Final Flashcards
What is memory and how does it operate?
- Persistence of learning over time
- Operates through storage and retrieval of information and skills
What are the processes of memory?
- Encode: information gets into brains in a way that allows it to be stored
- Long term potentiation: increase strength of neural signals between nerve cells that fire together
- Cellular consolidation: when neurons fire together a lot, synapses change so presynaptic cell is more likely to stimulate specific postsynaptic cell
- Store: information is held in a way that allows it to be retrieved
Retrieve: produce information in a form similar to what was encoded
- Recognition: identify stimuli that matches stored information when it is presented
- Recall: retrieve information when asked about it, prompted by retrieval cues
- Relearn: measure of how much less work it takes for you to learn information you have previously learned
What is the Atkinson-Shriffin model?
Effortful processing, involve stores and control processes which shift information
- External event makes its way through attention bottleneck to sensory organs
- Transduction occurs; from sensation into neural impulses (perception) - Sensory memory stores limitless amounts of information for short period of time
- Iconic memory (visual) = ½ to 1 second
- Echoic memory (auditory, hearing) = 5 seconds
- Waiting for attention to be placed to move to short-term memory
- Change blindness: fail to notice difference between photos if not centre of attention - Encode this memory through rehearsal into short term memory
- Short term memory can hold about 7 accurate pieces of information for 20 seconds (has limits to what it can store)
- Some information is forgotten forever - More encoding allows information to enter long term memory
- Use visualization, grouping, and distribution/processing techniques - Long term memory can be retrieved back into short term memory
- Depends of quality of original encoding and strategies used to retrieve information
What are the types of rehearsal?
- Maintenance rehearsal: prolonging exposure to information by repeating it, does little to facilitate encoding that leads to formation of LTM
- Elaborative rehearsal: prolonging exposure to information by thinking about its meaning, improves encoding
What is the serial position effect and why does it occur?
- Serial position effect: people recall items from beginning and end
- Proactive interference: process in which information learned occupies memory, leaving less room for new information
- Retroactive interference: recently learned information overshadows older memories
What are the techniques to encode memories into LTM?
- Spacing effect: distribute studying, don’t drop flashcards as soon as you think you’ve earned it
- Testing: answer questions increases memory
- Deep/semantic processing: think about item’s meaning
- Shallow processing: involves superficial properties of stimulus
- Self reference effect: think of information as how it is useful to you
- Survival processing: relate to survival
- Chunking: create groups within information
- Hierarchies: divide complex information into sub-groups
- Visual cues: link visuals to information
- Method of Loci: use memory palace
- Acronyms: words whose initials represent phrase
- First-letter technique: sentence’s first letters represent information
- Dual coding: information stored in more than 1 form
- Desirable difficulties: harder studying techniques are better
What are the types of memories?
- Implicit: the ones we aren’t aware of and uses automatic/low-track pathway to encode event straight into long-term memory
- Procedural: learned motor skills
- Conditioned association: learned through conditioning
- Information about space, time, and frequency - Explicit “declarative” memory: the ones we are aware of, uses effortful/high track pathway to encode/recall
- Semantic: general knowledge/facts
- Episodic: specific events
Includes flashbulb memories which are burned in due to emotional state
- Emotions can lead to stronger memory formation even if information is not directly related to emotional event
- Emotions have no influence over accuracy though
What are the encoding and retrieval processes for different memories?
- Explicit memories
- Encode: hippocampus, sleep (consolidation)
- Retrieval: working memory, frontal lobes - Implicit memories
- Basal ganglia: procedural memory
- Cerebellum: conditioned responses
- Hippocampus: spatial memories
How is the working memory model different from the other models?
- Holds information not just to rehearse but to process
- Simultaneously moving information using attention, encoding, and retrieval
- Stimuli are encoded in different ways (with vision and then hearing)
What are the components of working memory?
- Central executive: coordinates attention and exchange of information between storage components
- Phenological loop: stores information as sounds
- Word-length effect: people remember shorter words
- Repeating a phone number again and again (rehearsal) - Visuospatial sketchpad: maintains visual images and spatial layouts
- Feature binding: combining visual features into single unit
- Can retain 4 whole objects
- Eg. can’t read Korean, goes here, if you can understand Korean it may go in the phonological loop - Episodic buffer: combines images and sounds to form story
- 7-10 pieces of information
What is the encoding specificity principle? List related principles.
- Encoding specificity principle: retrieval is most effective when occurs in same context as encoding
- Context-dependent forgetting: change in environment makes us forget
- Context reinstatement effect: return to original location and memory comes back, strongest for explicit memory
- State-dependent learning: retrieval is more effective when internal state matches state you were in during encoding
- State-dependent memory: stronger for explicit memory
- Mood-dependent learning: if type of mood for encoding and retrieval matched, memory was superior
What are the types of amnesia? How do they occur?
- Anterograde: inability to form new memories for events occurring after a brain injury
- Eg. removal of temporal lobes and hippocampus cured seizures but caused this - Retrograde: condition in which memory for the events preceding trauma or injury is lost
What are the perils of memory and how do we avoid it? Why do they occur?
- Misinformation effect: incorporating misleading information into memory of event (thinking the crash is violent because of the police’s wording)
- Source amnesia: assign details of memory to wrong source (forgot the reason you thought the crash was violent was because of the police)
- False memories: confusion about an event; occurs if you thought of event often and it is easy to imagine, bringing attention to emotional reaction rather than facts
- False memory syndrome: condition in which identity and relationships of person rest on memories that are traumatic but are false
- Reinconsolidation: hippocampus updates and modifies existing long term memories
- Due to cognitive biases, we believe we have control over the information we encode but we do not
- To prevent this, filter the information you expose yourself to
What is associative learning?
Process by which behaviour changes as a result of experience
What is classical conditioning?
- Link 2 stimuli in a way that helps us anticipate an event to which we have a reaction; occurs due to firing of neurons together
- Neutral stimulus becomes conditioned stimulus to elicit conditioned response when paired with unconditioned stimulus
What are the processes of classical conditioning?
- Acquisition: occurs when neutral stimulus is paired with unconditioned stimulus, becomes conditioned stimulus
- Neutral stimulus needs to consistently appear before unconditioned stimulus - Extinction: diminishing of conditioned response that occurs when conditioned stimulus is presented without unconditioned stimulus
- After a rest period, presenting conditioned stimulus alone often leads to spontaneous recovery
- After a long time, the strength of response decreases - Generalization: tendency to have conditioned response triggered by related stimuli
- Activates brain’s representation of similar items - Discrimination: learned ability to only respond to specific stimuli
- Latent inhibition: frequent experience with stimulus before being paired with unconditioned stimulus makes it less likely that conditioning will occur after a single episode
- Preparedness: biological predisposition to rapidly learn a response to a particular class of stimuli
- Conditioned taste aversion: acquired dislike of food because paired with illness
- Conditioned drug tolerance: processes involved in metabolizing drug will begin with seeing the drug
- Conditioned emotional responses: emotional responses that develop to particular object or situation due to learning
What is operant conditioning and what principle does it rely on?
- Change behavioural responses due to consequences of actions; occurs due to dopamine-releasing neurons
- Thorndike’s law of effect: feedback from the environment can decrease/increase likelihood of behaviour occurring again
What are the types of reinforcement or punishment?
- Positive reinforcement: increase behaviour by adding something desirable
- Negative reinforcement: increase behaviour by decreasing something unpleasant
- Avoidance learning: removes possibility stimulus will occur
- Escape learning: response removes stimulus that is already resent - Positive punishment: decrease behaviour by adding something unpleasant
- Negative punishment: decrease behaviour by removing something pleasant
What is continuous and partial reinforcement?
- Continuous reinforcement: subject acquires desired behaviour right away after a reward
- Partial reinforcement: behaviour takes longer to be acquired but persists without a reward
- Fixed ratio: reinforcement after a constant number of responses, rapid responding near time for reinforcement (fixed number of cars to sell for money)
- Variable ratio: reinforcement after a different number of responses, very consistent responding (changing number of cars to sell for money each day)
- Fixed interval: reinforcing behaviour after same amount of time passes, high rate of consistent responding (pay-check after 2 weeks)
- Variable interval: reinforcing behaviour after a different amount of time passes, very resistant to extinction (pay-check after a random amount of time, pop quiz)
What is shaping?
Procedure in which specific operant response is created by reinforcing successive approximations of that response
How do you make punishments effective?
- For punishments to be effective, must occur immediately after behaviour consistently, and frequently, provide explanation for punishment, combine with positive reinforcement
- Punishment by itself inhibits behaviour and fails to provide direction
- Physical punishment teaches kids to respond aggressively to frustration
What are the processes of operant conditioning?
- Discriminative stimuli: cue that indicates that a response if made will be reinforced
- Eg. parents are in a good mood
- Discrimination: occurs when operant response is made to one stimulus but not another
- Eg. father will lend car but not mother
- Delayed reinforcement: occurs when reward is delayed, less strong
- Reward devaluation: behaviours change if reinforcer loses appeal
What is cognitive/latent conditioning?
- Learning that involves the individual’s thoughts
- Latent learning: learning that is not directly observable, stored until you need knowledge
- Observational learning: changes in behaviour by watching others, occurs without reinforcement
What is cognition?
- Cognition: mental activities/processes associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating information
- Human brains balance the need for speed with quality/accuracy which is suitable for most situations but can lead to incorrect outcomes
- Important to organize information to store knowledge over long term
What are concepts and categories and prototypes?
- Concepts: mental groupings of similar objects, events, states, ideas, people, derived from prototypes
- Eg. concepts of what a table, chair, human is
- Categories: clusters of related concepts
- Prototypes: mental images of best example of concept within a category
- Allow for classification by resemblance quickly
- Fail us when examples stretch qualities associated with prototype, boundary between categories of concepts is fuzzy, and when examples contradict our prototypes
What is categorization? Discuss the types.
Occurs based on experiences (schemas), fit to category is determined by comparing to prototype
Classical categorization: create groups of objects according to a certain set of rules by a specific definition
- Does not consider graded membership (some concepts are better category members than others, sentence verification technique)
Semantic network: interconnected set of concepts that form a category (concept map)
- Connections explain why it is easier to identify member of category after seeing a related word
- Priming: activating concept makes connected items more likely to be activated
Hierarchy: structure that moves from general to very specific
- Basic level categories are terms used most often, easy to pronounce, level at which prototypes exist
- Superordinate categories: general categories that are most likely to be used when someone is uncertain about object or wishes to group together examples from basic level
- Subordinate-level category: expert knowledge of basic category
What are algorithms?
- Step by step strategy for solving problem
- Methodically leading to 1 specific solution, provided that algorithm is appropriate for problem
- Quality > speed
What are heuristics?
- Mental shortcuts that give guidance on how to solve a problem without all the necessary information
- Does not guarantee solutions consistently
- Speed > quality
What are the issues with heuristics?
- Representativeness heuristic: judgement of likelihood based on similarity with particular category
- Conjunction fallacy: mistaken belief that finding a specific member in 2 overlapping categories is more likely than finding a member in one of the larger, general categories - Availability heuristic: judgement of frequency of event based on how easily we can think of examples
What are the types of biases?
- Confirmation bias: tendency to search for information which confirms our current explanations, disregarding contradictory evidence
- Solution: try to falsify your hypothesis instead of confirming
- Belief perseverance: evaluating evidence and only accepting ones that confirms beliefs
- Fixation: tendency to get stuck in 1 way of thinking because of how we understand concepts
- Mental set: cognitive obstacle that occurs when individual attempts to apply routine solution to a new type of problem
- Functional fixedness: sees object that could potentially solve problem but can only think of it as its most obvious function
- Anchoring effect: when individual attempts to solve problem using previous knowledge to anchor response within a range
- Eg. asking someone “what percentage of countries did this, is it less than 10%” anchors the response range near 10%
- Framing effect: people are much risk-averse when question is framed in terms of potential possesses
- Overconfidence: tendency to be more confident about our thinking than correct
- Occurs due to speed, reducing uncertainty about reality by using biases, and to gain power
What is language and why is it good? Discuss linguistic determinism and the bilingual advantage.
- Usage of symbols to represent, transmit, and store meaning
- Important for allowing society to progress by learning from previous mistakes with communication
- Linguistic determinism: idea that specific language determines how we think
- Bilingual advantage: people who are bilingual have greater number of synapses and greater executive control
What is motivation?
Need that energizes behaviour and directs it to a goal, combination of physiological and psychological processes
What is an instinct?
- Fixed pattern of behaviour observed across all members of species
- Not acquired by learning, rooted in genes
- Does not involve cognition, however this matter is blurry because even from birth humans are learning
What is a drive?
- Aroused state related to a need (survival) not being met
- Shared among all members of the species
Discuss the pushes of motivation and the pulls.
Push:
- Drive Reduction Theory: we are motivated to restore homeostasis when drive emerges
- Need = drive = drive-reducing behaviour
Negative reinforcement except for sex
- Cognitive perspective: what we perceive as a need, we have have cognition and go with the behaviour that we expect will satisfy need
Pull:
- Incentive: reward that increases likelihood of behaviour
- Positive reinforcement, attracts (pulls) to reward
- Allows for learned response-reward pairings
- Works together with drives/needs (push) to motivate individual
- Sometimes conflict with needs and we must regulate our behaviour
- Pleasure request must be delayed in order to function in society (norms)