Cognitive Psychology Flashcards
Creativity
A cognitive ability that results in new ways of viewing problems or situations. There isn’t much emperical evidence about the creative process. The most famous attempt to measure creativity is Guilford’s test of divergent thinking.
Stage Theory of Memory
Has been very influential in cognitive psychology. Holds that there are three different memory systems and that each system has a different function. Furthermore, the theory suggests that memories enter the systems in a specific order. The three memory systems are called sensory memory, short-term (or working) memory, and long-term memory.
Elizabeth Loftus
Has studied eyewitness memories and the tendency for eyewitnesses to be influenced or confused by misleading information. She has found that much of eyewitness memory (and testimony) can be erroneous for myriad reasons. Her work has been influential in both legal and psychological fields. More recently, she has studied the accuracy of repressed memories that return later in life. Together with Allan Collins, Elizabeth Loftus devised the spreading activation model of memory.
When did the study of memory for meaningful material begin?
The study by Hermann Ebbinghaus was so influential that for the next several decades, when psychologists studied memory for verbal material, they tended to use nonsense syllables. For the most part, although there were exceptions, the study of memory for meaningful material didn’t really begin until the 1950s.
The 3 Mental Processes
Involved in Memory
- Encoding: putting information into memory
- Storage: retaining information in memory over time
- Retrieval: recovery of stored material at a later time; the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, where you feel on the verge of remembering something but continue to be unsuccessful in doing so, is a problem with retrieval
3 General Research Methods
of Cognitive Psychology
- Reaction time (or chronometry): the measurement of the time elapsed between the presentation of a stimulus and the subject’s response to it
- Eye movements: have been used to study reading and language comprehension; especially useful because eye movements are an “on-line” measure––that is, they can be measured as the subject is actually performing tasks
- Brain imaging: has become increasingly important as researchers have tried to associate specific cognitive processes with specific parts of the brain
Capacity of Short-Term Memory
George Miller found that 7 (+ or - 2) pieces, or chunks, of information can be stored in short-term memory. Chunks are meaningful units of information. Chunking allows much more “raw information” to be stored in short-term memory than would otherwise be possible.
2 Types of Rehearsal
- Maintenance Rehearsal: Repeating the information; used to keep the information in short-term memory (this is where chunking comes in handy)
- Elaborative Rehearsal: Organizing the information and associating it with information already in long-term memory; used to get the information into long-term memory
Partial-Report Procedure
Method devised by George Sperling to test the capacity of sensory memory. Like earlier researchers, Sperling used a 3x3 matrix of letters flashed for a fraction of a second. However, unlike earlier researchers, he asked the subjects to report only one row of the array. Immediately after the presentation of the array of letters, a high, medium, or low tone was presented, indicating to the subjects which row to recall. The subjects didn’t know beforehand what row they had to recall, so they couldn’t focus on just one row. It turned out that, regardless of which row Sperling asked for, the subject’s recall was nearly perfect, suggesting that the capacity of sensory memory was at least 9 items. In fact, other experiments with larger arrays have confirmed that the capacity of sensory memory is ~ 9 items.
Whole-Report Procedure
Method used by early researchers to find out how much information could be retained in sensory memory. Subjects looked for a fraction of a second at a visual display of 9 items (such as a 3x3 array of letters). They were then asked to recall as many of the items as they could. On average, subjects could remember only about 4 of the 9 items. Researchers interpreted this as evidence that the capacity of sensory memory was only 4 items. However, a young researcher by the name of George Sperling suspected this might not be accurate…
Clustering
Memories are naturally “clustered” into related groupings. For example, if asked to memorize a list of words containing animals, fruits, and colors, you would probably break the list down into 3 clusters, and when asked to recall the list, you would probably state the words in groups that go together.
Metapsychology
“Meta” refers to the ability to reflect upon something. Metacognition and metamemory refer to a person’s ability to think about and monitor cognition and memory, respectively.
Learning Theory of Language Development
Holds that language is acquired through classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and/or modeling. B. F. Skinner was a proponent of this perspective.
Syntax
Deals with the grammatical arrangement of words in sentences.
J. P. Guilford’s Test of Divergent Thinking
The most famous attempt to measure creativity. The test-taker is presented with an object and asked to brainstorm as many possible uses for the object as possible.
Noam Chomsky
A linguist who paved the way for modern cognitive psychology with his critique of B. F. Skinner’s 1957 book Verbal Behavior. Chomsky opposed the behaviorist’s position that speech is best explained by operant conditioning and that language is acquired by reinforcement. Chomsky argued that since children say things that they could not have heard adults say (e.g., errors in growth), and that since even adults use language in novel and creative ways, speech could not possibly be due to reinforcement. Chomsky believed that language study is the most viable route to understanding the mind. He is credited with inspiring much work on cognition.
J. P. Guilford
Devised divergent thinking test to measure creativity. Coined the terms convergent and divergent production. Convergent production is the deductive generation of the best single answer to a problem. Divergent production is the creative generation of multiple answers to a problem.
Noam Chomsky’s Work
Chomsky critiqued the behaviorist perspective on language, and proposed a nativist theory of language acquisition. Because children across the world produce speech so early (12-18 months) and become fluent by about 5 years, Chomsky believed there must be some sort of innate, biologically based mechanism for language acquisition. Chomsky proposed a language acquisition device (LAD), which is built-in advanced knowledge of rule structures in language. He elaborated a theory of grammar, which among other concepts involves a distinction betweendeepandsurface grammatical structure, andtransformational rules.
Howard Gardner
Created theory of multiple intelligences, with 7 abilities defined: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spacial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic,interpersonal, andintrapersonal. Argues that Western culture values linguistic and logical-mathematical over the others (these are the two abilities tested for by traditional IQ tests).
Long-Term Memory
The “permanent” storehouse of your experiences, knowledge, and skills. Information can remain in long-term memory indefinitely. One of the ways we get information into long-term memory is by elaborative rehearsal, which involves organizing the material and associating it with information already in long-term memory.
Hermann Ebbinghaus
In 1885, kicked off modern memory research. His unusual experiments are among the most well known in the field of psychology. He used meaningless strings of letters to study the capacity of our memory system.
Short-Term Memory
Information that you attend to goes from your sensory memory into your short-term / working memory. Short-term memory can be thought of as the link between our rapidly changing sensory memory and the more lasting long-term memory. How long information remains in short-term memory depends on what is done with it. If nothing is done with the information, it will remain in short-term memory for only ~ 20 seconds. However, if the information is rehearsed, it can stay in short-term memory for a relatively long time, as long as you keep rehearsing the information. This is called maintenance rehearsal.
Cognitive Development Theory
(Jean Piaget)
of Language Development
Language development has to do with the child’s capacity for symbolic / representational thought, which develops toward the end of the sensorimotor period. Language continues to develop according to the child’s cognitive level. For example, the acquisition of comparison terms like “more than” or “less than” occurs at about the same time that cognition develops from preoperational to concrete operational thought.
Factor Analysis
A statistical method used to describe variability among observed, correlated variables in terms of a potentially lower number of unobserved variables called “factors.”
Transformational Rules
Transformational rules tell us how we can change one linguistic structure into another. For example, the sentences “The house is green” and “Is the house green?” are related by a transformational rule indicating methods for changing a statement into a question.
Sir Frederic Bartlett
(1886 - 1969) Conducted a classic study of memory involving the “War of the Ghosts,” a Native American folk tale. Bartlett found that subjects reconstructed the story in line with their own culture, expectations, and schema for a ghost story. In other words, prior knowledge and expectations influence recall.
Semantic Feature-Comparison Model
The Semantic Feature-Comparison Model was proposed by Edward Smith, Edward Shoben, and Lance Rips in the early 1970s. Concepts are associated with sets of features, some of which are required and some of which are merely “typical.” In the semantic verification task, if there is much overlap between the lists of features, then subjects should respond TRUE quickly. If there is no overlap, or very little overlap, subjects should respond FALSE quickly. On the other hand, if there is “some” overlap, it should take longer to reach a decision.
Louis Leon Thurstone
(1887 - 1955) Identified 7 abilities which he called primary mental abilities: verbal comprehension, word fluency, number facility, spatial visualization, associative memory, perceptual speed, and reasoning. Used factor analysis with factors more specific than g but more general than s.
Allan Paivio’s Dual-Code Hypothesis
Another theory of memory, according to which information can be encoded (i.e. stored) in 2 ways: visually and verbally. Abstract information tends to be encoded verbally, whereas concrete information tends to be encoded both visually (i.e. as an image) and verbally. For example, the word “virtue” would be encoded verbally while the word “elephant” would be encoded both visually and verbally.
Recency Effect and Primacy Effect
(i.e., Order Effects)
When asked to memorize a list of words, those words presented at the end of the list are remembered best. This is called the recency effect. The items presented first are also remembered fairly well, although not as well as things presented last. This effect is called the primacy effect. It’s the stuff in the middle that we most often forget.
