lecture 1 - intro Flashcards
what is cognitive psychology?
The scientific study of how people think and
process information. Includes:
- Attention
- Decision Making
- Language
- Memory
why study language?
Language makes us human
* (almost) every human knows and uses language.
* No other species has language as complex and powerful as we do.
What would the world be like without language?
* Everything would be a lot more difficult
– Social interactions
– Cooperation
– Transmission of information
* How to convey abstract notions?
* Science? Culture?
the world would be impoverished without language
key questions we can address
- How do we develop language?
- How can we communicate more effectively?
- How do we acquire concepts and categories?
- How can we help people with communication
difficulties?
why study memory?
- It contains everything we know!
- It tells us who we are, our memories contribute
to our sense of “self”. - events and autobiographical memories = episodic - It provides the words and the grammar to communicate, our knowledge of the world. - semantic
- Memory holds our skills e.g. riding a bike. - procedural
- It allows us to follow instructions
memory key questions we can address
- What techniques are most effective for
remembering? - How can we do (or not!) mental arithmetic?
- Why do we forget?
- What about people with memory problems?
why study language and memory?
- Knowing about memory and language is
useful for society - Memory and language are a core part of
being human
The language you speak can affect your working memory
two main forms of languages
* Right-branching (RB) e.g. Italian. Head of the sentence comes first, followed by modifiers that provide additional information (e.g. “the man who was sitting at the bus stop”). Process info incrementally.
* Left-branching (LB) e.g. Japanese. Modifiers generally precede heads (e.g. “who was sitting at the bus stop, the man”). Ambiguous until the end - need to retain modifiers to understand sentence meaning
head = the man
amici (2019)
- “The main finding of the study is that
left-branching speakers were better at
remembering initial stimuli across
verbal and non-verbal working memory
tasks, probably because real-time
sentence comprehension heavily relies
on retaining initial information in LB
languages, but not in RB languages”,
shows there are relationships between language and memory
Language and Memory
- Many phenomena engage both processes.
- Language can affect memory; memory
can affect language
if things are semantically related we remember them better - link between language and memory
Roediger & Karpicke (2006)
Repeated study:
Repeated study:
Passage read 4
times, no test.
Single test:
Passage read 3
times and then
students recall as
much as possible.
Repeated test:
Read once and
then recalled as
much as possible
on 3 occasions.
Average recall was 50% higher in the
repeated test condition compared to
repeated study. Robust effect - in one week condition.
there was a 5 minute and one week condition
Why do students prefer
studying to testing?
- Repeated studying produces short-term
benefits. - Students who repeatedly study think that they
will recall more after a week than those who
repeatedly test i.e. poor metacognitive
awareness. - Studying is less effortful and demanding than
testing, and this makes it more appealing.
the generation effect
reading is not good enough alone as a method of learning new content.
we need to generate or create something new with the learning.
taking an active role in producing learning increases the strength of the memory.
Slamecka and graf (1978)
Mean free-recall probabilities for each condition for each trial of experiment 4
graph in notes
