lecture 4

Question 1

what is Knowledge Activation

Answer 1

Retrieval of an element of social knowledge from long term memory
• Once knowledge is activated it can shape our attention, construal, memory, and behavior
• Results from interplay of relatively bottom-up (data driven) and top-down (knowledge- driven) influences

Question 2

what are the Determinants of Activation

Answer 2

1) Does the person have the schema?
• a necessary condition
• E.g., “Humbucking Pickup”

2) Applicability
• =overlapor“fit”betweenthefeaturesofa
stimulus and the features of some stored
knowledge
• Thebottom-upaspectofknowledgeactivation
and use
• Socialperceptiontypicallyfeelslikeitisentirely driven by applicability
• Socialstimuliareoftenambiguous,however

3) Accessibility:
=activation readiness of stored knowledge
=how likely is a schema to have a “top-down” influence

Question 3

what are the types of accessibility

Answer 3

Chronic accessibility
Temporary accessibility
Spreading Activation

Question 4

what is chronic accessibility

Answer 4

Higgins, King & Mavin (1982) -assessed chronic accessibility by
which words the person used to describe others
-2-wks later: story about a target person with characteristics related to the subject’s ‘chronic’ and ‘nonchronic’ dimensions
-impressions and memory more weighted by info related to subjects’ chronic dimensions

Stroop test with trait words, to assess how readily different concepts get activated to capture attention

So, different people have different types of concepts and dimensions chronically accessible, and ready to use in social perception

Question 5

what is temporal accessibility

Answer 5

Priming: = to activate some social knowledge, to make it accessible for later information processing
e.g.,Higgins, Rholes & Jones (1977) during memory task:
2 different prime words
(adventurous or reckless) Donald story - ambiguous details
-impressions consistent with primed category

Male participants read “boy meets girl” story OR control story (supposedly for a different study)
– Conversation with female confederate (blind to condition)
– Primed subjects were friendlier (smiled more, talked more, leaned forward more, and gazed at the confederate more)

Question 6

what is Spreading Activation

Answer 6

as a source of chronic or temporary accessibility =activation spreads from one concept to
other related concepts in the associative network