Cognitive Psychology Flashcards
Approaches of cognitive psychology
Experimental cognitive psychology - behavioural
Cognitive neuropsychology - brain damage
Computational cognitive science - computer modelling
cognitive neuroscience - brain imaging
Sensation
registering stimuli of senses
Perception
processing and interpreting sensory information
Cognition
using perceived information to learn, classify, comprehend
Bottom-up processing
perception via stimuli from the environment
Top-down processing
perception via understanding of stimuli from past experience and knowledge
(top down = searching for the best interpretation of the available data - Gregory 1966)
Single cell recording for sensation and perception research
action potentials of neurons recorded with microelectrode inserted close to cell, single neurons can be selective for a stimulus (can be very specific eg. a particular person)
Lesion studies: animal lesioning
Animal lesioning - knife cutting axons, neurotoxins (destroys nerve cells)
- Disadvantages - ethical issues, studying a faulty system brain changes in response to damage
Lesion studies: Neuropsychology
Neuropsychology - damage to brain - stroke, trauma ect.
- Disadvantages - damage may not be specfic, individual variation in damage eg. Phineas Gage
Eye parts and roles
Pupil - light enters eye
Iris - adjustable aperture, constricts in bright light to make pupil smaller
Cornea and lens - focuses light on retina
Ciliary muscles - change shape of lens to bring different distanced objects into focus
Types of retinal ganglion cells
Midget (parvocellular system, small, small receptive field)
Parasol (magnocellular system, large, large receptive field and connect to more of retina)
- On-centre, off-surround retina ganglion, or off-centre, on-surround
Retinal ganglion cell roles
Parvocellular cells - colour and detail (red-green) (midget cells)
magnocellular cells - movement and flicker (parasol cells)
Konicellular cells - blue-yellow
retinal ganglion cell cone types
Parvocellular = L/(L+M) (cherry-teal)
Koniocellular = S/(L+M) (violet-lime)
Magnocellular = luminance (black-white)
Retionotopy (property of V1/primary visual cortex/striate cortex)
contains a retiontropic map - have cells that respond to all of visual field - connect to fovea’s photoreceptors and adjacent parts
- V1 tuning for orientation
Visual cortex research
Hubel and Wiesel - detailed investigation of visual cortex - cells respond to orientated line but not dots - there exists cells to code for orientations
Blakemore and Cooper
Ohki et al - Colours represent cells coding for different orientations (colours for orientations)
Streams of processing
dorsal (where) and ventral (what) (eg. colour (ventral) and motion (dorsal))
Cone photoreceptors
human trichromacy - 3 cone types, maximally sensitive at short (S), middle (M) and long (L) wavelengths
Trichromacy evolution
- related to foraging for ripe fruit/berries - (L) split to (M) and (L)
- Can see through skin when blood is oxygenated or dexoygenated - health indicator - (Changizi, Zhang & Shimojo (2006)) (furies animals don’t need to see skin - monochromatic or dichomatic)
Monochromatic
only rods or one cone
Dichromatic (and types)
2 cones
- Protanopia - lack L cone (i.e. long-wavelength)
- Deuteranopia – lack M cone (i.e. medium-wavelength)
- Tritanopia - lack S cone (i.e. short-wavelength)
Anomolous trichromats
- Deuteranomoly (M cone shifted towards L)
- Protanomoly (L cone shifted to M)
- men more likely - can be acquired (aging/druga/hormones)
Human Tetrachromacy
(some women have 4 cone types), usually 3 cone types, does an extra colour mean more colours seen?, still need cortical processing of extra signal
anomaloscope
used to test colour vision
Cone opponency
output from 3 cones combined and contrasted to give 3 cone-opponent channels
Memory colour
Some objects have a typical colour - we learn from experience and so expect - bananas = yellow
- Hansen - counteract colour memory when making something ‘grey’
Aesthetic response to colour (competing theories)
we prefer some colours to others
Biological Components Theory (Hurlbert & Ling, 2007)
Ecological Valence Theory (Palmer & Schloss, 2010)
Ecological valence theory
colour-object association (so prefer a colour associated with positive objects
- Can predict colour preferences
Importance of attention
- Negative outcome when fails - education, driving
- Applied contexts - advertising
- Clinical contexts - ADHD, Anxiety
types of attention
selective, sustained, divided, attention to different sensory modalities
Sustained attention
maintaining focuses attention - vigilance
Covert attention
not looking at something but paying attention to it (so can’t study attention via eye movements)
Studying convert attention - spatial cueing
(eg. arrows pointing in the right direction) valid = pointing in the right direction, invalid = pointing in the wrong direction
studying covert attention: visual search
if the target ‘pops-out’ (eg. is a different colour), increasing non-targets doesn’t affect reaction time
studying covert attention - distractor effects
can slow us down when incongruent compared to congruent or neutral - stroop task (Response competition - when something competes with the target - slows reaction times)
Studying covert attention - error rates
e.g. press a button for every digit except 3 - measuring when people press 3
Effects on neural attention - boosted for covertly attended stimuli (e.g., Wojciulik et al., 1998), Vuilleumier et al., 2001)
- Two regions known to respond selectively to specific stimulus categories -> central fixation
- Fusiform Face Area (FFA) (increased response with covert attention to faces)
Parahippocampal place area (PPA) (increased response with covert attention to houses)
- Fusiform Face Area (FFA) (increased response with covert attention to faces)
early vs late attention selection
Early selection - hear physical characteristics of everything but only the meaning of what you are attending to is processed
Late selection - process both meanings - filtering later - perhaps based on the meaning
Broadbent’s filter theory
early attention selection theory - filtering occurs before semantic analysis (based on physical characteristics)
Triesman’s attenuation model
still an early selection theory, key modification to filter theory - unattended messages attenuated (reduced) rather than lost completely
- Words need to meet threshold of signal strength can be detected - threshold for certain words lowered e.g. own name/primed words
Late selection models -
(e.g., Deutsch and Deutsch (1963), Kahneman (1973), Duncan (1980))
- both attended and ignored inputs semantically analyses
- Selection takes place at higher stage of processing - analysis of what is important/demands a response
- can explain competition interference and negative priming
Mackay (1973) - dichotic listening
attended stream = ambiguous sentence, unattended stream = biasing word (biasing word changed interpretation of ambiguous sentence)
Lavie’s Load theory
- Both early and late selection are possible
- the stage of selection depends on availability of perceptual capacity - high perceptual load exhaust capacity - depends on load of task stimuli
- irrelevent distractors are filtered at early selection
- tasks with low perceptual load leave spare capacity, irrelevant distractors are processed - late selection
- individual differences
Evidence supporting load theory
- response competition effects found under low load
- simons and chabris
- Cartwright Finch and Lavie - inattentional blindness - lower load more likely to notice little picture on screen
- Neuroimaging evidence
Neuroimaging evidence for load theory of attention (lavie)
Bishop - neuroimaging - high perceptual load reduces amygdala response to fearful faces
Schwartz - high perceptual load reduces visual cortex response to background(below)
Biased competition theory - Desimone and Duncan
argues top down (what you want to pay attention to) and bottom down (distractions) compete for attention - something wins
Salient colour singletons
‘odd ones out’ - a different colour
- Theeuwes
Bottom up before top down - Theeuwes
- In the first stage there is a bottom-up sweep across the visual field - calculation of local salience
- Second stage - if target item is not selected then location is inhibited, attention then shifts to item next in line with respect to salience
Contingent capture - Folk and Remington (1992)
- attention capture not stimulus-driven, only captured by stimuli relevant to our goals
- eg. noticing a yellow sign when you are looking for a yellow taxi
Bacon and Egeth vs Theeuwes
- Bacon and egeth disagreeing with Theeuwes - argue singleton shape can be made to fit in, Theeuwes - does interfere if local salience is maintained
Abrupt onset
something which suddenly changes - we notice something that suddenly appears - moving/looming stimuli (but not things getting smaller) - evolutionary
Another argument against stimulus-driven capture (Gibson and Kelsey - 1998)
attention tasks usually begin with a change to display (onset/offset/colour change) - may induce ‘display-wide’ for dynamic changes - hard to think of an experimental task not involving any change to the display
Selection capture due to meaning
- Sometimes things attract attention because of their meaning (and for personal meaning) - for example - a snake over a similar looking ball of yarn
- Something important to you/familiar more likely to grab attention
(/value = rewards grab attention)
Effects of cognitive load - Lavie et al 2004
- response competition flanker task
- either remembering 1 digit/6 - high/low cognitive load
- distractor interference increased under high cognitive load
Cognitive load and awareness - Carmel et al 2012
- classify names and ignore distractor faces
low load - chance level - 50% accuracy in memory - higher load was 80% accuracy
Cognitive load theory
- availability of perceptual capacity determines whether distractors receive further processing
- cognitive control to inhibit distractors
individual differences in working memory capacity (engle et al)
Operation Span (OSPAN) task:
- Simultaneously perform simple maths and read words, recall of words
- related to fluid intelligence - assess efficiency of prefrontal functional
- e.g. “4/2 + 1 = 3, NO, CAT
- Low WM capacity:
- more stroop interference
- response competition interference
- “own name break through” more in dichotic listening
Cognitive control brain areas
- frontal/parietal (Hopfinger et al and de Fockert et al) and (Forster - frontal for sustained attention)
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) (Bishop)
Mind wandering and cognitive control - Christoff
- some frontal regions involved in both attentional control and generating task-unrelated thought
Will increased working memory capacity be associated with more or less mind-wandering?
- Kane et al (2007): High WM capacity associated with reduced mind-wandering during sustained attention
- Mind-wandering = executive failure
- Levinson et al (2012): High WM capacity associated with increased mind-wandering during low perceptual load response competition task
components of planing
- determining alternative plans
- decomposing a problem into chunks
- search through the problem space
- search guided by heuristics
- constraints
- task environment
components of a problem
- Initial state (problem as presented)
- Goal state (aim)
- Operators (things you can try)
- constraints (limitations, additional requirements)
analog - cards problem
- laying cards on a table
- environment changes what people try
problem deposition
- complex, multi-faceted
- constrained
- requiring creativity, novelty
- eg. designing a new car
sub goal specification
decomposing into smaller problems
decomposition orders
- breadth-first - minimal commitment (thinking about the whole thing first - overview, but hard work)
- depth-first - immediate feedback; lower cognitive load (each part seperatly)
- opportunistic - capitalising on current state (lack of structure, disorganisation)
the problem space
problem - state space, task environment, information processing system
state space
state - all possible paths to solution
task environment
task environment - way a problem is presented (format (display type), thematic content (familiarity), conditions (criticality) ,
information processing system
- working memory
- constraint on planning steps e.g chess
- Long-term memory
- knowledge of solutions, operators and constraints
- expertise
Search using heuristics
- means-ends analysis (eg. fix car tyre - make situation safe, remove wheel ect…
- operator selection (maximise reduction of distance between initial and goal states - sub-goal to apply the operator)
Other heuristics (shortcuts)
- means ends analysis
- hill climbing - getting as close as you can (e.g. raising car and seeing what happens)
- trial and error
- heuristics for sampling
- anchorics
- representiveness
CSP theory
characterises both insight and noninsight problem solving in terms of generic cognitive processes
- choice of 2 heuristics for novel problems - maximisation (maximise progress towards a goal) and minimisation (people limit the initial representation to search for moves which make progress
Insight
a change in conceptual understanding that allows a solution to a problem to be discovered → and repeated in the future e.g. 9 dot problem
Phenomena of insight
- simple to state, hard to solve
- fixation (stuck on the same thing)
- impasse (stuck after running out of ideas)
- ‘Aha’ (surprise - suddenly come to you)
- incubation (putting them to one side and then coming back)
Gestalt accounts - perceptual ‘whole’ limit moves to inside the square - way you see the world changes how you solve the puzzle
Importance of insight
- consciousness
- determinism (productive vs reproductive)
Modularity (own neural mechanisms?)
3 theories of insight
Representation change theory - (Knoblich) - knowledge holds us back
Criterion of satisfactory progress - (MacGregor, Ormerod, Chronicle) - strategy holds us back
Multiple factor theory - (Kershaw and Ohlsson) - everything matters - perceptual, knowledge and search
insight problems
- matchstick algebra (moving a matchstick to solve equation) (tests knowledge)
- 9 dot problem (4 lines through 9 dots) (tests strategy)
- 7/9 ball problem (different weight ball)
- 8 coin problem (moving coins with hints given) (testing knowledge and strategy together)
Enhancing insight - analogy
- transfer from example to a new problem
- fundamental to education and learning theories but is rarely spontaneous
- Gick and Holyoak found that people normally only used an analogy on a new problem if they were given the hint to use the analogy
proof
argument establishing a fact or truth = drawing an inference
- explanation, diagnosis, prediction, imagination
types of inference
- deduction - specific inference
- Induction - general inference
- abduction - best explanation/fit available - not logical properties
Inference as logical reasoning - Assumption
individuals draw conclusions from premises by applying rules of logic to derive a single valid inference
Inference as logical reasoning - Classic syllogisms
assuming all of something
Inference as logical reasoning - Conditional inferences
if P then Q, if P happened then why not Q
(e.g. If I work hard, then I will get a pay rise. I didn’t get a pay rise. Therefore…?)
Inference as logical reasoning -Transitive inferences
relationship conclusions between groups can be used to form further conclusions
latin conditional syllogisms
modus poens - both true
deny antecedent - both wrong
affirm consequent - opposite way round
modus tollens - conclusion wrong so start wrong
Piaget - formal operational thinking
formal logic → syntactic structure (form) determines the validity of an argument
Evidence against the selection task - Watson and Evans
matching bias - select cards that match our given information when it would be better to choose ones that go against to test
Cheng and Holyoak - pragmatic reasoning schemas
Schemas of permission, obligation → rules about how the world works. (not logic, we use rules)
Johnson-Laird (1983) – Mental Models theory:
- Inferences are drawn by searching for possibilities with no counter-examples
Search for models is constrained by:
i) Principle of truth
ii) Working memory capacity
iii) Procedural semantics
Ormerod and richardson - paraphrasing between logically equivalent
1 - Conditional → Disjunction easier than Disjunction → conditional
Conditional - if … then …
Disjunction - either or
2 - Generation easier than Evaluation
Generation = flesh out a single model set
Evaluation = compare model sets
Information gain (Oaksford and Chater):
- information = reduction in uncertainty
- Reasoning is about expected information gain (“what if….”) → utility
- Rarity – most events are rare compared with instances where they don’t occur
Dual systems accounts
- naturalistic decision-making (Klein) - habits
- System 1 (heuristic, pragmatic - gut feeling - no thinking)
- System 2 (analytic, logical - having to think about something)
Nisbett Choice
- Nisbett - telling participants to choose between identical stockings - typically chose first or last
Normative/Prescriptive models
- a model for how we ought to do something - a norm you are trying to aspire to
- rational - maximising resources and selecting optimally
- expected value and expected utility - probabilities
Descriptive - how we actually do something
Certainty and framing
- how you frame a problem can change the choices they make
- people rather a smaller positive with bad odds than a giant negative with more positive odds
Prospect theory - a descriptive theory - Kahneman & Tversky (1979)
- Editing - selecting against a reference point via heuristics (rules of thumb) (availability, anchoring, representativeness)
- Evaluation - calculate anticipated utilities x probabilities
- dual (system 1 and 2) process - driven by instincts (1) or thought out judgements (2)
Representativeness - Tversky and Kahneman (1983)
2 events can be more likely than one thing
- more people thought a woman would be more likely to be a feminist and a bank teller than just a bank teller
- conjunction fallacy
Anchoring - Stewart 2009
- sets expectations
- when buying a bet the smaller amount gives you a smaller thing to aim for but when selling the bigger amount anchors amount of loss
Phenomena of prospect theory:
- Loss aversion
- risk-averse - prefer lower gains with a higher uncertainty
- risk seeking to avoid losses - pain of a loss greater than joy of a gain
- Probability weighting
- attribute excessive weight to low probability events and higher weight to less likely ones
Testing prospect theory - Ball, et al (Ormerod)
- taken out info used for anchoring
- have to estimate how much is worth for gift and selling
- when this happens Anchoring is not driving the bet
- Doesn’t look great for prospect theory
- system 1 and system 2 explanation - think more when its a gift (system 2) no thinking when just you (system 1)
Delay discounting - Matta et al
the depreciation of a value in how long waiting
Episodic memory impaired in amnesia due to …
hippocampal damage (eg. patient HM) - hippocampus critical for binding associations of details - binding content to context
Episodic memory
- one shot memory for an event
- context, associations, details
(classical recollection = ‘reliving the past’) - lab tested with encoding and then retrieving ‘mini events’
stages of memory
Encoding → Storage → Retrieval → Behavioural measures
- Can scan brain during encoding and retrieval
Divided attention and memory
- Dividing attention during encoding impairs memory - even if prioritising one thing
- Craik - remembered less when multitasking even when trying to prioritise memory
- more activation in hippocampus (fMRI) for attended event features - and memory boosted (attention modifies input to hippocampus) (picture superiority)
Dual Code theory - Pavio (memory)
an image plus a verbal code produces a richer memory trace -
- only explains picture superiority effect, doesn’t explain processing or what is happening in the brain
Distinctiveness effect - Von Restorff (memory)
isolation effect - a memory boost processing difference in the context of similarity (Hunt 2013)
(colourful things more memorable - Ensor)
Predictors of memorability and models
(objects, colour and complexity)
- Scientific figures did not do as well as infographics and data visualisations - Borkin et al (2013)
- distinctive images more memorable - image feature model - Bylinski et al (2015)
- images less memorable when their concepts share more features with other concepts (Naspi et al. (2021))
Levels of processing - baker-Baker paradox
- easier to remember is someone is a baker (job) over it being a name
- processing for meaning helps memory encoding - ‘deep’ processing (’depth’ doesn’t tell us how this helps)
(People asked to redraw doodles - free recall better when the ‘story’ was known)
brain areas activated when learning new schema related facts in fMRI
- Activated the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) more
- Activated the medial temporal lobe (MTL) less (includes hippocampus)
- Medial PFC schema-related activation predicted second year course performance
area of the brain activated by semantic processing and successful encoding
ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC)
Elaboration as a processing strategy
- semantic processing - relating new material to prior knowledge
- deliberate elaboration - going further - may work by distinctive processing as well as meaning (mental imagery)
- students better remembered
distinctive processing
- means people are more likely to be recollected - (for taxi driver)
- similarity less (casting director)
- processing for distinctiveness helps to encode memories - more hippocampus activation
role and location of hippocampus
- main role of hippocampus = binding info together
- paying attention, processing for distinctiveness to boost
- hippocampus is in medial temporal lobes
Paying attention - does what?
Boosts hippocampal activation
Actively processing for distinctiveness - does what?
Boosts hippocampal activation
relating to your prior knowledge (schemas) - what area?
Medial prefrontal cortex
Deep (semantic) processing - what area?
Ventrolateral prefrontal cortex
Organising information in mind - what area?
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
contextual reinstatement
Reinstating a piece of a memory using a cue can help us bring back a memory - cue matches stored memory
Smith and Manazo (2010) - memory recall
written free recall of words improved by reinstating images from scene videos at test
- Cues better when more diagnostic (distinctive) - Goh and Lu 2012
Encoding specificity principle
memory better when cognitive processes engaged in retrieval same as when learned (Morris et al (1977); Tulving and Thomson (1973))
Context addressable memory
find by knowing content
Global matching models
retrieval reflects the match between cue and all stored memory traces (clark and Gronlund, 1996)
Complementary learning systems model
memory representation stored in cortex, match with partial cues means the hippocampus does pattern completion (McLelland et al 1995)
Diary studies - Linton (1978)
memories tested once mostly forgotten, those tested dramatically increases memory
- forgetting is cue-dependent - not passive decay
Polyn et al (2005) - recall via fMRI
- when people studies faces, locations and objects
- Machine-learning algorithms detected neural patterns from these ‘events’ that reappeared during recall
- This neural reinstatement - ‘relive the past’ during recollection
testing effect - reedier and Karpicke
- testing improved recall
- 52% forgetting in study, 10% forgetting for testing condition - large effect with lots of replications
- useful applications - studying
- can enrich semantic representations - more links
Episodic context of testing - updating
- when information is studied and tested the context is different - updates memory trace - includes old and new content
- larger range of potential cues - can trigger recall, may match either old or new context
- a difficult initial test is better - bigger testing effect - people have to do more mental reinstatement
Schacter (1999) - sins of memory
- sins of omission - forgetting something
- sins of commission - distorted/altered memories
types of memory error
- Schema and gist errors (explained by prior knowledge)
- Misattribution errors (imagination inflation) (explained by limits of memory control)
- Misinformation errors (explained by memory updating post-event)
Deese-Roediger-McDermott memory illusion
- study list of words
- falsely recognise/recall a related word that wasn’t studied (vivid memory)- critical lure (semantic associations) → gist memory
- can be wrong relying on semantic information rather than memory of pictures
- mnemonic discrimination - in older people and Alzheimers
DRM memory illusion - brain areas
- reduced false memory in amnesia - errors depend on normal hippocampal function
- medial prefrontal cortex damage also reduces it - semantic knowledge schemas needed for errors
- Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex damage increases it - intact memory control helps avoid it
Brewer and Treyens (1981) - memory for objects in a graduate office - objects rated by schema-expectancy
- schema-expectancy helped recall of objects
- more false recognition of high schema objects in recognition memory test (less likely to remember something less likely to be there eg. motorcycle helmet)
True vs false memories
can be vivid but differ in quality - more semantic gist and less perceptual information
Garoff-Eaton, Slotnick & Schacter, 2006 - retrieval and then fMRI - false memories of abstract shapes
- view abstract shapes - distinguish lures from studied, then tested, some same and some new
- fMRI - activations in brain in different regions - hippocampus and prefrontal cortex - no difference between true and false recognition
- problems of study: accepting a null finding, stimuli were abstract images so there was no semantic gist
- fMRI - activations in brain in different regions - hippocampus and prefrontal cortex - no difference between true and false recognition
Dennis, Bowman & Vandekar (2012) - semantic information for false memories
- fMRI scanning at retrieval, subjectivly true vs false recollections
- found true and false differed - right hippocampus and early visual cortex both more activated in true than false recollection - true recollection may be different
Memory bias and stereotypes (bias = incorrect semantic knowledge (studies)
- Allport & Postman (1947) – version of ‘telephone
game’ showing racist memory bias against Black
character - Kleider et al. (2008) – gender stereotype errors increased with delay (”who folded baby clothes?”)
- Tran, Hertel & Joorman (2011) - induced emotional bias
in story memory by training people in interpretation
Fake news and bias - Murphy, Loftus, Grady, Levine & Greene (2019)
- memory for real and fake stories just prior to Ireland’s May 2018 abortion referendum
- 48% remembered fake stories, people were 10-20% more likely to remember fake news consistent with their own views
Reality (source) monitoring - Johnson et al. (1993), Source Monitoring theory
- source of a memory (when and where)
- imagined vs real experience (reality monitoring)
- ability to specify contextual information surrounding memory traces (source =/= context)
- not just recollecting context - evaluating what is remembered - needs control
Cryptomnesia
unconscious plagiarism - a reality monitoring error - particularly hard if you discussed together
Imagination inflation
everyday errors (e.g. answering email versus thinking about it)
- imagining has a larger effect than just reading about something - even when events are unfeasible (Schacter et al)
Cognitive interview:
- Stage 1: Reinstate the context→ encoding specificity principle
- Stage 2: Recall events in reverse order
→ reduce schema use - Stage 3: Report everything
- Stage 4: Describe events from someone else’s perspective
→ both Stages: cue further recall and maximise monitoring
misinformation effect
Strong influence of post-event questioning on memory – potential for misleading information
- Loftus & Palmer (1974) car crash study (questions introduced as part of memory of original event) - memory updating
war of ghost issues
- tested after 15 minutes and then randomly on campus after weeks, months/years
- major distortions (increasing proportion with repeated retrieval) and accurate recall drop over time (Bergman and Roediger
Students’ event memory - following issues with war of the ghosts
- Wynn and Logie (1998) - tested students’ memories of freshers
- accurate and stable over a year - initial memory test not for 2-3 weeks
- memory distortion less common in naturalistic conditions - memories fir schemas well
Laptop class usage
- Putnam et al. (2016) recommend not using a laptop
- shallow processing on a laptop (Mueller and Oppenheimer) - verbatium notes (less clear cut in replication) - note taking to prevent mind wandering
Self-explanation
Explaining how new information is related to known information, or explaining steps taken during problem solving
Elaboration interrogation
Generating an explanation for why something explicitly stated is true
- less clunky than mnemonic - but depends on understading - Dunlosky et al 2013
Keyword mnemonic
Using keywords and mental imagery to associate verbal materials (can involve explanation)
- mneumonics helped psych students on MCQ - Richmod 2011
Medial Prefrontal Cortex (mPFC) - memory links
- links to schema
- integrate
- generalized
- Semantic (gist)
- false memories
Hippocampus - links to memory
- link (parts of memory)
- separate
- specific/detailed
- episodic (time and place)
Schemas in education - Van Kesteren et al 2018
- taught A-B and A-C, not B-C but you are supposed to infer - model of generalisation
- better for B-C if schema-congruent, judgements (of what they would remember) depend of reactivation - underestimated prior knowledge
Limits of improving encoding
- elaboration strategies involve work
- elaboration interrogation - (better when precise) - not effecting for LT learning
- use cues when revising - can be external/self-generated
Self generated cues
- elaboration
- Tullis and Finley (2018)
- semantically related to target fact - use interests
- better for studying - match better with personal cognitive context
- encoding specificity principle - memory better when context matches
Thomas et al 2020
- study vs quizzes - had exams with MCQs, essays and short answers
- transfer of learning to related concepts and different test format
- quizzing better than studying - testing helps concept development and generalisation from learning episode (semantic) and memory for instances (episodic) - fits with memory updating
- feedback = no sig effect
Evidence based revison - Dunlosky, Rawson, Nathan & Willingham (2013)
- least useful - summarisation, imagery for text and re-reading
- moderatly - elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, interleaved practice (with other material)
- most useful - testing
Revision timing and spacing effect
- spaced learning vs massed is better (revisiting after a break)
- expanding spacing (increasing lag) best probably
Academic learning - episodic and semantic memory - Conway et al 1997
- tested after a lecture and in a delayed test
- those who did better after lecture more likely to remember in delayed test (at delayed they knew facts not just the lecture) - shift from episodic to semantic
Challenges of speech perception
- no gaps between words
- “the” sounds different in different positions (co-articulation - different sounds that follow)
- accent, gender, speaking rate
- time constraint (up to 200 words per minute) - “now-or-never bottleneck” (Christiansen & Chater 2016)
What are speech sounds
- changes in sound pressure from vocal movements
- speech sounds - phonemes (smallest units of speech connoting to meaning - donated with slashes on either side, not the same thing as letters)
- letters - symbol, phoneme - speech sound
source-filter theory - producing speech
- source of energy - lungs push air up the trachea/windpipe
- air vibrates the vocal cords in the larynx (voicebox) - vocal cord = source (important for pitch and inotation)
- vocal cords shaped by supralaryngeal vocal tract (lips, tounge, teeth - the filter (important for producing different speech sounds) (movement filters sound)
Spectrogram and results
- for analysing frequencies of speech
- shows how sound amplitude varies as a function of time (x-axis) and frequency (y-axis), colour = amplitude
- filtering of vocal tract appears as bands of energy at certain frequencies - ‘formants’
- lowest 3 formants more important for speech inteligibility (F1, F2, F3)
source-filter theory - vowels
- F2 frequency decreases when going to a back vowel - “heed” to “had”, F1 frequency decreases from a low to a high vowels “hod” to “heed”
- decided by tongue position
- acoustic correlates - brain can match formants to memories to work out what vowel it is hearing
(For consonants - F2 and F3 important)
Categorical perception - testing
- set up a continuum of sounds between 2 phonemes and run an identification experiment - to find phoneme boundary
- run a discrimination experiment (pair straddling boundary)
Categorical perception
the tendency to perceive gradual sensory changes in a discrete fashion
- Abrupt change in identification at phoneme boundary
- Discrimination peak at phoneme boundary
- Discrimination predicted from identification
context influencing speech perception
prior knowledge, context and expectations influencing perception
examples - McGurk (”Ga” and “Ba” and “Da” - “Da”), green needle vs brainstorm, Ganong effect
Motor theory of speech perception (Lieberman) 1967
- used a specialised speech model - separately from perceiving non-speech sounds, uniquely human, speech (no other sounds) are perceived categorically
- Objects of speech as intended vocab gestures (can sound different but gesture the same)
Evidence for motor theory of speech perception and as evidence for dorsal stream
- listening to syllables activates motor and premotor areas
- TMS over premotor areas interferes with phoneme discrimination in noise but not colour discrimination
Evidence against motor theory
- categorical perception can also be demonstrated for non speech sounds (musical intervals) - so there is not a specialised speech module
- With training chinchillas show the same categorical perception - phoneme boundary for da/ta (not unique to humans)
Neural basis of speech perception - Classic model - Broca, Wernicke, Lichtheim
- superior temporal gyrus for speech perception (Wernicke’s area) (damage in cadavour brains - Weenicke’s aphasic)
- Inferior frontal gyrus for speech production (Broca’s area)
- Left hemisphere dominant - language is left hemisphere function
Modern dual streams model - neural basis of speech perception
- Ventral stream for word recognition
- both hemispheres (bi-lateral)
- Dorsal stream for linking perception with production
- involved in speech sound discrimination (ba/da)
- important for learning to speak - continues to function in adulthood (- learning a new language)
- Left hemisphere dominant
Evidence for ventral stream
- anterior temporal damage associated with semantic impairment (extracting meaning from words)
- inferior temporal damage association with comprehension deficits
cohort model
- memory for everything you know with phoneme sequences
- words activated and then narrowed down throughout word
- uniqueness point - when one word is consistent and recognised even before end of word
Evidence for cohort model
- from shadowing task
- Average response latency is approx. 250 ms, Average duration of words is 375 ms
- so listeners recognise words even before they hear the end of the word
- learning new words slows down recognition of existing words
Cohort model shortcomings
- still very influential
- verbal model so difficult to evaluate
- to implement as a computational models (as a computer program) - would be easier to be sure what a model/theory predicts
TRACE model of speech perception
within later inhibitory connections (for lexical competitions - activation for words narrowing shuts off non-words), bi-directional excitatory connections (not just bottom-up)
William James - Principles of Psychology 1890
- without categories and their concepts infants don’t sepeate sensory experience into parts but experience “one great blooming, buzzing confusion”
- we learn to recognise
Concepts
– things in common - what makes something a member eg. bird has to have feathers - a set of necessary conditions should be sufficent to be a bird
- “has to” - necessary conditions
- language gives us labels for concepts - single words/longer expressions
two ways of turning philosophical ideas into psychological theory:
- feature theories - Smith et al - store sets of conditions as lists of features
- network theories - Collins and Quillian - store concepts in networks with IS and HAS links
Eleanor Rosch and typicality - prototype theory
- not only features or network links
- typical members of categories are processed more early than atypical members - robin vs ostrich
- concepts represented by prototypes
- measure of closeness
exemplar theory of concepts
prototypes not represented but exemplars - clusters of exemplars define the bit of conceptual space that a particular concept occupies
Problems with prototype theory
- conceptual combination - we combine concepts
- AD HOC concepts - Barsalou - making concepts up on the fly
- Mathematical concepts - Armstrong et al - has pro typicality but not defined by prototypes
“Theory” Theory - Murphy and Medin
- scientific concepts defined by role they play in scientific theories - everyday concepts defined by place in lay theories on the world and how it works
- deals with conceptual combination
Basic theory - Eleanor Rosch - basic level categories
- concepts at one level of a hierarchy are easiest e.g fruit - apples
- at a basic level the features have a strong correlational structures - different from that of other types of objects
Types of concepts
- psychological works focuses on concrete nouns - natural kinds (people, animals, plants) vs artefacts (man made objects - tables ect.)
- abstract artefacts less studied - scientific concepts and social concepts, language rules ect.
Abstract concepts - Lakoff and Johnson’s - Metaphors We Live By - 1980
- abstract concepts understood via networks of metaphorical links to concrete concepts
- not just figures of speech but fundamental conceptual frameworks - getting “into” stuff eg. in love, into depression - in a ‘container’ - inform how we see the world
Embodiment
- to understand many concepts you have to know how people interact with the world
- mental representation of such concepts may have lots on common with motor knowledge
Embodiment and motor cortex - “an arm and a leg”
- brain activity supports idea - applied TMS to motor brain regions
- faster reactions to leg-related words “kick” with leg region stimulation and faster reactions to arm-related words “pick” with arm regions
- language as an integrated part of experience - not just lists of words
Action compatibility effect (ACE)
- Glenberg and Kaschak - response in the same direction as the action described - compatible
- pulling a lever forward for “opened a drawer” and pushing a lever away for “closed drawer”
- responses quicker when compatible
Embodied cognition - up and down - Pecher 2010
- words “up” - helicopter (sky), vs whale “down” (ocean)
- presented word not pictures at top or bottom of screen
- slower to respond when helicopter at the bottom of the screen - not matching “up” expectation and whale at the top
Embodied cognition and shape imagery - Zwaan ect 2002
- representations include perceptual properties - even if not mentioned
- bird sitting down looks different to bird flying - participants had to name pictures after reading word - quicker if bird picture matched with visual expectation from sentence - consistent vs inconsistent
Embodied congntion and orientation - Stanfield and Zwaan
- similar “ACE” effects for orientation
- vertical pencil - in pot vs horizontal pencil on desk
Embodied language - colour - Connell and Lynott 2009
- participants read a sentence implying a colour for bear
- asked to name colour of target word in 3 conditions - stroop-like task
- most typical automatically evoked by language - part of mental representation - non-standard concept can modify expectations but most common colour sticks around
concepts and categories from language
- If concepts reflect real world categories, then how we categorise the world shapes what language must be like
- Categories socially constructed means that different cultures may construct different concepts - their language shapes how they think
- more plausible for abstract concepts eg. democracy, love
traditional view on thought and language
- thought has priority, languages tailored to the thoughts we have
- Aristotle, Jean Piaget, Noam Chomsky (linguist), Roger Schank (worked on old AI)
- Fits with idea of language of thought (mentalese) - Jerry Fodor
- much in common with natural languages - externally express what we are thinking internally
Linguist Relativity Hypothesis - Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
language determines thought, shapes the way we think
- Claims attributed to Whorf - Hopi don’t have a ‘linear’ concept of time, inuit have more words for snow (disputed), not having a word for something makes it harder to understand
- Whorf on sentence structure - affects thought
- different versions of the hypothesis - becomes difficult to test
Whorf’s story
- A fire prevention engineer who studied linguists in his spare time with Sapir, studied Amerindian language in danger of disappearing
- his work was posthumously published, first received support but was then criticised, his ideas have recently been revisited
- work hard to read as not an academic
Criticisms of Whorf
- simplistic, word-by-word approach to translation
- assumed every aspect of language and language structure reflected in thought
- ignored that people can have concepts without having a word
- ignored that language differences go together with cultural differences (cultural differences may be more important bringing different ways of thinking)
Psychology against Whorf
- speakers of language with different colour vocabularies see colours in similar ways (some only have two pure colour terms)
- Elenor Rosch - Dani people in Papua New Guinea - two basic terms for colour - light/warm, dark/cold
- led to book “Basic Color Terms”
- perceiving colours as a small corner of thinking - may not just be thinking
basic colour terms
terms whose primary meaning is just a colour, different languages have different numbers, order of terms is fixed
colour psychology studies
Roberson et al 2000 - Berinmo, New Guinea
- 5 basic colour terms, perception aligned with colour terms - so perception/thought guided by language categories
Winawer et al 2007 - Russian terms for colour
- light blue and dark blue different terms , easier to discriminate when one is dark and one light, but not if doing a task at the same time (verbal colour labels)
Describing actions - Fausey and Borodistsky 2010, intentional vs accidental spilling
- do the differences in she broke the vase vs it broke correspond to a difference in memory for the words remembered
- Linguistic relativity - watched videos of events - question asked changed what remembered
Lev Vygotsky - stages of language and thought
Stage 1 - language and thought are independent - speech mainly imitative - pre-linguistic babbling - similar to animals
Stage 2 - overly spoken accompaniments to behaviour - ego centric speech, words direct attention, as children grow words precede action
Stage 3 - at 7 years speech becomes more internalised - inner speech main way of thinking
Arrangement and purpose of language
- patterns of form - sound, visual marks (written), hand positions (sign language)
- patterns of meaning
- called duality of patterning (Charles Hockett 1960)
- purpose is communication - communicating information and social interaction
Linguistics
- study of language and languages
- arrangements or structures in both parts are complex
- relations allow languages to express meaning (these relations are usually arbitrary - same types of animals but no relations for words)
Linguistics and psychology
- languages as complex systems
- we know languages and use them all the time
- this ability must depend on information stored in the mind/brain
- mechanisms that allow us to do this
Sound symbolism
- not all connections between sound and meaning and arbitrary - sound symbolism
- same sound-meaning connections occur in many languages
- Imai et al 2008 - children learn sound-symbolic verbs more easily
- Klink 2000 - sound symbolism in brand names Nidax vs Nodax for thicker ketchup nam
Sub branches of linguistics
sounds, sound patterns, structure of phrases and sentences, structure of discourse, direct/indirect meaning, style
Speech sounds
different from other vocal sounds (e.g. cough)
- phones - sounds of speech
- phonemes - group of phones equivalent in a given language even though not the same sounds
Phonology - sound patterns
- sound patterns of different countries - different sequences not allowed in different languages
- suprasegmental phonology - rhythm, intonation and stress timing - can make something sound like a question by how you say it
Written language
derived from and dependent upon spoken language, letters corresponding to phonemes (not always one to one in english), other languages use syllabaries (syllables) or logographs (symbols sort of correspond to a word - Chinese)
- rules for what strings of letters/symbols are allowed, punctuation
Sign languages
- signs that vary in their exact form from occasion to occasion - but clear contrasts
- basic “word”-type signs - BSL and ASL have systems of finger spelling
- sign languages are fully fledged languages in their own right, different from ones spoken around them
Arrangements (structures above words)
- words grouped hiearachically into phrases and larger units (table, big table, the big table, polished the big table)
- “polished the big” is not an arrangement
different types of text/stories
- set-up, confrontation, resolution
- story grammars?
- can you make a distinction between form and meaning at this level?
Arrangement of meaning
- phonemes/letters don’t have meaning
- we can make words from them that do have meaning
- words can have internal structure
- morphology - the study of the internal structure of words - affecting meaning
Morphemes
smallest meaningful unit in language
- free morphemes - words by themselves - eg. fast
- bound morphemes - not words by themselves
- inflectional - add grammatical info, make a word of the same type (e.g. “s”)
- derivational - change the meaning / the word category (e.g. “un”)
principle of compositionality
putting meanings together
Pragmatic meaning
- indirect meaning
- what is taken for granted - presupposition (eg. saying you’ve stopped - assumption that you used to)
- what follows but isn’t states - implicature
- socially conveyed e.g. - politeness
- conveyed figuratively
- what we do other than describing things by speaking
Stylistics
- use of different forms of language - formal vs informal, dialect
- ways of using language in different types of literary text
- overlaps with pragmatics`
Chomsky - competence and performance
- inguistic competence - knowledge we have about languages we speak (structures)
- linguistic performance - how we speak - mistakes
- so we have to be careful in judging knowledge people have from their performance - he concluded that performance could tell us relatively little about competence
comprehension and production
comprehension - listening, reading
production - speaking, writing
- intertwined in everyday language - conversations
- use a common score of knowledge, each have dedicated processes for using knowledge
- but other views are possibly - analysis-by-synthesis - the use of production for comprehension
stages of processing
- words, structure (sentence), meaning
- all 3 parts is taking place for different parts of a conversation/reading a text ect. - have to occur in order
- in spoken language the listener is constrained by how fast the speaker is speaking/how clearly, in reading we have more control of the order of processing
mental lexicon
our mental store for our knowledge of words
hear noises/see marks, have to divide them into probable words then identify probable words as stored words in memory
segmentation problem
breaking the speech stream into words according to what makes sense, have to assume that buts of the sound stre
processing words
- identifying words relies on a set of interconnected detectors - one for each word (also detectors for letters/phonemes ect.)
- McClelland & Rumelhart’s (1981) Interactive Activation Model for written word recognition - original network model
- TRACE (McClelland & Elman, 1986) - model for spoken words
- the system works too quickly for us to notice it working
processing structure
- have to use our knowledge for what structures are allowed to work out the structure for what we are reading/hearing
- many more structures for sentence than for words (finite number)
- Syntactic processing/parsing - the process of working out structure in comprehension, using stored rules
Structure issue theories
- the garden-path theory - we make a choice and go along with it, revise later if wrong - try for the simplest structure first
- constraint-based theories - we develop all possibilities in parallel, and discard them later if they becomes incompatible with later parts of the sentence
processing that is ‘good enough’ not right
- Agrammatic (Broca’s) aphasics seem to process sentences by putting the main content words together in a plausible way (Caramazza and Zurif, 1976)
- sometimes leads to mistakes
- could this be common in unimpaired ordinary language users too? - get the most plausible outcome most often
Altmann et al 1992 - can context determine initial analysis - garden path vs contextual constraint
- simpler vs more complex structure - with control
- there was either context or no context
- when you get to the later bit in the sentence you know if you are right or not
- readers slowed fown at the disambiguating region, don’t slow down when there is context (suggesting the right analysis was made)
- appropriate context leads you to choose the right, more complicated structure
- suggests the garden path theory is wrong
Implicit causality and consequentiality
- you think causality will be about john (first person) and consequence will be bill (second person)
- do we take implicit causes to have priority or do we wait for confirmation at the end of the sentence
- in visual looking experiment - - before “because” or “and so” - no tendency to look at specific thing - neither cause/consequence
- at end of sentence, cause or consequence is confirmed and so people look at it
Dialogue - comprehension and production intertwined
- is audience design an important factor (tailoring what you say depending on the person you are speaking to - what you know they know)
- alignment is not total - speakers don’t say the same thing in the same way, greater similarity than would be expected if alignment was not happening
Psychophysics (absolute and difference threshold)
quantifying relationships between physical stimuli and psychological response
Absolute/detection threshold: smallest stimulus needed for detection
Difference threshold: smallest difference between two stimuli that can be detected – the ‘Just-noticeable difference’ (JND)
