Exam 1 Flashcards
does visual attention always follow a person’s eye movements?
no, especially when the visual stimuli are complex.
overt attention is when eyes are physically moved to the stimulus.
covert attention is when the attention shifts mentally but the eyes are not physically moving.
(stimuli falling within the beam are processed more efficiently than stimuli falling outside the beam)
in general, participant’s recall accuracy decreases as ISI (interstimulus interval) increases. explain why this relationship exists.
recall accuracy is someone’s ability to recall what they saw, heard, or felt accurately.
in this experiment the isi is the time between the letters appearing and the sound to signify what row you need to recall.
people will be worse at recalling the correct letters as the time between increases because of how quickly it’s shown. your brain will see it but cannot fully encode it to memory and therefore when the sound is shown much later after someone has seen the letters, it’s much harder to recall.
in the phonological loop model, what is the phonological store?
the phonological store is a memory store that can retain speech-based information for a short period of time.
usually the traces will face and decay within about two seconds, unless it’s rehearsed.
what is the purpose of saying numbers aloud on half of the trials in the phonological loop lab?
disrupts the articulatory control system!
you get the phonological similarity effect when there isn’t any auditory input.
if you prevent the articulatory control process from converting the info, the effect will be removed.
because of that, recalling similar sounding and dissimilar sounding things will be equivalent.
a way to prevent the recoding is keeping the articulatory control process by doing something else, like repeating numbers.
according to the encoding specificity principle, what is the most important factor for recall?
how similar the encoding environment and the retrieval environment are. if it’s the same words presented in the first trial and the second trial, normally it’ll be easier.
do cues always help memory storage and recall?
they do not always help. sometimes what would be considered a strong cue is actually a weak cue, and vice versa.
it generally depends on how the target and cue were processed and if they were processed together or separately.
in regard to false-memory experiments, what are special distractors?
special distractors are words that are seen or heard that are meant to trick someone. in this experiment they are similar enough to the sequence of words that it would be plausible for that word to be shown but it wasn’t.
how can one assess the accuracy of someone’s memory?
the only way to access the accuracy of a person’s memory is through a recording or a photograph. by that way one is able to compare what the person said and what actually happened.
top down processing
relies on prior knowledge and context, sequence of events that is heavily shaped by the knowledge and expectation that the person brings to the situation
bottom-up processing
relies on sensory input, sequence of events that is governed by the stimulus input itself
i.e., “bottom-up” as starting with raw sensory information, like building a structure from the ground up
prosopagnosia
a condition characterized by difficulty recognizing faces
how many items on average can be stored in our working memory at any given time?
7+/- 2
the ____ stream helps us recognize objects visually (what pathway)
ventral
the ____ stream helps us process objects location and coordination of movement (where pathway)
dorsal
what happens during articulatory suppression?
articulatory suppression hinders verbal memory by blocking the rehearsal of information (repeating the numbers during lab)
dichotic listening
Dichotic= apart ear
research participants hear two simultaneous verbal messages - one presented via headphones to the left and ear and another presented to the right ear.
(book phone car!!!)
attended channel
group of stimuli that a person is trying to perceive.
ordinarily, info is understood or remembered from the attended channel. often contrasted with unattended channel.
unattended channel
stimulus (or group of stimuli) that a person is not trying to perceive.
ordinarily, little info is understood or remembered from the unattended channel.
the ____ hypothesis suggests that distractors are perceived without conscious awareness, and the selective attention operates at a ___ stage of processing
late selection, late
change blindness
pattern in which perceivers either do not see or take a long time to see large-scale changes in a visual stimulus.
this pattern reveals how little people perceive, even from stimuli in plain view, if they are not specifically attending to the target info.
mnemonic devices
help us improve our memory! method of loci, chunking, and pure repetition are all examples.
primacy effect
the tendency to show greater memory for information that comes first in a sequence.
generally attributed to the fact that research participants can focus their full attention on those items because, at the beginning of a sequence, the participants are not trying to divide attention between these items and other items in the series.
recency effect
the tendency to show greater memory for information that comes last in a sequence.
attributed to the fact that the late-arriving items are still in working memory (because nothing else has arrived after those items to bump them out of working memory).
method of loci
memory strategy by which one visualizes a familiar location and associated part of that location with pieces of info.
- its what kris taught you, like putting on your shoes and seeing a huge pink elephant.