Exam 3 Flashcards
Two Additional Characteristics of Autobiographical Memory
1) It’s multidimensional bc they consist of spatial, emotional, and sensory components.
2) We remember some events in our lives better than others.
Reminiscence Bump
The empirical finding that people over 40 years old have enhanced memory for events from adolescence and early adulthood, compared to other periods of their lives.
Explanations for the Reminiscence Bump
Self-Image Hypothesis, Cognitive Hypothesis, and Cultural Life Script Hypothesis
Self-Image Hypothesis
Proposes that memory is enhanced for events that occur as a person’s self-image or life identity is formed.
Development of the self-image therefore brings with it numerous memorable events, most of which happen during adolescence or young adulthood.
Cognitive Hypothesis
Proposes that periods of rapid change that are followed by stability causes stronger encoding of memories. Adolescence and young adulthood fit this description because the rapid changes, such as going away to school, getting married, and starting a career, that occur during these periods are followed by the relative stability of adult life.
People who emigrated at a later age have a later reminiscence Bump.
Cultural Life Script Hypothesis
Distinguishes between a person’s life story, which is all of the events that occurred in a person’s life, and a cultural life script, which is the culturally expected events that occur at a particular time in a life span.
Events that fit our cultural “stories.”
Events in a person’s life story become easier to recall when they fit the cultural life script for that person’s culture.
Amygdala
A subcortical structure that is involved in processing emotional aspects of experience, including memory for emotional events.
Emotions may trigger mechanisms in the amygdala that helps us remember events that are associated with the emotions.
Weapon Focus
The tendency to focus attention on a weapon during the commission of a crime, which is typically a high-emotion situation.
Flashbulb Memory
Refers to a person’s memory for the circumstances surrounding shocking, highly charged events.
Surrounding how a person heard about an event, not memory for the event itself. We believe these are very true compared to other memories, based on the emotions.
Ex. 9/11 and JFK’s assassination.
Repeated Recall
The technique of comparing later memories to memories collected immediately after the event. This is to determine whether memory changes over time.
Narrative Rehearsal Hypothesis
The idea that we remember some life events better because we rehearse them.
Constructive Nature of Memory
What people report as memories are constructed based on what actually happened plus additional factors, such as the person’s knowledge, experiences, and expectations.
Repeated Reproduction
Same subjects try to remember the story at longer and longer intervals after they have first read it.
Source Monitoring
Process of determining the origins of our memories, knowledge, or beliefs. Influenced by biases we might have.
Source Monitoring Error/Source Misattributions
Misidentifying the source of a memory.
The memory is attributed to the wrong source.
Cryptoamnesia
Unconscious plagiarism of the works of others.
Patient BP
Extremely rare disorder, damaging only his amygdala (bilaterally). Emotionally-charged things don’t stick with him better than neutral things.
Pragmatic Inference
Occurs when reading a sentence leads a person to expect something that is not explicitly stated or implied by the sentence.
Schema
A person’s knowledge about some aspect of the environment.
Script
Our conception of the sequence of actions that usually occurs during a particular experience. Knowledge about stereotypic sequences of events (scripts are a kind of schema). Ex. Doing laundry.
Misinformation Effect
Misleading info presented after a person witnesses an event can change how the person describes that event later.
A person’s memory for an event is modified by things that happen after the event occurred.
Misleading Post Event Information (MPI)
The misleading info from the misinformation effect.
One explanation for the MPI effect proposes that the original info is forgotten bc of retroactive interference, which occurs when new learning (misinformation) interferes with memory for something that happened in the past (actual events).
Eyewitness Testimony
Testimony by a person who was present at the crime about what he or she saw during commission of the crime.
Acceptance of Eyewitness Testimony
1) The eyewitness was able to clearly see what happened.
2) The eyewitness was able to remember his or her observation and translate them into an accurate description of what happened and accurate identification of the perpetrator(s).
Post-Identification Feedback Effect
Increase in confidence due to confirming feedback after making an identification.
Cognitive Interview
Based on what is known about memory retrieval. Involves letting the witness talk with a minimum of interruption and also uses techniques that help witnesses recreate the situation present at the crime scene by having them place themselves back in the scene and recreate things like emotions they were feeling, where they were looking, and how the scene might have appeared when viewed from diff. perspectives.
Truth Effect/Propaganda Effect
Thinking something is true because you heard it in the past, but forget the context in which you learned it in (source Monitoring).
Inferences
Assumptions made based on prior knowledge. Often happen without conscious awareness.
Elaboration
Introduced elements not in the original passage (based on schemas).
Why Are We Influenced by MPIs?
Memory trace replacement (replacing your original memory with the misleading info), retroactive interference (new learning is interfering with older info), source monitoring errors (making mistakes of sources from which you got this info).
Conceptual Knowledge
Knowledge that enables us to recognize objects and events and to make inferences about their properties.
Concepts
The mental representation of a kind of thing, class or individual / the meaning of objects, events, and abstract ideas. Ex. dog, chair, even number, crime.
Category
Includes all possible examples of a particular concept. Pointers to knowledge.
Categorization
The process by which things are placed in categories.
Definitional Approach to Categorization / Classical Approach
We can decide whether something is a member of a category by determining whether a particular object meets the definition of the category. Definitions work well for geometric objects, but not for many natural or man-made objects. Very tightly locked, you either have all the features from the definition or not.
Family Resemblance
Refers to the idea that things in a particular category resemble one another in a number of ways. Created to deal with the problem that definitions often do not include all members of a category. Ex. Chairs and sofas have a family resemblance.
Prototype Approach to Categorization
Membership in a category is determined by comparing the object to a prototype that represents the category.
Helps with all problems of the definitional approach. Classification is based on similarity to prototype.
Doesn’t require a complete definition; members share most characteristics, but not all.
Prototype
A “typical” member of the category. An average of commonly experienced members.
High Typicality
A category member closely resembles the category prototype.
Low Typicality
A category member doesn’t closely resemble a typical member of the category.
Sentence Verification Technique
A technique in which the participant is asked to indicate whether a particular sentence is true or false.
Typicality Effect
The ability to judge highly prototypical objects more rapidly.
Naming
People are more likely to list some objects than others when asked to name objects in a category. The most prototypical members of the category are named first.
Priming
Presentation of one stimulus affects responses to stimulus that follows. Prototypical objects are affected more by priming. The prime will facilitate the subjects’ response to a stimulus if it contains some of the info needed to respond to the stimulus.
Exemplar Approach to Categorization
Involves determining whether an object is similar to other objects. The standard for this involves many examples, each called exemplars.
Exemplar
Actual members of the category that a person has encountered in the past.
Hierarchical Organization
Larger, more general categories are divided into smaller, more specific categories, creating a number of levels of categories.
Superordinate (Global) Level
The most general category level (ex. Furniture).
Basic Level
In between both levels; it is special because it's the level where above, much information is lost and where below, little is gained. Ex. Table. Most common (first thing to pop up in your mind). Privileged because it's named first, learned earlier, have shorter names, easier to classify, and honestly depends on your expertise.
Subordinate (Specific) Level
The most specific category level (ex. Kitchen table).
Semantic Network Approach
Proposes that concepts are arranged in networks.
Collins’s and Quillian’s Hierarchical Model. Disorganized.
Hierarchical Network Model
Consists of levels arranged so that more specific concepts are at the bottom and more general concepts are at higher levels. More organized.
Cognitive Economy
Way of storing shared properties just once at a higher level node. Makes the network more efficient, but creates a problem when something doesn’t relate to all.
Spreading Activation
Activity that spreads out along any link that is connected to an activated node.
Reaction time decreases when two words were associated maybe bc retrieving one word from memory triggered a spread of activation to other nearby locations in a network, bc more activation would spread to words that were related, the response to the related words was faster than the response to unrelated words.
Asked to think of a term and spreads to connected words from the term.
Lexical Decision Task
Subjects read stimuli, some of which are words and some of which are not words. Their task is to indicate as quickly as possible whether each entry is a word or a nonword.
Collins and Quillian’s Hierarchical Model
Semantic network that consisted of nodes that are connected by links. Each node represents a category or concept, and concepts are placed in the network so that related concepts are connected.
“Computer model of human memory.”
Problems With Eyewitness Testimonies
Familiarity, source monitoring, weapons draw attention, suggestions can impact your decision (“good pick”), and reconsolidation.
Recovered Memories
Repressed memories from a long time ago (childhood) that are recovered and you’re able to remember details you didn’t remember.
Problems with Definitional Approach
Hard to define, some things are better members than others, and uncertain classifications (ambiguity).
Visual Imagery
Seeing in the absence of a visual stimulus.
Mental Imagery
The ability to recreate the sensory world in the absence of physical stimuli (also occurs in senses other than vision: auditory).
Imageless Thought Debate
The debate about whether thought is possible in the absence of images.
Paired-Associate Learning
A learning task in which participants are first presented with pairs of words, then one word of each pair is presented and the task is to recall the other word.
Conceptual Peg Hypothesis
Concrete nouns (ex. boat, tree, house) create images that other words can “hang onto.”
Mental Chronometry
Determining the amount of time needed to carry out various cognitive tasks.
Mental Scanning
Subjects create mental images and then scan them in their minds.
Imagery Debate
A debate about whether imagery is based on spatial mechanisms, such as those involved in perception, or on mechanisms related to language, called propositional mechanisms.
Spatial Representation
A representation in which different parts of an image can be described as corresponding to specific locations in space.
Epiphenomenon
Something that accompanies the real mechanism but is not actually part of the mechanism.
Propositional Representation
One in which relationships can be represented by abstract symbols, such as an equation, or a statement. Like words, whereas spatial representation would involve a spatial layout of the statement or equation.
Depictive Representation
Representations that are like realistic pictures of an object, so that parts of the representation correspond to parts of the object.
Tacit Knowledge Explanation
An explanation proposed to account for the results of some imagery experiments that states that participants unconsciously use knowledge about the world in making their judgements. This explanation has been used as one of the arguments against describing imagery as a depictive or spatial representation.
Subjects unconsciously use knowledge about the world in making their judgements.
People are relying on their knowledge of how perception works, and imitating it (demand characteristics).
Mental Walk Task
Subjects were asked to imagine that they were walking toward their mental image of an animal and how close would they have to be that the animal is taking over their entire visual field.
Dual Coding Hypothesis
When you try to remember a concrete noun, you get to remember the word and a mental image.
Imagery Neurons
A type of category-specific neuron that is activated by imagery.
Unilateral Neglect
A problem caused by brain damage, usually to the right parietal lobe, in which the patient ignores objects in the left half of his or her visual field. Ex. shaving only just one side of your face.
Method of Loci
A method in which things to be remembered are placed at different locations in a mental image of a spatial layout. Ex. remembering to go to the dental office by imagining a humongous set of teeth in your living room.
Pegword Technique
A method for remembering things in which the things to be remembered are associated with concrete words. Like remembering heaven by rhyming it with seven.
