exam 2 Flashcards
Consciousness
the awareness people have about the outside world and about their perceptions, images, thoughts, memories, and feelings.
Mindless Reading
Your eyes move forward in the text but you aren’t processing the meaning of the material.
Mind wandering
When your thoughts shift from an external environment to an internal environment.
Thought Suppression
The attempt to eliminate thoughts, ideas, and images related to an undesirable stimulus.
What is the White Bear Task
When you try not to think of something but you can’t help it.
AKA “Try not to think about a white bear”
Rebound effect
When we try to suppress certain thoughts, they “rebound” by increasing in frequency after the thought suppression.
Blindsight: What is it and which region of the brain is involved?
Vision without awareness.
Located in the primary visual cortex.
What did George Miller find the short-term memory span to be?
5-9 items
What is “chunking”?
Consists of strongly associated components.
E.g., the phone number is easier to remember in chunks of 3.
The Brown/Peterson & Peterson Technique: what is it?
Presenting some items to be remembered, then count backward by threes, and attempt to recall.
The Brown/Peterson & Peterson Technique: why do participants count backward?
Prevents rehearsal
The Brown/Peterson & Peterson Technique: what is the effect of delay on memory?
Memory is fragile for material stored for just a few seconds.
Serial-position effect: definition
tendency to remember the first and last items in a list better than those in the middle.
____ is more accurate for items at the BEGINNING of a list and _____ is more accurate at the END of the list.
Recall; Recency
Primacy effect
the tendency to recall information presented at the start of a list better than information at the middle or end
U-shaped relationship: serial-position effect
Relationship between a word’s position in a list and its probability of accurate recall.
semantic similarity: example
How much does term A have to do with term B?
semantics
The meaning of words and sentences
Proactive interference
Old information interferes with memory for new information
Wickens, Dalezman, & Eggemeier (1976)
memory accuracy improved when the semantic category changed, effectively releasing participants from proactive interference.
Atkinson-Shiffrin model of memory:
what are the three separate components of human memory?
Sensory memory, working memory, and long-term memory
Atkinson-Shiffrin model of memory:
What are the three types of sensory memory?
iconic, echoic, and haptic
iconic memory
registered through visual stimuli.
echoic memory
registered through the auditory system
Haptic memory
registered through touch
______ information is stored in ________ memory, just long enough to be transferred into _________ memory.
Sensory; sensory; short-term
Information Processing Approach
Proposed that mental processes are similar to the operations of a computer.
short-term memory is also known as?
working memory
how long can you store short-term memory?
20-30 seconds
long-term memory
Info is stored in the brain over an extended period of time. It can store an unlimited amount of info.
Control processes
intentional strategies such as rehearsal to improve memory.
Why did the Atkinson-Shiffrin model diminish in its influence?
Most cognitive psychologists now consider sensory memory to be a part of perception rather than memory.
Researchers question the clear-cut distinction between short-term memory and long-term memory.
The turn to working memory – what is the difference between short-term memory vs. working memory? Why did we change the terminology?
Short-term memory is not static. It is working. It is accomplishing some important work.
Definition of working memory
The brief, immediate memory for the limited amount of material that you are currently processing.
Baddeley’s Working Memory approach
(1) it is a limited-capacity system; at any moment in time, there is only a finite amount of information directly available for processing in memory;
(2) the specialized subsystems devoted to the representation of information of a particular type
Phonological Loop:
what is subvocalization?
In which you silently (mentally) pronounce words that you are reading. (inner voice)
the role of the phonological loop in other cognitive processes
Working memory is a gateway to long-term memory
We use the phonological loop during self-instruction
Used when we learn new words in our first language
Used when we produce language or learn a new language
Used during math calculations and problem-solving tasks, to keep track of numbers
Where is the phonological loop located in the brain?
The frontal lobe and left temporal lobe
Visuospatial Sketchpad: what is it?
Processes both visuals and spatial information. Has limited capacity
Visuospatial Sketchpad: what does it allow you to do?
store visual appearance and relative position
store visual information encoded from verbal stimuli
retain an image of a scene
find your way from one location to another
track a moving object
play videogames
where is the Visuospatial Sketchpad located in the brain?
The right hemisphere, occipital lobe.
Also includes activation of the frontal and parietal lobes.
Central Executive: What does it do?
Integrates information from the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, the episodic buffer, and long-term memory.
Central Executive plays a role in:
Focusing attention
Selecting strategies
Transforming information
Coordinating behavior
true or false?
The central executive suppresses irrelevant information
true
where is the central executive located in the brain?
frontal region of the cortex
what does the episodic buffer do?
Serves as a temporary storehouse that can hold and combine information from the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, and long-term memory
Integrates information from different modalities
Manipulates information for interpretation
Allows you to update and revise previously stored information by combining it with new information
Allows you to bind concepts together that had not been previously connected
Clive Wearing’s memory deficits
Memory is directly connected to psychological well-being. No ability to transform working memory into long-term memory.
Episodic memory:
Events or “episodes” that happened to you personally.
semantic memory
Organized knowledge about the world
“Who are the most famous actors in Hollywood?”
Procedural memory:
How to do something
i.e. ride a bike
What are the two aspects of long-term memory?
encoding and retrieval
encoding
Processing and storing info
retrieval
Locate/access info in storage
“What did you eat for lunch yesterday? Did you eat lunch alone?” is an example of what kind of memory?
Episodic memory
“What are typical lunch foods? What ingredients are in a burrito?”
is an example of what kind of memory?
semantic memory
encoding: levels of processing/depth of processing?
Argues that deep, meaningful processing of information leads to more accurate recall than shallow, sensory kinds of processing.
Deep processing increases distinctiveness and elaboration
Distinctiveness:
Different from other memory traces
Elaboration:
Processing the meaning and interconnected concepts
Self-reference effect
You will remember more information if you try to relate that information to yourself.
Encoding-specificity:
context-dependent memory
recall is better if the context during retrieval is similar to the context during encoding
when the two contexts do not match, you are more likely to forget the items
Marian & Fausey’s (2006) research
Found that accuracy is higher when there is math in encoding and retrieval and accuracy is lower when the language used during encoding is different than the language used during retrieval
Explicit memory tasks
declarative memory because we consciously try to recall a specific event or piece of information
recognition
Participants are presented with items and must judge whether they saw these items earlier.
implicit memory tasks:
Assess memory indirectly
Instructed to complete a cognitive task that does not directly ask you for either recall or recognition
Memory revealed without conscious effort to remember such as word completion and repetition priming task
retrograde amnesia
loss of memory for events that occurred prior to brain damage
anterograde amnesia
loss of the ability to form memories for events that have occurred after brain damage
Autobiographical memory
the types of details that are more likely to be mistaken
generally concern peripheral details and specific information about commonplace events, rather than central information about important events.
Schemas
Consists of your general knowledge or expectation
“You have a schema for eating at a restaurant”
consistency bias
we tend to exaggerate the consistency between our past feelings or beliefs and our current viewpoint
tend to tell our stories so that they are consistent without current beliefs or schemas about ourselves
source monitoring
trying to identify the origin of a particular memory
reality monitoring
trying to identify whether an event really occurred or was imagined
brain regions involved in reality monitoring?
prefrontal, medial temporal, and parietal cortices 10, 11, 12
flashbulb memories
a special kind of emotional memory, which refers to vivid and detailed memories of highly emotional events that appear to be recorded in the brain as a picture taken by a camera.
Flashbulb memories: What are the factors that increase the likelihood that emotional memories will endure?
Flashbulb memories have six characteristic features: place, ongoing activity, informant, own affect, other affect, and aftermath.
Arguably, the principal determinants of flashbulb memory are a high level of surprise, a high level of consequentiality, and perhaps emotional arousal.
