Chapter 1 Flashcards
associationism
when two or more psychological stimuli become mentally ‘linked’ as result of prior experience eliciting one for the other
one elicits or stands for the other, like a name and phone number
activity in one circuit can trigger the other!
EBBINGHAUS & ARISTOTLE
Behaviorism
Mid-20th cent. school of psychological
Shift away from mental process/unobserved towards stimulus/observation–response/behavior. Assumes associations with reflex-mechanistic result
Tolman’s cognitive map in rat mazes–memory successful despite SR history
Garcia’s taste aversion–not all stimuli and not all responses equivalent
Youngs paired associates–response not correspond perfect with previous stimulus
cognitive psychology
study of mental processes: perception, attention, memory, language, higher level process
Memory arguably most important
memory
1) location where information is kept, storehouse
2) thing that holds contents of experience, as in memory trace: engram
3) mental process used to acquire (learn), store, or retrieve (remember) information
computer model
metaphor for memory most widely accepted, also known as information processing approach
builds on behaviorism by adding a manipulation process–the brain–that alters the input and output
SOR Stimulus, external phenomena–Organism, internal process–Response, overt activity
declarative memory
portion of memory that is open to conscious inspection and verbalization
explicit memory–memories easy to articulate and talk about
Divided by episodic (specific memory)-semantic (generalized memory)distinction TULVING
distributed practice
rehearsing of information into memory spread over several occasions=better memory
EBBINGHAUS
embodied cognition
mental activity does not occur in a vacuum but grounded in type of worlds our bodies inhabit and how we use our bodies in that world
thought, memory, etc. all influenced by our interactions with the world
encoding
refers to how what is going on as we acquire information: the sensory information, the attention
Encoding phase will miss lots of sensory info that it selects as unimportant
engram
Neural representation of a memory trace; the contents of experience
As engrams each memory is different mental representation both distributed & localized
LASHLEY’S RATS–lesioned rats better than control, critical factor was amount of tissue
episodic memory system
memory for the individual events of a persons experience tied to a time or place: first date
a part of declarative explicit memory–easy to articulate
autonoetic–requires knowledge of self
Ernst Weber
Just Noticeable Differences JND–research in change necessary for people to notice difference in energy
Hearing test–when does physical energy become different enough to percieve
Donders
Mental chronometry–measuring time course of mental processes with reaction time studies
Work implied:
we can study mental process with a scientific method
we can quantify environment to the mental experience
Ebbinghaus
invented nonsense syllable as learning stimulus
invented method of savings
documented leaning curve & forgetting curve
documented advantage of distributed over mass practice
documented advantage of overlearning
documented advantage of repetition
Savings
difference between amount of effort required on subsequent learning and prior learning attempts
EBBINGHAUS
leaning curve
negatively accelerated function which most of learning occurs in first period, less and less learned with each period
EBBINGHAUS
forgetting curve
1st demonstrated that retention percentage vs retention interval, most is forgot after during initial period, less and less forgotten with each period
EBBINGHAUS
overlearning
where continuous learning occurs after perfect recall is achieved, insulating against forgetting
EBBINGHAUS
introspection
self-observation and reporting of conscious inner thoughts, desires, sensation
Used by WUNDT to describe early cognitve processes – too subjective, unreliable across people & time
massed practice
when rehearsing of information in memory is lumped into a single session rather than spread out over several occasions
inferior to distributed practice
EBBINGHAUS
mechanism
theory that a description of all working parts in the system can explain the total operation allowing for predicitons
EBBINGHAUS
mental chronometry
Studies that attempt to measure the amount of time taken for various mental activities; includes personal equations and reaction time studies
DONDERS
Modal model of memory
standard memory model
Sensory registers: visual, auditory…haptic stimuli–>
STM: consciousness, holding infomration for short times
interaction with world
neuroscience
The field of study encompassing the various scientific disciplines dealing with the structure, development, function, chemistry, pharmacology, and pathology of the nervous system.
nondeclarative memory
implicit memory such as procedural memory (riding a bike), conditioning response, priming effects
Anoetic–does not require conscious awareness
nonsense syllable
these often come in the form of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) trigrams
used to study memory performance in the absence of prior knowledge
EBBINGHAUS
organismic variable
Refer to an individual’s relatively permanent characteristics, such as age, personality traits, gender, cognitive abilities, presence of brain damage, etc.; you most likely cannot change these things – hence, them being permanent – but you can use them to compare to others with or without these traits
Paired Associate learning
A pair of items presented during learning in a memory experiment. One word would serve as the context or cue for the retrieval of the other word during a memory test
ABCD
perception
includes recognition and identiification of information in the world
how we interpret our senses
psychophysics
study of how physical energy is perceived and interpreted by our mental processes
Stimulus Response S-R
Behaviorism– including PAVLOV classical conditioning and THORNDIKE operant condition
Purely mechanistic view of the mind–observation-behavior
structuralism
the mind can be broken down into building blocks and perception is a composite of all the pats
WUNDT
consciousness not a sum of all the parts–rhythm
Triarchic Theory of Memory
TULVING theory of memory dividing long term memory into procedural/anoetic, semantic/noetic, and episode/autonoetic
verbal learning
a way to study memory in context of behaviorism
memorization=attachment of response to stimuli
forgetting=loss of response availability
Wilhelm Wundt
First psychological lab using structuralism and introspection to determine that consciousness was not sum of the sense but subjective and predictions were difficult because of individuality
recorder of experience metaphor
memory is like a video, recording everything we see
storage location metaphor
memory is like a library, holding all the information in different places
interconnections metaphor
memory is like a network, intertwined with eachother
jumbled storage metaphor
memory is like a junk drawer, retrieving from a chaotic mess
temporal availablity metaphor
memory is like a conveyor belt, becoming harder to get to over time
content metaphor
memory is like a lock and key, requiring a search for the right memory to meet the need
forgetting details metaphor
memory is like a leaky bucket, most of which is stored is forgotten only leaving part of the original
reconstruction metaphor
memory is like a skeleton, requiring recreation of missing parts from what is left behind
active processing metaphor
memory is like a computer, with active manipulation of information
