Cognitive Psychology Flashcards
What is capacity?
The size of the store (the amount it can hold)
What is duration ?
how long information stays in the store
What is mode of representation?
(Mode of storage) the form in which information is encoded or stored
What is encoding?
How memories are encoded (how are they registered) eg a smell/sound etc.
What is storage?
How memories are stored (how and where do we keep them)
What is retrieval?
How we retrieve memories when output is needed (how we access memories)
How long does the sensory register hold memories?
It cannot hold information for long, typically for a few hundred milliseconds
What is the primary effect?
Information learned first will be remembered (it is rehearsed and goes to the LTM)
What is the recency effect?
Information learned last will be remembered (still in rehearsal loop in STM)
What happens to information in the middle?
It is most likely to be lost because it is not rehearsed and therefore displaced by new info and forgotten
Why cant displacement alone describe forgetting?
As decay must be considered
Describe some of the history of cognitive psychology
- following ww2 there was a greater need of understanding of human performance eg how to best train soldiers to use technology
- this led to study of attention ; integrating concepts of human performance research and recently developed information process approach
- In 1956 Newell and Simon introduced the concept of artificial intelligence (AI). The result was more of a framework but integrated ideas like memory, storage and retrieval
- in 1956 Noam Chomsky presented his theory on language development and the same year Miller proposed the magic number seven in short term memory
- in 1967, the term cognitive psychology was introduced by Neisser in his book. His definition of cognition refers to all the processes by which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used.
What is cognitive psychology?
he study of cognitive processes in the human brain. This includes the mental processes of perception, memory, attention, language and problem solving
What does the brain processing information in a linear fashion mean?
that the information flows through the brain seems logical
What’s the basic idea that the information is taken in through the senses …
And then it is encoded in the brain, which means it is translated into a manageable form. It is then stored and can be retrieved as necessary
What’s neuropsychology?
Cognitive psychologists investigating these mental processes is by studying people with cognitive impairments
It considers how damage impacts on ability and also uses brain imaging techniques and uses experiments to gather information
What’s the computer analogy?
Describes the brain like a storage system that receives information from the environment, processes it and provides an output
Memory is now seen like more of a process than a …
Storage system
What are the three stages of memory?
- Encoding - this refers to how we put information into our memory, do w remember things by how they sound how they look or what they mean
- Storage - this simply refers to how we keep the information in our memory, do we keep it in the short term or long term memory stores
- Retrieval - this refers to how we access our memories, so when we need to remember events and memories, how we bring those memories back to the fore front of our minds help us recall the information we need
Explain the multi store model of memory
Information is encoded, which is the early part of the process and then it is stored such as in short erm and long term memory. When a memory is needed, there is retrieval and without that there would be forgetting. The capacity of a store is its size and the duration is how long term memory lasts in that store. Finally there is focus on the mode of representation which is the form in which information is stored
What does the Multi Store Model show?
Memory is composed of three parts, sensory memory, short term memory, and long term memory and information is stored in these parts depending on how it is cognitively processed (attention, rehearsal, encoded)
What is encoding in the MSM w examples?
How is the information put into the memory and remembered, this is different for STM and LTM
STM - acoustic
LTM - semantic
MSM detailed process
Information from the environment first enters sensory memory, where it is store for a very brief period of time.
Depending on coding and rehearsal determines the fate of this information. If we do not pay attention to it, it is lost and decays and if we do pay attention to it, it is passed onto the STM
In order for it to be passed onto the long term memory, we must rehearse the information. This means repeating the info over and over again, if the information isn’t rehearsed; it is forgotten.
Maintenance rehearsal is a key process as it keeps information in the STM but it also is responsible for transferring it to the LTM
Also if short term memory becomes too full, information is lost via displacement (this means the storage reaches full capacity and can’t be take more items and so they aren’t attended to)
Once in the long term memory, the only ways the information is lost is through the lack of use (decay or interference (confusing information)