Midterm 2 Flashcards
What is imagery?
A mental picture, BUT mental imagery does not always have to be visual imagery
What is the dual coding theory?
We break down the mental representation of events into two categories: the verbal and non-verbal system
- both systems interact through referential connections
What is the difference between a concrete and abstract word?
- Concrete: word that can be represented as both a word and an image
- Abstract: word that tends to be represented only as a word
What is the propositional representation hypothesis?
All information is stored as descriptive statements, regardless of the content
- Imagery is a by-product
What is the method of loci?
- Place objects in unexpected locations to remember them better; imagine yourself walking through the location, “picking up” the objects along the way
- This makes the objects distinct, bizarre or humorous among common items
What is the Von Restorff effect?
objects are remembered better when they are bizarre among common objects
What is the special places strategy?
When you want to jeep something secure, you often think to hide that item in an unexpected place
- not as effective since there is no cue about location
What is mental rotation?
manipulating a mental image in space
What is synaesthesia?
A sensory experience in which a stimulus in one sensory modality also invokes a response in one or more other sensory modalities
What is chromesthesia?
the most common experience among synesthetes
What is amusia?
Deficits in musical abilities - also called tone-deafness
- People with amusia have been shown to have deficits in visual/spatial imagery
What are memory traces?
a physical representation in the brain
What is a trace?
When a cue completes a pattern of a stored memory
What is echoic memory?
a sound-byte held for ~ 3 seconds
What is haptic memory?
a very brief memory of a touch
What is iconic memory?
visual information held very briefly
What is a positive afterimage?
a sensory memory contains the original image
What is a negative afterimage?
A sensory memory contains the inverted colors from the original image
- Your photoreceptors become tired, so they reveal the negative colors
What is the phonological loop?
Holds sound and verbal info
- Phonological store: passive store for verbal info
- Articulatory loop: subvocal rehearsal of verbal information and used to convert written material into sounds (reading)
What is the visuospatial sketchpad?
Contains the:
Visual cache: holds info about visual features and identity
- Memory for patterns
- Passive
Inner scribe: holds info about spatial location and movement
- Memory for sequence movements
- Active
What is the episodic buffer?
Integrates different types of info from many sources
- Explains how separate working memory systems interact
What is the forgetting curve?
A law that describes how information is forgotten over time
- Forgetting is exponential – memory loss is largest early on and slows down over time
What is the spacing effect?
memory is better when the same amount of learning is spread out over time
What is the primacy effect?
better recall of the first few items from a learned list
What is the recency effect?
better recall of the final few items
What is the decay theory?
forgetting occurs because of time
What is the interference theory?
forgetting occurs because of interfering information
What is retroactive interference?
new info interferes with old info
What is proactive interference?
old info interferes with new information
What is generalization?
forgetting perceptual details of an encoded object or event allows one to apply information from that memory to new situations
What is shallow processing?
Focus on structural or physical characteristics of information during learning – examples:
- Phoneme information: the sound
- Grapheme level: letter, syllables
What is deep processing?
Focus on the meaning of the information during learning
- Link new with old information
What is state-dependent learning?
Memory is better when a person’s context is the same at encoding and retrieval
What is the self-reference effect?
memory is better if you relate it to yourself
What is the generation effect?
memory is better if you generate it
What is implicit memory?
- Non-conscious and non-declarative memory
* Procedural memory and priming
What is procedural memory?
Memory for well-established procedures and skills
- Does not require conscious thought
- Linked to habits
What is episodic memory?
remembering specific events and episodes
What is semantic memory?
facts and general information about the self and world
What is anoetic consciousness?
implicit memory, no awareness of knowing or personal engagement (no personal engagement, like tying your shoes)
What is noetic consciousness?
semantic memory, awareness of knowledge but no personal engagement (you’re not thinking about a specific episode you were involved in, like remembering your dog’s name)
What is autonoetic consciousness?
episodic memory, awareness and personal engagement (mental time travel)
What are memory schemas?
Generalizations of events and objects
- Represents commonalities from overlapping experiences
What is the reappearance hypothesis?
a single memory trace is recalled the same way at each retrieval
What are flashbulb memories?
Vivid memories of significant events
- Emotionally arousing or shocking events
What is the now print theory?
significant experiences are immediately “photocopied” and preserved in long-term memory
What is the misattribution effect?
retrieving familiar information from the wrong source
What is false recognition?
Confuse new info with memory for old information
What is misinformation?
the effect of leading questions on false memory formation
What is spreading activation?
activation in a semantic network spreads from an activated concept (unit) to other semantically related or interconnected units
What is childhood amnesia?
inability to recall memories form early childhood
What is the reminiscence bump?
We tend to remember more events from our teenage years than any other period in life
- Extends to music
What is the associative deficit hypothesis?
older adults have problems encoding and retrieving associations
What is the difference between recollection and familiarity?
• Recollection (remember): recognize something and where you learned it
- Autonomic consciousness and requires associations between that something and context
• Familiarity (know): recognize something but you cannot consciously recollect anything about its actual occurrence and does not require associations
- Noetic consciousness
What is Alzheimer’s disease?
Progressive neurodegeneration (decline in structure and function of neurons) that beings in the medial temporal lobes (hippocampus)
What is semantic dementia?
- Neurodegeneration that begins in the left anterior temporal lobe, an area critical for meaning, concepts, and facts
- Deficits present as a loss of word meaning and word finding difficulties
What is Korsakoff’s syndrome?
- Anterograde and retrograde amnesia
- Chronic alcoholism leads to thiamine deficiency leads to damaged mammillary bodies of the hypothalamus, which are connected to the hippocampus
What is dissociative amnesia?
- A very rare psychiatric disorder that varies in presentation
- Commonly retrograde amnesia for episodic and identity autobiographical information in response to psychological and/or physical trauma
- A retrieval deficit, not a storage deficit
What are concepts?
representations of categories and systematic grouping of instances
What is the rule-based approach of concepts?
concepts are collections of necessary and sufficient features
What is the probability-based approach of concepts?
concepts and categories are formed through experience
What is Bruner’s rule-based approach?
- Concepts result from logical inferences (ex: learning rules)
- These rules describe concepts as made up of attributes
What is a conjunctive concept?
an instance must hold all the attributes to make it a concept member
- Ex: a mother is defined as a female AND having a child
What is a disjunctive concept?
an instance must hold only one attribute to be a concept member
- Ex: fame can be defined in different ways
What is a rational concept?
an instance must have attributes relate to be a concept member
- Ex: marriage is defined by the link between two people
What is successive scanning?
form a single hypothesis about the concept and test it by selecting instances until it is false
What is simultaneous scanning?
start with all hypotheses about the concept and attempt to eliminate as many as possible with each instance
What is the prototype theory?
- Conceptual knowledge and categories are defined by a ‘more or less’ principle
- Concepts are formed from experience, by the way we interact with information
What is the typicality effect?
a preference for processing prototypical items compared to more obscure category members
What is cognitive economy?
the balance between simplification and differentiation when categorizing and describing
- Use the fewest bits of information that would still be meaningful for the situation
What is the embodied view of concepts?
• Concepts are formed as a function of the environment and goals
- We can define concepts flexibly depending on what we need to do with the info we’re accessing
What is morphology?
complexity of language
What is aphasia?
Impaired language function from brain injury
What is Broca’s aphasia?
Intact language comprehension with impairments producing fluent speech articulatory movements
- These impairments range from deficits in generating meaningful speech (agrammatical) to generating all forms of speech depending on the amount of damage
What is Wernicke’s aphasia?
- Impairments understanding or comprehending speech with intact ability to produce speech
- Produces random but fluent speech with a lot of non-words or inverted words
- Patients are often unaware of their deficit
What is conduction aphasia?
- Intact speech comprehension
- Intact speech production
- Impaired speech repetition due to disconnection between language production and comprehension
What are paraphasias?
Primary deficit of Wernicke’s aphasia - language output errors
What is verbal paraphasia?
Substitutes a word with something that is semantically related
- Shares meaning with intended word
- Ex: swapping term brother with sister
What is phonemic (literal) paraphasia?
Substitute or add speech sounds
- Shares sounds with intended word
- Ex: calling crab salad sad - cralad
What are neologisms?
Substitute with a made-up word
- Real world example: webinar and calling shoes “feet houses”
What are psycholinguistics?
• The branch of cognitive psychology interested in how we comprehend, produce, acquire, and represent language
What is Chomsky’s view of language?
Language is innate
What is the difference between linguistic competence vs performance?
Linguistic competence: internalized system of rules used to understand language
- Phonology, syntax, semantic…
Linguistic performance: real world output
- Dependent on competence mixed with cognitive factors (memory) and situational factors
What is transformational grammar?
a theory that describes linguistic competence, how language is structured and processed by a system of formal rules
What is finite state grammar?
A rule system for stringing together words that operate one word by one word in one direction
- There are a finite number of states and transitions between words
What is the innateness hypothesis?
Humans are born with knowledge of language
- There is a universal grammar: a common underlying system of rules for all languages
What is the language acquisition device?
an innate set of language learning tools
What is the Nativist view of language and thought?
Language and thought are independent and change over development
What is the language of thought hypothesis?
• The medium of thought is an innate non-spoken language called mentalese
- Mentalese is structured to represent all conceptual content and propositions to create thought
- Explains why children (and animals) without spoken language can still think
What is linguistic relativity?
Language and thoughts are dependent
What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
languages influence our experience and perceptions
What is linguistic determinism?
a person’s thoughts are determined by language
What is intrinsic frame?
spatial relations described in terms of objects
What is relative frame?
spatial relations described from an observer’s viewpoint
What is absolute frame?
spatial relations described as map coordinates
What is the Grapheme-phoneme conversion?
what you see you convert to sounds
What is surface dyslexia?
impaired at producing irregular words (25% of English words) like ‘comb’ or ‘thought’
What is phonological dyslexia?
impaired at reading non-words or new words
What are cognates?
same word, same meaning, but in a different language
What are interlingual homographs?
same form, different meaning
ex: coin vs coin
What is the language selective activation hypothesis?
you can “turn-off” the other language, so they never compete
What is the language non-selective activation hypothesis?
You cannot “turn-off” the other language
- Words from both languages compete for selection
What is executive control?
Set of cognitive processes involved in mental control and self-regulation
- Helps us attend to the target audience or to suppress the irrelevant language
What is the Stroop effect?
the incongruent context is the slowest to be named correctly and results in more inaccuracies
What is problem solving?
the multi-step process to shift your current problem state to a goal state
What is a problem?
a state in which a goal has not been reached
What are well-defined problems?
problems with a defined and established goal state, including set constraints to meet that goal
What are ill-defined problems?
situations that have no clear path or way to move from the problem to the goal state
What is cognitive load?
the amount of info that your working memory system can hold at one time
- Working memory capacity is limited
What is brute force?
Systematic algorithms represent all the possible steps from the initial problem state
- You go through all the options via a blind search
What is the hill climbing heuristic?
A difference reductions strategy
- Select the operation that would bring you closer to the end goal without examining the whole problem space
What is the foothill problem?
since you don’t consider the full problem space, you may think you have reached your goal, but it’s a ‘local maxima’
What is the working backward heuristic?
start with your goal state in mind and work back to your current state
What is the means-end heuristic?
- Involves both forward and backward movements and constantly evaluating the difference between current and goal states
- Looks for greatest reduction in this difference while considering the full problem space
What is concurrent verbalization?
describe what you are doing as you do it (how are you solving a problem)
What is retrospective verbalization?
describe what you did at an earlier time
What is analogical problem solving?
making comparisons between two situations and applying the solution from one of the situations to the other situation
What is analogical transfer?
using past stories or solutions to solve a current problem
What is insight problem solving?
• A person can’t find the solution, but then the correct solution emerges into consciousness
- Aka the “aha moment”
- Breaking free of assumptions to form new connections in mind to reach a new solution
What is functional fixedness?
the inability to see beyond the most common use of a particular object
What is mental fixedness?
Responding with previously learned rule sequences even when they are inappropriate or less productive
What is the Einstellung effect?
the tendency to respond inflexibly to a particular type of problem (a rigid set)
