Final

Question 1

1. How do anterograde and retrograde amnesia differ?

Answer 1

Anterograde amnesia is the inability to form new memories after brain injury while retrograde amnesia is the inability to recall memories prior to brain injury event.

Question 2

2. What can patients with amnesia teach us about the nature of different types of memory?

Answer 2

Patients such as HM tell us about explicit vs implicit memory
Skills, priming, they can learn motor skills over time even w/out the memory of doing/learning
KC: tells us about semantic vs Episodic memory
Changing a tire (knows the steps)
No memory of doing himself, or being taught to cook
More fact based event

Question 3

3. How might we explain DRM effects?

Answer 3

DRM tells us about the probability of recall
Critical lure is sometimes remembered just as good
Plot memory → serial input of words
Substantial # of false memories
Intrusion errors/semantic activation; gist-based memory
Feel like you’ve “SEEN” will claim a source memory. In other words, semantic meaning can lead you to make more mistakes

Question 4

4. How does prior knowledge both help and harm memory? Give examples of each.

Answer 4

Prior knowledge helps us learn by encoding new, related information. However it can also hurt because it can lead to intrusion of schema/gist congruent information
Example for help: networks?
Example for hurt: (think office experiments where participants are asked to list if “books” were in the office 30% falsely remember books because they were relying on schema C prior knowledge when reconstructing memories

War of Ghost story retelling revealed patterns of errors:

Question 5

War of Ghost (Bartlett, 1932)

Answer 5

• memory susceptibility to errors in misinformation studies
  Patterns of errors during story retelling
• omission, distortions, rationalization, & simplification/condensation

Question 6

Omission

Answer 6

of information considered irrelevant (or nonsensical)

Question 7

Distortions

Answer 7

order of events, focus or emphasis, more line in with cultural background of participants (Westernized)

Question 8

Rationalization:

Answer 8

details or aspects that did not make sense were “padded out” and explained in an attempt to make them more comprehensible

Question 9

The Misinformation Effect (Loftus & Palmer, 1974)

Answer 9

• Subjects watched a film about traffic safety that showed an accident
• Later asked some questions about the video
• Key question:
• How fast were the cars going when they hit/contacted/smashed each other?

Question 10

Consistent/Inconsistent Misleading (Loftus, 1978)

Answer 10

yield/stop sign –> affected visual memory depending on consistency/inconsistency

Some time later, shown 15 pairs of slides and asked to judge which image in each pair was the one they originally had seen
• The critical trial was the one where these two images appeared:

Question 11

Planted mall memories

Answer 11

• Participant + relative • Created 3 true + 1 false “lost” memory – Personalized for the participant, but always included several consistent themes • Read the relative’s account, then offered their own (3 times) • Remembered the false memory 29%, 25%, 25%

Question 12

Interference

Answer 12

Proactive & retroactive inference

Question 13

4. How does prior knowledge both help and harm memory? Give examples of each.

Answer 13

Prior knowledge helps us learn by encoding new, related information. However it can also hurt because it can lead to intrusion of schema/gist congruent information
Example for help:
Example for hurt: (think office experiments where participants are asked to list if “books” were in the office 30% falsely remember books because they were relying on schema C prior knowledge when reconstructing memories
- War of Ghost story retelling revealed patterns of errors: omission, distortion, rationalization, simplification/condensation to make more consistent w/your schemas

Question 14

5. Give examples of how memories are susceptible to change in misinformation effect studies.

Answer 14

Misinformation Effect (Loftus & Palmer, 1974), participants were asked how fast the car was going when it hit/smashed/contacted? 1 week later, asked “was there glass on the ground after the accident?” “smashed” condition answered “yes” 34%, and “hit” condition answered yes 14% of the time--but there was never any glass on the floor
Loftus, 1974
Performance goes down w/inconsistent (stop/yield)affects visual memory

Question 15

6. Describe three reasons why people forget, and the general pattern
   forgetting tends to take over time.

Answer 15

• Time, inference, retrieval failures
  Proactive interference: old learning gets in the way of new learning ex. What’s my new #. In retroactive Interference, new learning gets in the way of old information ex. What’s my old #? Forgetting occurs rapidly, then slows down

Question 16

7. How can emotions affect memory?

Answer 16

Personal significance can create “flashbulb memories” special episodic memory we can recall in great detail. Often described a ”photographic” tend to include where, what, who. Accuracy over time declines but the confidence of the memory remains high

Question 17

8. From what parts of our lives do we remember the most?

Answer 17

The most vivid memories are typically earlier in life (about ages 10-30)

Question 18

What are the concepts

Answer 18

A category is a set of things that are grouped together.

A concept is the mental representation of a category.

Question 19

What are concepts for?

Answer 19

Representing experience for efficient 
Memory 
Communication 
Inference 
Reasoning

Question 20

Evidence for theory theory

Answer 20

• Springer and Keil(1989) • children given a description of an object that belonged to a natural kind – e.g. an animal that looks, acts, and sounds like a horse
• later, given new, plausible, defining features of a different kind – e.g. the horse-like animal actually has the inside parts of a cow as well as cow parents and cow babies
• children under age six thought that these animals were horses

Gelman & Markman (1987)

• by age seven, were more likely to think of them as cows

85% of preschoolers guessed that the blackbird feeds its babies mashed-up food – they used category information, rather than perceptual similarity, to make their inference

Question 21

Summary of theories of categorization:

Answer 21

• Classical Theory – concepts and categories have definitions (necessary & sufficient conditions)
• Prototype theory – there’s a summary representation for each category
• Exemplar Theory – no summary representation-a concept is a collection of individual instances
• Theory Theory(theory-based categorization) – categories include causal explanations