Cognitive Psychology Flashcards
What is Reconstructive/constructive memory?
Remembering as reconstruction
-Idea that remembering the past means reconstructing the events
What is Change Blindness?
When a change occurs during an interruption to attention
- Mack & Rock (1998) Unexpected object on grid unseen
- Simon & Chabris (1999) Unseen Gorilla during ball pass
What is Selective attention?
Influence of the viewers task and task demands override saliency/visibility of stimulus
What are Failures of Attentions?
Not just static senses; not just dynamic scenes in a video; also during interactions (change blindness)
-The Door Study (Simons & Levine 1998)
What studies demonstrate how weapon focus can effect Eye Witness memory?
Loftus. et al (1987) -Cheque or Gun Loftus (1979) -Inky hands & pen -Bloody hands & knife
What are the two types of Long Term memory?
Declarative and Non Declarative
What is Nondeclarative memory?
- Procedural
- Skills motory & cognitive
- Classical conditioning effects
What is Declarative memory?
- Personally experienced events (episodic memory)
- Facts/general knowledge (semantic memory)
What is Episodic memory?
Remembering coherent episodes/events in the context, stored with ‘tags’ relating to time and place
-‘Tulving’ mental time travel
What is Semantic memory?
- General conceptual knowledge, stored without reference to time or place of acquisition
- Mental thesaurus
What is a schema?
A chunk of knowledge about the world
What is the schema effect?
Remembering what you expect to see
-Memory distortions caused by influence of expectations
What is familiarity based recognition?
When we remember something fast and automatic because it is familiar
What is recollection based recognition?
Having to take time to remember something, is slow and demanding
What is Source misattribution error?
Failure of source monitoring
-The process of examining contextual origins of a memory
What is Unconscious transference?
Tendency of Eyewitness to misidentify an innocent face (or property) on the basis of familiarity
-Experimentally effects can be reduced by informing witness that bystander is a distinct person from culprit (Ross et al. 1994)
What is confirmatory feedback?
Confidence in their answer and certainty of the face
What is change blindness blindness?
Overestimating our own eye witness abilities
What is a Stimulus?
Any passing source of physical energy that produces a response in a sense organ
What is a Sensation?
Activation of the sense organs by a source of physical energy
What is Perception?
Sorting out, interpretation, analysis, integration of stimuli, carried out by the sense organs and brain
What cortex of the brain interprets information from the eyes?
Visual cortex
What cortex of the brain interprets information from the ears?
Auditory cortex
What are our Sensory and Perceptual systems designed to do?
Select relevant and significant information and send it to the brain
What is the structure of an eye?
Retina: A layer of photoreceptor cells
Fovea: A small pit in the retina which provides the most accuracy in vision
What is the structure of a Retina?
Cones: sensitive to colours in light
Rods: Used in dim light; black and white perception
What colour can short wave-length cones see?
Blue
What colour can medium wave-length cones see
Green
What colour can long wave-length cones see
Red
What do the cones need to do for colour perception?
Comparison in activity between tree cone types
What is colour constancy?
Perceiving objects as having consistent colour, even if changing illumination alters the wavelengths reflected by the objects
What are Gestalt psychologists?
Psychologists who emphasise our tendency to integrate pieces of information to make a meaningful whole
What are the Gestalt principles?
- Similarity
- Proximity
- Closure
- Continuity
What is the order of the 3 processes sensation, cognition and perception?
Sensation the Perception then Cognition
What is Size constancy?
Understanding of the world around us in order to aid Perception
-Things don’t tend to change in physical size
What is structural encoding?
Producing various representations of the face
-Recognise the face as a face
What are Face recognition Units (FRUs)?
Contain fairly abstract structural information known about faces
What are Person Identity Nodes (PINs)?
Area in the brain that provides information about individuals (interests etc)
What is name generation?
Providing the name for the face (names are stored separately)
What is Prosopagnosia?
A condition in which there is a severe impairment in face recognition but much less in object recognition
-Face blindness
What is acquired prosopagnosia?
Prosopagnosia due to brain damage
What is Developmental Prosopagnosia?
Prosopagnosia without brain damage
What is Fregoli Syndrome?
Delusional belief that a single person can assume different physical appearances
-Lack of pins and wrong nodes activated
What is Intermetamorphosis?
Delusional belief that people change appearance to that of someone else familiar
-Deficit in FRUs: Activating FRUs with abnormally low thresholds
What is Capgras Syndrome?
Delusional belief that someone who looks familiar is actually an impostor
-Preserved face recognition but impaired emotional response to faces
What does the Embodied cognition theory suggest?
- Our cognitive systems are grounded in our sensory and motory systems
- No need for a separate mental representation
- Representations are distributed across motor and sensory areas
Why do we need attention?
Need to avoid overloading processing capacity in brain
What is the Cocktail party phenomenon?
The brains ability to focus one’s Auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out over stimuli
What is Dichotic listening?
Test used to investigate selective attention and the lateralization of brain function with the auditory system
What is Attended information?
The stimuli that is attended to, we are paying attention to the stream of information
What is the technique shadowing?
Shadowing requires participants to repeat words out loud from the attended stream
What can we notice about unattended information?
- There’s very little memory for the content of a message in the unattended ear
- Subjects notice sex changes etc in unattended ear
Who proposed the Early selection theory?
Broadbent 1958
What stages are in the Early selection theory?
Input from world > Sensation (Only attended info goes through)> Selective Filter > Response/Awareness
What are the problems of the Early Selection theory?
Breakthrough: Semantically meaningful stuff in unattended ear can be noticed and remembered
How did Treisman discover predictability matters in Selective listening?
In the experiment the 2 tracks switched ears, tracks with more predictable words after switch are spoken
What did Gray and Wedderburn discover about word/number stimuli in listening?
Participants incorporated meaning when reciting the information, they grouped the words and numbers together
What is Subliminal Material?
Information presented at a low level so we are not consciously aware of it
What is Attenuation?
To reduce somethings effect or power and to filter the less important information down
What are the processing steps in the Late selection model with Attenuation theory?
Input from world > Sensation > Attenuation > Cognition > Semantic Selection > Response/Awareness
What is selective attention?
Maintaining a focus of attention on a specific item even when faced with alternatives and distractions
Why are you less likely to recognise fire whilst playing a video game?
The capacity you have influences how much processing takes place in the unattended stream (fire)
Which stream of information is always processed?
The attended stream
What are the stages of the Late selection without Attenuation theory?
Input from world > cognition > Relevance selection > Response/Awareness
What is Perceptual Load Theory?
A study of attention with distractors that describes high and low perceptual load
What is the difference between high and low perceptual load?
High perceptual load has lots of stimuli
Low perceptual load has minimal stimuli
Whats the difference between a hard and easy visual search?
Easy visual search: Very obvious differences in Shape, colour or orientation
Hard visual search: Increasing set size and similarity of features on distractors as to target
What is Divided attention?
The ability to respond seemingly simultaneously to multiple tasks or demands
What is Serial processing?
Attending to and processing one item at a time
What is Parallel processing?
Attending to and processing all items simultaneously
What is Feature Integration Theory (FIT)?
- Organisation in the brain
- Brain has specialised areas for vision and processing
- Certain cell domination in areas seeing different orientations
What is Exogenous control?
When an external locus grabs our attention (our name in the cocktail part effect)
What is Endogenous control?
Self decided focus of attention
What is Overt attention?
When our eyes move to something
What is Covert attention?
Attention is shifted to a location that the eyes are not fixated on
What are valid cues?
Cues that indicate the information (i.e an arrow pointing towards stimuli)
What are invalid cues?
Cues indicating away from the information (i.e an arrow pointing away from stimuli)
What is central cuing?
A method that established that providing covert attention to facilitate processing can occur via intentional control
What is an Endogenous system?
Controlled by intention (seen in use of central cues)
What is an Exogenous system?
Attention is automatically shifted (determined by external cues)
What did Corbetta and Shulman distinguish between?
-A goal directed or topdown system involbed in selection of sensory information and responses
And
-A stimulus driven or bottom up system, circuit breaking
Can we selectively attend to more than one location at a time?
Yes, multiple loci of attention
What research is there into multiple loci of attention?
Baldauf, Wolf and Deubel 2006
How does a second stimulus affect someones driving ability?
People are much worse at driving after having to do a task beforw driving and when driving
What is the peripheral detection task (PDT)?
Peripheral light detection to measure attention and awareness
What is habituation?
A decrease in strength of a response to a repeated stimulus. (singular stimulus)
What is Sensitization?
An increase in the strength of a response to a repeated stimulus. (singular stimulus)
What is Classical Conditioning?
When an organism learns to associate two stimuli such that one stimuli comes to elicit a response that was originally elicited only by the other stimulus
What is Acquisition of a conditioned response?
The period during which a response is being learned
What is extinction of a condition response?
A process in which the Conditioned Stimuli is presented repeatedly in the absence of the Unconditioned Stimuli, causing the Conditioned Response to weaken and eventually disappear
What is Spontaneous recovery?
The reappearance of a previously extinguished CR after a rest period and without new learning trials
What is Stimulus Generalization?
Stimuli similar to the initial Conditioned Stimuli elicit and Conditioned Response
When does Discrimination occur in Classical conditioning?
When a Conditioned Response occurs to one stimulus but not to others
What is Higher Order Conditioning?
A neutral stimulus becomes a CS after being paired with an already established CS
