Midterm 2 Cognition Flashcards
Primary memory:
A memory system proposed by William James ; thought to be the short-term storage area for memoriese
Secondary memory:
A memory system proposed by William James; thought to be the long-term storage area for memories
Modal Model of Memory:
A memory model proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin, consisting os sensory memory, and long-term memory.
Iconic and echoic sensory memory:
The visual and auditory sensory memory systems. Sensory memories has the ability to register a large amount of information, although it typically decays quickly: iconic memory has an upper limit of 1 second and echoic memory has an upper limit of 2 seconds.
Rehearsal:
The process through which information in short-term memory is maintained.
Consolidation:
The processes through which memory traces are stabilized to form long term memories.
Chunking:
A strategy used to increase the capacity of STM by arranging elements in groups (chunks) that can be more easily remembered.
Working Memory:
The system that allows for the temporary storage and manipulation of information required for various cognitive activities.
Central executive:
The component of working memory that coordinates information from the three subsystems.
Phonological loop:
Temporary store of linguistic information.
Visuo-spatial sketchpad:
Temporary store of non-linguistic information.
Episodic buffer:
The mechanisms that moves information to and from long-term memory.
Fluid systems:
Cognitive processes that manipulate information.
Crystallized systems:
Cognitive processes that accumulate long-term knowledge.
Declarative memory:
One of two major divisions of memory, also known as explicit memory; the memory system that contains knowledge that can be stated.
Episodic memory:
The subdivision of declarative memory concerned with personal experience.
Semantic memory:
The subdivision of declarative memory concerned with general knowledge (e.g. facts, words, and concepts).
Recency Bias vs. primacy Bias:
A tendency to recall experiences from the recent past versus a tendency to recall experiences from the relatively distant past.
A site in the brain that plays a crucial role in the consolidation of memory traces would be:
the Hippocampus.
Non-declarative memory:
one of two divisions of memory. also known as implicit memory; the memory system associated with behaviour that does not require concious thought.
Method of opposition:
Pits conscious and unconscious tendencies against one another.
Perceptual representation system.
A memory system containing very specific representations of events that is hypothesized to be responsible for priming effects.
Priming:
The unconscious process through which recognition of a particular item is facilitated by previous exposure to an identical or related item.
Prime:
The item the is presented first in a priming experiment. Later response times to this or related items are generally faster.
Probe to target:
The second item presented in a priming experiment; may be identical, related or unrelated to the prime.
Lexical decision task (LDT):
A task requiring participants to determine whether a presented string of letters is a words or not.
Procedural Memory:
The memory system concerned with knowing how to do things.
Tacit Knowledge:
Knowing how to do something without being able to say exactly what it is that you know.
Butcher on the bus phenomenon:
The felling of knowing a person without being able to remember the circumstances of any previous meeting or anything else about him or her.
tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon:
Knowing that you know something without quite being able to recall it.
Spreading activation:
The idea that activation of the paths that make up a semantic network spreads from the node at which the search begins.
Involuntary semantic memory (“mind popping”)
A semantic memory that pops into your mind without episodic context.
Excitatory and inhibitory connections:
Connections that either enhance or diminish the associations between the units that make up a neural network.
Associative deficit hypothesis:
The hypothesis that older adults have a deficiency in creating and retrieving links between single units of information.
Korsakoff’s syndrome:
A form of amnesia affecting the ability to form new memories, attributed to thiamine deficiency and often (though not exclusively) seen in chronic alcoholics
disconnection syndrome:
Amnesic patients may be able to acquire new information and yet not be aware that learning has taken place
prospective memory:
the intention to remember to do something at some future time
errorless learning:
Participants in a learning situation are taught in such a way that they never have the opportunity to make errors.
Mehtods of vanishing cues:
A way of teaching amnesic patients the meaning of computer commands by presenting them with definitions of the commands and fragments of the commands’ name. Additional letters are presented until the patient is able to give the name of the command when presented with its definition.
mystic writing pad:
A model of memory based on a toy writing tablet that retains fragments of old messages even after the have been “erased”. In time, these fragments accumulate and begin to overlap. so that they become increasingly hard to read.
Reappearance hypothesis:
Neisser’s term for the now rejected idea that the same memory can reappear, unchanged, again and again.
Flashbulb memories:
Vivid, detailed memories of significant events.
Now print! theory:
the theory that especially significant experiences are immediately “photocopied”, preserved in long-term memory, and resistant to change.
Consolidation theory:
the classic theory that memory traces of an event are not fully formed immediately after that event, but take some time to consolidate.
Retroactive interference:
A decline in recall of one event as a result of a later event.
reconsolidation:
the hypothetical process whereby a memory trace is revised and reconsolidated.
Method of repeated reproduction:
and
Method of serial reproduction:
one participant is given multiple opportunities to recall a story over time.
One participant, A, writes down what he or she can recall of a previously read story. A’s version is given to a second participant, B, who reads it and then tries to reproduce it. B’s version in turn is given to C and so on. (like the telephone game)
rationalization:
the attempt to make memory as coherent and sensible as possible.
Schema (Bartlett)
An active mass of organized past reactions that provides a setting that guides our behaviour.
Selection:
The hypothesis that we select information both as we receive it and as we recall it.
Abstraction:
the hypothesis that we tend to remember only gists, not the specifics, of what we experience.
interpretation:
the hypothesis that we interpret information by making inferences, and then remember the inferences as part of the original information.
integration:
the hypothesis that we abstract the meaning of an event and then put that meaning together with the rest of our knowledge to form a coherent consistent whole.
misinformation effect:
The hypothesis that misleading post-event information can become integrated with the original memory of the event.
Source monitoring framework:
the theory that some errors of memory are caused by mistaken identification of the memory’s source.
Principles of encoding specificity:
The way an item is retrieved from memory depends on the way it was stored in memory
mood-dependent recall:
the hypothesis that mood congruence between learning and recall sessions should facilitate recall.
mood congruence:
the idea that mood might cause selective learning of affective material.
script:
a set of expectations concerning the actions and events that are appropriate in a particular situation.
autobiographical memories:
episodic memories of events recalled in terms of the time in our life when they occurred.
Galtons number:
the number of autobiographical episodes available to participants from preceding 20 years, as calculated by Covitz, Schiffman and apter (1991) 224
Childhood amnesia:
the general inability to retrieve episodic memories from before the age of about 3.
memory bump:
An increase in the number of memories between 10 and 30 years of age over what would be expected if memories decayed smoothly over time.
proust effect:
the power of odours as autobiographical memory cues.
Autobiographical consequential experiences (ACEs) :
Pivotal experiences in a person’s life, typically occurring between the ages of 18 and 35.
life script:
A cultural narrative that prescribes the age norms for important events in an individual’s life.
levels of processing:
a continuum that ranges from registering an event purely in terms of its physical characteristics to analyzing it in terms of its relationship to other things that you know.
Elaboration:
Adding to or enriching information by relating it to other information.
Distinctiveness:
the precision with which an item is encoded.
specific and general levels of representation:
As people age they tend to forget specific details but to remember deeper, more general meanings.
Lab-based approach to memory research:
An approach that emphasizes controlled laboratory (as opposed to real-world) research in the search for general principles.
nonsense syllable:
nonsense “words” consisting of a consonant followed by a vowel followed by a consonant.
forgetting curve:
Ebbinghaus’ finding that the rate at which information is forgotten is greatest immediately after the information has been acquired, and declines more gradually over time.
Jost’s law of forgetting:
Of two memory traces of equal strength, the younger trace will decay faster than the older one.
Ribot’s law of retrograde amnesia:
Older memories are less likely to be as a result of brain damage than are newer memories.
Law of progressions and pathologies:
A “last in, fist out” principle referring to the possibility that the last system to emerge in the first to show the effects of degeneration.
ecological approach to the study of memory:
an approach that emphasizes real-world complexities in its investigations to discover general principles.
permastore:
Bahricks’ term for the state of relative permanence in which he found that some kinds of memory can be retained over very long periods of time.
time spaces:
the visual experience of time units such as days of the week or moths of the year as occupying spatial locations outside the body.
Number forms:
Automatically generated images of numbers in various spatial layouts external to an individual.
Dual-coding theory:
the theory that there are two ways of representing events, verbal and non-verbal.
logogens:
the units containing the information underlying our use of a word; the components of the verbal system.
Imagens
the units containing information that generate mental images; the componants of the non-verbal system.
Imagery (Pavio’s sense)
the ease with which something such as a word can elicit a mental image.
Concretness:
the degree to which a word refers to something that can be experienced by the sense ( i.e. heard, felt, smelled, or tasted)
left and right hemispheres theory:
the theory that the left brain controls speech and is better at processing verbal material than is the right hemisphere, which is better at non-verbal tasks.
mnemonic techniques:
procedures used to aid memory
method of loci:
a mnemonic technique based on places and images.
distinctiveness hypothesis:
the hypothesis that the more distinctive the item is, the easier it will be to recall.
von Restoroff effect:
if one item in a set is different from others, it is more likely to be recalled.
special places strategy:
Choosing a storage location that other people will not think of; the problem is that when the time comes to retrieve the item, you may not think of it either.
metamemory:
Beliefs about how memory works.
synesthesia:
the condition in which a stimulus appropriate to one sense (e.g. sound) triggers an experience appropriate to another sense (e.g. a colour)
Chromesthesia:
Coloured hearing
inducer:
the cue that elicits a synesthetic experience.
Concurrent:
the synesthetic response itself
Apotosis:
Programmed pruing of neurons.
Strong synesthetes:
People for whom an inducer in one sensory modality (e.g. a sound) produces a concurrent image in another sensory modality. (e.g. a colour)
cross-modal effects:
the ability to appreciate that the sensations of one modality can be similar to those in another modality.
weak synesthetes:
people who can appreciate cross-modal associations without having strong synesthetic experiences.
icon:
the initial, brief representation of the information contained in a visual stimulus.
eidetic imagery:
Images projected onto the external world that persist for a minutes or more even after a stimulus (e.g. a picture) is removed.
cognitive dedifferentiation:
fusion of perceptual processes that typically function independantly.
vividness of visual imagery:
the degree to which an image is clear and lively. and resembles an actual percept.
mental rotation:
Imaging an object in motion and viewing it from different perspectives.
objective distances:
the true distances between objects in the real world, which are preserved in our mental images.
categorical distance:
the number of units traversed during mental scanning: for instance, landmarks on an island map, rooms in a building, or counties in a state.
image as anticipation hypothesis:
the hypothesis that an image is readiness to perceive something.
emergent properties:
new properties that emerge when a mental image is constructed.
analog form of representation hypothesis:
the hypothesis that a mental image embodies the essential relationships of the thing it represents.
egocentric perspective transformations:
you imagen yourself moving, while the objects in the environment remain still.
Spatial frameworks:
an imaginary space with one vertical (above-below) and two horizontals dimensions ( ahead-behind, and left and right)
propositional knowledge hypothesis:
the hypothesis that knowledge about the world is represented and stored in the form of propositions.
cognitive map;
information from the environment that is :worked over and elaborated … into a tentative, cognitive-like map…. indicating routes and paths and environmental relationships” (Tolman)
egocentric frame of reference:
using information available from our current perspectives to orient ourselves.
path integration:
the process whereby our position in relation to an important location is continuously updated as we move through the environment.
Mental modal theory:
the theory that we construct a mental model of a given situation, on the basis of which we understand, reason , and draw conclusions about it.
auditory imagery:
the experience of sound in your mind that is not caused by stimulation of the receptive cells in your ears.
earworm:
a conscious experience of sound – typically a short phrase of catchy music – that seems to get stuck on replay in your head.
criterial attribute:
An attribute that is required in order for something to qualify as an instance of a concept.
Selection task:
A concept formation task in which the participant selects instances from those presented by the experimenter.
Conservative focusing:
A concept formation strategy of activity formulating hypotheses and selecting instances to see if your hypotheses are correct by focusing on one attribute at a time and by selecting instances that vary only in that attribute.
focus gambling:
the concept formation strategy of selecting instances that vary only in that one attribute.
Simultaneous scanning:
the concept formation strategy of keeping in mind all possible hypotheses and trying to eliminate as many as possible with each instance selection.
successive scanning:
the concept formation strategy of formulating a single hypothesis and testing it by selecting instances until the correct hypothesis emerges.
reception tasks:
a concept formation task in which the instances presented to the participant are chosen by the experimenter.
wholist strategy:
A concept formation strategy, used in reception tasks, in which you initially hypothesize that all attributes are members of the concept.
partist strategy:
a concept formation strategy, used in reception tasks in which you initially hypothesize that only some attributes are members of the concept.
implicit vs explicit learning:
learning that takes place unintentionally versus learning that takes place intentionally.
cognitive unconscious hypothesis:
the hypothesis that implicit learning represents an evolutionary primitive form of unconsciousness cognition
family resemblance (concepts chapter) :
instances of concepts that possess overlapping features, without any features being common to all.
prototypical (concepts chapter):
Representative of a pattern or category.
correlation attributes:
the hypothesis that some combinations of attributes tend to occur more frequently than other combinations
misaligned hierarchies :
judgement made at one level suggest one conclusion while judgement made at another level suggest a contrasting conclusion.
commitment heuristic:
A strategy in which we commit ourselves to the true when it is only likely to be true.
superordinate, basic, and subordinate levels (Rosch)
levels of inclusiveness of a concept, as in tree, oak and live oak.
graded strcuture:
Describes a concept in which some members of the category are better examples of it then others.
embodied cognition:
the role of cognition is to facilitate successful interaction with the environment.
goal-derived category:
A category invented for a specific purpose on a particular occasion.
perceptual symbols:
Aspects of perceptual memories that stand for events in the world and enter into all forms of symbolic activity.
category-specific deficits:
Selective deficits in knowledge, resulting from brain damage.
primary metaphor:
A pairing of subjective experience with sensorimotor experience.
double-function words:
words that refer to both physical and psychological properties (e.g. warmth)
conceptual modules:
Modules responsible for domain-specific knowledge.
Folk biology:
the concepts that ordinary people use to understand living things.
folk taxonomy:
a classification system composed of a hierarchy of groups
