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