Learning Cognition Emotion Flashcards
Ways to improve memory
- repetition
- elaboration
- association
- biological factors (sleep, vitamins, etc)
- pay attention
- pictures
- use your ears
- reduce over-loads
- time travel
- rhyming
- relax
Principles of association
- contiguity (either spacial or temporal)
- frequency
- similarity
Ebbinghaus main ideas
- psychology of memory as a science
- “father” of modern memory research
- used himself as participant
- increase practice, increase retention
- forgetting and retention curves
Law of exercise
we learn by doing, we forget by not doing
Watson’s theory of learning
behaviorism. rats in maze learned automatic motor behaviors to help them solve mazes, simply from finding rewards on the correct paths
Tolman
Cognitive maps (contrary to Watson’s theory of how rats solved the mazes)
Miller’s magic
Magical number: 7 +/- 2. Also, context helps us understand messages and information
Rummel-Hart
connectionist theory: concepts based on overlapping associations of nodes (get it? rummel connected with hart: rummel-hart)
Where does the majority of learning happen?
The Central Nervous System
Basal Ganglia
plan and produce skilled movement
Hippocampus
- inside temporal
- important in learning new info about facts and autobiographical info
- Emotional memory
- looks like seahorse
Thalamus
incoming sensory stimuli go here, then get relayed to appropriate primary cortex involved for interpretation/manipulation
Theory of equipotentiality
memory takes place in all parts of our brain
Acetylcholine
connects motor neurons and muscles. Regulates attention and memory
Dopamine
- muscle movement
- pleasure/reward
norepenephrine
- increases arousal
- contributes to learning and long term memory
epinepherine
excitatory, attention and concentration
serotonin
sleep, appetite, mood
Long Term Potentiation
- a process by which connections between neurons become stronger with frequent activation. (AKA a post-synaptic neuron can strongly respond to weak stimuli if repeatedly stimulates)
- Neurons that fire together wire together
What happens when the hippocampus is damaged
-damage to learning ability because you can’t have LTP, so you can’t form new memories. AKA anterograde amnesia
Neurogenesis
creation of new neurons - modifies brain in adaptation to changing environmental conditions
Blocking
If a stimulus that has been conditioned to elicit a response gets paired with another stimulus, the second stimulus will not elicit the response because it is blocked by the first one.
When is delayed conditioning most effective?
for autonomic response
Trace conditioning
CS presented long before the US
Renewal
when previously extinguished conditioned response reappears in a context in which extinction did not take place
reinstatement
previously extinguished CR reappears in a context where extinction did take place
Higher order contditioning
when a conditioned response becomes an unconditioned response to an unconditioned stimulus (ex. in pavlov’s experiment: if a ball (unconditioned stimulus) gets paired with the bell enough times, the ball will also elicit salivation)
occasion setting
determining the occasion when a conditioned stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus (ex. only presenting bell with food when in a certain room, or at a certain time of night)
A very relevant example of opponent process theory
Developing a drug tolerance. When a conditioned stimulus creates a conditioned response that is opposite of the unconditioned response, which is the drug’s effects.
-the body is preparing to compensate for the drug’s effects to better maintain homeostasis
Shaping
think potty training - successive approximations of desired response that are selectively reinforced
chaining
learning to execute complicated sequences of discrete responses (i.e. learning piano 1 hand at a time)
Name the 5 types of reinforcement schedules
- continuous (every time)
- fixed interval (after every so much time passes - think paycheck)
- fixed ratio (after a fixed # of responses - think coffee punch card)
- variable ratio (think gambling)
- variable interval (think facebook notifications, pop quizzes)
Premack principle
pairing an undesired activity with a preferred activity
Response deprivation hypothesis
when we don’t get to execute a response, the thought of being allowed to itself is reinforcing (think getting to do something normal like shopping, when it’s been restricted by having to stay in studying all week)
Disequilibrium schedule
when preferred routine schedule gets out of wack, returning to it is reinforcing.
Pleasure/reward circuit
Neurons stimulate projection from hypothalamus -> Ventral tegmental area -> Nucleus Acumbens in Basal Ganglia, dopamine deposit -> signals motor response
Memory consolidation
remembering details after a slight delay, when you couldn’t remember it before
Is verbal or visual intelligence better preserved?
Verbal
Types of amnesia
- retrograde (can’t remember past)
- anterograde (can’t learn anything new/make new memories)
Types of memory
Declarative
-semantic, episodic
Nondeclarative
-procedural, skeletal musculature, emotional responses
Levels of memory processing
- shallow: based on physical/sensory characteristics
- deep: analysis of info based on meaning
- rehearsal
- maintenance vs. elaborative
proactive memory interference
when previous learning interferes with new learning (my previously learned Spanish interfered with learning Portuguese)
retroactive interference
new learning disrupts previous learning (learning manual driving disrupts when you drive an automatic later)
output interference
activity of retrieving interferes with retrieval of needed information
cryptonesia
inadvertent plagiarism
medial temporal lobe memory storage
right = spatial memory, left = verbal memory
Frontal lobe’s part in memory
prefrontal can decide what gets transferred to memory, frontal lobe is active in suppressing hippocampus from creating a memory
Brain structures for creating memory
Basal forebrain and diencephalon connected to hippocampus via fornix, help trigger hippocampus into encoding the important/interesting things
Working memory brain stuff
- Executive functioning necessary for WM
- dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex
- dorsolateral: manages central executive functions
- ventrolateral: supports encoding and retrieval, performs roles of sketchpad and loop
Brain part most necessary for skill memory
basal ganglia
epigenetics
a non-DNA-based form of inheritance: a gene that gets passed on or activated because of the environment
Emotion’s role in perception/attention
- we pay more attention to emotional things
- we encode emotional things better
- we detect emotional things faster
Amygdala’s role in memory
- aids in storage of memory
- can modulate consolidation process
- affects retrieval (not very accurate, but more efficient because emotions)
