper). If you’ve been doing the WPQs, you have a good sense what exam questions look like; make sure you understand the concepts and can apply them to situations. Few if any exam questions will test rote memorization. Lecture 1 Mind: in cognitive psychology, the mind is seen as a complex and logical system that allows us to perceive, interpret, remember, and interact with the world. It is a dynamic information processing system. Information: (in a cognitive psychology context): information is the data or knowledge that is processed in the brain. Information involves any sensory input, mental representations of this input, and how the brain organizes, interprets and stores. It is viewed similarly (anecdotally) to how a computer operates. This involves encoding, storage, retrieval, attention, and perception. Information is everything from the light that hits your eye to my ability to recognize my notes on this page. Sensory input: information being perceived and processed by our information systems. But also “how does language work?” Attention: The “feature glue” that brings sensory information together into undertsanding. Information overload: there is a limit to how much we can process at a time. This refers to information overload or the concept that there is a capacity limit we are not able to surpass. So how to de choose what to process? Attention is how we deal with all the information. Memory: once attention has selected information (either overtly or covertly) how do you keep it? Access it? Is it accurate? This plays into working memory, short term memory and long term memory. Information manipulation: Edwin Smith Medical Papyrus: ancient egyptian medical records on treatment for head trauma/head injury. First of its kind to describe diagnisis and treatment in a scientific manner instead of a magical manner. First to associate brain to behaviour. 1500BCE. Abu Ali Sina (Avicenna): The Book of the Cure: mind-body connection. Healing the mind through knowledge and reflection. Hasan Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen): father of modern optics that studies how light reflects off objects and enters the eye, rejecting the belief that the eyes emit rays that allow for vision. Emphasis on experimentation and observation, laying the groundwork for the scientific method. The Book of Optics: (1011-1021 CE), groundwork on behaviour of the two eyes, relfeciton, refraction and anatomy of the eye. Gustav Fechner: closer to the 19th century; this guy related physical stimuli to the perception and sensation they produce. Aka how our mind experiences the world. Elmente der Psychophysik: relationship between sensory input and our sensation. Measured how increasing input intensity influences perceived intensity. Psychophysics: a branch of psychology that studies the relationship between physical stimuli and our perceptions and sensations. It aims to quantify our perception of sound, sight, touch, taste, by measuring responses and testing thresholds. Franciscus Donders: how long does internal computation take? He measured response time and how long it takes someone to see a prompt, decide what to respond, then respond by clicking a button. Detection vs Selection: detection is being aware of a stimulus, and selection is actively focussing or choosing to focus on a target stimulus. Ex. looking at a room (detection) and locating phone charger (selection). Wilhelm Wundt: 19th century experimental approaches to studying the ‘black box’. He introduced introspection where people are asked to think about their thought processes and how information is processed in the brain. There are many issues with introspection as you cant verify the information, it vaires from each person, no way to actually access the underlying process, hard to articulate, therefore cannot be scientific. Introspection: “what information does the mind have” “how did I encode x into memory?” “how did I retrieve this information in memory?” the act of articulating cognitive processes by focussing in on your thoughts. Very hard to do- if not kind of impossible. Variability, verification (vis introspection): variability means that answers vary between subjects/people and verification refers to the fact that theres no way to verify what people are saying is accurate or reflects any truth about cognition. Opaque: no way to access underlying process producing introspective thoughts. Edward Bradford Titchner: structuralist guy; understanding what is in the mind instead of what its there for. Wanted to use introspection to achieve this knowledge. Structuralism: structure of the brain instead of function. Margaret Floy Washburn: first female PhD psych student (slay) very big on animal cognition and how movement is important for mental processes. Conscious vs Unconscious Cognition: cognition we can detect or be aware of vs processes that we are not capable of detecting or being aware of. For example its hard to be conscious of how you see vs being conscious of whether youre thinking about studying or laying in your nice warm bed right after. Ivan Pavlov: classical conditioning with the salivating doggos. US (bell) wont make dog salivate on its own. CS (bell) right before food US will lead to an association. Therefore CS bell will cause dog to salivate CR. Classical Conditioning: ^^^ J.B. Watson: not a fan of introspection. Instead we can predict and control behaviour. People are measured based on inputs and outputs and the internal mechanism doesnt matter as much. Lil albert with the rat :(( Behaviorism: psychological approach that focuses on the study of observable behaviors and the effects of the environment on behavior, emphasizing the role of conditioning and reinforcement in shaping actions. Operant Conditioning: has to do with rewards and punishments. Action is initiated by the organism and the organism learns from consequences of actions. B.F. Skinner: The behaviourist responsible for training all these rats^ very utopian guy who thought behaviourism could be used for the greater good. Black Box of Cognition: impossible to study, reach, or understand the mechanisms between input and output of the mind. Only stimulus and response can be observed and studied. Behaviorism and Childrearing: skinner’s air crib “Cognitive Revolution”: 1950s and 60s (hey big civil rights times too) focuses on information. Moving away from behaviourism. Ulrich Neisser: Claude Shannon: Dom Thomas Verner Moore: Edward Chase Tolman: used the rats in mazes experiment to argue for cognitive psychology. Rats in mazes: rats learned the layout of a maze without any reinforcement. Cognitive mapping/mental mapping. Colin Cherry: dichotic listening paradigm to provide evidence for attentional selection. Dichotic Listening: task involves headphones speaking two different messages in each ear. What happened to the behaviorists?: cognitive revolution is what happened. But they had a few nice comebacks after the 50s like broadbents perception and communication and reviews on behavioruism. Post WWII research on behaviour. Computational analogy: inputs outputs and the program. Mind as a computer. Inputs, Program and Outputs in the Analogy: the world, behaviour, and internal cognitive processes. Process models: this is broadbent’s model of selective attention. Process models aim to explain information moving between cognitive stages. Structural models: describe connections between diff areas of the brain and how they move from one area to another. Grounded in anatomy. Cognitive Psychology vs Cognitive Neuroscience: how can we study the inner working of the mind without access to the brain vs. how does the anatomy of the brain represent information. How does information move between brain areas. Biological plausibility: accepts that resources are limited, so theories and models cannot be too biologically expensive. Must be efficient enough to be biologically plausible. Electrophysiology: listening to the brain. Involves dropping microelectrodes near a neuron and listening to action potentials to see what that neuron will respond to. fMRI: measures brain activity by detecting oxygen and blood flow in the brain regions that are assumend to be active during stimulation. Great spacial resolution, not so great temporal resolution. EEG: electrodes along the scalp that measure brain activity. Great temporal resolution and not so great spacial. Neuronal selectivity: how neurons fire when a specific stimulus or type of stimulus is presented. Degree to which a neuron responds to particular features. Hubel and Weisel: Charlie Gross: monkeys’ neurons respond more to objects that look more like a hand than abstract hand-like shapes. Neuronal specificity: neurons prefer one particular stimulus. This is the idea that neurons are specialized. Population coding: each stimulus is represented by a large group of neurons. More neurons means more details but this is very metabolically expensive. Sparse coding: each stimulus is represented by a small group of neurons. Less metabolically expensive. → Why might the brain do one of the previous three (neuronal, population, sparse)?: MRI vs fMRI: anatomy vs activation or oxygenation where brain is active. Spatial and temporal tradeoffs: fmri great spacial lousy temporal and eeg great temporal lousy spacial. Lecture 2 Main points: Visual Perception, Part I Perceiving the world Object recognition Theories of visual representation Disorders of object recognition Computer vision and its failures Scene Gist: even when presented with a scene for a fraction of a second, you can pick up a lot of general information like how many people, what they were doing, where they were. Aude Oliva and Michelle Greene: scene gist girlies. What information do we need? What are the constraints? How much in the blink of an eye? 150-200ms Where you’re looking vs rest of vision? Visual field: 180-190 horizontal and about 130-140 vertical Fovea: centre of eye Periphery / Peripheral Vision: not blurry, your mind picks up on a lot of information to work with. Eccentricity Photoreceptors Photoreceptor density: lower in periphery but never zero. Great for low light conditions. Cone density in periphery Rods in fovea Visual Angle: how big something is on the retina. Its a measure that is size independent in the real world but consistent with size on retina. Blur and peripheral vision Peripheral + Foveal vision What do cones do?: process colour What do rods do? Process light Cone types: S-blue, M-green, L-red. Colourblindness: achromatopsia Deuteranopia: missing M-cones lerefore green man aka can’t see green at all or as well. Protanopia: missing L-cones. La’red therefore cannot see red Achromatopsia: no colour vision, which is super rare. Might happen in the case of brain injury. Identification: what objects are Localization: where they are Image segmentation: what part of the image belongs to one object vs another ex. Cat in a blanket, its hard to tell where the cat ends and the blanket begins. Invariant representations: do we have a unique representation in our brains of every possible way an item or object may be found? Occlusion: objects can be partially hidden behind others but we can still identify them Perceptual consistency: same object appears differently in many different states ex. Kitty sleeping or kitty playing. Illusory objects: think of the square that isnt actually there. We perceive the square in negative space but there's no square. Its just weirdly cut circles. Template theory: a template representation of every object in the world Perceptual vs Memory Representation Problems with template theory: super metabolically expensive Features in Visual Representation: seeing objects as a combination of features. Colour, orientation, size, line termination, curvature. This is why neuronal selectivity is important! That guy in front of the board- yeah shows how neurons react to features, Simple Cells: respond to oriented lines at a specific location on retina Complex Cells: oriented lines regardless of orientaitons. Preferred motion directions Hypercomplex Cells: respond to combinations of specific features. Adaptation: reduction in repsionse of a neuron bc its firing a lot n gets tired Habituation: ^^^ What did you learn from the adaptation demos? My neurons get tired of seeing the lines rotate to one side. When the demo stops, my brain sees lines moving the opposite way as residual activity. Aftereffects: ^^^ Low-level to High-level areas in brain: process simple features vs assembles features into object representations. Visual agnosia: inability to recognize objects but able to reach for them. Where pathway intact Prosopagnosia: inability to recognize faces, sometimes contextual information helps Allison Yamanashi Leib (2012): allison yamanashi found out that prosopagnostics understand emotion but dont know who people are. Fusiform Face Area (FFA): theres an area of our brain that specializes in responding to faces Nancy Kanwisher: ^^ Isabel Gauthier: showed that the FFA is not just the face area but an expertise area. Activation increases with practice. Greebles: weird green face-ish like objects that people became specialized in differentiating with pracitce. Specialization vs Expertise Balint’s Syndrome: can recognize objects but cant reach for them (dk where exactly they are). Algorithmic Bias: trained on google images. So limited in ability to recognize people from diff races or backgrounds. Other Race Effect for computers?: bad at recognizing people froma race they werent trained with. Timnit Gebru: ^^ found out that these systems dont work equally across races. Lecture 3 Main points Questions from Quercus Visual Perception, Part II Perceptual biases and assumptions Gestalt principles in perception Scene grammar Visual search Perception and Action Perceptual bias: the world is super complicated, so to save time and resources we make a ton of assumptions and biases based on previous experience to shortcut processing the world. Unconscious inference: we do these biases unconsciously Hermann von Helmholtz: likelihood principle think of squares one occulded by the other. Were unlikely to believe behind quare is a weird cut out. Gestalt principles: Proximity: objects close together appear to form a group Similarity: objects that are similar appear to form a group (share one or more features) Closure: perceive an object or shape as complete even when made up of broken lines Good continuation: something continues even if part of it is occluded Pragnanz: a complex object or shape is perceived as one continuous unit. Ex. olympic rings Perceptual assumptions: based on how we believe the world works Light from above: we know the sun comes from above, so when processing objects or shadows we assume thats where the light is coming from. Oblique effect: better at discriminating vertical and horizontal lines Face inversion: better at processing upright faces rather than upside down ones Thatcher illusion: inverted eyes and mouth looks normal on upside down thatcher but we notice how weird it is once its flipped Expectations in natural scenes: we make lots of assumptions on how the world works. Ex we wouldnt expect to see a cat driving a car. Semantic violations: object is in the wrong place but its technically possible for that object to be there. Ex, toilet paper in the dishwasher Syntactic violations: object is in the right context but in a way that is physically impossible. Ex. floating toilet paper in the bathroom Melissa Vo: studied this ig ^^ Scene grammar: what we expect to see in a scene based on our knowledge and previous experiences. We have a deep understanding if the world and what we expect to see. Visual search: task to search for specific item or thing. When is search easy? Single feature pop-out tasks are easy When is search hard? Multiple feature search tasks are hard because you need to scan the scene for multiple combined features. Pop-out search: is parallel using entire visual field. Feature-defined search Parallel vs Serial in search: using entire visual field vs searching through each item to find a match in combined features. Conjunction search How do RT slopes change as a function of what you’re looking for?: RT slope does not change for pop-out search but changes for conjunction/serial search as #of items/distractors increases. Present vs Absent search? Same pattern except in conjunction you need to work through about half the items to determine if its missing or not. Search in the world? Syntactic and semantic guide where you look for an item. Much harder in real life. Its harder to notice something when its somewhere you dont expect it to be. Think baggage search. TVST: two visual streams theory with the dorsal and ventral regions. Since there are the two conditions, agnosia and balints syndrome, then what and where must be processed by two diff systems. Mel Goodale and David Milner What vs Where Pathways: dorsal (dorsal fin), where? On top → where pathway (location). Ventral is at the bottom/base and is the what pathway (objects). Patient DF and what they tell us: temporal lobe damage, had impaired identification (what/ventral) but can still use objects (dorsal/where intact). Satisficing: you dont need complete information: some is enough Detection vs Localization: task hazard or not vs task left or right when driving. Lecture 4 Attention What does it mean to attend? How we describe attention  Historical theories of attention Modern conceptions of attention Failures of attention Attention: taken for granted as ‘everyone knows what attention is’ but the truth is that attention is hard to define and there are a couple theories to how attention works and exactly what it is. William James: dude responsible for overused quote about everyone knowing what attention is. He describes it as focusing the mind on a clear or vivid object in the environment or a train of thought. The problem of attention: attention solves the problem of the world having too much information to attend to all of it effectively. We save time and resources being able to attend to only the most important. Attentional capacity: the world is incredibly detailed (practically infinite information) and we can only process so much at once. Safety in numbers: we’re more likely to notice and see things when they appear where we expect them to. Ex. we’re more likely to notice a cyclist downtown because theres so many of them and its so common to see them there, and we are less likely to notice a cyclist on mississauga road because they are so rare. This became a problem for people tracking aircraft. Vigilance: sustained attention. We cannot attend to something indefinitely. Selectivity: Attentional selection: therefore, attention must be selection, and how you choose what to process when a ton of information is presented to you. Is attention under conscious control?: sometimes, it can either be volitional or involuntary. Colin Cherry: (1953) dichotic listening task guy makes a comeback, lets see if ill remeber his name this time. Dichotic listening paradigm: headphones with a different message in each ear. This found out that we cannot listen to both messages at once. When we choose one to focus on and are asked about the other, we cannot report much of the other message. Therefore, attention can be thought of as a filter to our awareness/detection. Broadbent’s early selection: broadbent wanted to answer the question of when attention filters information. He came up with the early selection model where attention chooses what to allow in for further processing, but when attention does not select something then all that information is gone and never processed. Attention as gatekeeper: in the early selection model, attention is an absolute gatekeeper of the information that makes it into your brain. Cocktail party effect: this is evidence aginst the early selection model since we know that when youre in a crowded room full of people talking. If you hear your name being called or mentioned somewhere, you notice it. Therefore, some of the surrounding information is still able to be noticed even when youre not trying to attend to it. Moray’s 1959 study: dichotic listening with a twist → they had to repeat what they heard in one ear and in the other it would say “you can stop now” at some point, and only 6% did. But if the other voice said “[name] you can stop now” 33% of the participants did. So something gets through even if its just their name. Late selection models: mkay so early selection clearly aint it so they came up with the late selection model (way to swing the pendulum). Late selection argues that everything gets in and is processed (detected and recognized) then attention decides what goes into memory. Still problematic since not every bit of information is detected. Aka we cannot report all of it. This is too much info now. Attenuation model: looks at attention like a filter instead of an absolute gatekeeper. Where not all irrelevant information is necessarily blocked, but is wweakened before detection and recognition. This accommodates the cocktail party effect since it shows that listening to one conversation does not block you from hearing your name in another conversation. Anne Treisman: (1964) the bhaddie that figured this out. Girlie had to save the cognitive psych bros. Shes also responsible for the feature integration theory (slay). Feature Integration Theory (FIT): attention is a feature glue! Brings features together into object representations in the brain. Role of attention in FIT: attention is how you recognize that this colour and this orientation together in one object defined the target in conjunction search. Therefore you need attention to know what something is. Guided Search: we have feature maps in our minds that guides where we place attention. Attentional cueing (Posner, 1980): an experiment where people are asked to hit a button as soon as they see the dot pop up in a square. Attentional cues and their results: when there is a valid cue, response time is faster, when there is an invalid one the response time is slower. When the valid cue is valid only 20% of the time then response time is still faster than neutral but slower than the valid cue sample. Pretty much when cue is 80% valid youre much faster at finding the dot whereas if its 20% valid theres barely an effect. The cue works due to attentional capture. It either draws your attention towards the target making you faster or away from the target making you slower. Overt attention: attending to where you are looking. This can be done bottom-up (the stimulus is salient/ eye catching so you look at it) or top-down (I want to look for my phone so im attending to it). Eye tracking and attention Salience: how attention capturing something is. Ex a sudden loud noise is very salient, hard to ignore, so you attend to it without thinking. Usually something that is different. Attentional capture: salient stimulus draws your attention towards it. Covert attention: attending to something in the visual field that youre not directly looking at so eye tracking would not be effective to study this type of attention. Example, walking and texting. Youre attending to the information beyond your phone to ensure you dont trip and that youre heading in the right direction. What can you attend to?: objects, places, colours Multiple Object Tracking: most people can track 2-3 moving objects pretty well using covert attention (watching moving objects all at the same time by focussing in the centre and relying on peripheral). Four or more is really hard. Attention in the brain: attending to a stimulus results in higher firing rates in the brain than when it is unattended. Does attention increase stimulation in the brain? Contralateral organization and attention: visual information from the right hemifield is processed in the left visual cortext and vice versa. Retinotopic mapping / retinotopy: items in a specific location in the visual field are represented in the same mapped out location in the brain. fMRI data shows us that brain has a map of the world represented in it, so early cortex area is activated according to the space attended to. Neural impacts of attention: more stimulation of neuron responsible for the specific space youre attending to. Molly Potter: still a scientist since 1930 (giving the Queen a run for her money), she questioned how fast we can process info. She did this by… RSVP Tasks: rapid serial visual representation. Showing a bunch of images/objects rlly quickly to see how much we can remember. She did this through 3 tasks (1) remember all photos then report whether they saw one in the set (2) show a target image then participants report when they see it (3) give a category then report members of that category. Limits of information processing: at 1fps we can do all 3 tasks pretty well. However at 4-8fps we get a lot worse. We are better at detecting at high speeds rather than recognizing. Attentional blink effects: theres a stream of letters and participant is asked to identify the white letter (what was the white letter) and the X (was there an X?). when white letter and x are close together, there is great detection. When there are a few letters in between, we miss the x, and when there is a large string of letters in between we get better at it again. This is called the attentional blink. Multitasking: we multitask all the time but there are penalties associated with the switch cost since we are switching between tasks. Switch cost: when multitasking were actually rapidly switting between tasks instead of doing tasks at the same time. This makes us slower and less efficient at each task compared to if we had full attention on it. Distracted driving: this is a problem when it comes to distracted driving as we are less efficient at reacting and making potentially life saving decisions when distractors are using up attentional resources. Cognitive vs Visual distraction: we still pay attention to the road, but doing something like having a conversation eats at attentional resources vs looking away from the road which makes us pay covert attention to the road. Very unsafe. We forfeit a lot of efficiency by doing this. Inattentional blindness: we can miss a lot in the world when we are not attending. Things can slip under our biases and heuristics. Ex. even professional radiologists miss a hidden gorilla in an image bc they are not expecting it to be there. Drew, Vo and Wolfe 2013: they did the radiologist vs gorilla exp. Radiologists only did slightly better than naive observers. Attentional tunneling: if we only attended overtly, we would have tunnel vision. Its much harder to hit a chicken when you have tunnel vision vs full vision. Therefore attention cannot be a total gatekeeper for awareness. We have a ton of awareness that is necessary and covert. Lecture 5 Short-Term / Working Memory Modal model of memory Sensory / Iconic memory Primacy and Recency Effects Evidence from Neurological Patients Baddeley’s model of Working Memory Capacity limitations of vSTM and mechanisms Memory encoding: we have limits on the amount of information we can incode at a time. Depending on the format, some information is easier to encode than others. Memory storage: Memory retrieval Encoding limits Encoding facilitation Memory capacity Modal Model (Atkinson & Shiffrin): Sensory memory (iconic memory): very large capacity but rapid decay and interference affects this. Think scene gist and how we can make sense of a lot of visual memory, but doing that again with an interrupting image would make it harder. Everything comes into sensory memory but we cant encode and represent all of it. What moves information into STM? ATTENTION! (its all coming together) selection is required to move representations from sensory to STM. Memory transfer: moving contents from STM to LTM for long term storage. Requires mental representaitons, connecitons to meanings, understanding, or rehearsal. Short-term memory [STM]: limited capacity and rapid decay, items need to be actively worked on to be retained. STM is awareness. Same as Working memory [WM] Memory rehearsal: repeating information over and over or actively working to recall information. Long-term memory: vast capacity, inactive and very durable storage of information. Must be retrieved into working memory in order to be used or for us to be conscious of it. Sperling (1960): tested capacities of sensory memory. Did this by presenting 16 letters and asking participants to either give a whole report (all letters. Very hard ppl usually only get like 30%), a partial report where a tone is immediately given to indicate row the person needs to remember (much easier, we get like 80% of these). And finally mask where 16 letters are shown, a static screen pops up and then youre asked to report (were also terrible at this. Just as bad as reporting the whole chart). What can we learn from Sperling?: we learn that STM has limited capacity since we are not able to store the information of all 16 letters in a durable enough way to work with them in STM. the partial report shows us that we have a vast capacity in sensory memory but is extremely brief (even half a second delay n we forget). And sensory memory is vulnerable to interference while STM isnt. Masking and iconic memory: masking throws us in for a loop. We got it then we dont. Its giving, goldfish memory- although pretty sure the goldfish brain thing is a myth and we’re just mean humans. Glanzer & Kunitz (1966): asked how timing, speed, and junk impact memory. They did this by providing a list of 15 words, then participants recall all that they can in any order. Primacy effect: we are more likely to remember the first words, letters, or images presented Recency effect: we are also more likely to remember the most recent words, letters or images. Middle is easier to forget. Effects of speed on primacy / recency: speed lessens the primacy effect but not the recency effect. Ig we get caught off guard in the beginning. Plus junk eliminates recency effect but ion see prof putting that into the key terms list :/ ~ Amnesias ~ Patient HM (Henry Molaison): a famous dude cause his brain is funky. Anterograde amnesia: difficulty forming new memories after incident, but can recall memories from before the incident. HM’s lesion: terrible epilepsy so doctors revoked his hippocampus privileges. What were HM’s limits? This made encoding new memories really hard or even impossible for HM. he could learn some proceidural memories tho. Imagine only remembering the good old days (assuming ofc they were good) but HM’s sweet smile tells me he was doing aight. - Also impacts on declarative memory as he couldnt tell you he learned new tasks/ couldnt recall learning them but got better at new motor skills and classically conditioned responses over time. Then we saw that a teeny bit of his hippocampus stayed in place so theres that. Plus frontal lobe damage :( Clive Wearing: 30 second memory dude! Every time he did something he felt like he just woke up or just started his day. He’s like perpetually spawning into life which must be so frustrating. He got his amnesia from encephalitis. What are Clive’s limits?: he can learn new proceidural memories BUT hugely impaired declarative memory. He can play piano and conduct but he cant tell you how to do those things or how he learned it. Knows hes in love with his wife even if he cant clearly remember his life with her :(. Patient KF: impaired working memory due to head injury. KF’s limits? Retreival from LTM is not impacted but cant rehearse or remember longer than 1 item. So very limited WM capacity but some learning is still possible albeit slower/harder. Case studies (HM, Clive, KF) x modal model: KF learning new long term memories even though his WM is so bad is hard to explain in terms of the modal model. Like how is info moving from STM to LTM if there aint STM? Also: HM had working STM but moving info into LTM was severely impacted. KF didnt have good STM but could still form some new LTM. So this model is imperfect. Baddeley’s WM model: so this guy attempted to make it better → he states that working memory is made up of the central executive and it’s subordinates: the visuospatial buffer and the phonological buffer. Visuospatial buffer: stores a limited amount of visual information for a short period of time. Phonological buffer: limited amount of audio information stored and rehearsed. Central executive: moves the information around Phonological similarity: similar letters may get confused for one another and make it harder to remember. Articulatory suppression: hard to store information in the phonological loop when saying distractor words like tryin to remember a sequence of letter while saying the word ‘the’ over and over. Interrupts the process of us ‘saying’ th eword in our head. Word length effect: longer words are harder to remember and rehearse. No matter the language. VSTM capacity limits: coloured squares demo; were much worse at remembering 7-8 coloured squares vs 3-4. VSTM capacity x fluid intelligence: theres a correlation between VWM capacity and fluid intelligence. Them folks who can work with 5-7 items at a time are smarty pants. Cavanagh and Alvarez 2004: really practical dudes that tested whether we can keep track of the same number of simple vs complex items. VSTM capacity x objects: we store the same number of complex objects but our memory of the details is limited. We can keep track of 3 kittens but may not notice that one doesn't have a tail. Working memory x EEG: this is where we hit an activation ceiling where it doesnt matter how many more items we add, stimulation of that region is limited by a ceiling. Adding mor items will not lead to more activation in the brain. Contralateral delay activity in vSTM: showed a bunch of coloured squares and only one side changes. BOLD activity in vSTM: there is a max capacity to what the brain can represent. Activity in the PPC tracks the number of objects maintained in vSTM. Therefore both fMRI and EEG see the activity capacity at 4+ items. Dual-task interference: therefore these two buffers pull from two different pools of resources. Audioverbal vs Visual distraction: verbal distraction makes negligible difference in visual tasks but remembering dot locations does. I.e calling while driving less impact but texting while driving is huge impact. Lecture 6 Long Term Memory, Part 1 Encoding into LTM Duration of Maintenance Rehearsal Levels of Processing Spacing effect Improving Retrieval Specificity, state dependent memory Maintenance rehearsal: how to best encode memory for retrieval later, does studying hard work? Craik and Watkins 1971: if studying longer and harder, then words with a long lag will be remembered easier. Does duration of rehearsal help?: they found that elongating the rehearsal period does not improve LTM recall. Elaborative rehearsal: Shallow processing: asked if the two words are in the same font (just what the words look like) Medium processing: asked if the words rhyme (something about the words feature but not meaning Deep processing: asked if words are synonyms (required to understand and connect the meanings of the words). Incidental learning: only asking the above three questions Intentional learning: asking the above three questions then telling participants to remember the two words for later. Gives them a reason to memorize. Generation effect: participants are better at remembering words they come up with themselves (maybe thats why prof wants us to always write down notes and definitions in our own words, bc of the generation effect). Summarization: synthesizing information in your own words involves deep level processing as I need to understand what the content means, how it develops, how it connects, and explaining it in a way that demonstrates I understand what I learned. Plus more generation opportunities through summarizing. Mnemonics: organizational framework that makes it easier for me to encode information and connect it to previous knowledge. First-letter mnemonics (acrostics): easy to remember sentence using the letters of what you need to remember. Ex. Roy G. Biv for the colours of the rainbow. Peg-word mnemonics: items held on things I already know like numbers or alphabet. Ex. one is a bun, two is a shoe. Maybe the way I remember La’red, green man, and sad blue is this? Journey mnemonics: incorporate items into a physical journey or path you are walking. Items in the environment help you remember concepts. Mental loci / mind palace: imagine a familiar space and begin to organize and place knowledge onto spaces in that room. Like I can pull all these scientist names off my shelf. Narrative mnemonics: rather than placing information in a space, adding an overarching story to all the material you learned will help you remember. This seems more my vibe ngl. And weve been doing this since the dawn of time so… Utility of labels in memory: labelling bodies of text is useful for understanding and remembering it’s content. Tried doing this for psy442 idk how much that helped. Hopefully im having better luck here. Its easier to remember ambiguous content when it has an identifying title. Mnemonic principles: 1. Minimize interference or distractors when making you mnemonics 2. Use much of what you already know to anchor new information and scafofld that on there. 3. Use imagery to enhance memory. Make things very vivid- esp with concepts youre having trouble remembering (like names). Impacts of interference^^ Imagery and memory^^ very useful! Effects of spacing: encoding is better when spaced over time in short distributed periods. Massed practice: encoding over long continuous period Spaced practice: encoding across multiple short distributed periods. Encoding specificity: memories encoded in the context in which they were learned Context reinstatement: going back to the same context where you learned to retrieve information State-dependent memory: your context and state (emotional/cognitive) matters for encoding. Mood and memory: matching mood from learning to retrieving helps. Matched state >mismatched state. Alcohol and memory: state matching also found but performance is really bad. Pot (cannabis) and memory: Utility of testing for encoding: 6th graders that took a practice test before the actual test and did better. Same with McDaniel who tested uni students. So making up my own questions and testing myself really helps. Bonus [how has Dr Wolfe described them?] Howl the Cat: a fat chonky boy full of love. Sophie the Cat: the one with extra toes.