Cognitive Psychology Flashcards
Selective attention
We are not conscious of all stimuli detected by senses - e.g. gorilla basketball
Sensory memory receives more than can be put into STM
Sperling 1960 - grids of letters - people could recall 4 or 5 of 9 letters but remembered rows perfectly
Selective attention exists because brain mechanisms responsible for processing have limited capacity
Dichotic listening
Cherry 1953 - made people listen to 2 messages at once in different ears - had to follow one source
Some info always gets our attention even when not shadowed - sexual or our name
Info presented to unattended ear can still get our attention - Von Wright et al. 1975 - words presented with electric shock would produce emotional reaction
McKay 1973 - information presented to unattended ear influences verbal processing - river/money experiment
Cocktail-party phenomenon
We can sort one voice from another - even in crowds
Moray 1959 - 33% participants picked out their name in another conversation
Conway et al. 2001 - least capable participants identified their name because of poor working memory
People better at verbal and equation problems also better at ignoring their name.
Attention and how to test it
Attention controlled by automatic processing (endogenous attention) - causes distraction when incongruent with focal task
Attention can also be controlled deliberately (exogenous attention)
Attention tested through Stroop task - attention processes are in conflict (words and colours)
Posner cueing paradigm - illustrates distinction between exogenous and endogenous attention
Models of selective attention
Early selection models - items not attended to will not get processed
Late selection models - all info is attended to and gets selected later in processing chain
Attenuation Model - compromise between positions - not all unattended info is ignored - it is processed in a weakened form
Significant info like our names is still processed (explains cocktail-party)
Priming
Exposure to one stimulus influences processing of a subsequent target stimulus without conscious guidance
Positive priming - enhances processing
Negative priming - inhibits processing
Impairments of attention
Unilateral neglect - patients cannot attend to information contralateral to injury
Hemispatial neglect syndrome - unable to move ‘spotlight’ of attention to certain regions
Neglected information is still processed, just not consciously (e.g. still emotional reaction)
Bisiach and Luzzati 1978 - only describe half a scene
Leisman 2011 - damage to right side inferior parietal lobe causes most problems
Impairments of memory
Retrograde amnesia - forgetting what happened prior to injury
Anterograde amnesia - unable to form new memories after injuries
Organic amnestic syndrome - disorientation, anterograde amnesia, intact IQ and procedural learning
Famous case - HM (hippocampus mostly removed to treat epilepsy) - CW - brain infection destroyed hippocampus - always thinks he has just woken up
Graf and Mandler 1984 - amnesiac patients could complete word stem completion tasks but not free recall
Impairments of speech and language
Broca’s aphasia - damage to left frontal lobe - speech production
Wernicke’s aphasia - damage to left temporal hemisphere - speech comprehension
Impairments of conceptual processing
Superordinate concepts more susceptible to forgetting than basic level concepts - Alzheimer’s patients refer to apple as ‘fruit’
Semantic dementia - progressive, selective loss of semantic knowledge
Loss of word meanings, can’t recognise objects - episodic memory
Dissolution of knowledge is structured - Hodges 1995 - specific birds - bird - animals - nonsense
Organising semantic information - defining attributes
Inference - knowledge is inferred from what we know about related things
We form spiderweb semantic networks - each subordinate category inherits attributes of superordinate ones.
Basic level categories - middle level of categorisation - e.g. “dog” more specific than mammal
Speed of responding to Q like “does a dog bark?” is quick because dog and bark are close in semantic chain.
Problems with this approach -certain attributes are more salient - e.g. pink more associated with salmon than fins.
Objects defining attributes vary based on perspective, context etc.
Semantic organisation - exemplar account
Categories as clusters of exemplars - specific instances we’ve encountered
Graded membership - certain exemplars are more typical because we have experienced them more.
Correlations between features allow for prediction
Comparing defining attributes with exemplar accounts
Similarities - importance of similarity - stimuli placed into categories by:
DA - comparing with defining attributes
E - comparing with other exemplars that are similar
Same general cognitive processes - new stimulus - activation of concept in memory - comparison - categorisation.
What something is:
DA - determined by possession of defining attributes
E - flexible and variable - categories emerge from structure of world
Bowman, Iwashita 2020 - creatures study - people use combination of both category models
Prototype activation in ventromedial prefrontal cortex and anterior hippocampus
Exemplar activation in inferior frontal gyrus
Memory systems
Multi-store model - separate stores
Baddeley and Hitch - working memory model - more detailed model of STM
Phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad and episodic buffer
7 +/- 2 digit span - can be increased with chunking
Implicit and explicit memory tasks
Explicit memories - consciously accessible - includes episodic and semantic memories
Implicit memories - unconscious, difficult to verbalise - includes procedural memories.
Implicit learning - Heyes and Foster “reaction time” test - people got faster, but even faster on repeating sequences, which they didn’t realise
Performance improves with practice, but improvement diminishes with time
Explicit learning - when people learn a word list, they recall more words from end and beginning - primacy and recency effects.
Why do we forget?
Issues with encoding - not paying attention - levels of processing Craik and Lockhart 1972
Issues with consolidation - information not stored, e.g. patients with amnesia
Issues with retrieval - e.g. recall vs. recognition, retrieval failure
Recognition not always easier than recall - Muter 1978 - Doyle recognition harder than Arthur Conan… recall
Dual-process model of recognition
Mandler 1980 - familiarity - fast process, knowing in absence of context
Recollection - slower process that involves retrieval of contextual details.
Information may be available even if not accessible
Memory determined by compatibility between encoding and retrieval - encoding specificity principle - closer test is to learning - better memory
False Memories
Baioui et al., 2012 - participants given lists of related words (rest, awake, dream etc.)
Asked to remember words - recalled absent words like sleep - participants sure of hearing word
Making consonants
Phenome - smallest unit of speech sound - e.g. pin /p/ + /i/ + /n/
Group phenomes - smallest unit of speech that influences meaning e.g. bet and bit
Consonants are made by place in vocal tract where constriction takes place (pact/cat)
Difference between ‘pa’ and ‘ba’ is voice onset time - pa is 50ms slower than ba.
Lisker & Abramson 1970 - computer generated sounds that varied VOT of ba/pa - no gradual shift - either pa or ba - abrupt shift at 25ms
Making vowels
Vowels determined by height of tongue, backness of tongue and roundedness of lips
Vowels have distinctive frequency components / acoustic signal peak
Speech perception
The McGurk effect - one sensory modality can influence another - seeing ga but hearing ba produces da
Ganong 1980 - computer generated sounds fell between /g/ and /k/ - when followed by ift - gift - when followed by iss - kiss
Measuring speech development in infants
High amplitude sucking - rate of sucking increases when new sound is detected - slows if sound is repeated - used for recognition
Children can differentiate between ba and pa as young as 1
Head turn preference - infants can turn and listen to one stimulus over another - can perceptually distinguish
Preferential looking - infants look for longer at one type of stimulus while hearing its name - must be able to recognise it
Speech development in infants
Infants are sensitive to all categorical boundaries in first 6 months - by 12 months, only native categories
Emergence of stable, adult syllables around 6-8 months
Production-perception loop - when infants hear sounds that correspond to babbling - they already know how to produce sounds - first words are pretty accurate
0-5 months - coos
6-12 months - recognition of simple words + production of first words
12-18 moths - understanding of 150 words
18-48 months - vocabulary spurt, basic grammar
48+ months - figurative language
