Chapter 5: Representation of Knowledge

Question 1

What are the brain regions involved in the representation of knowledge?

Answer 1

• Prefrontal regions

- Posterior Regions (Temporal Cortex)

Question 2

Left Prefrontal Regoin

Answer 2

• Processing Verbal Material

Question 3

Right Prefrontal Region

Answer 3

• Processing Visual Information.

Question 4

Posterior Regions

Answer 4

categorical (conceptual) information

Question 5

Eric Wanner (1968)

Answer 5

• illustrates circumstances in which people do and do not remember the exact wording of verbal information.
• Thus, by looking at participants’ ability to discriminate between different pairs of sentences, Wanner was able to measure their ability to remember the meaning versus the style of the sentence and to determine how this ability was affected by whether or not they were warned.
• Pg 135

Question 6

Implications of the Wanner study

Answer 6

1 - memory is better for the meaning of the sentence in the instructions than for the style of the sentence. The superiority of memory for meaning indicates that people normally extract the meaning from a linguistic message and do not necessarily remember its exact wording. Moreover, memory for meaning was unaffected by whether participants were warned or not. (The slight advantage for unwarned participants does not approach statistical significance.) Thus, participants retained the meaning of a message as a normal part of their comprehension process. They did not have to be cued (warned) to remember the meaning of the sentence.

2- The second implication of these results is that people are capable of remembering exact wording if that is their goal — the warning did have a significant effect on memory for style. The unwarned participants remembered the style of the sentence in the instructions at about the level of chance, whereas the warned participants remembered it almost 80% of the time. Thus, although we do not normally retain much information about exact wording, we can do so when we are cued to pay attention to such information.

Question 7

Shepard (1967)

Answer 7

comparing memory for pictures with memory for verbal material.

• In the picture-memory task, participants first studied a set of magazine pictures one at a time, then were presented with pairs of pictures consisting of one picture they had studied and one they had not, and then had to indicate which picture had been studied. In the sentence-memory task, participants studied sentences one at a time and were similarly tested on their ability to recognize those sentences. Participants made errors on the verbal task 11.8% of the time but only 1.5% of the time on the visual task. In other words, memory for verbal information was quite good, but memory for visual information was virtually perfect

Question 8

Recognizing pictures accurately however, depends on: ______

Answer 8

The circumstances

Question 9

Nickerson & Adams (1979)

Answer 9

• Showed how participants can have a lack of memory for visual detail.
• The Penny experiment: Individuals had to identify which of the pennies was that actual American penny.
• the details of the penny are not something people attend to. In experiments showing good visual memory, the participants are told to attend to the details.

Question 10

What do people remember when looking at a complex scene?

Answer 10

Typically, people attend to, and remember, what they consider to be the meaningful or important aspects of the scene

Question 11

Mandler & Johnson (1976)

Answer 11

After studying eight such pictures for 10 s each, participants were presented with a series of pictures consisting of the exact pictures they had studied (target pictures) and distracter pictures, which included token distracters and type distracters for each target.

• Mandler and Johnson (1976) found that participants were more sensitive to significant changes in a picture than to changes in minor details. This is not because people are incapable of remembering such details, but rather because people do not attend to details that do not seem important.

Question 12

What is a token distractor?

Answer 12

A token distracter differed from its target only in a relatively unimportant visual detail (e.g., Figure 5.5b is a token distracter because the pattern on the teacher’s pants is an unimportant detail).

Question 13

What is a type distractor?

Answer 13

a type distracter differed from the target in a relatively important visual detail (e.g., Figure 5.5c is a type distracter because the difference between an artwork and the world map in the target is an important detail that indicates the subject being taught).

Question 14

Bransford & Johnson (1972)

Answer 14

• Descriptive passage / Washing Machine Study:
• Presumably, you find this description hard to make sense of; one group of participants did, too, and showed poor recall of the passage. However, another group of participants were told before reading this passage that it was about washing clothes. With that one piece of information, which made the passage much more interpretable, they were able to recall twice as much as the uninformed group.

Question 15

Goldstein & Chance (1970)

Answer 15

Snowflakes / faces memory experiment.

• In a test 48 hours after viewing pictures of faces and snowflakes, participants were able to recognize 74% of the faces and only 30% of the snowflakes (because snowflakes are not assigned interpretation the same way that faces are).

Question 16

Bower, Karlin, and Dueck (1975)

Answer 16

• Droodle drawing experiment
• shows two drawings like the ones they used, called “droodles.” Participants studied the drawings, with or without an explanation of their meaning, and then were given a memory test in which they had to redraw the pictures. Participants who had been given an explanation when studying the pictures showed better recall (70% correctly reconstructed) than those who were not given an explanation (51% correctly reconstructed).
• Thus, memory for the drawings depended critically on participants’ ability to give them a meaningful interpretation.

Question 17

Yim, Garrett, Baker, and Dennis (2018)

Answer 17

Camera wearing experiment.

• Participants wore a camera for two weeks. Were then asked a series of questions related to the photographs that were taken (a picture was snapped every 5 mins).
• They were far more accurate at judging the time of events that they considered imports t.
• The significance of an event is a main determinant of whether the event is represented in detail in memory.

Question 18

How does our brain manage unimportant events?

Answer 18

We have large gaps in our memory when going about our daily lives, because of these unimportant experiences.

-We remember relatively little detail from our daily lives, and what we remember tends to be that which we consider important.

Question 19

What is one way of improving our memory?

Answer 19

Attach things that we need to learn to something meaningful

• It is easier to commitmarbitrary associations to memory if they are converted into something more meaningful.

Question 20

Mnemonic technique

Answer 20

A method for improving memory.

• “memory assisting”
• Ex., when trying to remember two meaningless word pairs, you need to make them meaningful. DAX = DAD. GIB = gibberish. Therefore, my dad was talking gibberish to me.

Question 21

Propositional representation

Answer 21

A representation of meaning as a set of propositions.

• This process is borrowed from logic and linguistics.

Question 22

What is a proposition?

Answer 22

A proposition is the smallest unit of knowledge that can stand as a separate assertion- that is, the smallest unit that one can meaningfully judge as true or false.

Question 23

Kintsch

Answer 23

The propositional representation proposed by kintsch represents the meaning of each sentence as a list containing a relation, followed by an ordered list of arguments.

As an example, the propositions corresponding to sentences A through C would be represented by the following structures:

A (president of: Lincoln, United States, war)
B (bitter: war)
C (free: Lincoln, slaves)

Question 24

Relation

Answer 24

The element that organizes the arguments of a propositional representation.

• The relations organize the arguments and typically correspond to the verbs (in this case, free), adjectives (bitter), and other relational terms (president of).

Question 25

Argument

Answer 25

The elements of a propositional representation that correspond to particular times, places, people, or things.

The arguments refer to particular times, places, people, or things, typically corresponding to the nouns (Lincoln, United States, war, slaves).

Question 26

Amodal Symbol System (Barsalou, 1999)

Answer 26

An inherently nonperceptual system for representing information (i.e., a system in which the symbols are not associated with any particular perceptual modality.

• The original stimulus might be a picture or a sentence, but the representation is abstracted away from the verbal or visual modality.

Question 27

Perceptual Symbol System (Barsalou, 1999).

Answer 27

A system for representing information in which the terms are tied to particular perceptual modalities.

• The perceptual symbol system hypothesis is an extension of Paivio’s (1971, 1986) earlier dual-code theory,

Question 28

Dual-code Theory (Paivio)

Answer 28

Paivio’s theory that information is represented in combined verbal and visual codes.

• Paivio suggested that when we hear a sentence, we also develop a visual image of what it describes. If we later remember the visual image and not the sentence, we will remember what the sentence was about, but not its exact words. Analogously, when we see a picture, we might describe to ourselves the significant features of that picture. If we later remember our description and not the picture, we will not remember details we did not think important to describe
• According to the dual-code theory, memory for wording versus memory for meaning depends on the relative attention that people give to the verbal versus the visual representation.
• A number of experiments indicate that when participants pay attention to wording, they show better memory for wording.

Question 29

What did Barsalou suggest we do when distinguishing meaning between two sentences?

Answer 29

internally reenacting what seems like a plausible history behind each sentence. So even if the actual act of writing and forging might be the same, the history of what a person said, thought, felt, and did in getting to that point would be different. Thus, the perceptual features involved in forging (but not in signing) might include the sensations of tension that one has when one is in a difficult situation.

Question 30

Standfield & Zwaan (2001)

Answer 30

• Nail pounding experiment
• participants read a sentence about a nail being pounded into either the wall or the floor. Then they viewed a picture of a nail oriented either horizontally or vertically and were asked whether the object in the picture was mentioned in the sentence that they just read. If they had read a sentence about a nail being pounded into the wall, they recognized a horizontally oriented nail more quickly. When they had read a sentence about a nail being pounded into the floor, they recognized a vertically oriented nail more quickly. In other words, they responded faster when the orientation implied by the sentence matched the orientation of the picture. Thus, their representation of the sentence seemed to contain this perceptual detail.

Question 31

Embodied Cognition

Answer 31

The viewpoint that the mind can only be understood by taking into account the human body (motor action) and how it interacts with the environment.

Question 32

Glenberg’s argument (2007)

Answer 32

our understanding of language often depends on an inner acting out of what the language describes.

Question 33

Hauk, Johnsrude, & Pulvermuller (2004)

Answer 33

• Face, Arm, & leg experiment
• recorded brain activation while people listened to verbs that involved face, arm, or leg actions (e.g., lick, pick, or kick). The researchers looked for activity along the motor cortex in separate regions associated with the face, arm, and leg. Figure 5.11 shows that each type of verb produced greater activation in the part of the motor cortex associated with the corresponding action.

Question 34

Mirror Neurons

Answer 34

Neurons that fire both when an animal is performing an action and when the animal observes another animal performing the action.

• brain-imaging studies have found increased activity in the motor region when people observe actions, particularly with the intention to mimic the action

Question 35

Multi-modal hypothesis

Answer 35

The theory that knowledge is represented in multiple perceptual and motor modalities.

• For instance, the arrow going from the visual to the motor representation would be a system for converting a visual representation into a motor representation. The parallel arrow going from the motor to the visual representation would be a system for converting the representations in the opposite direction.
• Diagram on Page 151

Question 36

Amodal hypothesis

Answer 36

The proposal that meaning is not represented in a particular modality.

• there is an intermediate abstract “meaning” system, perhaps involving propositional representations like those we described earlier. According to this hypothesis, we have systems for converting any type of perceptual or motor representation into an abstract representation of its meaning (arrows going from the representations to the meaning in Figure 5.12), and we have systems for converting abstract representation into any type of perceptual or motor representation (arrows going from the meaning to the representations). So to convert a visual representation of a picture into a motor representation of an action, one first converts the visual representation into an abstract representation of its meaning and then converts that representation into a motor representation.
• Diagram on Page 151

Question 37

We see the world in ___?

Answer 37

Categories.

Question 38

Quillian (1996)

Answer 38

People store information in various categories in semantic networks.

Question 39

Semantic Networks

Answer 39

Hierarchical network structures for representing categorical information and the properties associated with each category.

Question 40

Isa link

Answer 40

In a semantic network or schema, a link that indicates the superset of a category

Question 41

Collins & Quillian (1969)

Answer 41

• Canary experiment
• having participants respond to assertions about concepts, such as

Canaries can sing.
Canaries have feathers.
Canaries breathe.

• False assertions were also included: ‘Apples have feathers’.
• to verify sentence 1, participants would just have to look at the properties directly associated with “Canary”; for sentence 2, participants would need to traverse one isa link, from “Canary” to “Bird”; and for sentence 3, they would have to traverse two links, from “Canary” to “Bird” and from “Bird” to “Animal.”
• Results: If our categorical knowledge were structured like Figure 5.13, we would expect sentence 1 to be verified more quickly than sentence 2, and sentence 2 to be verified more quickly than sentence 3.

Participants required 1,310 ms to judge statements like sentence 1; 1,380 ms to judge statements like sentence 2; and 1,470 ms to judge statements like sentence 3.

Question 42

What are the concluding statements on the organization of facts in semantic memory and their retrieval times?

Answer 42

1. ) If a fact about a concept is encountered frequently, it will be associated with that concept even if it could be inferred from a higher-order concept.
2. ) The more frequently a fact about a concept is encountered, the more strongly that fact will be associated with the concept. The more strongly facts are associated with concepts, the more rapidly they are verified.
3. ) Inferring facts that are not directly associated with a concept takes a relatively long time.

Question 43

Schemas

Answer 43

A slot-value representation of categorical knowledge that specifies a category’s superset (higher-level category) and its attributes (properties, including the category’s typical parts), along with the typical values taken by the properties.

Isa (slot): building (value)
Parts (slot): rooms (value)
Materials: wood, brick, stone
Function: human dwelling
Shape: rectilinear, triangular
Size: 100–10,000 square feet

Question 44

slot

Answer 44

Any element in a schema for the different attributes of a category.

Question 45

Default Values

Answer 45

The typical values for a slot in a schema representation, but do not exclude other possibilities.

Question 46

More about schema parts

Answer 46

Pg 156.

Question 47

Brewers & Treyens (1981)

Answer 47

• provided an interesting demonstration of how inferences from schemas can influence memory.
• Participants were taken into a small doctor’s office and asked to wait for researcher. After 35 seconds, they were taken to a seminar room and asked to draw as much of the items in the room that they could remember seeing. Had to label them as well.
• Brewer and Treyens predicted that their participants’ recall would be strongly influenced by their schema of what an office contains. Participants would recall very well items that are default values of that schema, they would recall much less well items that are not default values of the schema, and they would falsely recall items that are default values of the schema but were not in this office.
• Thus, we see that a person’s memory for the properties of a location is strongly influenced by that person’s default assumptions about what is typically found in the location. A schema is a way of encoding those default assumptions.

Question 48

Rosch (1973)

Answer 48

Experiment on: category membership.

• Participants consistently rated some members as more typical than others. In the bird category, robin got an average rating of 1.1, and chicken a rating of 3.8. In reference to sports, football was thought to be very typical (1.2), whereas weight lifting was not (4.7).
• Also completed a similar experiment with pictures
• Robins are seen as birds more rapidly than are chickens. Thus, typical members of a category appear to have an advantage in perceptual recognition as well.

Question 49

McCloskey & Glucksberg

Answer 49

• They found that although participants did agree on some items, they disagreed on many. For instance, whereas all 30 participants agreed that cancer was a disease and happiness was not, 16 thought stroke was a disease and 14 did not.
• Thus, disagreement about category boundaries does not occur just among participants — people are very uncertain within themselves exactly where the boundaries of a category should be drawn.

Question 50

Labov (1973)

Answer 50

Cups Vs. Bowls experiment.

• Thus, it appears that people’s classification behavior varies continuously not only with the properties of an object but also with the context in which the object is imagined or presented. These influences of perceptual features and context on categorization judgments are very much like the similar influences of these features on perceptual pattern recognition

Question 51

Schank & Abelson (1977)

Answer 51

proposed versions of event schemas that they called scripts, based on their observation that many events typically involve certain specific sequences of actions.

• Ex., sequence of events for restaurant dining.

Question 52

Scripts

Answer 52

Schemas for events, representing the most typical sequences of actions involved in the events.

Question 53

Bower, Black, and Turner (1979)

Answer 53

reported a series of experiments in which the psychological reality of the script notion was tested. They asked participants to name what they considered the 20 most important actions typically involved in an event, such as going to a restaurant.

Question 54

Prototype theories

Answer 54

Models proposing that we store a single prototype of a category member and classify specific objects or events in terms of their similarity to the prototype.

Question 55

Exemplar theories

Answer 55

Theories holding that concepts are represented by specific instances in our experience and that new instances are categorized on the basis of their similarity to the stored representations.

• Ex., how typical a specific bird is in the general category of birds, we compare the specific bird to other specific birds in our experience and make some sort of judgment of difference from the average.

Question 56

Rule-based

Answer 56

164