Chapter 7 (Week 5) Flashcards
What area of the brain is damaged if a patient has semantic dementia?
The anterior frontal temporal lobes.
What’s the difference between episodic and semantic memories?
Episodic, you consciously look for the memories.
Semantic, you don’t.
What are personal semantics?
Aspects of one’s own personal or autobiographical memory combining elements of episodic and semantic memory.
What is semanticization?
The phenomenon of episodic memories changing into semantic memories over time.
True or false: we can combine semantic and episodic memories.
True.
What are concepts represented as in Collins and Quillans’s hierarchical model?
Nodes.
Which one would take longer to conceptualize in the hierachical network?
A canary is yellow
A canary breathes.
A canary breathes.
What are the 3 shortcomings of the hierarchical network theory?
- People who take a while to find links between concepts and categories might just be unfamiliar with them.
- Sometimes it takes people to realize what category something is (i.e. a penguin is a bird).
- People’s perceptions of concepts can change.
What is the typicality effect?
The finding that the time taken to decide a category member belongs to a category is less for typical than atypical members.
If two concepts are _________ related in a spreading activation network, they will both activate.
Semantically.
What are the three shortcomings of spreading-activation theory?
- The notion that each concept is represented by one node is oversimplified.
- That each concept has a single, fixed representation.
- There is no consensus concerning the most appropriate measure of semantic distance.
When describing a dog, what would be the superordinate, basic, and subordinate level of identifying it?
Superordinate: Animal
Basic: Dog
Subordinate: corgi.
What was Barsalou’s issue with the typical theories on identifying things?
Most concept research has involved presenting words referring to concepts in isolation (in the absence of context).
What is Situated Simulation theory?
Processing a concept in a certain way depending on the concept.
What are category-specific deficits?
Disorders caused by brain damage in which semantic memory is disrupted for certain semantic categories, like “living things.”
What is Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)?
A technique in which a very weak electrical current is passed through an area of the brain; anodal tDCS often enhances performance.
What is a script?
A form of schema containing information about a sequence of events (like the order of events in a restaurant).
What is a frame?
A type of schema in which information about objects and their properties is stored.
What is rationalization?
A term introduced by Barlett to refer to the tendency in story recall to produce errors conforming to the rememberer’s cultural expectations.
