Cognitive Psychology Unit 2 Flashcards
stroop effect
delay in reaction time between congruent and incongruent stimuli.
what does the stroop effect demonstrate
people’s inability to ignore the meaning of words
William James famous quote
“Everyone knows what attention is”
exogenous attention
Attention can be drawn by salient stimuli
Endogenous attention
People can pay active attention like in a lecture
divided attention
people can focus on multiple things
focused attention
people can only focus on just one thing
overt attetnion
looking at an object
covert attention
Focusing on one thing with your eyes but paying attention to something else in your periphery
Exogenous attention is (5 things)
fast, automatic, hard to override bottom up, and motivationally relevant events
What does the money and and red/green circle experiment prove?
Value Driven attentional Capture – attention is automatically captured by value even if the value is not relevant anymore
What does the first Posner Cueing Task prove?
attention is drawn by many things
Is attention captured by motion always, offset, onset, not-task related?
onset
Which experiment is evidence that attention is drawn by the onset of motion?
Rectangles turned into Es or Hs and participants had to say if the odd one out is an E or an H. The movements were continuous, static, motion offset, and motion onset. People answered quicker with motion onset condition (static and then starts moving) and people were slowest with continuous motion
It also worked with natural motion with actual mechanical things moving as opposed to pictures on a computer screen → proving that it is the actual motion that caused the difference and not something about the computer
Characteristics of endogenous cueing
strategic, slow, can be overridden, top down, motivationally relevant goals
What are the two possibilities for how endogenous attention works?
enhancing relevant representations and suppressing irrelevant representations
Experiment for evidence of enhancing relevant representations
monkeys looked at light and either looked or attended and looked at it, and higher neural firing rate when stimulus was attended
Evidence for suppressing irrelevant representations
cars, people, and trees experiment which showed that target info was enhanced and distractor info was suprressed
Conclusion about enhancing relevant representations vs suppression irrelavent representations. evidence!
they are not mutually exclusive and the retinotopic map experiment with the attending to center or predefined target showed that there is both enhancement and suppression
Binding Problem
How does the brain know where to focus its attention
Feature Intergration Theory
using different feature maps to be joined (color and square)
What do we use to combine different features?
Focused Attention
Evidence for the feature integration theory:
participants had to report and focus on the numbers and presumably they weren’t putting focused attention on the other colorful shapes –> ended up having illusory conjuctions and reported wrong colorful shapes BUT this did not happen without the focused attention on numbers
illusory conjuctions
psychological effects in which participants combine features of two objects into one object
What is Balint’s Syndrome due to
Due to damage to parieto-occipital lobes on both sides
What does Balint’s Syndrome cause
Impairment in focusing attention
Impairment with feature integration
if a patient cant say the right color of a letter or see objects right in front of face, what syndrome might they have?
Balint’s Syndrome
What is hemispatial Neglect due to
Damage to only one side in the angular gyrus
What does hemispatial neglect cause
Impairment attending one side side of space
What does the stroop effect demonstrate
how automatic processing can interfere with intended processing
In Schneider and Shiffrin’s experiment, in which particapants were asked to indicate whether a target stimulus was present in a series of rapidly presented “frames”, divided attention was easier when___
processing had become automic
when does automatic process occur
when tasks are well-practiced
What are attentions functions? (2)
to enhance processing of relavent information and to bind features into objects
what are attention’s limitations
only a few elements at the same time
What is feature search?
focusing on just one feature when searching
what is conjuction search?
looking at a combination of features when searching which makes it hard
What type of processing does feature search entail?
parallel
What type of processing does conjunction search entail?
serial processing
Which is easier: feature or conjunction search?
feature
Is conjuction search quicker when the target is absent or present and by how much?
Present and by 2x because you stop looking when you find the target
Which experiment did we use in class to discuss feature and conjuction search?
blue and red lines and looking for red vertical line
What is feature integration theory?
binding multiple features together
How does parallel processing relate to feature search?
The time it takes
to evaluate 1 item, is
identical to the time it takes
to evaluate n items
What did we initially think about primitive features?
that they are percieved quickly with parallel processesing and without focal attention in feature search
What did we initially think about binding features?
that they require focal attention and are serially processed in conjuction searhc
What complicates the idea that primative features are processed w parallel processing and that binding features is processed with conjuction search?
Sometimes images have feature search and conjunction search combined like all blue vertical lines in one area and a red vertical line in the middle but a lot of red lines horizontally
and sometimes feature seach can be really difficult like finding diagonal lines in other diagonal lines
why is it hard to tell the difference between one diagonal line to another
they are not very salietn
Visual Salience
Features are more dissimilar or more unique so items pop out and are exogenous
What type of guidance do you use for Salient Features
bottom up guidance
If there is no bottom up guidance what do you need to use?
endogenous control and you need to inspect items serially
What type of guidance can we use to process different streams of information in parallel
top down guidance
Evidence Against Broadbent’s Early Selection Model
Cocktail Party Effect
Explain the dichotic listening expriment and what it proves
A sentence was repeated in one ear. In the other ear, a participants heard 8 boring words 35 times
The participants were supposed to only listen to the sentence and they could ignore the words but if the words contained their own name, then the participants were able to hear their names and couldn’t ignore it – cocktail party effect
Proves: brain must be encoding for meaning which goes against broadbent’s early selection model
What model of attention was created to address the problems with the early selection model
Treisman’s Attenuator Model
How does Treisman’s Attenuator Model differ from the early selection model
Each unit has a threshold it must meet before it becomes consciously available so we process some amount of semantic meaning before higher order processing
Do our own names have high or low thresholds in the Attenuator Model
very low
What experiement proves that the Attenuator model has truth to it?
Heard the sentence “they threw stones at the bank” in one ear and heard the word river or money in the other eye
They then said what the word bank referred to
PROVES: that everything gets processed → even stuff we are supposed to ignore gets processed and influences higher order processing even if we are unaware of it
What are the two steps of Attenuator model?
Attenuator –> Dictionary Unit
What are the three steps of the late selection model?
Sensory store –> semantic analysis –> higher order processing
A task is automatic if:
It doesn’t require attention
Occurs outside of consciousness
It is ballistic (if you start it, it keeps going)
What is more automatic: reading or color naming?
reading
Why is reading more automatic than color naming?
We’ve spent our entire lives reading, so it is automatic – when you look at a word, the meaning just comes to you
Which experiments proves tasks can be automatic when trained and that automaticity is relative
Color Shape Training Task: Participants linked shapes to colors for 20 days in a row
And eventually after the 20 days, they did the stroop version with congruent and incongruent trials
Task with target as numbers and frames as mostly letters as initial phase and then swapped to reverse phase
What two things are needed for automaticity?
Practice and Consistency
In terms of something becoming automatic what comes first: top down problem solving or bottom up recognition
top down problem solving BECOMES bottom up recognition with practice and consistency
how often do people’s minds wander
47% of the time
are ppl happy or unhappy while midns are wandering
unhappy
What does more mind wandering correlate to and what experiment proves this
worse working memory and the expriment were individuals were asked to do a sustained-attention-to-response task which measures the degree of mind wandering and then a working memory task where they remembered phone numbers
What is the default mode network?
a system of connected brain areas that show increased activity when a person is not focused on what is happening around them.
Characteristics of Mind Wandering
- not just a lack of attention
-can be endogenous inward-focused attention - strategically deployed
What is some evidence for Broadbent’s filter model?
Colin Cherry used a procedure called dichotic listening to have people listen to passages being read from two people and ignore one to learn more about their selective attention
Participants repeated the attended messages out loud (shadowing)
PROVES: listeners can only attend to one message
What is the dear aunt jane experiment?
Evidence against Broadbent’s model: Dear Aunt Jane experiment where people confused the messages in each ear even though they were supposed to be selectively paying attention to just one ear
Final Conclusion on early vs late models of attention:
Early selection happens in some cases and late selection happens in others
Instead we’ll focus on cognitive resources and cognitive load
cognitive resources
Refers to the idea that a person has a certain cognitive capacity which can be used for carrying out various tasks
cognitive load
The amount of a person’s cognitive resources needed to carry out a particular cognitive task
Inattentional Blindness
Occurs when an individual fails to perceive an expected stimulus in plain sight, purely as a result of a lack of attention rather than any vision defects or deficits
Change Blindness
Difficulty in detecting changes in scenes when an individual only sees one scene at a time
What experiment proves that mind-wandering can be strategic?
clock experiement
What does the senory memory contain in the modal model of memory?
Sensory memory is an initial stage that holds all incoming information for seconds or fractions of a second
In the modal model of memory, what is interesting about the STM?
it can hold items for a short period of time (15-30 sec) but can hold longer with rehearsal
What do Atkins and Shiffrin say about the memory system?
it includes control processes, which are active processes that can be controlled by the person and may differ from one task to another ex. mnemonics and rehearsing a phone number to call
Encoding defintion
The process of storing something in long term memory
Retrieval Definition
The process of remembering something in long term memory
What are the sparkler example and red, green, and blue ball example good examples of?
Visual Persistance
What is echoic memory?
sounds that persist in the mind
Digit Span Defintioin
The number of digits a person can remember and digit spans vary between person to person but typically it is around 7 plus or minus 2
Auditory Coding
Remembering sound of something
Proactive Interference
the decrease in memory that occurs due to prior learning
What is an example of visual coding
Representing items visually as would occur when remembering the details of a floor plan or the layout of streets on a map
Working Memory definition
a limited-capacity system for temporary storage and manipulation of information for complex tasks such as comprehension, learning, and reasoning
Phonological Similiarity Effect
the effect of confusing letters that sound the same like F and S
Is it easier to remember short or long words
short
Articulatory Suppression
the articulation of irrelevant information during a verbal task affects the normal functioning of the phonological loop – reduces memory because speaking interferes with rehearsal
What effect does saying the word “the” many times abolish
the word length effect
Phonological Loop
a component of working memory model that deals with auditory information
Episodic Buffer
can store information (providing extra capacity) and is connected to LTM and therefore making connection between the working memory and LTM memory possible
What did the delayed response task with uncovering tray to get food show
prefrontal cortex is important for holding information for brief periods of time
What is the magic number according to miller
7 +- 2
Long term memory includes memories from anything more than __ seconds ago
30
What is the biological underpinning of STM
STM: dependent on maintenance of neural activation
What is the biological underpinning of LTM
LTM: dependent on permanent synaptic changes to neurons
What did the experimetn with the grid of letters and whole report and partial report with tone prove?
Sensory or iconic memory is very brief, automatic, and has a very large capacity
BUT recall makes it harder to remember things
What did Luck and Vogel’s study of colored squares with some overlapping and some not overlapping prove
individuals represent objects all together and can do 3-4 objects at the same time
What does the contralateral delay activity prove
amplitude reflects how many items you have in memory which suggest that people can remember around 3 items and can’t do much more than that
According to the slot model, if the set size is larger than the slots what happens?
If set size is larger than slots, some items are just not stored
According to the resource model, if the set size is large what happens?
all items are stored but they are stored less precisely
What is good evidence for the slot model?
Experiment with meemorzing either 3 or 6 colors. Going from set size 3 - 6, probability of storage changed but not probability of accuracy for set size 3 but not for set size 6 → evidence for slots model because some information was just not stored at all
What are two ideas about the duration of STM?
18 seconds: Participants would hear 3 letters and count up and then 3 letters and continue counting and then they found that after 18 seconds, participants cannot remember the letters at all
10 Seconds: Probability of storing colors dropped after like 10 seconds but if the item was actively recalled then it was easier for them to remember
2 examples of chunking
Jonas and 52 cards
Chess players remembering constelations
How long does information remain in the sensory memory?
seconds or a fraction of a second
Definition of Chunking:
Items are defined as ‘psychological’ units
Performance depends on how information is chunked
What is a chunk?
Collection of elements that are:
1. strongly associated with each other
2. weakly associated with other chunks
How does Baddeley’s Model address the problems of the model modal of memory?
There are two loops that interact with long term memory and are governed by a top down system (central executive): phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad
What did the experiment with people mixing up Bs for Ps and Fs for Ms show
Showed that the quality of language matters and phonetic information must be stored in some sort of auditory form and not just visual
Which language has the best digit span?
Chinese
What is some evidence for the visuospatial sketchapd
picture-plane pairs (the blocks in shapes) show that humans can store information and manipulate it
what does the visual cortex do with cued information as opposed to uncued information AND how do we know
Visual cortex maintains cued information and discards uncued information. We know this because of the probe rotating experiment where people were only good at rotating the cued information.
What interferes with the visuospatial sketchpad span?
Distracting visual information like with the pattern memorization and abstract paintings experiment
What is another explanation for how Phonological Info and Visuospatial info is stored? How do we know it’s wrong?
Just Central Executive and STM and audtiroy and visual info is kept together
Task with Ys and Ns versus saying out loud: people were much faster at pointing for the verbal task than having to say it out loud. For the visual task, pointing was slightly slower than saying out loud. –> when modalities overlap (using same system for representing and manipulating, it is really hard) SO the memory stores are separate (allan badleys model) CE → phonological and CE → visuospatial
According to Baddeley what is the CE required for?
control and regulated the refreshing or rehearsal process, focus, dive and switch attention and helps you connect with long term memory
Where is the Central Executive
Prefrontal cortex
How do we know prefrontal cortex is important for maintaining learning and memory
N-back test and Delayed match-to-sample task
How do the phonological loop and visuospatial loops interact?
episodic buffer
What type of intelligence does working memory predict?
Fluid Intelligence
Fluid Intelligence
(ability to solve novel problems)
Crystallized Intelligence
facts, information, skills
Can people improve their fluid intelligence with working on their working memory?
Working memory can be trained, but this does not generalize
training can improve the cognitive proceses you use (near transfer) but not the ones you don’t excerise (far transfer)
Multiple demand network Definition
The multiple demand (MD) system is a network of fronto-parietal brain regions active during the organization and control of diverse cognitive operations. It has been argued that this activation may be a nonspecific signal of task difficulty
Damage to the hippocampus and surrounding structures causes deficits in ___
the ability to form new long term memories
How was KC primarily studied?
through interviews
What parts of KC’s brain are injured?
Hippocampus and temporal lobes
What does the serial position curve experiment with people remembering words and some people having a filler task prove?
recency effect is short-term memory and primacy effect can be attributed to long-term memory
What other explanation is there about STM and LTM in terms of primacy and recency effect.
maybe primacy effect isn’t fully LTM and maybe recency isn’t fully STM like in the experiment where people were tasked with remembering 10 words, and 10 seconds between each pair of words, and there is also a distractor task between words, and sometimes there is even a 30 second delay at the end
What type of tasks did HM do to be studied?
Star task and priming task
What did HM’s star task show?
Long term memory is different implicitly and explicitly and implict LTM may not be related to the hippocampus
what did HM have problems with
anterograde amnesia so he couldn’t form new LTMs
Visual Skill Learning Experiment
With constant mapping between items and response, over time, retrieval becomes an accurate process but this is only for repeated instance
what does the experiment where people had to tap a specific finger depending on which light came up seem to prove?
you don’t need the medial temporal lobe for simple learning tasks
What does the weather prediction task with cards prove?
we might not need our hippocampuses for harder explicit memory either
Where is the implicit memory imprinted and how
in neocortex through extensive repetition
Conclusions: Is hippocampus required to learn procedures
nope
Explain the Statistical Learning Task and if it showed that the hippocampus was needed or not
People are shown random symbols and they don’t know that the symbols are formed in pairs, but the symbols are in a pattern of pairs
People got pretty good at doing this and predicting the second symbol when they see the first one
You can give them a familiarity test to ask them which symbol is old and which is new
They did 4 versions with tones, symbols, shapes, and scenes and it showed that people were pretty good at remembering which was new and which was old
Hippocampus IS needed and maybe it is needed for higher order relational associations
Final Conclusion abt hippocampus
Perhaps: hippocampus learns higher-order relational associations
hippocampus is not needed for STM and perhaps not for implicit LTM
2 types of explicit memory
episodic and semantic
3 types of implicit memory
procedural priming and conditioning
is explicit memory dependent on the hippocampus
yup
is implicit memory dependent on the hippocampus
nope
What experiment shows that conditioning is not dependent on the hippocampus
rabbit and puff experiment with no difference between Amnesics and control
what is a bell called before it is conditioned
neutral stimulus
what is the food called in pavlovs experiment
the unconditioned stimulus
what is the conditioned stimulus in pavlovs experiment
the bell
What are two examples of classical conditioning in daily life
ads and notifications
Priming defintiion
Presentation of one stimulus changes the response to a subsequent stimulus without conscious guidance
What two experiments with amnesics show that priming does not involve the hippocampus
umbrella and elephant experiment and the finishing pairs of words experiment
Which two experiments seem to contradict each other in terms of implicit memory and the hippocampus
finishing pairs of words and statiscal learning task
What is another word for declartive memory
explicit memory
Did either KC or HM have episodic memory
nope
what type of memory involves mental time travel
episodic
what is chronesthesia
mental time travel
What kind of memory does the fact that KC can explain a picture of a machine when looking at it but cant say what it is without the image demonstrate
priming
What is the difference between personal semantic memory and autobiographical memory
personal semantic is semantic but still a fact about your life, not a reliving of an event and autobiogrpahical memory is episodic
Did HM have episodic memory?
he shows no episodic memory for events before his surgery
Does HM have semantic memory?
Yes but mostly from long before the amnesia onset
What do they hippocampus and MTL do
- encode declarative memories
- play role in retreving memories (old and new for episodic and primarily new for semantic)
How does LP differ from HM and KC
she has problems with semantic but not episodic
What does KC and LP’s differents suggest
a double dissociation
What does the remember/know paraidgm show
They looked at distribution of responses and the amount of remember responses goes down greatly from events in the last 10 years versus 40-50 yrs ago but know responses stay the same
What does the remember/know paradigm prove
events that were initially episodic either become semantic or become forgotten
The default mode network might be involved in ___memory
episodic
Standard Model of Memory
When initial experiences activate, visual, auditory, and sensory informations start to form links with the hippocampus
Eventually it becomes less dependant on the hippocampus when it consolidates
Overtime, the hippocampus becomes not useful
Which is why people with lesions to hippocampus, remember things from a long time ago but not from recently because the hippocampus is still dependent with the individual parts
Multitrace model
hippocampus never loses its connection and maybe episodic information is lost just because it isn’t rehearsed as much
