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.
