Chapter #8 / Session #8

Question 1

What is Semantic Memory?

Answer 1

Your semantic memory is your memory for general facts about the world around you

Question 2

What are scripts and schemes?

Answer 2

These are knowledge-related principles that facilitate the integration of incoming information from the environment with the vast amount of knowledge stored in your long-term memory.

Question 3

What is an Inference?

Answer 3

An inference refers to the logical interpretations and conclusions that were never part of the original stimulus material.

Question 4

What does Semantic Memory include?

Answer 4

For example, semantic memory includes general knowledge (e.g., “Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia”). It also includes lexical or language knowledge (e.g., “The word justice is related to the word equality”).

-In addition, semantic memory includes conceptual knowledge (e.g., “A square has four sides”).

Question 5

___ and ___ are essential components of semantic memory

Answer 5

Categories and concepts

Question 6

What is a Category?

Answer 6

A category is a set of objects that belong together. Your cognitive system considers these objects to be at least partly equivalent. A category tells us something useful about their members.

Question 7

What is a Concept?

Answer 7

Psychologists use the term concept to refer to your mental representations of a category.

Question 8

What is the situated cognition approach?

Answer 8

According to the situated cognition approach, we make use of information in the immediate environment or situation. As a result, our knowledge often depends on the context that surrounds us.

Question 9

We tend to code a concept in terms of the ___ in which we learned this information.

Answer 9

context

Question 10

What are the two current approaches to Semantic Memory?

Answer 10

The prototype approach and the exemplar approach

Question 11

What is the prototype approach?

Answer 11

According to the prototype approach, you decide whether a particular item belongs to a category by comparing this item with a prototype. If the item is similar to the prototype, you include that item within this category.

Question 12

What is a Prototype?

Answer 12

A prototype is the item that is the best, most typical example of a category; a prototype therefore is the ideal representative of this category.

Question 13

What is the graded structure of a category?

Answer 13

All members of a category are not really equal. Instead, a category tends to have a graded structure. A graded structure begins with the most representative or prototypical members, and it continues on through the category’s nonprototypical members.

Question 14

If someone asks you to name a member of a category, you will probably name a ___.

Answer 14

prototype

Question 15

What is the typicality effect?

Answer 15

The typicality effect occurs when people judge typical items (prototypes) faster than items that are not typical (nonprototypes).

Question 16

What is the semantic priming effect?

Answer 16

The semantic priming effect means that people respond faster to an item if it was preceded by an item with similar meaning. The semantic priming effect helps cognitive psychologists understand important information about how we retrieve information from memory.

Question 17

___ are judged more quickly than ___, after semantic priming

Answer 17

Prototypes // nonprototypes

Question 18

What is Family resemblance?

Answer 18

Family resemblance means that no single attribute is shared by all examples of a concept; however, each example has at least one attribute in common with some other example of the concept.

Question 19

Prototypes share attributes in a ___ category.

Answer 19

family resemblance

Question 20

What is a superordinate-level category level?

Answer 20

It means that they are higher-level or more general categories. “Furniture,” “animal,” and “tool” are all examples of superordinate-level categories.

Question 21

What is a Basic-level category level?

Answer 21

Basic-level categories are moderately specific.
“Chair,” “dog,” and “screwdriver” are examples of basic-level categories.

Question 22

What is a Subordinate-level category level?

Answer 22

Subordinate-level categories refer to lower-level or more specific categories.
“Desk chair,” “collie,” and “Phillips screwdriver” are examples of subordinate categories.

Question 23

What is the Exemplar approach?

Answer 23

The exemplar approach argues that we first learn information about some specific examples of a concept; we then classify each new stimulus by deciding how closely it resembles all of those specific examples. Each of those examples stored in memory is called an exemplar.
The exemplar approach emphasizes that your concept of “dog” would include information about numerous examples of dogs you have known.

Question 24

What is a main difference between the Prototype and Exemplar approach?

Answer 24

However, the prototype approach proposes that your stored representation is a typical member of the category. In contrast, the exemplar approach proposes that your stored representation is a collection of numerous specific members of the category.

Question 25

What are Network Models?

Answer 25

Network approaches are more concerned about the interconnections among related items.
These network models of semantic memory propose a network-style organization of concepts in memory, with numerous interconnections.

Question 26

What are the two most recent Network approaches?

Answer 26

Anderson’s ACT-R Theory and the Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) approach.

Question 27

What is the ACT-R?

Answer 27

Anderson created ACT-R and its variants to explain every topic in your textbook. For example, these topics would include memory, learning, spatial cognition, language, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making. this approach attempts to account for human performance on a wide variety of tasks.

Question 28

What is a Proposition?

Answer 28

A proposition is the smallest unit of knowledge that people can judge to be either true or false.

Question 29

According to the ACT-R approach, the meaning of a sentence can be represented by a propositional network, which is ___.

Answer 29

a pattern of interconnected propositions

Question 30

What is the parallel distributed processing (PDP) approach?

Answer 30

The parallel distributed processing (PDP) approach proposes that cognitive processes can be represented by a model in which activation flows through networks that link together a large number of simple, neuron-like units.

The PDP approach emphasizes that we should represent concepts in terms of networks, rather than specific locations in the brain. The word distributed tells us that these activations occur in several different locations. The word parallel tells us that these activations take place simultaneously, rather than one after another.

Question 31

What is Spontaneous generalization?

Answer 31

Spontaneous generalization means that we draw a conclusion about a general category (e.g., the category “engineering students”).

Question 32

What is Default assignment?

Answer 32

Default assignment means that we draw a conclusion about a specific member of a category (e.g., a particular engineering student).

Question 33

What is Graceful Degradation?

Answer 33

The brain’s ability to provide partial memory is called graceful degradation. For example, Chapter 6 discussed the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, which occurs when you know which target you are seeking, but you cannot retrieve the actual target. Consistent with graceful degradation, you may know the target’s first letter and the general sound of the word—even though the word itself refuses to leap into memory. Graceful degradation also explains why the brain continues to work somewhat accurately, even when an accident, stroke, or dementia has destroyed portions of the cortex.

Question 34

What is a Schema?

Answer 34

This generalized, well-integrated knowledge about a situation, an event, or a person is called a schema. Schemas often influence the way we understand a situation or an event, and we can think of them as the basic building blocks for representing our thoughts about people.

Schema theories propose that our memories encode “generic” information about a situation. We then use this information to understand and remember new examples of the schema.

-Specifically, schemas guide your recognition and understanding of new examples because you say to yourself, “This is just like what happened when …”. Thus, schemas allow us to use stored knowledge to predict what will happen in a new situation.

-Schemas are one kind of heuristic, which is a general rule that is typically accurate. The predictions that we make from reliance upon schemas are usually correct, although they can sometimes lead us astray and thus cause us to make errors. Still, these errors usually make sense within the framework of that schema.

Question 35

What is a Script?

Answer 35

A Script is one kind of Schema. A script is a simple, well-structured sequence of events that usually occur in a specified order; this script is associated with a highly familiar activity.
A script is an abstraction, in other words, a prototype of a series of events that share an underlying similarity. The terms schema and script are often used interchangeably. However, script is actually a narrower term, referring to a sequence of events that unfold in a specified order.

Question 36

What is a Life Script?

Answer 36

A life script is a list of events that a person believes would be most important throughout his or her lifetime.

Question 37

Steve Janssen and David Rubin discovered that people within a culture often share similar ___.

Answer 37

life scripts

Question 38

If the information describes a minor event—and time is limited—people tend to remember information accurately when it is ___ with a schema (e.g., the desk and the chair in the “office”).

Answer 38

consistent

Question 39

If the information describes a minor event—and time is limited—people do not remember information that is ___ with the schema (e.g., the wine bottle and the picnic basket).

Answer 39

inconsistent

Question 40

People seldom create a completely false memory for a lengthy event that ___. (e.g., the lecturer did not dance across the room).

Answer 40

did not occur

Question 41

When the information describes a major event that is ___ with the standard schema, people are likely to remember that event (e.g., the child who crashes into Sarah).

Answer 41

inconsistent

Question 42

What is Boundary Extension?

Answer 42

Boundary extension refers to our tendency to remember having viewed a greater portion of a scene than was actually shown. In boundary extension the material is visual
We have a schema for a scene like the one depicted in Demonstration 8.6, which we could call “a photo of someone’s garbage area,” and our cognitive processes fill in the incomplete objects.

Question 43

What is Abstraction?

Answer 43

Abstraction is a memory process that stores the meaning of a message, rather than the exact words.

Question 44

What are the two approaches to the abstraction issue?

Answer 44

the constructive approach and the pragmatic approach.

Question 45

What is a False Alarm?

Answer 45

In memory research, a false alarm occurs when people “remember” an item that was not originally presented. Bransford and Franks found that people were especially likely to make false alarms when a complex sentence was consistent with the original schema.

Question 46

What is the Constructive Model of memory?

Answer 46

According to the constructive model of memory, people integrate information from individual sentences in order to construct larger ideas. Later, they believe that they have already seen those complex sentences because they have combined the various facts in memory. Once sentences are fused in memory, we cannot untangle them into their original components and recall those components verbatim.

Question 47

What is the pragmatic view of text memory?

Answer 47

The pragmatic view of memory proposes that people pay attention to the aspect of a message that is most relevant to their current goals.

Question 48

What is memory integration?

Answer 48

In memory integration, our background knowledge encourages us to take in new information in a schema-consistent fashion. As a result, people may remember this schema-consistent information, even though it was not part of the original stimulus material.